So, Hadrian’s Wall stops transphobia, too?

I’ve been bewildered by the rapid spread of transphobia across the UK — I know it seems bad everywhere, but it seems to have been caught by more politicians and celebrities and even skeptics in the southern part of the country. I suspect social media is partly to blame, but then, a country that elected Boris Johnson has got some deeper issues, too (the US elected Trump, and I won’t deny the depth of our problems).

So it’s nice to see that Scotland is staying sane. At least, the part that elected Nicola Sturgeon.

Is this another sign of the rifts breaking the UK? How is Wales feeling nowadays? Are we going to have to drop the “U” and just call the place “K” someday?

What is this mania about “cancel culture”?

Not Rowan Atkinson, too?

In an interview with the Radio Times, the multi-hyphenated British star blamed social media platforms for increased levels of polarization, which he said makes him fearful for the future of freedom of speech.

“The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be ‘cancelled’,” Atkinson said.

“It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future.”

Tell me, who has been cancelled? It seems to me that what this paranoia is all about is that some people who are dependent entirely on their personal popularity with the citizenry are pleased to have a label to tag on the phenomenon of losing that popularity. It’s not their fault — whether it’s just that their 15 minutes are up, or that their creepiness is publicly exposed, or that someone finds out they are a racist or a pedophile — no, none of that. It’s entirely due to a wicked external force, “Cancel Culture”, that is targeting them for destruction for arbitrary and unfair reasons. So Louis CK might have been exposing himself and masturbating in front of women, but nobody would have known that if Cancel Culture hadn’t revealed that. Milo Yiannopoulos might have been frolicking with Nazis and babbling about how molesting children is OK, but the only way you knew that was because Cancel Culture was picking on him.

It’s as if they’re only now noticing that popular opinion is fickle, and yes, people will decide whether they like you on your personal opinions and behavior. This is the human condition. And if your entire career rests completely on your popularity, there will be ups and downs, and you can thoroughly trash your own reputation without any external agent doing any conspiratorial work against you.

It’s also nothing new. Was Fatty Arbuckle a victim of Cancel Culture? I’ll concede that Julius Caesar definitely was, but if you haven’t been stabbed, you can stop complaining. Critics can be obnoxious, but they’re not Culture Assassins.

It’s a ridiculous invention, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Go ahead, tell me that Louis CK and Milo were victims of “Cancel Culture” — it won’t make a bit of difference in my opinion of them. I don’t like what they did or said, and I can choose not to support them. The fact that I might not like you does not mean that I have a “simplistic, binary view of society” — I can be looking at you with all kinds of nuance, recognizing that you’ve done some good work, that you’re kind to dogs, that your mother loves you, but if you’re also a misogynist I can still decide that, on balance, I’d rather not associate with you. I’ve enjoyed Rowan Atkinson’s comedy, but at the same time I can think he’s being a bit of a dumbass right now. Do these whiners about an imaginary Cancel Culture hiding under their bed want to take my choice away from me?

Back of the line, MAGAts!

After months of dragging their heels and opposing pandemic control efforts, our Republican representatives are making a rush for the front of the vaccination line.

Republican leaders of the Minnesota Legislature suggested Friday that state lawmakers and the staff who work for them should be among the early recipients of a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.

“I’m encouraging the vaccines, as one of the priority groups after elderly and some of our front-line workers, that we think about the people that have to be essential at the Capitol,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said at a forum with other legislative leaders.

No. If Republicans all got sick and had to stay home for a month, ending their obstructionism, we’d make better progress. All Republicans should be sent to the end of the queue.

Front of the line: health care workers. Right behind them: public school teachers. Then, if there were any justice in the world, we’d do a rational risk assessment and distribute the vaccine to those communities with the highest mortality from the disease, which would be the black and Latin communities in our cities.

Aww, but get real. This is America. It’s going to go first to the already wealthy people, because it’s going to be sold on capitalist principles, which means the actual beneficiaries will be those with the least need.

Why Jordan Peterson’s new book should have difficulty finding a publisher

Nathan Robinson cuts right to the bone here on why it’s perfectly legitimate for employees of Penguin Random House to protest any contract with Jordan Peterson.

It’s not reasonable to claim that employees who object to publishing Peterson are “censorious”. A publisher is not a Kinkos. Penguin Random House rejects far more books than it accepts, and it does not treat all points of view equally. It does not publish works of Holocaust denial or phrenology. It has standards, and it’s reasonable for employees to argue that Peterson does not meet those standards. After all, he has suggested that gay marriage might be a plot by cultural Marxists, that women wearing makeup in the workplace is “sexually provocative”, that trans women aren’t women because they’re not “capable of having babies”, that women cannot handle truth, and that transgender activists are comparable to mass-murdering Maoists. He peddles debunked scientific theories and dangerously dodgy diets. I have gone through his work myself and shown that he is a crackpot, whose writing is devoid of basic reasoning and full of wild unsubstantiated claims. When Pankaj Mishra wrote a critical review of Peterson’s work in the New York Review of Books, Peterson called Mishra a “prick” and said he’d “slap [Mishra] happily”. The things he says are often false, prejudiced and dangerous. What possible obligation does a publisher have to publish the ravings of bigots?

Unfortunately, there’s also a reason Peterson’s new book should have publishers lining up to take it on: there is a legion of gullible fans willing to pay good money for it.

That is a short-term excuse, though. In the long run, you’d think a publisher would want to be able to maintain some level of prestige and some quality control over the books released under its imprint. I think the employees of Penguin Random House are seeing an imminent degradation of the value of their work, while management just has dollar signs in their eyes.

Jordan Peterson really is just one step toward Holocaust denial and phrenology; a publisher shouldn’t aspire to be Quillette, either.

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst, along comes Crowder

He is a truly vile human being.

YouTube will do nothing about this, because Crowder has 5 million subscribers. That in itself is bizarre — 5 million people watch this unfunny, bigoted hack?

Oh my, I have some favorite tweets

I couldn’t give up Twitter, there are so many candid self-owns on there. Like this “totally crap analysis” from James Lindsay, who explains to us his interpretation of feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory.

All three really deserve a spit take. Feminism sees men as the ideal… we can just stop right there. It’s projection, through and through. Only a heterosexual white man would look at people protesting oppression by a heterosexual white male establishment and think, “Oh, they’re just jealous and want to be heterosexual white men”. He’s making the superficial smooth brained interpretation of everything. Please do have fun eviscerating his words.

But then, just when I thought I’d found the dumbest tweet of the week, along comes Dean Browning, former Lehigh County Commissioner and Christian conservative.

He seems to have forgotten that he had to log in to his sock puppet account.

That’s a very Christian conservative thing to do.

Oh man, that last story just gets twistier by the minute.

The Woke are gonna get you!

The Right is trying their best to invent imaginary enemies. They’ve been whining about Antifa™ for a while now, worrying over their growing membership rolls, and how their leadership was scheming to overthrow everything they love, when antifa is actually nothing but a loose sentiment, with no formal structure and no hierarchy of bosses running the show. Conservatives just can’t imagine any movement without a rigid hierarchy, so they conjure one up in their fever dreams.

It makes me wonder…would the atheist movement be in better shape if no one had tried to pretend it was at all structured? No President of Atheism, no Four Horsemen, just people who thought for themselves? As soon as a pretense of leadership appeared, they formed a target and started exposing themselves and everything went downhill.

Anyway, the increasingly ridiculous James Lindsay has started blaming everything on a scary phantasm, The Woke or Wokeness.

He thinks that if Joe Biden gets the presidency, it will be an expansion of the Woke’s tentacles of power. Joe Biden. I don’t know. If I were trying to imagine a King of the Wokes, it wouldn’t be an old white centrist Democrat who has been grasping for the presidency for decades. He isn’t even a Jewish billionaire! How are you going to motivate your legion of neo-Nazis if the figurehead you’re targeting is as cluelessly Aryan as they are?

Lindsay also thinks The Woke are a concrete, formal organization with finances and funding run by religious fanatics.

Yeah, right. That’s simply palpable paranoia and projection, and it’s ironic that Lindsay himself is a bought and paid for tool of Michael O’Fallon, Catholic reactionary, and his Sovereign Nations grift.

I wonder…have I been triple-dipping as a Captain (ret.) of Atheism™, foot soldier of Antifa™, and now, Padre of Wokeism™? Why aren’t I rich yet? Maybe my salary is just late this decade. I hope it gets here in time for the Raging Twenties, coming soon!

The blame was fixed the instant protests against injustice began

You can’t possibly be surprised to learn that the violence accompanying the recent protests was generated by happy white fanatics who wanted to use it to disrupt the country.

In the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday.

A sworn affidavit by the FBI underlying the complaint reveals new details about a far-right anti-government group’s coordinated role in the violence that roiled through civil unrest over Floyd’s death while in police custody.

The Boogaloo Bois hate the police, too, but the reason is rather different: it’s not because the American police are forces for oppression and injustice, but because they threaten the Boogaloo Bois’ desire to rule the countryside with heavily armed right wing militias; they want chaos because that would allow these wannabe bandits and warlords to run amuck. They want to be the ones with the guns and tanks.

The Star Tribune has been following these guys for a while now, since they seem to be active here in Minnesota. A previous article profiled several of these goons.

Solomon, who manages the maintenance division for a local property management company, called himself “an armed redneck” who joined the Boogaloo movement after dabbling in right-wing conservatism, libertarianism and militia activity. The police bulletin that named Solomon noted that he had a “III%-er” militia sticker on his truck.

In an interview, Solomon said his allegiance rested with the Boogaloo movement and that he had neglected to remove the armed militia sticker. Like many Boogaloos, Solomon also said he now recants his past support for President Donald Trump. Now, Solomon views himself as an “anarcho-capitalist.”

The good news: support for Trump is declining among these fanatics. The bad news: they’re libertarians and ancaps.

The good news: they say they are against racism and white nationalism. The bad news: they still think shooting up a police station and letting the black community take the blame is just fine.

We’ve been suffering with these violent clowns for centuries, thanks to our institutionalized policies of injustice. Don’t be fooled by people who claim to be for equality, yet eagerly enjoy the privileges of structural racism and take advantage of a convenient pool of scapegoats. Watch Cody explain the whole grand problem.

I bet you can all name a lot of “launderers”

That’s a concept from Talia Levin’s new book, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, which she expounds on in this interview.

Most people don’t start out waving swastikas. They are being led to this place by “launderers,” people who seem reasonable and who introduce racist ideas subtly, and give people permission to engage in hate that is more socially acceptable. The launderers can be YouTubers and right-wing influencers. They may start out saying there are too many women in Star Wars movies, or that lady Ghostbusters have ruined their childhood. It soon becomes easier and easier for them to say that feminism is harmful garbage that has caused them to be unhappy. From there it’s not a long journey. The slope is greased by people with high production values and a lot of money behind them.

They are not weird toothless masturbators living in their mothers’ basements. Every member of the organized racist movement that I surveilled, spoke to, and catfished was a person — a human being with complexity and dimensionality who has made amoral choices. Their humanity is an integral part of the portrait but it does not absolve them. They make the choice to disseminate evil. It makes them more worthy of condemnation. They have chosen to spread hate and fear. They have chosen to follow an ideology that makes them feel like heroes for hurting people who are already hurt.

Think about it. It’s easy to name a lot of these launderers. They range from talentless goofballs like PewDiePie to nasty lying culture warriors like Ben Shapiro to millionaire establishment spokespeople like Tucker Carlson to corrupt gangsters like Donald Trump. I bet you all can rattle off a long list yourself. All of them deny their racism and white nationalism with varying degrees of believability, and none of them ever face any consequences.