The Board of Regents is visiting campus, and I found this invitation slipped under my office door. (Not from the Regents, obviously.)

This is clearly a dig at a certain regent who made some stupid comments. I’d like to go, except…

1. My attendance would contribute nothing to diversity
2. Nobody from the Board of Regents will bother to show up
3. That’s my birthday! Can’t I find a better way to celebrate it?

My counterarguments would be…

1. But it would show that even old white men support diversity
2. I care what the students think, not the Board of Regents
3. No.

I guess that’s my Thursday evening planned out then.

Scott Adams makes a blatantly racist rant and his comic strip is dropped from a large number of newspapers; guess who rushes to defend him? That privileged child of apartheid, Elon Musk.

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

That is the least surprising alliance since the Rome-Berlin Axis.

Well, I guess we all have to start reading Dilbert, since Elon says so.

I said we should cancel Scott Adams, and gosh, look what happened: people spoke up all across the country, and Scott Adams was canceled.

Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them.

I guess it’s easy to be a prophet when you predict the obvious stuff.

One could argue that this means Adams will be whining indignantly about injustice and those damned libs some more, but that’s fine, he has free speech, he can complain all he wants, I simply won’t be hearing about it and can take some satisfaction in the fact that he won’t be making as much money off his bigotry anymore.

There’s nothing anyone can do about it, I guess, but anti-semitic, that is, NAZI organizers are telling their followers to carry out acts of harassment against Jewish people on Saturday. The police are just warning you all — you’re on your own, nothing they can do.

Chicago police are urging Jewish and other religious communities to be extra vigilant this weekend when a neo-Nazi group has declared a “day of hate.”

“At this time, there is no actionable intelligence,” the Chicago Police Department said in a statement. “We continue to actively monitor the situation.”

In New York, the police will have “elevated situational awareness”, but otherwise, it’s on you to be careful.

In the warning, the NYPD advised officers to maintain “elevated situational awareness” on Saturday, particularly at locations that “might garner higher interest from these types of actors.”

What good are the police, then? Once the bodies have bled out, then they can step in? I have noticed that the police are pretty darned good at making life miserable for black people, harassing them with frequent traffic stops, hassling them on street corners, threatening them with arrest for trivial actions, even too often outright killing them — I don’t want cops murdering skinheads either, but it seems to be easier to stroll around with a swastika tattoo than the unadorned skin a black person is born with. The police have the tools, they use them when they wish, but apparently, they don’t wish to crack down on white people threatening violence to other citizens.

In addition to the uselessness of cops, do these Nazis have even an ounce of introspection? Declaring a “Day of Hate” really ought to be enough for any normal person to realize that they are the baddies. The very baddest baddies. I guess the fact that they’re wearing swastika arm bands should have been the first clue, but they ignored that and are just going to run all the way to beating up little old Jewish ladies in the street, because they generically hate them.

That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? We have the power to somehow, in some way cancel people for being, for instance, racist as hell. So get to work! Chant the magic words, wave your fairy wands, summon the spirits of expulsion, whatever, and banish Scott Adams to some pit on the fringes of Sheol. He’s the face of bland, casual, rich white person racism.

I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, the 65-year-old author exclaimed. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.

Reiterating that whites need to escape, Adams said that he had already done so by moving to an area with a very low Black population. He then cited Black CNN anchor Don Lemon to justify his assertion that there’s a correlation between a mostly Black neighborhood and a bunch of problems he didn’t see in majority-white areas.

So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore, Adams huffed. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.

He continued: The only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying.

This rant was prompted, he claims, by a survey that showed that the phrase “It’s OK to be white” was considered racist by almost half of black people. How considerate of Adams to immediately confirm that opinion.

If we can’t “cancel” Scott Adams, then “canceling” is a toothless, imaginary threat. The difficulty lies in the fact that Adams is rich, his comic makes lots of money for a tangle of distributors (Andrews McMeel Syndication, Universal Uclick, GoComics, etc.), and all you have to do is look at the comics page of any newspaper to see that this is an industry locked in to nearly permanent frozen rigidity. Adams knows this. He can afford to be smug and safe and bigoted.

He can be pulled by individual newspaper chains, though.

Amid the incorporation of the anti-”woke” plot lines, Dilbert was dropped last September from 77 newspapers by publisher Lee Enterprises. Adams, for his part, claimed the move “was part of a larger overhaul” of comic syndication. At the same time, however, he also said it’s “possible” the strip was pulled for other reasons.

I suspect that all we can do is recognize that Adams is a front for racism, and while we can’t do anything about him, we certainly can judge our friends and family who post Dilbert comics on their office door and send them around via Facebook. That’s all “canceling” is, anyway.

I find this jarringly horrible. Some people in Florida are driving around in a truck projecting Nazi imagery on buildings.

They also put up messages, like “Kanye was right about the Jews,” but showing a swastika intertwined with a cross is particularly revealing. Christian nationalism, anti-Semitism, blatant bigotry, all proudly displayed, and no one is doing anything about it. Try to do that in my neighborhood, and I’d be part of the mob taking bats to the projector and flipping the truck over.

What mystifies me is that there are subsets of the population in the US that revere Nazis and don’t react to this kind of hate speech with the kind of shuddering revulsion I feel. This is evil stalking our streets. It should not be tolerated, and the people perpetrating it need to understand the visceral disgust they trigger in others.

Unfortunately, these people are also close kin to all the rabid conservatives who hate “wokeness”.

Nick Bostrom paced about his chambers, agitated and offended. The puling mob had accused him of racism for merely writing Blacks are more stupid than whites in his youth, and then refusing to admit that thinking entire ethnic groups, nay, even the population of whole continents, could be genetically inferior was racism. It was science! He was not going to repudiate Science!

He must rebuke these irrational people. They are distracting him from his important work. He must deliver a stunning riposte. He considers the most effective way to crush them. He shall accuse them of being…mewling infants? Lowing beasts? No — they are buzzing insects.

Perfect. Accusing those damned SJWs of being a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitos will strike exactly the right chord with his fanbase of libertarian/conservative free speech warriors.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

Two of them, actually, the second to repudiate the first. They’re both pretty bad.

One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers has apologized for writing a racist email in which he used an appalling racial slur and said he believed it was “true” that “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”

Before we get to the flaming racist bits, I have to question that. “One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers”? Nick Bostrom? Seriously? He’s a bloodless weirdo who writes bizarre fantasy stories about the world being a simulation that seems to be mainly taken seriously by Libertarian Silicon Valley tech-bros. Is he really a celebrated philosopher? Or a fringe goofball who caught the imagination of a tiny group of rich dudes? Let me know, philosophers. And if that’s true, you all have some in-house cleanup to do.

Anyway, snapping back to the content…Bostrom was dismayed to learn that someone was snooping around in the archives of an old listserv he participated in, and was rushing to pre-empt the disclosure of some ugly things he shared 26 years ago. Among these unpleasant exposed bits of rubbish, which he’d intended to share with only the cozy fellow white dudes of this listserv, was this bit about “offensive communication styles,” where, as an example, he wrote:

Blacks are more stupid than whites.

I like that sentence and think it is true.

He then goes on to say that he thinks it probable that black people have a lower IQ than mankind in general (which is weird in itself — aren’t black people part of mankind?), and throws in a racial slur. He then explains his point:

My point is that while speaking with the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity would be appreciated by me and many other persons on this list, it may be a less effective strategy in communicating with some of the people “out there”. I think it is laudable if you accustom people to the offensiveness of truth, but be prepared that you may suffer some personal damage.

Please note precisely what he is saying: here is what he really believes, but it wouldn’t be expedient to say it in public. Honesty is admirable, but only if it is strategic, and otherwise, DON’T SAY THE QUIET PARTS OUT LOUD. But now, uh-oh, the normies are uncovering the stuff they weren’t supposed to here, and it’s time to cover his butt.

That was the message a quarter century ago. Now that it’s being exposed, yeah, it’s butt-covering time. That’s the whole point of Nick Bostrom’s new email, which you can read at the link. It’s an interesting exercise in loudly repudiating your old views while not actually repudiating them. He announces in bold:

I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

OK, good, now stop. Stop, I said. Shut up! Dear god, why do you have to keep on babbling on, undercutting your own repudiation? Yeah, he did not shut up. After listing all the charities he donates to (see? He really is a good person), he decides to expand on that black IQ business.

Are there any genetic contributions to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise [So shut the fuck up already!], and I don’t have any particular interest in the question [So disinterested he can’t shut up about it]. I would leave it to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role.

That’s how he “rejects utterly” his racist ideas from 26 years ago…by saying, oh gosh, I don’t really know, maybe my more racist friends ought to talk about it a lot more.

Then he goes on to ask, What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? Hold on there. The old email doesn’t say anything about eugenics — why do you suddenly feel the need to go on and on about it? Are there some other emails you haven’t told us about where you talk about policy to take care of inferior races that you’re feeling guilty about? Really, you should definitely shut up.

If you’re curious about his position on eugenics, he is in favor of some uses and against others, which fits perfectly with his declaration of complete repudiation and utter rejection. It’s just more waffly shit.

So we’re now left to make a choice: should we believe his old email, which argues that you should like to hide your offensive views from us people “out there,” or should we believe his new email that claims his offensive views are totally false while being unable to simply say so?

It’s like a philosophical dilemma that is trivially easy to solve!