Two wackjobs met in a podcast

No. I’m not going to listen to it. I’ll take the Readers’ Digest Condensed version of the epic encounter between Boghossian and Bret Weinstein.

This was amazing.

1/ Peter Boghossian’s interview with Bret is, predictably, an hour of them discussing the mental and moral defects (including ‘being ugly’) that lead people to disagree with them

Bret brags about how intellectually honest he is and how hard he works to disconfirm his hypotheses

2/ IMO the highlight was when Bret released a suprise new hypothesis

Apparently, the Woke Mind Virus could very well be a bioweapon seeded by our geopolitical enemies to destroy The West!

3/ I thought he probably meant this in an unfalsifiable sort of “well there are russian/chinese troll farms sowing dissent on twitter” kind of way, but no, he’s very clear that he believes they might have *invented wokeness* and deployed it as a weapon

4/ Also funny that Peter Boghossian seems to have paid absolutely no attention to Bret’s content and does not know that he’s become a hardcore antivax conspiracy loon.

5/ Bret’s recent interactions twitter with yours truly😘 seem to have crystalized into a new talking point. You don’t have to pay attention to your critics if they haven’t “accomplished anything.” This raises the question – what has Bret accomplished?

Yeah, Bret used to be a biologist. Boghossian used to be a skeptic.

The poopy-pants brigade in action!

Project Veritas still exists, and they were recently slapped with $150,000 in legal fees because they tried to sue Stanford University and failed. I love watching them fail.

An academic blog post in September 2020 from a Stanford-affiliated nonpartisan coalition called the Election Integrity Partnership was at the heart of Project Veritas’ lawsuit.

The blog post questioned a Project Veritas report about alleged “ballot harvesting” in Minnesota. Zilly’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit said “the phrases in the blog post that Project Veritas challenges as defamatory are nonactionable opinions.”

“Ballot harvesting” is perfectly legal in Minnesota. It just means that volunteers will pick up sealed absentee ballots from voters and deliver them to polling places. Project Veritas tried to make a big deal of a normal, legal process as “corruption”, and they were taken to court over it.

Unfortunately, $150,000 in small change to the deep pockets that fund these rotten “think tanks”. What I don’t understand is why they keep pouring cash into these corrupt, discredited jokers. James O’Keefe is a notorious liar with no credibility, who has been banned from Twitter for various disreputable activities.

Right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe, best-known for his undercover “sting” operations and deceptively edited videos, was permanently suspended from Twitter on Thursday for what the social-media site said were violations of the its policy on manipulation and spam.

But, you know, what I find most revealing is that the rich conservatives who pay for his shenanigans, who like to pretend to be defenders of righteous American values, have been overlooking the decadent frat boy behavior of the crew.

As an administrative assistant for the conservative undercover group Project Veritas, Antoinetta Zappier had some unusual responsibilities. She claims she would be woken up in the middle of the night because Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe had lost his apartment keys, or asked to fake O’Keefe’s signature onto thousands of copies of his book, after donors had paid $200 each to receive “signed” copies.

And then, there was the time, Zappier says, she had to buy supplies to clean up a boat after partygoers at an event hosted by O’Keefe relieved themselves on the floor.

In a lawsuit filed Sunday, Zappier alleges that her duties for Project Veritas extended to a particularly debauched boat party for Young Republicans. After buying hundreds of dollars worth of alcohol for the party, Zappier alleges, she was left frantically purchasing cleaning supplies when attendees “defecated on the floor.”

The boat-excrement scene is just one incident alleged in a federal lawsuit Zappier filed Sunday against Project Veritas. The allegations—which also include an abortion, a near-fatal drug overdose, pornography, and secret sexual recordings—portray a conservative group running out of control under O’Keefe’s leadership.

What is it with with these right-wing kooks pooping their pants all the time? And why do the fat cats continue to fund them?

We already knew Elon Musk was a villain

He’s so villainous, sometimes he openly admits his villainy!

Elon Musk has wielded a virtual monopoly on how we think about the future, but will his visions really deliver better lives for most people in our society? For all the tech industry’s talk of “disruption,” keeping us all trapped in cars for decades into the future by equipping them with batteries or upgraded computers doesn’t feel like much of a revolution.

A much more sustainable alternative to mass ownership of electric vehicles is to get people out of cars altogether—that entails making serious investments to create more reliable public transit networks, building out cycling infrastructure so people can safely ride a bike, and revitalizing the rail network after decades of underinvestment. But Musk has continually tried to stand in the way of such alternatives.

He has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options. The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now. As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition. But the futures sold to us by Musk and many others in Silicon Valley didn’t just suit their personal preferences. They were designed to meet business needs, and were the cause of just as many problems as they claimed to solve—if not more.

Monologuing is such a bad habit for villains to get into — they spill all the beans.

So yeah, the Hyperloop was an obviously absurd scheme that was never going to reduce traffic congestion, so it’s useful that he revealed his actual motivations, which was to kill mass transit, which actually does work for his previously stated goal. His “serial killer” rationale is also silly — like Ted Bundy was knocking women unconscious and flagging down a bus to carry them to the murder site, or the Green River Killer was picking up prostitutes on the King County Metro.

Now I’m wondering, though, what is his ulterior motive for colonizing Mars? We know it isn’t going to work, and we know it’s not to save humanity, so what’s going on in his selfish little brain to drive him to hire people to build SpaceX?

I guess it was a joke?

You know, bro humor, so not actually funny.

The responses are “hilarious”.

He probably wanted to smoke a big cigar next to the proof of his potency.

You gotta feel sorry for Matt Walsh. He doesn’t understand what a woman is, so how can you expect him to empathize with one?

I was right there by my wife’s side during all three births, and I find it hard to laugh about all the pain and the sweat and the blood she went through. Maybe if I were a bro I could get through those jokes. Maybe if it were their wives, rather than a bunch of smarmy men, making the jokes, I’d be able to see the laughter through the pain.

The only kind of humor conservatives like, though, is punching down.

Goon University shot their wad

Would you believe that a two week course in a rented building led by a team of conservative wankers was the majestic peak of intellectual achievement this summer? Bari Weiss thinks so.

They’ve reached their peak so soon. It’s all downhill from here.

THREE HOURS OF JORDAN PETERSON?

If it were just 3 hours of Peterson alone, it would be hellish. As 3 hours of exposing Peterson as a shallow right-wing grifter, though, I found this entertaining. Infuriating. Infurataining? Try it as a kind of background anti-ASMR, maybe.

Hey! If you’ve got a little time after that, Abe and I seem to have similar tastes, so you can go over there and spend an additional hour watching Thoughtslime explain how hard work is a grift.

By the way, life hack here: I usually play videos at 1.25 speed, which doesn’t wreck listenability too bad, and if you’ve got a little free disk space, use an app (I use one called ClipGrab) to download the whole video and play it from there — it removes the annoying commercials which are currently a plague on YouTube.

He’s such a good Republican

An empty football helmet. Perfect!

Herschel Walker personifies all those good ol’ Republican ideals: stupidity, ignorance, greed, and dishonesty.

He might be the next Senator from Georgia. You can hear all the chucklefucks in the audience clucking approvingly over his ‘science’, and you can hear the gears grinding. Why should we do something that benefits us if it also benefits the rest of the world? They’re all thinking about modifying their trucks so they can roll coal now and teach China a lesson.

Now I wonder if he’s actually lying, or his brain is so rotten that he doesn’t know he’s lying.

Doesn’t matter, the deader the brain and the more corrupt the morals, the better the Republican candidate.

He is so angry!

Boy, Jordan Peterson sure is upset that other people don’t share his Objective™ and True™ evaluation of beauty.

How dare Sports Illustrated insist that a non-athletic body could be beautiful? I’m going to take that personally.

Then he’s offended that SI was exploiting Yumi Nu…as if no other woman asked to pose in a skimpy bathing suit was exploited. He pretends that he’s defending her by insulting her.

It’s weird how he exposes his rage over such subjective issues, as if he is the final arbiter, and he and he alone gets to decide who is beautiful and who is not for everyone else. His authoritarianism is exposed.

How long until we get to Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Someone asked Elon Musk when we’d be landing people on Mars.

His answer: 2029. In seven years.

I’d like to know when everyone finally realizes that Musk is completely out of touch with reality. The current big project his hired engineers are working on is the Starship (such hubris…) heavy lifter — they’re making bigger and bigger rockets, and that is supposed to take off this year. But that isn’t even touching the real problem of getting people to Mars. It’s a 7-9 month one-way trip! 21 months if you plan to bring them back home…not that I’m at all confident that Musk would care about that, he’s not going, after all. He’s nowhere near working out the problems of sustained life support in an incredibly hostile environment, where the crew would be completely isolated from any chance of aid, and where they’ll be soaking in radiation. No one is going to be ready in seven years. The tech won’t be here.

I’ll remind you that we got to the Moon six times, with astronauts hopping around for a few days each time, and that was it. We haven’t gone back. It’s doable, I could imagine people could make a few more trips in the 2030s to the Moon, but that’s trivial in comparison to going to Mars.

I’ll also remind you of the history of Musk’s grand projects. He was going to solve traffic with tunnels, remember.

It turned out to be a pitiful short, but expensive, tube that a few cars at a time could drive through. When Musk promises, expect something far short of the dream.

He might be vaguely aware of that.

That first comment is a lie. He doesn’t love humanity — maybe he has a few idealistic fantasies about his vague vision of “humanity”, but he’s an out of touch billionaire who is totally isolated from the herd. That’s why he hates traffic and mass transit, he wants to live in a bubble.

That last bit though, that oh-look-a-squirrel moment, is perfect. Yeah, I believe he’s capable of marketing pez dispensers.