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.

I get email (Phillip edition)

If you experience difficulties typing exclamation points in a comment here, it’s because Phillip Jones has been hogging them all. I just discovered a vast stagnant pool of missives from him deep in the bowels of my university email account, which has a lot of filters on it to prioritize messages from students and colleagues, so email from outside those groups tend to languish in neglect there. He seems to go on a rage jag every few weeks and dump a lot of repetitive invective, with numerous exclamation points, typically including links to his own posts on Twitter or Facebook, as if they are authoritative sources.

But lately he’s raging on Gettr, the right-wing pro-Trump Twitter look-alike, because his Twitter account has been suspended. Poor man. At least his emails are getting shorter.

https://gettr.com/post/p1a8bdj013f https://gettr.com/post/p1a8cis02f9 I’m going to contact the police and ask them to arrest you! And I’m going to contact UNMM and ask the to fire you!

Now I want to ask my local police if they’ve been contacted by a very emphatic kook — that was sent last night, so if the cops knock on my door and drag me away in handcuffs today, you’ll know why.

He’s going to have a tough time contacting my employer at UNMM, though. I don’t even know what that is!

Jordan Peterson can’t see any holes in his argument

But I can!

The Bible is true in a very strange way. It’s true in that it provides the basis for truth itself. And so it’s like a metatruth, without it there couldn’t even be the possibility of truth. And so maybe that’s the most true thing, the most true thing isn’t some truth per se. It’s that which provides the precondition for all judgements of truth. I can’t see any holes in that argument. And I can’t see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either, because I think we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem.

Oh, yeah, the familiar is/ought problem. I agree with the last sentence above, but what I don’t see is Peterson’s solution. So we should derive ethical direction from a collection of contradictory, incoherent myths in a specific holy book? Why should I accept the precondition of the Bible’s rules instead of some other holy book, or instead of a framework of empiricism? That’s all he’s saying, is that ethical action requires a standpoint and a goal, but he doesn’t even try to justify the mish-mash of primitive ideas in the Bible as that good perspective needed to drive ethical behavior.

Why should I consider the ravings of a Jungian weirdo with bizarre dietary beliefs to be representative of a “scientific perspective”?

In his tweet, he seems to be claiming that “the west” should have a different precondition for truth than the rest of the world. Is this relativism? Or maybe it’s post-modernism. I have no idea what philosophical mumbo-jumbo he’s drawing this claim from — I think it might just be what you get emerging from a drug-addled, overly-entitled brain.

Nice suit, though. It drapes well even when its contents are empty.

Quite possibly the worst commencement speech ever

The students of the University of Wyoming deserved better. Their commencement speaker was an awful Republican who said stupid things.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) was resoundingly booed on Saturday while giving a commencement address at the University of Wyoming after she said it is a “fundamental scientific truth” that there can only be males and females.

“There are those in government who believe not that the creator endowed us with inalienable rights … but that government created those rights,” Lummis said in her speech. “And the government should redefine those rights, including our rights to freedom of speech, religion, property, assembly and to keep and bear arms. Even fundamental scientific truths — such as the existence of two sexes, male and female — are subject to challenge these days.”

Students erupted in boos and jeers after that last sentence — and they continued on for nearly 30 seconds as Lummis stood awkwardly smiling onstage.

You can watch the moment here, starting right around the 49:40 mark.

Good for the students booing her. She seems to think that Jesus created “rights”, that they weren’t the product of human beings writing rules down. She thinks “two sexes” is a scientific truth, when the science she excludes and doesn’t understand says that sex is much more complicated and diverse than she imagines.

If you just listen to that short segment, though you’ll miss the other lunacies in her speech. A minute or two before that, she was plugging Bitcoin. After her “two sexes” bit, she talks about her favorite contemporary non-fiction author, who is…Eric Metaxas? Well, there’s the problem right there. She thinks a conservative evangelical pundit who writes children’s books supporting Donald Trump, with titles like Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp, who writes bad biographies praising Christian leaders, whose writing is full of nothing but god-talk, who is an anti-vaxxer, is an example of a non-fiction author.

Lummis is a deluded, ignorant fool. Wyoming is a conservative state, so I can understand how she got elected, but I used to expect a university to promote just the best and brightest, and the University of Wyoming failed on that point.

Also, as of February of this year, Lummis owns about $200,000 worth of Bitcoin. I don’t know what that’s worth now (I hope much less), but using a commencement speech to shill for your personal profit is kind of gross.