How to throw away $30 billion.
Twitter’s value has plummeted by almost two-thirds since Elon Musk acquired the company in October 2022, one of the social media company’s only remaining external investors has admitted.
Don’t cry for Elon, though, he still has $14 billion in value in his pocket. You can live pretty well on a few billion, I’ve heard.
Kandiss Taylor ran for governor of Georgia on the slogan, Jesus, Guns, and Babies,
which is the perfect Republican mantra. She also promised to execute sheriffs who disobeyed her rules. To everyone’s immense surprise, she lost big time, getting only 3.4% of the vote. Don’t worry, she’s doing the Trump thing and contesting the election, saying it was rigged
.
She’s in the news again. She went on a flat-earth podcast to denounce globes.
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1660677910959730688
Would you believe she has a PhD in counseling and was employed as a guidance counselor at an elementary school for 19 years? I think someone needs to go back and check on those poor kids.
I think we’ve found the perfectly distilled essence of Republicanism, and astoundingly, someone even worse than Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It leads stupid people like Ray Comfort to say things like this:
The Queen of rock ‘n’ roll passed into eternity today. All the money that Tina Turner possessed, all her fame, all her awards, and accolades now mean nothing. The only thing that matters, is “Were her sins forgiven?”
OK, I forgive her sins. Done.
Maybe better questions to ask when someone dies are: “Did they make the world a better place? Did they create beauty? Did they inspire? Did they speak truth to the world?”
Tina Turner gets a yes to each question. Ray Comfort gets a slow, sad shake of the head.
Michael Flynn (remember him? Former security advisor to Trump, couldn’t keep his mouth shut talking to the Russians, now a QAnon-loving, Christian Nationalist wacko?) has a new grift. He’s one of the founders of a site called 4thePure, which is dedicated to helping people who haven’t been vaccinated. It’s a combination dating site, blood bank, sperm and egg donation site, location for weird webinars with Q creeps, and most importantly, a vector for misinformation. And it only costs $2500 for a lifetime membership, which will give you a 25% discount on overpriced merch (which doesn’t exist yet…coming soon!).
General Jack D. Ripper is real! Now I’m worried about the Doomsday Machine.
I think Kat Abu is too young to make the Dr Strangelove connection.
I’ve said before that Jordan Peterson is a bad biologist, not any kind of biologist at all, and especially not an evolutionary biologist. When someone knowledgeable in the field looks at his expertise, he’s not even a good clinical psychologist. What, exactly, is he supposed to be good at? We can definitely say it sure isn’t ancient languages and the Bible.
…I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them.
Peterson frequently makes etymological arguments, which I’ve always found silly and are typically used creatively by know-nothings to make rhetorical points. Fake etymologies are common on the internet. The annoying thing about Peterson is that he uses them to sound “scholarly,” but he’s using them in bizarre ways.
By the way, sin. There’s two derivations of the word sin: one is chet, which is from the Hebrew, and the other is hamartia, from the Greek. And they both are archery terms that mean to miss the target.
And then he goes on to babble about sports arenas and crowds and I don’t know what, all while gesturing madly. It’s weird display. Very cringe.
But he’s getting everything wrong! Not that that would slow him down in the slightest.
In these few short sentences, Peterson has already made three serious errors. First, he mispronounces the Hebrew word חֵטְא (ḥeṭʾ)—a noun derived from the verbal root ח־ט־א (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ)—as /t͡ʃɛt/ (pronouncing the ⟨ḥ⟩ at the beginning like the ⟨ch⟩ in cheese) when it should actually be pronounced /χɛt/. This is a pronunciation mistake that no one who actually knows anything about Hebrew would make, since the sound /t͡ʃ/ does not exist in ancient or modern Hebrew. By mispronouncing the word in this blatant manner, Peterson clearly demonstrates that he does not even know the Hebrew alphabet.
Second, Peterson claims that these words are “derivations of the word sin,” but this is factually incorrect. Neither of these words is the etymological root of the English word sin; instead, they are ancient Hebrew and Greek words that occur in the texts of the Bible that modern translators normally render into English as the word sin because translators have decided (whether rightly or wrongly) that sin is the closest English equivalent of these terms.
Etymologically speaking, the English word sin actually derives from the Middle English word sinne, which derives from the Old English word synn, which derives from the Proto-West Germanic word *sunnju, meaning “responsibility,” “care,” “worry,” or “need.” This word, in turn, derives from the Proto-Germanic word *sunjō, meaning “truth.” This, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁sónts, meaning “a thing which exists or is true,” which is the active participle of the Proto-Indo-European verb *h₁es-, meaning “to be.”
Third and finally, Peterson claims that both the Hebrew word ḥeṭʾ and the Greek word ἁμαρτία are “archery terms,” but this is only partly true. It is true that ancient texts do use both of these words to refer to when a person shoots an arrow or throws a spear and misses their intended target. Nonetheless, ancient texts also use both of these words in a much more general sense to refer to any kind of mistake or failure that a person makes. In fact, some of the earliest attested occurrences of the word ἁμαρτάνω use it in this more general sense to mean simply “make a mistake.”
I’ll take the author’s word for it all, but using a tenuous link between sin and archery is already ridiculous. It’s an unwarranted extrapolation and interpretation, even if the etymology were correct. It’s like if I were talking about developmental biology, using technical terms we take for granted, like “competence” and “induction” and “determination,” and used a dictionary to declare that we thought embryos were self-willed intelligent beings. No, it’s more that embryologists in the 1920s were enamored with psychology and were borrowing terms to apply to concepts that had absolutely nothing to do with minds.
Peterson is that clueless nerd with a dictionary making stuff up to justify his conclusions.
This is not the person you want running your school.
A Florida principal resigned during an impassioned school board meeting on Tuesday, after it was revealed she tried to send $100,000 from the school’s account to a scammer posing as Elon Musk.
Jan McGee – the principal of Burns Science and Technology charter school in Oak Hill – claimed she spent months talking to a man online who was pretending to be the richest man on Earth, NBC affiliate WESH reports.
McGee was reportedly trying to net a multi-million dollar donation in the school, in exchange for a $100,000 check. Thankfully, the school’s business manager cancelled the check before it could be cashed.
The principal was repeatedly told she was speaking to a scammer, according to other administrators at the meeting. School staff members also pointed out other issues they have with McGee and accused her of fostering a toxic work environment.
McGee resigned after multiple staff members said they refused to work for her any longer, according to WESH.
If I really wanted to be a con artist, I would definitely move to Florida.
Men these days have decayed from the power and virility of their forebears. Think of those mountain men who’d go off into the wilderness alone and hunt and fish and trap and live off the land, to return after months or years with a sledge loaded with valuable animal pelts. They were awesomely self-sufficient. We have degraded over time, to the point where some men are little more than weak parasites on society who depend on others to tend to their frail, fragile selves and pathetic needs.
I speak, of course, of American conservatives.
These smug, self-satisfied little ‘men’ chortle and laugh as they’re asked if they would rather do dishes or laundry…and admit with an air of pride that they don’t do either. Not only are they ineffectual and incapable, they are vain about their deficiencies. It makes them a special elite, I guess.
Listen. It makes them spineless atavisms.
Here’s what a real man should be able to do:
(This is what a real woman should be able to do, too, so maybe it’s a list of what real humans do.)
These guys have gone from whining about “stand up straight” and “clean your room” to bragging about their incompetence at elementary chores. I do all those things, including washing dishes and doing laundry, and I’m a wokefied candy-ass liberal who uses pronouns.
On the bright side, American conservatives are on the road to extinction.
One pleasant bit of non-news is that CPAC is dying. For a couple of decades now, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a yearly spectacle of far right conservative speechifying, when the radical Republicans could let their hair down and let their freak flag fly, and the media would dutifully report on their gibbering mania, and we’d point and laugh, and then some of the kooks would get elected to high office. Remember when David Silverman tried to get American Atheists represented at CPAC? That was an omen.
This year, I hadn’t even realized it was going on until several days into the conference, it was that much of a yawner. Attendance is way down, and the ratfuckers are giving speeches to nearly empty seats. Prospective presidential candidates are skipping the whole show. It’s a “who cares?” event now.
However, as it’s relevance declines, the participants are reaching for the big bottle of crazy evil to spark excitement, and as we all know, the Republican party has become unhealthily obsessed with what’s in other people’s pants. They’re trying to pass laws to restrict people’s civil rights, they’ve developed a weird hatred of Mrs Doubtfire, they want to burn books that even mention the existence of non-traditional non-heterosexuals. What’s next? How can they top the insanity they’re perpetrating right now?
The Right’s war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles openly called for the public eradication of transgender individuals. During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd,
For the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.
…
In his speech, Knowles used a convoluted line of thinking and false logic while trying to prove his horrifying point that trans people should not exist.There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It can be all or nothing,he said.If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false — as it is — if men really can’t become women — as they cannot — then it’s false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it, especially when that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of many people. It if is false, then for the good of society — and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion — then transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.
We’ve seen where this line of thinking goes, we don’t need a roadmap to recall our history. First we have to silence the Badthought with bookburnings and firelit marches and shrieking news articles. Then we pass laws criminalizing drag shows (Tennessee just made appearing in drag a felony with a 6 year prison sentence). Next we have to isolate the bad people in concentration camps, and then we have to move on to a Final Solution.
You would think that Ben Shapiro, Knowles’ big boss at the Daily Wire, would be aware of the comparison. Knowles himself is being made aware that he said the evil parts out loud, and is lashing out at the media that is reporting on his words and demanding retractions.
You said it, big boy. Be thankful that the only pain you might suffer is a little public humiliation, rather than a prison sentence or a beating or a gas chamber, like your victims have to deal with all the time.
When the gender essentialist scum get stirred up on Twitter, that also means my in-box becomes a cloaca. A representative example:
Your twitter account looks like it belongs to a psychopath. You retweeted something from another psychopath re Libs of Tiktok’s children’s book claiming she was presenting a ram as a ewe. She wasn’t. He didn’t open up the book to let people see the full illustration which shows a ram and a ewe.
Your page looks like it belongs to a man with a perverted interest in spiders (why not? I mean we have furries and adult diapers wearers). Apparently you don’t understand there are two sexes in humans, although apparently there are in spiders.🤡
There’s no point in arguing with them. The kind of doofus who assumes that saying “sex is more complicated than a simple binary” means “I don’t believe sex exists” is too thick to waste time on.
Also, defending Libs of Tiktok is too deranged.
I’m sorry, Florida is a joke.
If the Lee County Republican Party has their way, the state of Florida will be banning the use of Covid-19 vaccines. Yes, you heard that correctly. Based on a majority vote, the Party has passed a so-called “Ban the jab” resolution that will now go to the desk of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) for his consideration. And why does the Party want such a ban? Well, an article for WINK News by Michael Hudak and Taylor Wirtz quoted Joe Sansone, the guy who drafted the resolution, as saying, “The Lee County Republican Party is going to be on the vanguard of this campaign to stop the genocide because we have foreign non-governmental entities that are unleashing biological weapons on the American people.”
This Sansone clown is a “psychotherapist” who clearly knows nothing about biology. He claims the vaccine is a “bioweapon”, and he has the ear of the governor. Do you think DeSantis will refuse to sign his insane declaration?
Sansone is pretty far out there.
The WINK article also included another quote from Sansone that really seemed to embrace some conspiracy theory claims: “If you got this shot, you go home and hug your pregnant wife—she can have a miscarriage through skin contact.” Wait, so now, you’ve got to start worrying about hugging people who have gotten Covid-19 vaccines? How exactly is that supposed to work scientifically? Did Sansone provide any peer-reviewed scientific studies to support his assertion? Most likely not, because good luck trying to find any peer-reviewed scientific studies to support such an assertion.
Don’t worry, though, he has been verified by Psychology Today, so you can trust him. PT would never publish a wackaloon, right? (Actually, I feel like Psychology Today is the Florida of pop-sci magazines.)
Joseph Sansone, M.S., PhD, LMHC, CCMHC, is the author of Bioplasticity: Hypnosis Mind Body Healing. A psychotherapist specializing in clinical hypnosis, Joseph was trained in advanced clinical hypnosis at the Academy of Professional Hypnosis in 1997. Dr. Sansone has a B.A. in psychology, a M.S. in clinical mental health counseling, and a PhD in psychology. Joseph has spent much of his life as an entrepreneur and enjoys facilitating self-actualization. Joseph Sansone is a licensed mental health counselor as well as a board certified clinical mental health counselor. Dr. Sansone is also a member of the National Guild of Hypnotists.
