Inmates, asylum, yadda yadda yadda

I do believe I said something about that cultural marxism lunacy that’s been floating about in the far right fever swamp for several years. Now would you believe Charles Pierce has found an astonishingly incoherent policy statement that reads like it came straight out of that swamp?

Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck. However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing. Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.

…

Academia has served as a principle counter-state node for some time and remains a key conduit for creating future adherents to cultural Marxist narratives and their derivative worldview. The Deep State – The successful outcome of cultural Marxism is a bureaucratic state beholden to no one, certainly not the American people. With no rule of law considerations outside those that further deep state power, the deep state truly becomes, as Hegel advocated, god bestriding the earth. Global Corporatists & Bankers – Exploitation of populations, unfettered by national protections and notions of personal morality and piety. Democratic Leadership – The democratic leadership has been a counter-state enabler that executes, sustains, and protects cultural Marxist programs of action and facilitates the relentless expansion of the deep state. Republican Leadership – More afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” the Republican Establishment accepts and enforces cultural Marxist memes within its own sphere of operations. In doing so, knowingly or not, it becomes an agent of that.

Pure madness. Except this doesn’t come from some fringe nutter on Twitter. It’s from a guy named Rich Higgins, who was serving on the National Security Council. The conspiracy theorists have taken over the state.

Goddamn fascist cowards

A car driven by our craven American Nazis was intentionally driven into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville today.

There has been lots of violence by raging Nazis this weekend — Nazis who chant anti-semitic slogans, “Blood and Soil”, and “Heil Trump”.

Let this be a lesson to every city, every where: when white supremacists announce their intention to riot in your town, shut the fuckers down. Don’t send out the police to corral the antifa protesters and shelter the fascist marchers — use them to throw these awful, disgraceful people out and defend your citizenry.

Unless, of course, you suspect the police sympathize more with the racist cowards. Which may be the case.

Never give Nazis an inch

The KKK, the alt-right, white supremacists, and unabashed Nazis have all converged on Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, treacherous defender of slavery, from a local park. They marched with torches through the city last night.

We can at least appreciate this moment of linguistic simplification: KKK, alt-right, white supremacist, and Nazi all refer to exactly the same thing, one united collection of deplorable bigots, and we should likewise unite to oppose them all. No more Nazis. Shun them, scorn them, punch them in the face. Tear down their monuments, trash their flags, fire them from their jobs.

Now that David Brooks has endorsed it, can we declare evolutionary psychology brain-dead and pull the plug?

This is a doozy of a canard that just won’t die. It’s how idiots who don’t understand evolution, but know that the theory is highly esteemed by scientists, attempt to coopt Darwin to be the figurehead for racism and sexism.

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism

Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.

Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.

Charles Darwin: I’m not a creationist: I’ll use the word ‘race’ in title of my Origin of Species

It’s the dumbass dichotomy: you will either believe in their crude, ill-informed, cartoon version of biology that says that black people are different and inferior, or you’re a creationist. It’s false. The argument is rotten all the way through. Not only do I reject the premise as ill-informed and wrong, but I also reject it because it’s a blatant attempt to commandeer science to be their banner.

It’s bad enough that racists play this game, but guess who else does it? Evolutionary psychologists. Evolutionary psychologists are just the worst.

So I got called out by Lilian Carvalho, a professor of marketing at a business school who studies consumer behavior and — what else? — evolutionary psychology. I have to revise my previous statement: evolutionary psychologists who think their crude misunderstandings of how evolution works gives them a handle on consumer behavior and marketing are the worst of the worst.

Anyway, Carvalho twitted this:

Another false dichotomy, common to evolutionary psychologists! You see, if you don’t accept their adaptationist model of how the human brain evolved, with every quirk and kink selected to be optimal for life on the savannah 10-100 thousand years ago, then you think biology only works from the neck down. They like to set themselves up as the sole arbiter of how brains evolved, when they always seem to have such a poor grasp of evolution in general, and usually are just coming at it in defense of the biases of the status quo.

I took a look at her twitter history before blocking her, and oh, yeah — it’s full of familiar names, “scientific” racists and anti-feminists and marketing professors, basically a collection of third rate ignoramuses puffing themselves up by waving Darwin around as their virtue signal. Ugh. I don’t need that crap in my life.

But then I read…David Brooks. Fuck me sideways, but we’ve found the worst of the worst of the worst.

Like all the EP wackaloons, he’s irate over the James Damore affair — he argues that Damore shouldn’t have been fired, because he was correct about the biology (which raises the question…how would a conservative pundit with no qualifications for anything know?), but that the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, ought to be fired for joining the mob. Of course, he cites evolutionary psychologists as saying Damore’s manifesto was scientifically accurate when the truth is that an evolutionary psychologist wouldn’t recognize scientific accuracy if it bit him in his bright pink berries.

I hit this paragraph and was stunned at the magnitude of the dishonesty and inanity.

Damore was tapping into the long and contentious debate about genes and behavior. On one side are those who believe that humans come out as blank slates and are formed by social structures. On the other are the evolutionary psychologists who argue that genes interact with environment and play a large role in shaping who we are. In general the evolutionary psychologists have been winning this debate.

Whoa. Brooks sets up two strawmen, labels them incorrectly, stages a battle in his head, and declares the victor.

Look, guy, the nature/nurture debate is dead. Any time I see someone setting up an argument with this hoary ancient dichotomy, I know I’m dealing with an uninformed nitwit. But to characterize it as Brooks has done is carrying idiocy to an absurd degree.

And then…the blank slate. Good god, I blame Pinker for reviving this bullshit and using it to slander his scientific opponents. No one believes the human mind is a blank slate. No one. I’m probably as liberal as most scientists come, you can call me a SJW and I don’t blink an eye, and you won’t find me claiming that. I believe we carry all kinds of predispositions (like a tendency towards tribalism…) that are consequences of our biological nature. I know there are biological differences between men and women, but I also know that people like to falsely rationalize behavioral differences as somehow innate and genetic. That first straw man is basically a nonexistent cartoon.

His second straw man made my jaw drop. evolutionary psychologists … argue that genes interact with environment…unbelievable. The standard understanding among all knowledgeable biologists is that organisms are products of genes and environment interacting; you can’t tease the two apart. That’s why the nature/nurture debate is archaic nonsense. What Brooks has written there is not the key property of evolutionary psychology. It’s what actual evolutionary biologists think.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that the human brain evolved in a specific environment over 10,000 years ago, and that all of the features of how our minds work can be described as adaptations to that environment. It is profoundly dishonest to appropriate the mainstream understanding of the role of genes and environment and credit it to a pseudoscience, while leaving out the actual premises of that pseudoscience. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize the primacy of genetic explanations; they argue that human behavioral traits — how well we do at math, who is most suitable for working in computer science — are affected by a legacy of genes we inherited from our paleozoic ancestors, and that they have the tools to determine exactly which traits are adaptive products of our past. They don’t. They’re masters of the panadaptationist just-so story, nothing more.

And then Brooks declares that the evolutionary psychologists are winning. But he’s just used a bogus definition of evolutionary psychology, one that is more appropriate to real biologists, and pretended that their opponent is a caricature, the blank slater.

Man, those two straw puppets just whaled the hell out of each other.

Yet people are citing David Brooks as the voice of reason all over the place — even Steven Pinker retweeted it. Wait. Of course Pinker would retweet that pile of crap.

James Damore was speaking bullshit calmly, so I can sort of understand David Brooks approving of it, as a kind of professional courtesy among bullshitters. But if you know anything about the science, you shouldn’t accept these lies.

Science doesn’t say that biology holds women back in the workplace. What Damore and Brooks have written is the same old exhaustingly familiar apologetics for discrimination. It’s not science, it’s prejudice pretending to be science.

And right now, evolutionary psychology is the field of choice for bigots who want to pretend to be scientists.

The 2017 Hugo awards are out

The winners have been announced, and they are NK Jemisin, Seanan McGuire, Ursula Vernon, Amal El-Mohtar, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Marjorie Liu…hey, wait a minute, those are all lady names. Obviously, this must mean that women are genetically predisposed to write the best science fiction and fantasy. The evidence is right there! I’m sure the people who argue that existing sex differences in anything can’t possibly be caused by socio-cultural factors will agree because they hate that kind of stuff. They’re just going to have to acknowledge that women are biologically better writers.

Oh, there was the usual effort by the Sad/Rabid Puppies to get some of their nominees on the ballot, and they did have a few works they pushed — none of them won. Not even the transparent attempt to steal credit from good authors by naming them succeeded. They nominated, for instance, China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, and the movie Deadpool…they lost, too. I suspect there might be some weak negative effect, even, where attaching Vox Day’s recommendation to an otherwise good book causes some negative votes. Not that it matters; all the winners were rewarded fairly on their own merits.

One interesting twist: the Puppies, for some reason, really really hate Rachel Swirsky’s If you were a dinosaur, my love, which was nominated for a Hugo in a previous year. I like that story a lot, so I don’t quite get the hatred, but OK, they’re allowed…but this year they intentionally went looking for an opposing story, something with dinosaurs in it, so they could simultaneously sneer at both Swirsky and Chuck Tingle. They picked Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex, by Stix Hiscock. You can’t hold that against Hiscock, though.

Hiscock also said she didn’t know anything about Beale, and seemed to be unaware (before the interview) that he was responsible for Alien Stripper getting on the ballot. She was a little hurt that he would use her novelette as a way to mock the Hugos, especially since it doesn’t seem like he’s even read it. (It’s possible Beale picked it specifically because of the Rabid Puppies’ hatred of the award-winning novelette If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love.) “I guess I’ll cry a little, laugh a little. But I’ll be ok. Jokes are pretty hilarious sometimes,” Hiscock said.

Still, Hiscock said it’s an honor to be nominated, even though she probably won’t be able to attend the ceremonies in Helsinki because of the expense. And even though Beale might’ve gotten Alien Stripper on the ballot due to sheer pettiness, the bank error is definitely in Hiscock’s favor. Book sales of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex are through the roof.

It didn’t win, even though the author is a woman, and we now know that women naturally have superior writing skills.

But I ordered a Kindle copy of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex anyway. It was free. The author seems nice. Besides, I’ve already read all the winners.

Escalating

Our boob of a president has now announced that Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, because he’s a blustering incompetent who would love to bomb something to distract from the legal actions creeping up on him.

North Korea is happy to call his bluff. They’re spreading the news about their attack plan, and they’re willing to be specific: they’ll launch missiles at Guam.

North Korea said under its attack plan, four Hwasong-12 rockets would fly over Shimane, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures in Japan, hitting waters 19 to 25 miles from the island, the Associated Press reported. The plan could be sent to leader Kim Jong Un for approval within a week or so.

They’re threatening to fire a warning shot. So we’re at the next step in the nuclear poker game: they’ll launch a few missiles at us, just to let us know they have the ability. What shall we do next? Do you think our madman would possibly back down and negotiate at some point? I don’t think so.

A prediction: If Kim Jong Un lobs a few bombs in our general direction, Trump will use that as an excuse to target and destroy the missile launching sites…and then the shooting war begins.

Leakers! At Google!

While James Damore is out virtue signaling with the alt-right (he’s already been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, you know Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan are drooling at the prospect of getting him on, and I hear that Gad Saad has sent him an invitation — the deplorables already love him), Google had to cancel a town hall meeting because of growing harassment.

On Tuesday, a 4chan-related Twitter account posted screenshots of fourteen Twitter profiles of Google employees, ranging from rank-and-file engineers to Sundar Pichai himself. Every Googler targeted was either a woman, trans man, or a man of color. This tweet may not have been the origin point of this list of Googlers, but it was spread widely.

Because if you’re not a cis-het white man, you deserve to be attacked by 4chan. Most troubling is that internal screen shots are being leaked by people at Google, who know exactly what’s going to happen to their colleagues.

The targeting of those specific Googlers might have been the work of outsiders, but anxieties are running high inside the company because of the publication of screenshots from the internal Google+ on alt-right channels. On Tuesday, Gizmodo reported that a meme depicting whistleblowers being beaten was being shared on an internal meme generator.

On Sunday, alt-right blogger Vox Day published screenshots from the internal Google+, showing employees criticizing the Damore memo. On Monday, Breitbart published an even larger set of internal screenshots. Names and profile pictures were not redacted. “What really gets me is that when Googlers leaked these screenshots, they knew this was the element of the internet they were leaking it to,” a former Google employee tells The Verge. “They knew they were subjecting their colleagues to this type of abuse.”

It’s a big company, and it’s to be expected that there will be a fair number of Silicon Valley misogynists working there, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that anything disseminated within the company will eventually find its way elsewhere. It’s just sad that there are these people with so much contempt for their coworkers that they’ll sic 4chan dorks on them.

And then if they’re caught, they’ll be so outraged at getting fired.

David Avocado Wolfe doesn’t care about the truth, anyway

Yvette d’Entremont might have pissed off David Avocado Wolfe with her article, DAVID AVOCADO WOLFE IS THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE IN THE MULTIVERSE, because he went on an angry Twitter spree against those damned people who think science works recently. Or maybe he just howls angrily all the time…I don’t know, it seems like that’s the latest thing for big assholes, just spluttering away on the Twitter. I wonder if historians will look back on this decade, wonder what people were thinking, and call this time the Twitting Twenty Teens (I’m kind of afraid there won’t be any historians looking back on the next decade, and if there are a few survivors, they’ll call it the Smoldering Wreckage of the Twenty Twenties.)

Anyway, Wolfe’s latest weird assertion is about lunar and solar eclipses.

You see, gold cannot ‘crystallize’ during a solar eclipse because, like Superman, it derives all of its power from the rays of our yellow sun (just to remind you, the nonsense about “wavelengths” and “vibrations” is common currency in nerd literature, as well as in the New Agey BS), while similarly, silver will not solidify during lunar eclipses, because obviously, it shares mystical wavelengths with the moon.

Wolfe does not explain how he knows this. He also does not give details; is it only in the track of totality during the brief period of the eclipse that gold and silver become recalcitrant, or is it worldwide? Do the metals just mold more slowly during a partial eclipse? Do dentists find that gold fillings set more rapidly if they make them in front of a sunny window than if they do them under fluorescent lamps? How does gold and silver ‘know’ what wavelengths are bouncing around in the room? Inquiring minds want to know, because we could actually test this claim. Woo-woo minds don’t want us to know, because we could actually test this claim.

It reminds me of the time back in the Dismal Nineties made the mistake of telling us that gelatin would not set during a void-of-course moon. He gave us all the details we needed, and since gelatin is cheap and easily available, so guess what a number of us eagerly did? We tested his claim!

It didn’t work.

The annoying thing, too, is that if Wolfe did give details, which he might do since he is the Biggest Asshole in the Multiverse, there are people who would waste their time while in the eclipse of doing the experiment of testing the physical properties of certain metals. There will be no change. And afterwards, like my astrologer, he’ll invent new excuses for why it didn’t work.

So don’t bother, people.

Demand that he demonstrate the phenomenon first, and document it. Or better yet, ignore him, because he is a big lying asshole.

I get email

Man, I thought Catholic fanatics were bad, but they’ve got nothin’ on anti-feminists.

great article about the google diversity

hey,

i just wanted to take the opportunity to tell you that you are a huge (literally nice man tits) cuckold f4gg0t and one day you may be hanging from a rope.

cheers!

He seems nice.

The philosophy of Pickle Rick

I saw the Pickle Rick episode of Rick & Morty last night, and all I can say is…that was pure raw genius. Short synopsis: Mad scientist Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of a therapy appointment, and then has to construct an exoskeleton out of cockroach and rat parts save himself after falling into a sewer.

Yeah, you’re saying that sounds nuts.

Stick with it, though. It’s amazing. After this elaborate series of improbable events, Rick does finally end up with the therapist and there’s this wonderful dialogue (taken from Film Crit Hulk, which really gets into this episode):

Therapist: “Rick, why did you lie to your daughter?”

Rick: “So I wouldn’t have to come here.”

Therapist: “Why didn’t you want to come here?”

Rick: “Because I don’t respect therapy. Because I’m a scientist. Because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living. And when I don’t like something about the world, I change it. And I don’t think going to a rented office in a strip mall to listen to some agent of averageness explain which words mean which feelings has ever helped anyone do anything. I think it’s helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself. I’m not a cow. I’m a pickle – when I feel like it – So… you asked.”

Therapist: “Rick. The only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family, is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it is your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk, to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe. And yet, you are dripping with rat’s blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy. The same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is – it’s NOT an adventure – There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just… work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.”

That last bit — after 20 minutes of unbelievable adventure and violence and exotic super-science — suddenly grounds the whole story in mundane reality and speaks of a far deeper truth than is possible with a talking pickle.

It would be good to use this cartoon in a discussion of bioethics, except that I fear students might be more distracted by the hyper-violence that comes before. But man, I know a lot of people who would nod enthusiastically to everything Rick says, and would spit on everything the therapist said…when the therapist is the one to bring some real insight.

Maintain, everyone.