Media complicity

David Brooks has a new fucking column out, and I’m seeing outrage at its banality everywhere. I don’t give a damn. Brooks is a symptom of the corruption in our media; just a great big pustule oozing on the surface that tells you something is sick and rotten underneath. I’m going to just let driftglass tell the story, so go read that. It’s a long summarizing moan of despair, covering Brooks & Newt Gingrich & Rush Limbaugh & the High Holy Church of Bothsiderism. Liberals have been exactly correct about the bankruptcy of the Right all along, and it doesn’t matter, because the Murdochs and Zuckers and Sulzburgers just chuckle and throw money at the festering batshit.

History will note that the New York Times keeps shoveling cash at David Brooks for his regular insipid apologetics for elitist criminality.

An autocatalytic negative feedback loop in the Republican party

The Republican attitude towards education is taking an abrupt plunge, which is both unsurprising and unfortunate.

It’s unsurprising because Republicans have been the anti-education party for as long as I’ve been alive — this is what they do, hatin’ on those damned hippie elitists and their uppity airs, and also, as the Republican party fuses with the religious right, they figure going to college is the fast track to atheism and ultimately, hell fire. So they rail against education, and now it’s reached the point where it is going down faster than ever: They rage against education, so when they don’t do well in college they blame the institution, so they rage further, fueling more disaffection, leading to poorer performance, und so weiter. Students improve when they see a path to correcting their own deficiencies; they do more poorly when they find an irrelevant scapegoat. And Republicans are all about the scapegoating.

It’s unfortunate because this is the 21st century and a technological society that depends on maintaining an edge in their beloved capitalist competition with the rest of the world, and they’re going to throw it all away out of spite and ignorance. But then, the Republican have become the party of spite and ignorance ever since Saint Reagan. They’re going to tear it all down for the rest of us, too.

The descent of the History Channel continues

I’m sure that by now most of you have seen The Photo that the History Channel purports supports a hypothesis that Amelia Earhart was captured by the Japanese navy in 1937. I hope you will all join me in a resounding chorus of “BULLSHIT!”

This is a blow up of the relevant portion of the photo. The person seated with their back turned to us is supposed to be Earhart.

Can you tell? It looks just like her! Right. Looks like bullshit to me.

Not only is that supposed to be a photo of Earhart, but the ‘investigators’ can detect her mood.

They obviously believe that they’ve been rescued, Gary Tarpinian, the show’s executive producer, tells NPR. However, the word came back from Tokyo that … we can’t let her go. I’m not sure why. Did she see something she shouldn’t have seen? Did they think she was spying? Who knows? We can only speculate. But somewhere between when she thought she was rescued and after that photo, she was held captive and she was brought to Saipan.

How can they infer all this? Somehow, I think their analysis consisted of scanning the photo into a computer and shouting “ENHANCE” at it. All bullshit.

Here’s a good debunking of this stupid hypothesis. It’s not bullshit.

Just remember: friends don’t let friends watch the History Channel.

Every time. Every time the Catholics make up nonsense.

The Pope has just reiterated a rule about the Eucharist.

The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition. It follows therefore that bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament. It is a grave abuse to introduce other substances, such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist. Hosts should obviously be made by those who are not only distinguished by their integrity, but also skilled in making them and furnished with suitable tools.

The newest rule:

Hosts that are completely gluten-free are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist. Low-gluten hosts (partially gluten-free) are valid matter, provided they contain a sufficient amount of gluten to obtain the confection of bread without the addition of foreign materials and without the use of procedures that would alter the nature of bread.

I remember being inundated with mail from outraged Catholics explaining the nature of the communion wafer: it specifically transformed into the flesh of Jesus when served, although it wasn’t a change of substance but of spirit. And now I learn that Jesus can only be made from wheat, and specifically must include some quantity of gluten, or the magic doesn’t work.

I’m pretty sure that if there were an actual Jesus, son of a god, living in Palestine 2000 years ago, he would not have been made of wheat, and he would have been gluten-free. I’m also pretty sure that the menu from the last supper was not preserved — there are more than enough silly arguments about whether the bread was leavened or unleavened — that for all we know they might have been nibbling on nice slices of pumpernickel, and no Catholic has ever shared the right kind of bread at communion, so they’re all going to hell.

Philosophers who understand neither philosophy nor biology

Peter Boghossian is demonstrating that he’s a fool and an ignoramus again.


Why is it that nearly every male who’s a 3rd wave intersectional feminist is physically feeble & has terrible body habitus?

You just have to love that extra fillip of the term “habitus” — it adds an extra level of pomposity to a statement that basically, feminists men are weak and have ugly physiques. It’s the male counterpart to the old anti-suffragette cartoons that portrayed them all as hideous crones and spinsters. That attitude is alive and well among regressive assholes today.

But then he goes further and invokes his poorly understood version of biology to justify it, and claims the authority of Science behind his opinion of those ugly feminists.


My “body habitus” tweet was a reference to what evolutionary biologists term “sneaky fucker” theory.

I have to correct HJ Hornbeck; the “sneaky fucker” theory was not invented by MRAs, but is a legitimate evolutionary idea that’s been around for quite a while. The thing is that you don’t publish a term with an obscenity in it — editors tend to chop those out. It’s more often called “sneaks and guards”, and if you want to find it in the scientific literature, better search terms are “alternative mating strategies” or “dimorphic males”. One of the clearest examples is found in Onthophagus beetles, where there is an allocation trade-off in development between investing in giant horns for use in direct battles with other males, vs. giant testes for better sperm competition. That’s also an experimental model where you can manipulate the tissues in the larva. Cauterize the developing testis, the horns grow bigger; cauterize the primordium of the thoracic cuticle that forms the horn, the testes grow larger.

But MRAs do love this theory, because they think it justifies condemning those wimpy feminist males (“betas” and “cucks”; by the way, that whole nonsense of “alphas” and “betas” is misappropriation of ethological descriptions used in wolves and some other species, which have more complex life history strategies than the MRAs can imagine). They’re just “white knights”, “sneaky fuckers” who sidle up to women and pretend to be on their side in order to have sex with them! They’re just as bad as the noble, straight-forward Alphas, but they’re devious about it!

However, I have to mention another, more useful term to Boghossian: the naturalistic fallacy. I hear that he teaches philosophy, so he might have heard of it, but he clearly doesn’t understand it. Spend less time on Reddit and YouTube where it is dreadfully abused by internet atheists to rationalize all kinds of bad behavior — if chimps throw feces, then obviously YouTube commenters have evolved to be shitlords. They take a grain of truth from animal studies and extrapolate it into all kinds of nonsense about people.

But sure, you can find animal models that fit an extreme pattern.

Beetles demonstrate a pattern of disruptive selection to produce large bodied “guard” morphs and smaller “sneak” morphs. But I am not a beetle, and humans do not show such a pattern.

Cuttlefish also have large aggressive males that zealously guard their harem of females with threat displays, and also smaller males that turn off the threat displays and instead camouflage themselves as females to join the harem. But I am not a cuttlefish, and humans show a wide range of courtship behaviors.

Orangutans have large flanged adult males who also guard harems of females, and smaller, unflanged young males skirt the outside of his territory, looking to mate opportunistically. But I am not an orangutan, and humans change their courtship behaviors to suit the circumstances, so you don’t get to claim a dichotomous suite of mating practices within our species.

Gorillas have a high degree of sexual dimorphism allowing one large male to control a group of smaller females. I am not a gorilla. Humans have evolved to reduce sexual dimorphism and increase cooperation, making the “guard” strategy impractical and counter-productive.

So please, do not shoehorn human behavior into your simplified model of how sex works. It’s reductive and also fails to appreciate the importance of female mating choice. Think about it: “sneaky fuckers” would be a total flop if females of the species didn’t go along with the opportunity and mate happily with the sneaky guys. Females have reproductive strategies, too, and they would rarely favor having their mate choice removed because the big thug corrals them and controls when and with whom they can mate. Unfortunately, we still live with a Victorian influence on science that tends to downplay female participation and initiative, leaving us with many theories that treat females of the species as objects collected and used by the males.

I am a human being. I am a member of a species with complex life histories and prolonged child-rearing requirements that require extensive social behaviors for survival. We have reduced sexual dimorphism, and rarely does our survival hinge on brute force muscular development. We form communities with intense social interactions. We choose mates based on long-term compatibilities — we form partnerships between individuals. One sex does not do all the choosing, and further, choices are based on fairly sophisticated intellectual and emotional properties. Does he or she have a sense of humor, do they have shared interests, are they willing to cooperate in necessary chores, are they fun to be with, are they sexually compatible, do they share the same religious beliefs, do they enjoy the same movies, do they have complementary skills, etc.? Rarely do women wonder whether he would be able to lock them in in the basement and successfully fight off all other human beings who come to visit, and if they do, it’s an argument to reject further association with the man.

Physical appearance does play a role, and we’d be foolish to pretend it doesn’t, but if you look around you at the world of human relationships you might notice that there a lot of stable, long-term couples where neither individual looks like they’re going to be featured on the cover of People magazine. Why? Because all the social and intellectual connections trump all the ephemeral details of looking like a 20 year old model. Appearances matter more in casual hookups (which rarely produce offspring, especially nowadays when birth control is cheap and easy), but the evolutionary outcomes are going to be more dependent on successful family construction and integration into communities.

We need terms more appropriate to the human condition. I suggest that we call superficially handsome, virile, young people like Peter Boghossian “shallow fuckers” while us old homely (or otherwise) guys who can recognize the autonomy of women and form relationships on the basis of long term cooperativity “decent human beings”. At least, that’s a good idea if you’re one of those shallow fuckers who also demand that the world be divided into no more than two classes of people.

Matthew Facciani also gets the science wrong:

“Sneaky f*cker” theory refers to the evolutionary psychology idea that beta males will “sneak in” and have sex with a female while the alpha males are busy. This theory was coined by John Maynard Smith and doesn’t have much (if any) scientific support.

This is not evolutionary psychology. It’s standard, ordinary old ethology, and it’s an idea that’s been around for a long time (I don’t think Maynard Smith coined it, either, he just gets credit for it because he’s a prominent authority), and there is plenty of scientific support — in specific species. But at least his criticism of Boghossian is spot on.

Both Tweets by Dr. Boghossian here are embarrassingly ignorant and illustrate his own bias against feminism. It’s like Pete can’t imagine why any man would embrace feminism so obviously they must be doing it to do get laid. It’s also just sloppy reasoning based on supposed anecdotes. Did he actually measure the body fat of a sample of male feminists and compare it to the average population? Until he shows the study he did, it’s just a childish attack on people he doesn’t like. But interestingly, he attempts to use pseudoscientific jargon to justify his biases.

This is interesting in another way, though: it reminds me of some old debates where pro-evolutionary people would argue against creationists that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution was made up by creationists, and that the terms weren’t used by real evolutionary biologists…so I’d have to cite lists of books and papers that explicitly used those entirely legitimate terms and help out the wrong side of the debate. It was kind of annoying.

Lauren Duca should be teaching journalism to the big networks

She is exactly spot-on in this analysis of that stupid Trump/CNN wrestling video. The bottom line: everyone is focusing on the dingleberry troll who created the video, and churning up the conversation with “blackmail” nonsense, effectively burying the significant story. And that story is that our president is babbling like an immature troll himself on Twitter.

CNN responded with an investigation into the creator of the video, thus totally missing the point, which was not who created the content, but the fact that it was officially disseminated by the White House.

We have to stop getting distracted by the alt-right noise machine and turn our attention directly to the root problem: the Trump regime itself.

It’s easy to tell you to stop getting mad, to pull this visceral experience into the abstract, and declare that we shouldn’t be so confused by confusion, but we must be especially mindful with our outrage when it is being leveraged for intellectual destruction. #CNNBlackmail is not the last we’ve heard of trolling, though calling it out for what it is can help us find focus in the haze of perpetual BS. You’ll be less likely to fall for such trickery if you remain true to yourself, and are actively thinking through your contributions to the public forum. If we can’t yet figure out how to turn off the strobe light, we can at least try admitting that the flashing lights are contributing to our collective headache.

Man, she’s smarter than I am. Smarter than most of the media faces that drone on on the TV, too.

Any priests willing to donate some entrails?

Wait a minute here…Ivanka sat in for Trump at the G20 meeting? This is nuts.

I think all three of my kids are pretty darn great and brilliant and wonderful and thoughtful, but I would never think of taking a day off and inviting one of them to take over teaching my genetics course. If I did, not only would the students be annoyed, but I would be called in to the division head’s and dean’s offices and asked to explain my irresponsibility. But Trump can do this with something that is probably of greater importance to the rest of the world?

I can think of a couple of possible excuses.

  • The way Trump manages the presidency makes it so trivial and fungible that they can bring in any bozo off the street to replace him.

  • Trump believes the job is bestowed on his bloodline — that he’s American royalty, making his daughter a princess.

He probably thinks both are true. My solutions:

  • Fire Trump now, replace him with one of those inflatable bopper clowns.

  • We all know what this country should do to kings.