Another day, another war

Our weapon is piety and sanctimony. No, our two weapons are piety, sanctimony, and hypocrisy. Our three weapons are piety, sanctimony, hypocrisy, and a whole lot of bombs. Trump must have thought it was wonderful that he had an opportunity to wrap himself up in the flag and babble about god.

My fellow Americans, on Tuesday Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror. Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the chemical weapons convention, and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council. Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behaviour have all failed and failed very dramatically. As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilise, threatening the United States and its allies. Tonight I call on all civilised nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types. We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world. We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed, and we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will in the end prevail. Good night and God bless America and the entire world. Thank you.

Assad is a vile piece of shit, I agree. Killing civilians, or anyone for that matter, with nerve gas is a crime against humanity, and something should be done…I just don’t know what, except that wrecking a country with a hail of missiles doesn’t seem to be a very practical way to protect “beautiful babies”. It’s also not just Trump — Obama seems to have killed a lot of civilians with drone strikes, and clearly both parties are blithe about murdering foreigners.

And now I’m also confused by the Trumpian incoherence, which doesn’t help.

You know Syria is one of the countries under a travel ban — and Trump campaigned on opposing immigration and banning those “beautiful babies” from entering the US.

The United States’ record on allowing those “beautiful little babies” of Syria — and their battle-scarred parents — to come here as refugees from the war zone has been abysmal. Over one roughly equivalent stretch of time last year, our next-door neighbors in Canada took in 25,000 Syrian refugees while America took a paltry 841. Hillary Clinton pledged to increase that number — not dramatically — and she was savaged on the campaign trail by Trump and his supporters. Trump, of course, announced a ban on accepting refugees as part of his sweeping — and struck down — travel ban.

It’s also the case that only a few years (months?) ago, Trump was howling in opposition to any military intervention in the region.

It also means that he has thrown away all the cards in his hand and seems to be asking for a new deal.

He was pals with Putin; throw that away, because Putin is an Assad ally and is now talking about beefing up Syria’s defenses.

One of the reasons Trump hadn’t leapt into action before was that the openly hated ISIS was also fighting against the Assad regime. We are now allied with ISIS, in this one thing!

This one is almost amusing: Pepe the Frog is most unhappy with Trump. Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Gavin McInnes, Mike Cernovich, Charles Johnson, and Stefan Molyneux — among the most horrible awful people on the planet — are united in condemning the FAKE, GAY bombing. No word yet on Martin Shkreli’s opinion. I’m allied with these trolls, on this one thing? I’m feeling nauseated.

It’s total chaos!

And look at the flagrant embrace of god-talk in his last three sentences, the usual first resort of American politicians leaping into destruction. I don’t know what god he’s appealing to, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s Arioch. Blood and souls! Blood and souls for Lord Arioch!

Mike Cernovich is getting his moment in the sun

And he deserves every glittering sunbeam. This is Cernovich.

He got to appear on 60 Minutes, which has led to more media exposure.

Cernovich’s allegiance to the “alt-right,” a self-descriptor for a faction of the white nationalist movement, has been repeatedly documented. In 2015 he explained, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for white genocide.” Additionally, in a series of since-deleted tweets, Cernovich declared that “white genocide is real” and “white genocide will sweep up the [social justice warriors].” Cernovich also traffics in sexist rhetoric, having claimed that “date rape does not exist” and “misogyny gets you laid” and said that people who “love black women” should “slut shame them” to keep them from getting AIDS.

Cernovich has also helped popularize numerous conspiracy theories, including the “Pizzagate” story that claimed an underground child sex trafficking ring was run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor and involved top Democratic officials. Despite widespread debunking, Cernovich recently claimed that the restaurant was a place “where a lot of pedophiles meet.” He often uses conspiracy theories to weaponize his social media following against his critics, such as when he baseless claimed satirical video editor Vic Berger was a pedophile after Berger published videos mocking Cernovich.

That’s not all.

The New York Times recently published an article answering the question “Who is Mike Cernovich?”; the cliff notes version of the answer is simply: he is a bad guy. For anyone willing to look for evidence, it isn’t hard to find; Cernovich’s lies are all readily accessible on his own social media, not to mention a documented fact from both conservative and liberal sources alike.

I’ve also been targeted by the lies of Cernovich. My crime: I pointed out that he was completely wrong about HIV when he claimed If you’re a straight man, you will not get HIV.

So he accused me of raping a student. No, he didn’t just accuse me: he made up the detailed and totally imaginary testimony of the student confronting me.

Using psychodramatic techniques, I will tell the story of PZ Myers’ alleged rape victim, as best as I can. (I have not spoken to the alleged victim. Rather, I am imagining and channeling what she might have felt, said, and experienced.) TRIGGER WARNING: This will be very disturbing.

He’s a fucking lawyer. He included this confession that he was openly lying to provide an excuse if he was sued (I obviously wasn’t claiming that he had actually done this, your honor), but no one is fooled. He’s a liar.

I guess if you lie big enough you get an episode of 60 Minutes and a mob of fascist defenders as a reward.

Was anyone burned at the stake? Probably not a witch trial, then

I’m never going to be a fan of a story of a hearing that is titled Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial — it’s loaded with language that is prejudicial and ignores the facts, from the title onward. “Witch trial,” really? It’s the story of a philosophy professor, Peter Ludlow, who was accused of taking advantage of a student. The story states the facts quite clearly, but then goes on to assume the professor was innocent. Here’s what we absolutely know, because both sides agree to this account.

Ludlow and the student, whom I’ll call Eunice Cho, spent the evening going to gallery openings and bars, then ended up sleeping together, clothed, on top of the comforter, in a bed at his apartment. They agree that they didn’t have sex, but Cho would charge that Ludlow had forced her to drink liquor she didn’t want and had then groped her, both at a bar and at his apartment, which led to her trying to kill herself a few days later. Cho filed a Title IX complaint; then hired a lawyer and sued both Ludlow and the university for monetary damages. Ludlow countersued for defamation.

I’m going to say right there that Ludlow was in the wrong. Getting drunk with a student? Bringing her back to your home? Sharing a bed, even if sex didn’t happen? Damned poor judgment on Ludlow’s part. I cannot imagine ever doing anything like that — a student, at an event on my invitation, who was getting drunk…that’s where you stop the situation cold, not hours later when you’re both passed out in bed. This is an action by a professor that warrants discipline.

Then more problems are exposed.

When Cho’s lawsuits went public, a graduate student I’ll call Nola Hartley came forward. Ludlow and Hartley had had what was, at the time, a consensual three-month relationship some two years earlier. Hartley now charged that Ludlow had raped her on one occasion when she was asleep in his bed after drinking too much, though she didn’t actually remember it happening. (They had sex on another occasion, she acknowledged, but that was consensual.) Hartley had also decided, in retrospect, that the entire relationship with Ludlow had never been consensual. She was 25 at the time, well over the age of consent.

Good grief. He had a sexual relationship with a grad student in his department? This faculty member spells trouble all around. This author is also trouble. The fact that the accuser was over the age of consent says nothing about whether the relationship was consensual — when a woman turns 21 it does not mean she has suddenly agreed to everything. You can be 25, 50, or 80 and still refuse consent to sex.

A surprisingly large chunk of this story is also focused on a character witness who was brought in to testify about how wonderful and charming Ludlow is, sentiments the author clearly shares.

Wilson had known Ludlow for 15 years, she said, first as his student and then in two departments as a colleague, and spoke movingly about him as a mentor and a person. Being around him had been a sort of “effervescent philosophical situation” for Wilson and her then-boyfriend, also a philosopher, when they were all in the same department. When she and her boyfriend decided to get married, they chose Ludlow as the officiant “because he was the most erudite, witty, wonderful person that I knew.”

Yes? So? A psychopath can be witty and charming, that doesn’t mean they are innocent of ever committing any wickedness. I can well believe that Ludlow had a perfectly appropriate, reasonable professional relationship with this witness, and even that the witness had never heard a word of complaint about Ludlow — I’ve been in that same position where I’d been stunned to learn people I thought well of were perfidious scumbags in other relationships. It happens. It also actually supports the complaint by Hartley that she hadn’t been in a consensual relationship: she’d been snowed by a charismatic charmer, as Ludlow apparently is.

The story takes a weird turn with the author’s response to the witnesses testimony.

It probably sounds bizarre to say, given the circumstances, but it felt as if there was an erotic current in the room. It reminded me of my own student days, when the excitement of learning made me feel alive in such profoundly creative, intellectual, erotically messy ways — which were indistinguishable from one another, and no one thought it should be otherwise.

WTF? This is a hearing, which she already characterized as a witch trial, and now she’s talking about an “erotic current”? Jesus. I guarantee you the lawyers didn’t feel that way on either side, nor did the defendant who was trying to protect his career, nor would any of his accusers. This was a hearing, a terrible tedious committee meeting with significant consequences. It sounds like someone was enamored with Ludlow.

By the way, this was serious business. The hearing stretched over a month, with lawyers and peers reviewing the evidence. Here’s how it’s characterized:

It was the campus equivalent of a purification ritual, and purifying communities is no small-scale operation these days: In addition to the five-person faculty panel, there were three outside lawyers, at least two in-house lawyers, another lawyer hired by the university to advise the faculty panel, a rotating cast of staff and administrators, and a court reporter taking everything down on a little machine. Ludlow had his lawyer (and on one occasion, two).

How would the author prefer this be handled? The accusations were serious, the impact on the defendant substantial, and there was a massive investment in addressing them formally and seriously. It was not the kind of thing where it would be appropriate to flippantly dismiss either side — the young woman was distressed enough to have attempted suicide, the professor was at risk of losing his tenured position and his career. Damn right it was going to be handled with due attention to all the details. It was actually overkill in giving due process to a faculty member who had essentially admitted to gross impropriety with at least a couple of students, and the conclusion was essentially foregone once he’d admitted to the behavior, even if he does believe that he has sexual privileges with students because he’s erudite and scholarly. That’s not a “purification ritual”, that’s granting the professor full opportunity to justify his actions.

He lost, too. The author even admits, in a roundabout way, that he’s guilty.

Yes, Ludlow was guilty — though not of what the university charged him with. His crime was thinking that women over the age of consent have sexual agency, which has lately become a heretical view on campus, despite once being a crucial feminist position. Of course the community had to expel him. That’s what you do with heretics.

Goddamn. This is not about the age of consent. It’s not about a 60 year old man having having consensual relationships with younger women. It’s about a power differential, and how someone in a position of greater power can abuse it. He was not a heretic, just a professor who took advantage of students. That’s an already difficult situation, and he made it worse by stupidly getting a student drunk and traumatizing them.

He got a fair and perhaps even too deferential hearing, and his poorly thought-out behavior led to his own resignation.

Why are conservatives so weird?

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder if they were all raised by Harry Harlow’s fake mothers made of chicken wire and cotton, because they sure seem to be lacking in something. This guy at the Federalist, Hans Fiene, has an essay that reads like something from an alien.

The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.

We do not have a problem of underpopulation — we’re doing just fine, maybe growing too fast for our environment. The “demographic shift” is merely the typical natural change in a population over time. There was an era when there were relatively few Irish in North America, and now there were lots of people of Irish descent. It wasn’t a tsunami, it didn’t cripple us. It’ll be the same with an increase in the proportion of Latin and black families — we’ll be fine. There is a kind of demographic tsunami that would be destructive, like the one that overwhelmed the Indian population of this continent, but there’s no threat of that. Maybe Mr Fiene has a guilty conscience?

Maybe the real problem is his use of the word “us” — it doesn’t seem to have the same inclusive meaning to him that it does to me. He’s using the racist “us”, referring to only people with his skin color.

What is his solution to the “tsunami”? He wants “us”, you know, the white “us”, to have more children than the brown “them”. How does he hope to do that?

Perhaps I’m overstating the danger a bit, but the point remains: Americans need to raise our sagging birth rates. One of the best ways we can do so is by reversing the trend of Americans waiting longer to get married. So, apart from tearing down America’s institutions of higher education, which tend to slow down the recitation of wedding vows, how do we do that? It’s quite simple. We tear down the Friend Zone.

But we Americans don’t have a sagging birth rate…oh, wait, he’s using the racist version of “Americans”, that doesn’t include every American citizen.

I’m relieved that he’s not advocating tearing down universities, but his reasoning is weird. Having children a little later is a fine idea, especially since child-rearing is a difficult and important job that would benefit from a little more emotional and intellectual maturity (trust me, I work with 18-22 year olds all the time, and there’s a huge amount of growth in that span. Because someone is physically capable of getting pregnant at 14 does not necessarily mean they’re mature enough to raise them well…but then, if your vision of parenting is chicken wire and cloth, you may not get that).

Instead, he thinks we need to tear down the Friend Zone. There’s that strange, alien “we” again — now it seems to exclude women. “We” White Men are going to insist that if “You” Women want to have dinner with us, you must also consent to be impregnated.

Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.

Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration. Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.

Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed. For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.

I can simplify that rule a lot. Don’t be friends with Hans Fiene, or anyone like Hans. Hans needs to realize, though, that this isn’t a binary situation, where one is either friends with Hans, or is fucking Hans–there is the possibility of accepting neither.

He goes on and on about his fantasy of a world where women either have sex with him or obligingly vanish into the woodwork, never to speak to him again, but I think we get the message. Hans Fiene does not consider women or minorities to be fully human, and not part of his “us”.

Hans is a Lutheran pastor, by the way.

His mother was probably just fine. He just thought she was made of chicken wire.

Tooting Mastodon

There’s a lot to despise about Twitter, but at the same time, it’s become one of those social necessities, like those calling cards you had to have handy when visiting Victorian homes. But at the same time, Twitter totally sucks. It’s a haven for Nazis and shit-posters and harassers, and Twitter management has zero interest in making it better for users. Another problem is that they don’t seem to have any competition.

So let’s see some! Sarah Jeong explains a promising alternative called Mastodon. It’s similar in function to Twitter, but has a different underlying philosophy, relying on distributed clusters of users called instances, which then share conversations with users you follow more widely. I haven’t figured out all the mechanics yet, it’ll take time. The big difference is that the instances have zero tolerance for fascists, racists, and harassers, and they say so — and they’ll cut you off if pull any of the crap that is routine on Twitter. That sounds good to me!

If you’re interested in trying it out, go to the list of instances and pick one out — they’re rated for their reliability and number of current users. Jeong signed on to mastodon.social, but that one is closed right now, so pick a different one — they should all allow exchanges between one another, so it shouldn’t make a difference, I don’t think. I chose octodon.social, just because something about the name appealed. Don’t know why. I also kind of liked the manager’s rules:

It should be similar to mastodon.social’s.
NSFW/any legal porn is allowed, but tag it as NSFW or make it unlisted or something.
Trolls are only allowed if they’re quiet; you can shitpost but not harass someone, and my threshold is pretty low.
I’m not Twitter, I’ll fuck up nazis and bullies for fun, and get an AI to do it if I get bored.
I’m your nice cyberpunk queen but I intend to keep this place decent and safe for everyone.

So now I’m signed up as pzmyers@octodon.social. I haven’t done anything with it yet — you know the general principle with any social medium, right? Listen for a while before blaring — but the environment seems pleasant, if a little more quiet. The problem with these things is that they require a critical mass of users, or they fall flat and die, so that may happen here, too.

Oh, and another problem: you don’t “tweet”, you…”TOOT”. Ugh. Why do the people who have the smarts to set up this kind of thing always have a tin ear?

Anyway, if you’d like to take a small step in disrupting the Twitter hegemony, try it out.

But what about the Smug Points?

Interesting. An analysis of the results of that Ivy League college vs. the state land-grant college shows no difference.

These researchers tracked two groups of students—one that attended college in the 1970s and another in the early 1990s. They wanted know: Did students attending the most elite colleges earn more in their 30s, 40s, and 50s than students with similar SAT scores, who were rejected from those elite colleges? The short answer was no. Or, in the author’s language, the difference between the students who went to super-selective schools and the students with similar SAT scores who were rejected from those schools and went to less selective institutions was “indistinguishable from zero.”

What does that mean, exactly? It means that, for many students, “who you are” as an 18-year-old is more important than “where you go.” After correcting for a student’s pre-existing talent, ambition, and habits, it’s hard to show that highly selective colleges add much earning power, even with their vaunted professors, professional networks, and signaling. If you’re one of the roughly 50,000-100,000 students who is sweating a decision from one of these tony schools, you’re focused on the wrong thing. The decision of a group of people you’ve never met isn’t as important as the sum of the decisions, habits, and relationships you’ve built up to this point in your young life.

Or, to put it in less encouraging terms, college isn’t a vehicle for upward mobility. There is an important exception, though.

For the elite colleges themselves, the Dale-Krueger paper had an additional, fascinating finding. The researchers found that the most selective schools really do make an extraordinary difference in life earnings for “black and Hispanic students” and “students who had parents with an average of less than 16 years of schooling.”

In other words, getting into Princeton if your parents went to Princeton? Fine, although not a game-changer. But getting into Princeton if your parents both left community college after a year? That could be game-changing. There are several potential explanations, but I’m most persuaded by one that Dale and Krueger put in their conclusions section. Minority students from less-educated families are more likely to rely on colleges to provide the internship and job networks that come automatically from living in a rich neighborhood with wealthy parents.

As the article points out, though, the students who would benefit most are the least likely to get in — the big name colleges have an interest in perpetuating the status quo and protecting the social hierarchy, so through mechanisms like “legacy” admissions (jeez, but I hate “legacies” — I saw too many brilliant undergrads fail to get into med school while their less competent, lazy peers sailed in on their parents’ status) they police who is admitted.

Anyway, I’m at a state university — apply to the University of Minnesota and specifically Morris! Our new motto will be “We’re not worse than Harvard.”

Time for the War on Easter!

I didn’t even know we were fighting over that one, but apparently we are. It’s an unexpected front. You might be wondering what deep article of Christian faith we’re going to be battling over. That too is unexpectedly trivial.

The war is to be fought over eggs.

The latest manufactured moral outrage came courtesy of the Archbishop of York, whose bandwagon was soon jumped on by none other than the Prime Minister. The cause of their holy indignation? Cadbury and the National Trust have had the temerity to advertise Egg Hunts, rather than Easter Egg Hunts. Well, there go hundreds of years of Christian-appropriated pagan religious tradition down the plughole!

It’s hard to believe, but the fanatics are up in arms over those totally biblical symbols of Jesus from deep antiquity, chocolate eggs.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu said Mr Cadbury, a Quaker who founded the firm in 1824, was renowned for his religious beliefs and would not condone dropping the word Easter.

He said if people were to visit Cadbury World in Birmingham “they will discover how Cadbury’s Christian faith influenced his industrial output”.

“To drop Easter from Cadbury’s Easter Egg Hunt in my book is tantamount to spitting on the grave of Cadbury,” Dr Sentamu added.

A spokesman from the Church added: “This marketing campaign not only does a disservice to the Cadburys but also highlights the folly in airbrushing faith from Easter.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the issue reflected “commercialisation gone a bit too far”.

Are all the party leaders idiots over there? Even the prime minister, Theresa May, is whining about it. Doesn’t she have anything better to do, like preparing for the coming war with Spain?

P.S. Cadbury, the guy whose grave we’re supposed to be spitting on, was a Quaker. Quakers don’t actually celebrate Easter.

Good museum news!

The Bell Museum is in the process of getting a new building and moving, and is scheduled to open early in the summer of 2018 — it’s a fine museum that will be even better.

The new $64 milllion Bell Museum slated to open in the early summer of 2018 is under construction on the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus, Thursday, March 30, 2017. The building will feature products sourced sustainably in Minnesota, including white pine from Cass Lake; granite from Morton; Iron Range steel, and bird-safe glass from Owatonna Scott Takushi / St. Paul Pioneer Press

The new $64 milllion Bell Museum slated to open in the early summer of 2018 is under construction on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, Thursday, March 30, 2017. The building will feature products sourced sustainably in Minnesota, including white pine from Cass Lake; granite from Morton; Iron Range steel, and bird-safe glass from Owatonna
Scott Takushi / St. Paul Pioneer Press

One thing of note is that the new building will be very modern, with lots of glass, and look! A natural history museum, unlike our local football stadium, actually cares about animals in the region and will have bird-safe glass windows!

See, Minnesota Vikings? It’s not that hard to respect your community.

#ObscenelyOptimistic

Jeremy Messersmith is giving away a free songbook of Obscenely Optimistic songs. I don’t know if we should be encouraging this sort of thing:

It’s jam-packed with ridiculous songs about kittens, world peace, flying cars and the transformative power of love. Why? Because we all need a ray of sunshine every now and again. Because it’s important to not lose sight of how good things could be. Because the first step to a better world is to imagine a better world.

He’s not kidding. Look at the song list:

Everybody Gets A Kitten
There Is Nowhere We Won’t Go
We All Do Better When We All Do Better
Love Sweet Love
Why
Everything Is Magical
Honeybee
I’m A Snowflake, Baby
You Belong Up There With The Stars
We Can Make Our Dreams Come True

I tried sneering and fixing the lyrics to better reflect my attitude — “Everybody Gets a Vicious, Bloody-Minded, Bird-Slaughtering Predator”, for instance — but then found that they don’t scan anymore, and they don’t fit the notes, either, so I guess we’re stuck with the cheery words he’s giving them. I think I was also bitter because I looked at his tour route, and noticed he wasn’t coming anywhere near western Minnesota.

messersmithtour

Then I realized he couldn’t, because his route makes a perfect heart shape*, and he couldn’t visit Morris without wrecking the pattern, so I’ll forgive him.

Get a copy and print it out, and attend his concerts — they’re going to be singalongs, accompanied by ukulele. Presumably without the accompaniment of Vicious, Bloody-Minded, Bird-Slaughtering Predators, but you never know.

*Before you all peevishly tell me that that doesn’t look like your heart**, note that I didn’t say what species. That pointy triangular shape looks exactly like the heart of a salmon, which are better than people anyway.

**Any salmon writing in will not be making that complaint. I appreciate your support. Don’t ask how I know the shape of your heart.