The Huck is full of…

It’s always fun when a Republican jerk opens his mouth to say something stupid. Here’s Mike Huckabee, arguing that we shouldn’t accept Syrian refugees because Minnesota is cold.

huckspeaks

If you ever get a chance to fly into the Minneapolis/St Paul airport, take a look around you: most of the service jobs are held by formerly Somali people. When you take a cab, you’ll probably have a Somali driver (there was some conflict a while back where Muslim drivers objected to transporting alcohol). There are Hmong areas in town — I’ve had a fair number of Hmong students over the years.

It seems to me that the problem isn’t the temperature of the climate, but the temperature of the citizens, and that human beings are fairly adaptable and capable of living just about anywhere. But none of them can thrive living anywhere near a reprehensible scumbag like Mike Huckabee.

There’s also some implicit racism in his remark. We aren’t surprised that white people live in both Alaska and Florida, and take for granted that we can live anywhere; why should we look at the color of someone’s skin and decide that they’re limited to living in just one kind of environment?

WTF is wrong with you?

First thing in the morning, every morning, I diligently check my multiple email accounts, the social media accumulation, the general chaos of inputs into my digital world, and every morning I am mostly saying “WTF?” and working my delete key hard. But this morning even I, hardened, thick-skinned, and cynical as I am, had to stop and wonder. Why would anyone think these contributions to the discourse are at all a credit to the sender?

Here, for instance, is an image some chortling fuckwit sent to me, apparently thinking it will teach me a lesson, or make me feel bad, or harm me somehow. Allow me to describe it. It’s a picture of me sitting at Skepticon with my iPad, and someone has put a thought balloon above me. What am I thinking of? Why, according to the ‘artist’, I am daydreaming about a prominent woman skeptic, who is naked and wrapped up in tentacles. Here it is, although I’ve edited it myself to cut out the face of the real woman that was pasted in there.

I don’t get as much sexual objectification and harassment as the women I’ve talked to, so this was weird: some asshole decided to sexually objectify and demean a woman for my benefit, and thought it would be an effective insult to pretend I was the one doing it. That’s just twisted and stupid. And the guy who sent it to me thought it was a marvelous zinger.

Then there’s this.


Why couldn’t #ISIS have attacked #Skepticon 8 instead? #justdesserts #madeforeachother

Ladies and gentlemen, our opposition, true skeptics and atheists all.

Gaining a daughter!

That’s good news, right? I can’t be sure because the one we’ve had is an independent-minded troublemaker. Anyway, #2 Son Connlann has announced his engagement to Ted Bear. No date has been set yet — there are a few hurdles to leap over before an American serviceman can marry a Korean citizen, but eventually…and then Mary and I are planning to fly over and visit South Korea for the wedding.

connlann_tedbear

Maybe they’ll schedule it to fall during the Chicken and Beer Festival?

Constructive pessimism

I approve of Kim Stanley Robinson’s message: interstellar travel, and interstellar colonization, are almost certainly impossible. He breaks the obstacles down into 5 categories, physical, biological, ecological, sociological, and psychological (wait, since when is ecology not biological?) and explains how unlikely we are to overcome them. We’re part of Planet Earth, and nowhere else.

This may sound like terrible news to people weaned on Star Trek and Star Wars, but I prefer to think that closing off the fantasy alternatives helps us focus on the realistic ones.

Oh no! For some people this is a disturbing and deeply pessimistic conclusion to come to. Then when you combine that new judgment with the recently discovered problems concerning the plan to terraform and inhabit Mars (presence of perchlorates and absence of nitrogen), and we come to an entirely new realization about our species: there is no Planet B.

Earth is our only home.

Oh no again!

This conclusion, startling to some, obvious to others, has ramifications that are worth pondering. If it comes to be a generally agreed on view, it might change how we act as individuals and a civilization. These changes in behavior might turn out to be crucial for our descendants. So although this entire discussion consists of speculations about hypothetical futures, which is to say, science fictions, still they are worth thinking about, as useful orientations in our sense of our own history as a species.

I like that. It’s not a bad thing to take a sober look at what we’ve got (which is a pretty danged sweet planet) and maintain and enrich it, rather than neglecting it for a dream of building a hermetically sealed dome on a hostile planet far, far away.

Something else I like: Robinson has just written a novel about…humans colonizing a planet around Tau Ceti, titled Aurora. He doesn’t condemn the genre, which is good, since I like reading space opera of various sorts, but is asking us to recognize that it’s no more realistic than fairy stories. Which are also fun.

It’s not about white people’s victimhood

Right now, the usual trolls are doing their best to lie about Skepticon: they’ve seized on that one incident in which Mark Schierbecker was unfortunately given a slot to speak as an excuse to rant about how Skepticon hates autistic people (nope), how Skepticon called him a racist (nope again — that was what his own publicist said), that they were abusing an “autistic kid” (no way — he came to Skepticon fresh off interviews on Breitbart and Fox News), and how evil SJWs are. I saw people calling in biased outsiders like Milo Yiannopoulos, Thunderf00t, and Sargon of Akkad to contribute to the propaganda, and I’m sure we’ll see more noise from them soon; it was also somehow magically tied to #gamergate and the standard anti-feminists.

I thought about writing a rebuttal, but decided the best thing to do was just present the views of a few black people who have a genuine interest in this matter.

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Q&A with Mark Schierbecker

Skepticon has released a video of the interview to, I presume, shut down all the stupid claims by people who weren’t there.

It didn’t work. This is the kind of response I’m seeing on Twitter now.


@RealSkepticon Wow. Watched the video and the participants at Skepticon should be ashamed by their behavior.

I was there for the first half of the talk. I’ve now watched the whole video. Skepticon has absolutely nothing to apologize to Schierbecker about: they gave him and his publicist a time slot at the last minute, they allotted him 25 minutes and he went on for an hour and 15 minutes instead, and the audience was calm, made reasonable points, and asked difficult questions. And now their videographer worked extra hard to make the whole talk available on YouTube!

It seems the racists on Twitter want Skepticon to apologize for questioning a white man.

A new fantasy “award”

LovecraftPrize1crop

Since the World Fantasy Awards announced that they will no longer give out ugly statuettes of HP Lovecraft, the racist fantasy writers are feeling a bit miffed. Fortunately for them, Counter-Current Publishing has announced that they will be giving out a new fantasy award to white authors who honor the principles of National Socialism, named after HP.

As the Left continues to hollow out and destroy institutions, corrupt minds and culture, and denigrate white greatness in art, science, statecraft, and the culture at large, Counter-Currents and other New Right organizations will construct new institutions and honors to carry forward the greatness of European man.

White Greatness! The Greatness of European Man! Let us all bow before the amazingly confident bigotry of White Men everywhere.

Comma strikes again!

Reddit and the usual clueless suspects are stirred up again over that misstep at Skepticon, so once again I’m getting inundated by messages from people who weren’t there telling me how awful I was for mistreating those poor white people at the meeting. It doesn’t matter that I am not an organizer or volunteer at this conference, just an attendee who had no influence over decisions, good and bad, made here: Skepticon has been ‘taken over’ by SJWs, led by the nefarious PZ Myers.

I wish I could take any credit at all for the excellent talks here, but I have to be honest: I have had zero influence. Sorry, conspiracy theorists, but I am not the mastermind you’re looking for. I’m also disappointed that the Illuminati keep refusing to take my calls.

But at least I have “Terry Dean, Nemmers” AKA Comma sending more letters on my behalf!

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