Bari Weiss is freakin’ weird

Bari Weiss founded this journamalism website, The Free Press, back in 2022. I guess it is “free” — it’s bleeding money, and they’re desperately seeking investors, and you can predict that they’ll get money from some billionaires somewhere, so they’ll continue to be “free,” although they’ll also be “owned” at the same time by, probably, some pro-Trump fanatical Zionist, because that’s what Weiss is. What will be published won’t be what I would consider journalism — we need a new word. Journanalism? Jourge? Jourbarism?

Anyway, Weiss went on Twitter (heh, she still uses Twitter) to plug the latest article on her glorified blog, titled The People Who Rage Against the Machine, which I’m sure Tom Morello appreciates. It’s an account by Suzy Weiss (any relation? I don’t know, don’t care) of a hyper-weird, tiny meeting of 50 people, by invitation only, called “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat. The headline says An emergent coalition of Catholics, preppers, localists, Luddites, and farmers is determined to resist modernity. They call themselves Doomer Optimists.

It’s illustrated with this photograph:

Even if you’re not convinced that thermonuclear war, or widespread political violence, or an AI overlord is coming for us in the near future, you can probably recognize what the Doomer Optimists are seeing. The signs of decline are everywhere.

Are you confused yet? What is the point of this article? Does the author have a perspective on this strange cult-like ideology?

She does not. Except maybe that she thinks it’s cool.

Now try to actually read the thing.

If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name.

“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”

That’s…that’s incoherent. Dick Cheney is the liberal establishment? Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are the rebel alliance? What kind of cartoon world is she living in?

This is a self-selected gang of raw milk drinking, goat-farming, conservatives patting themselves on the back over their iconoclasm, that is, their wildly backwards reactionary freakishness, and Weiss is calling them the intelligentsia? Keep those insightful articles coming, The Free Press!

Worse, Bari Weiss has a rather inflated perception of her own cleverness. She also retweeted this cartoon.

That’s jerbalism for you.

They’re not even good liars

You know what’s fun? Put JD Vance in front of a friendly interviewer and let him talk. In this case, He sat down with a Breitbart drone and felt confident to just unfurl his freak flag and sing.

I actually think we have to destroy the universities in this country. They get too much money, they have too much power, I don’t think they do anything good.

He also claims that universities teach students to hate your country and hate your family. I had to quickly review my syllabi to see if I included those points…oops, no, I guess I’m going to have to spend my weekend doing revisions.

There’s so much hatred of education and learning in that interview…I’d go on, but he’s such a prolific source of insanity that The Cut listed a guide to his most unhinged public statements. It doesn’t even include his DESTROY ALL UNIVERSITIES talk.

And he’s just the vice president candidate. CNN compiled a list of 12 blatant lies Trump said in the last month.

Pre-Fall

I went for a walk this morning. I see that we’re in that transitional phase between deep summer and inescapable Fall. We’re not quite into Fall yet, but the signs are clear.

The trees are still green, but here and there we see blotches of yellow.

If you ask me, the weather is nearly perfect: sunny, warm, but not unpleasantly so, with cool breezes (although we do occasionally see fierce thunderstorms). I wouldn’t mind if the weather were like this year around, but the trees know better, and they know what’s coming. They’re making preparations.

I’m also seeing brown leaves piling up curbside, blown there by the wind, so I know some trees are shedding leaves already.

The more fragile forbs are taking it even further. The flowers are losing their petals already. The milkweed we planted in our yard to feed the monarchs are reduced to brown, rustling stalks.

Get ready. October is almost here.

Definitely a PR stunt, and quite stupid

The New Tolerance Campaign is a weird little right-wing organization founded by Log Cabin Republicans who are claiming to be “tolerant”, but their entire raison d’etre is to hate Muslims and anything “woke”. They are also hating on gay people who think Palestinians don’t deserve to be killed.

They have a Hate Map page that lists all the organizations across the country that they hate. Antifa, they hate. Muslim student associations, they hate. Socialists, they hate. Multiple chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, they hate (because they’re anti-Semitic, obviously). You get the idea. This organization is run by people so twisted by hatred for Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular that they have put every faintly left-wing organization on a List.

They’ve also come up with a stunt.

The New Tolerance Campaign has secured $1,000,000 to underwrite expenses for an LGBTQ Pride Parade in Gaza or the West Bank!

Oh, wait. It’s not a publicity stunt. We know this because they say so.

This isn’t a joke. It’s not a publicity stunt. Our offer is real.

It’s absolutely insane, though, and reflects a lack of understanding and empathy on the part of the New Tolerance Campaign. They are incapable of comprehending the idea that people can simultaneously recognize that people living in a conservative, patriarchal culture or following a religion that is antithetical to LGBTQ values are not on their side, and that those people don’t deserve to die for their beliefs. You can believe that the best approach to dealing with a group that contains many misogynists and homophobes is education, coexistence, and, you know, tolerance, while recognizing that they do not share your goals.

I don’t know what the New Tolerance Campaign expects to demonstrate with this PR stunt (which is what it actually is). That LGBTQ people are actually aware that some people have ideological values that harm LGBTQ people? I think they’re already very aware of that. But maybe, just maybe, they’re capable of empathizing with other groups that are being oppressed and persecuted, and are able to allow them to live.

Maybe they’re also smart enough to realize that the West Bank and Gaza are free-fire zones for the IDF, and taking a walk with banners and flags is a good way to get a bomb dropped on you. Also maybe they can see that this is a relatively trivial cause to throw in the face of people who are being bombed, who might resent a stupid parade through the ruins of their homes.

We’re all happy to see Miss Sassy safe and sound

They keep trying to validate their racist claims.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance tried to prove his baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets by pointing to a police report from one resident in Springfield, Ohio, that alleged her cat may have been stolen by her Haitian neighbors.

How’s that going for them?

Anna Kilgore in Springfield, Ohio with a Trump-Vance hat and flag. The Springfield resident told police last month that her Haitian neighbors may have stolen her cat Miss Sassy. The cat turned out to be hiding in her basement the whole time, and she apologized to her Haitian neighbors

The Trump campaign is not backing down, though.

I’m sorry to say that this is the very last time I’ll link to Snopes. They have a lengthy article straining to justify the statement that they’re animals, because Trump was referring to illegal immigrants who committed crimes. I hate to tell you this, but those are human beings, too.

I finally unsubscribed

I donated to the Harris/Walz campaign a while back, and you know what that means: I’ve been inundated with texts/emails begging me for money a dozen times a day. I tolerated them because I support the Democrats, and I was planning to donate again soon.

I finally had to unsubscribe/block/delete all their messages, because right now they are constantly pushing the Oprah endorsement. No. Oprah is a soft-brained snake oil salesman who got rich promoting feel-good nonsense, and who inflicted Dr Oz and Dr Phil on the world. Go away.

I’m still voting for Harris/Walz in November, but I am not going to stomach Oprah cluttering up my in-box.

Oh, what a catastrophe the New Atheism was for lower-case “a” atheism

Fuck all of these guys

There is no doubt but that the New Atheism was a channel that directed people towards right-wing, conservative, anti-immigration politics. Eiynah explains it all, and I think she’s right.

This link between New Atheism and the far-right is a dangerous and an under-discussed one. This has never been demonstrated so starkly as when Richard Dawkins tweeted out a recommendation for a book by fellow atheist Douglas Murray.

The day after the mass shooting in Buffalo that was explicitly motivated by great replacement theory, by ideas like there being an outright “war on white people,” Dawkins chose to tweet praise for a book titled The War on the West. He called it “utterly superb” and urged his nearly three million followers to read it with an open mind and “forget about labels like right wing”…Because surely, among us secular friends, we can overlook an inconvenient term like that, even in the aftermath of a mass shooting underpinned by the same ideology.

I’ve been listening to the audio version of Murray’s book myself, and it is reminiscent of the incendiary rhetoric of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. In his promotional podcast tour for this book, Murray talks repeatedly of an “outright war on white people.” He is losing patience, he says, done being polite with people who don’t “respect [his] ancestors, history and culture” – while disparaging other cultures for supposedly not contributing to “mathematical, scientific or artistic discoveries”. The combination of ignorance and arrogance is staggering, as this is patently, overwhelmingly untrue.

This is no dog whistle, it is an airhorn.

While I was attracted towards Dawkins’ ideas, at least I was never tempted by Murray. I was actively repulsed by Douglas Murray — he was just a garden variety Nazi wanna-be, fed on racist literature and never questioning it. It was one of the factors driving me away from New Atheism and the Dawkins fandom, evidence that he was losing it altogether with his fawning over Murray. Sure, Murray is an atheist — but he’s a cultural Christian atheist who values his local religion as a tool to bludgeon those foreign people with different traditions.

Of course, Douglas himself is no outsider to the atheist scene. He too is a well-known and prominent atheist figure, one who happens to lament the loss of Europe’s Christian heritage and the supposed identity-crisis caused by increased secularization. Despite this, he has been propped up in vocal anti-theist circles because, rather than consistency on the matter of critiquing religion, it is his views on Islam and immigration that are appealing to a certain crowd. Murray has a long history of cloaking extreme statements in a posh accent, his rhetoric has been described as gentrified xenophobia. Which is putting it mildly.

Remember Dawkins’ declaration that he was a “cultural Christian” because he like hymns and church bells, and hated Islam because it was “indecent”? That sounds like he’s been hanging out with Douglas Murray too much.

Any much is too much.

Let’s not forget Sam Harris, who has also been sipping from the chalice of Douglas Murray.

Harris often claims that ‘woke identity politics’ is destroying the path to a harmonious ‘colourblind’ world. But his actions and endorsements do not paint a picture of someone who truly prioritizes colour-blindness, as seen by his repeated promotion of race and IQ, or his endless propping up of Douglas Murray.

The War on the West is overflowing with racialized language. The first chapter is even called “Race.” It wouldn’t be unbelievable as a parody of a far-right book featured in The Onion. But colourblind Harris has been filled with praise, referring to it as a “fantastic read and a doubly fantastic listen.”

Interestingly, Harris’s attitude changes completely when it comes to anti-racists like Ta-Nehisi Coates whom he refers to on several occasions as a “pornographer of race”—not Douglas Murray who talks obsessively of race, or even Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund. In fact Harris is also a dedicated defender and promoter of Charles Murray, referring to him as a “deeply rational and ethical thinker” and “the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime.”

Has anyone else noticed that all of the worst people associated with atheism have been gravitating together into one horrible toxic clump? And that they’re all making apologies for conservative Christianity nowadays?

One of those movies where I was left wondering, “What did I just watch?”

Uh-oh. I just learned that Grave of the Fireflies is streaming on Netflix. It’s a magnificent movie, but I don’t know if I could cope with the painful catharsis of seeing it again.

I took my daughter to see it years ago; I should ask her if she considers that a horrific instance of child abuse, or an opening of her emotional experiences. Or if she’d take her daughter to see it.

Here’s someone arguing that You Should Show Grave of the Fireflies to Your Kids. They make a good case.

It is okay for children to experience sad and even scary stories. In fact, doing so in safe environments is extremely healthy! Feeling sad allows us to learn empathy so we know how ourselves and others should be treated. The need to healthily experience sadness is literally the entire point of the movie Inside Out — a movie made with child audiences in mind — which will probably get its importance across better than any short paragraph I could write here. Sadness is an inevitable part of life, why would we want to leave children ill prepared to deal with it?

If the continued relevance of fairy tales and Goosebumps Books didn’t make it clear, stories that safely scare kids as part of consensual fear experiences are healthy for their development too. As psychologist Emma Kenny explained, “when you are reading a scary story to a child, or they’re reading to themselves, the child has got a level of control — they can put it down, or ask you to stop. And the story can raise a discussion, in which they can explore and explain the way they feel about a situation.”

I suspect that the kids could cope with the experience better than many parents, including myself.

Good morning!

My wife has been keeping an eye on a chrysalis on the neighbor’s garage, and this morning it looked like this:

Empty! Where did the former resident go? It was stretching and warming itself up on a twig down below.

We have to celebrate every single monarch that emerges, because they’ve become too uncommon nowadays.

My tarantula, Blue, might be mad at me

I cleaned up their container because it was choked with silk. They seemed kind of sulky afterwards, but look, clean soil, and I propped up a clam shell to give them a nice shelter. What did they do? They coated everything with silk! I can’t even see into their hiding space because the silk is nearly opaque!

I think the evidence is clear that they’ve entered their spider teens: sullen and sulky, their room is incredibly messy, and they really want their privacy.