The perils of wokeness

The latest Stephanie Stirling video dropped a tantalizing mention. There exists something called a “woke content detector“, which is basically a small group of self-appointed censors who are busily telling everyone which video games are bad. Not particularly interesting, except that the criteria they use to decide which games are too woke are hilarious. They have a spreadsheet listing their reasoning.

Here are some examples of things that make a game unrecommended or too woke. These are things the censors consider bad.

  • “The Myplayer clothes shop features apparel with BLM slogans.”
  • “has Non-binary gender option”
  • “Features a diverse cast and LGBTQ+ characters”
  • “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them”
  • “POC soldiers on both sides”
  • “LGBTQ+ decorations/furniture, diverse students, students can enter same sex relationships”
  • “LGBTQ+ and diverse characters including a plus size POC queen”
  • “Pride flags displayed in the police station and fire station”
  • “Optional homosexual romance”
  • “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them. Homosexual and non-binary romance options”
  • “Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. ‘an environmental card strategy game with climate change as your opponent.'”
  • “Demonizes golfers and golf-courses by highlighting potentially negative environmental impacts of the sport”
  • “The player character is a woman with depression. Features a story about living with depression”
  • “Features a story about living with a disability”
  • “Features a story about a world where ‘climate change has made life hard'”
  • “Contains overtly anti-capitalism and anti-western society messaging”
  • “The player character is a WOC who can fix any antique. She immediately finds plenty of work in a town she has never been to before”
  • “Features a diverse cast of 1st gen immigrants to the USA. Features a female CEO of a green tech startup”

I’m impressed with the pettiness, and how they can be offended by just the existence of LGBTQ+, women, disabled people, pronouns, and decorative features that don’t affect the game. I’m amazed that anyone would want to play such culturally impoverished video games. Checkers is probably a safe game for them.

You will be relieved to know that “Alex Jones: NWO Wars” is recommended and has no woke content, so there are some games you can play.

Another day in my history of evolutionary thought class

Today I’m teaching a perilous topic: the eclipse of Darwinism. There was a period of several decades where you could make an honest intellectual argument against evolution, roughly from the time it was first published (1860) to the development of population genetics (say, roughly 1920). All the arguments since then are fundamentally garbage, but before then, some smart, reputable, qualified scientists did have sincere disagreements with the theory. Also there were some terrible arguments against Darwin, but I’m focusing on just the intelligent principled arguments.

One part of Darwin’s problem is that we have to admit that there were some gigantic holes in his theory — in particular, he didn’t have a good theory of inheritance. He tried to come up with one, his theory of pangenesis, which was a combination of Lamarckian and blending inheritance. It was wrong. It was also incompatible with his theory of evolution.

What I’ll be arguing, though, is that there was a greater problem than the flaws, and that was not that people were punching holes in The Origin. Good criticism is a treasured thing in science, and critical evaluation of an idea is essential to refining and improving it. Eventually, the people ripping on Darwin’s model of inheritance were going to produce a much more solid theory.

I’m going to make the somewhat controversial claim that the people who were burying evolution were the ones who were must uncritical and gung-ho about the idea — the ones who wholeheartedly embraced Darwinism, warts and all, and extended it in unproductive ways. That means that today I’m going to talk about two people who were disastrous to Darwinism while simultaneously acting as prominent cheerleaders for it.

So yeah, I’m going to rake a couple of historical figures over the coals, specifically Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. We’re going to discuss the positive claims of a couple of prominent 19th century boosters of evolution, and I’m going to make the case that their excesses were a contributing factor to the eclipse. Worse, their version of evolution was popular and persuasive and despite their rejection as good science, we’re still dealing with people who think recapitulation and “survival of the fittest” are great shorthand summaries of the principle of evolution.

The reading I’ve assigned for the week is this article, The Beauty and Violence of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrations, which is an extremely harsh condemnation of Haeckel’s views. “Haeckel’s visions of nature were less objective depictions of life and more projected notions about the proper ‘order’ of nature,” it says. I’m telling the students to read Haeckel critically and also to regard this article skeptically. I’m hoping maybe they’ll be provoked into good, vigorous debate in the classroom, and that they’ll put together some thoughtful essays on the topic.

The polls have gone cancerous

The news is hideous and diseased — every new poll inspires a frenzy of speculation, and gets promoted heavily on the networks, depending on whether the results meet their biases or not. Unfortunately, that provides an incentive to the Poll Industry to do more polls and to found more polling companies, further undermining their credibility. The latest flurry of rabid prognostication was triggered by a poll that suggested Iowans might favor Harris.

I honestly don’t give a fuck. I have come to despise both polls and the media’s reliance on them to generate “news”.

I am pleased to see that Bob agrees with me.

P.S. Especially Nate Silver, you can just fuck off to the moon.

Don’t let small town values decide the fate of women

Republicans seem to be proud of their ‘solution’ for abortion: they’ll just devolve everything to the states and local authorities, so they don’t have their callousness and brutality thrown into their faces on the national level anymore. As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst possible solution. It puts women under the thumb of the town busybodies and church-goers (pretty much the same thing). The pettiness of small-minded locals knows no bounds.

Here’s a story illustrating what I’m talking about.

Patience Frazier was the kind of person who was a scapegoat for all the problems of rural America. She was poor, sometimes living out of her broken down car, was taking drugs. She got pregnant. Her child was stillborn, and Frazier buried it in her yard, marked with a cross. The story should have ended there.

She was, unfortunately, reported to a self-righteous sheriff’s deputy named Jacqueline Mitcham. Mitcham decided that Frazier must have “killed her baby” and went on a crusade to get her convicted of murder. They dug up the baby’s corpse, finding no evidence of foul play, and then went fishing for a charge that might stick.

While Frazier was tangled up with the law, Mitcham took the baby’s corpse, kept it, and put it in a wooden box near her front door. Already, I smell an obsessive sicko. Frazier, meanwhile, spent two years in jail while the case dragged on. She was finally released.

The judge who ruled in 2021 that she should be released wrote: “Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system.”

As for Mitcham taking custody of the fetal remains, Diaz-Tello noted that Frazier only came to the attention of law enforcement because of how she memorialized her loss, which she called “deeply tinged with pain and respect.” Diaz-Tello said it was morally repulsive for the police officer who personally saw to it that Frazier was put in prison to then take those remains, create a memorial, and say to a reporter that it was her baby. “Essentially she’s doing the exact same thing that Patience tried to do [with the remains],” she said, “but Patience should go to prison for it, and this police officer should get to keep this as a trophy.”

That’s what we can expect with an administration that refuses to support the reproductive rights of women.

We have more than just horrifying anecdotes to let us know what to expect. Look to Texas.

The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.

“There’s only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality,” said Nancy L. Cohen, president of the GEPI. “All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.”

Remember this on Tuesday: A vote for Trump is a vote for more dead babies and mothers.

Mano also writes about benighted Texas.

Caught up!

I am pleased to announce that not only have I gotten all my lectures/discussions planned out for this week, I have completed all grading to date. On Canvas, my to-do list is completely empty, for now.

I was scheduled for jury duty for tomorrow (one of the reasons I was striving to get all caught up), and the case was settled out of court.

Now what? Is there something people do when they’ve finished all their work by mid-afternoon of Sunday? Or are all of you swamped right now too?

Minnesota has a “beaver provision” that prohibits the eating of beaver

I guess we’ve fixed everything in this state, because the DFL has stuck a provision in our latest funding bill that prohibits beaver eating. It’s only under special circumstances, though: you can’t eat “nuisance beavers” that you killed to stop them from flooding your farm with their dams, but if you killed them because you trap them for their fur, yeah, go ahead, you can chow down on that fine furry beaver. Nuisance beavers can still be used for fur, castor oil, or taxidermy, just no eating allowed.

It’s a very peculiar law, because nobody can explain why this rule has been inserted. The Republicans are rightly peeved at this goofy and unnecessary regulation, and the DFL is being evasive and not explaining the purpose.

…a Senate DFL spokesperson issued a statement saying the conference committee dealt with “multiple provisions related to beavers coming from both chambers. This language emerged from many conversations between the House, Senate, DNR, and governor’s office.’’

It sounds like there was a lot of concern about beavers, and I wonder if maybe there might have been more significant issues to address. Apparently not; Minnesota has achieved policy perfection.

Why beavers? I have two hypotheses. One is that it was to give Minnesota Republicans something to do — it’s a distraction. They’re busy right now bragging about how they’ve all eaten beaver.

“I eat beaver. It’s fine,’’ Wesenberg said. “No one is going to get in trouble for doing it. I don’t know why it’s in the bill.’’

OK, dude, I’m happy for you.

My other hypothesis is that this is a cunning anti-Catholic ploy. The Catholic Church decided beaver was a fish and therefore you were allowed to eat all the beaver you want during Lent. This law will deny good Catholic farmers a traditional dish, apparently on a whim.

Don’t say I never criticize Democrats. This is a useless law that accomplishes nothing (they even say it won’t be policed or enforced) and justifies complaints that they’re going to pad the legal system with stupid regulations.

It’s just a tiny violation of the Constitution

I thought that Americans were generally opposed to aristocracy and the concept of nobility. We even had the sentiment written into our Constitution!

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Some of us have that principle imbedded in our generally held principles, but to be real about it, there have always been Americans who desire and envy the label of an unearned title. They’re generally conservative and rich, but those snobs are honestly American. They’re just wrong.

So what kind of person would happily accept a title of nobility from a foreign organization? Would you believe it would be arch-“originalist”, worshipper of their interpretation of the Constitution, Founding Father cultist, and Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito?

The Intelligencer has a story today that actually happened several years ago but — not unlike Alito’s Upside-Down Flag nonsense — didn’t register with the public at the time. As we noted last week, Alito has been taking expensive gifts — as the conservative Supreme Court justices are wont to do! — from a right-wing German princess, but it turns out he’s been cultivating more ties to the European aristocracy.

It turns out the last time Donald Trump was president, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision setting women’s health care back a few centuries, added a knighthood to his own résumé, pledging an oath to the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. The knighthood, bestowed in 2017, wasn’t widely reported at the time, but the order’s website was updated in July with Alito’s investiture on the front page.

Cool. I can see where Alito would find the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George appealing — it’s an extremely Catholic organization that fawns over the Papacy. It has only 3000 members and seems to be mainly about grandiloquent cosplaying with elaborate symbols and rituals (they also have a charitable angle of providing food aid to stricken communities in Europe, to their credit). It’s mostly harmless and just a kind of stupid posturing, but sheesh, a Supreme Court justice ought to avoid flagrantly violating the letter of the Constitution…

Oh. Wait. Our current crop of Supreme Court justices are all about partisan bias and shredding the egalitarian principles of the Constitution.

Never mind.

Another headache

My mother’s house just went on the market, which meant the asking price has gone public. As part of the probate process, the names of all of the heirs were publicly posted a while back. There are skeevy people who are tracking that kind of information, who instantly swoop in and contact the heirs, asking if they’d like a fast advance on their inheritance, for the price of a small, tiny, hardly even mentionable fee, so small that they don’t even mention it, and you won’t know about it until after the estate is settled.

It’s like a payday loan scam run by funeral-chasing ghouls. I think I’ve just learned about a whole ‘nother industry full of people I hate.

My whole family is about to get junkmail from these horrible people who promise painless advances on their inheritance, except for the big bite they take out of it (one company was going to skim off 20%) and the nuisance to the executor (me) and his lawyer. I’m just telling everyone to be patient, we’re making good progress on the estate, and I’m hoping we can get everything cleared up by Christmas, so I only have one complicated tax year.

(In good news, we’ve already had 3 people tour the house, so maybe it’ll go fast.)

Who remembers “trickle down economics” and other lies of the right?

Here’s a doozy from the always reliable source of an anonymous far right nobody pontificating on Twitter.

If Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit – there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy – this economy propped up with debt (generating asset bubbles) and artificially suppressed wages (as a result of illegal immigration). Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on a sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.
Elon Musk says “Sounds about right”

The first part might be right — the economy will be devastated by a Trump victory followed by mass deportations and firings. The last bit? Where the economy will be magically restored by people realizing this will be good for us? That’s pure fantasy, wishful thinking, nothing but moonshine. But hey, the belief in an all-powerful head of state with total control of everyone’s lives worked for North Korea, so maybe we should give it a shot. It’s not as if Republicans haven’t given us sound financial advice since the Reagan years.