I’m hoping for the death of the debate bro

I’ve long despised debate — if you’ve been here long you know how opposed I am to debate — and the recent debacles with the Jubilee channel, which invites one person to engage 20 people with an opposing ideology, has demonstrated how terrible this format is. It’s simply an opportunity to give idiots a platform and to promote bad ideas unfettered by constraints. I’m a broken record on this topic, but fortunately, Rebecca Watson can articulate why these people, and this concept, are awful.

One thing that annoyed me is that Rebecca got a copyright strike and had to edit out a segment showing the one apparently honest attempt at communication within the debate. So much for Jubilee just encouraging the free expression of ideas! They’re a machine using controversy to generate clicks.

Transvestigators are nuts

And Candace Owens is their queen. This is an unbelievable claim from a person who has been spiraling into lunacy for a long time.

In March, conservative commentator Candace Owens revived an absurd conspiracy theory with a YouTube video titled “Is France’s First Lady a Man?” according to the complaint.

Promoted widely on X, Owens said the conspiracy theory was, “likely the biggest scandal in political history.”

Wait, wait. I’m not giving her wacky claim an ounce of credibility — I’ll trust what Brigitte Macron and her husband say over a pronouncement from a notorious Internet wackaloon — but even if it were true, so what. There’s nothing criminal, scandalous, or illegal about a trans woman in politics. It is scandalous that Candace Owens is fine with making random accusations.

Since then, Owens has produced numerous videos about Brigitte Macron for her nearly 4.5 million YouTube subscribers, including a multi-part series called “Becoming Brigitte.”

The lawsuit further claims she has also sold merchandise promoting the claim.

She’s pumping out multiple videos on this topic? That’s a “you” problem, Candace, you’re obsessed.

The Macrons have already provided lots of evidence that Brigitte is a woman. Shouldn’t the fact that she gave birth to three children be enough to satisfy even the wackiest transvestigator? Time for a legal solution.

The Macrons are seeking punitive damages against Owens and her business entities for 22 counts of defamation, false light, and defamation by implication, the statement said.

Clare declined to say the amount of money the Macrons would seek but warned that if Owens continues to double-down on the claim, “it’ll be a substantial award.”

I hope this bankrupts Candace.

Snack time!

When I was a kid, I would park myself in my grandmother’s vegetable garden and snarfle my way down the rows, eating the carrots and peas like some gigantic verminous pest. My wife planted peas in our garden just for me, and the first pods were ready for eating.

Mmmmm. Peas. A glorious vegetable.

Conservative pundits have no clue about academia

Could someone explain to me how Marc Andreesen has so much clout? Everything I’ve ever read by him says he’s a flaming goofball and wanna-be fascist. Here he is expounding on academia.

“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

So he is afraid that the white children of Trump voters, a notoriously ignorant group that hates education (especially secular education), is being displaced from educational opportunities by ambitious immigrants and go-getter minorities. This is a non-issue. We’re supposed to prioritize lazy students (or to be fair, students who have been deprived of a good basic education by America’s fucked-up public education policy) over students who are willing to work hard because their parents voted for Trump? What an insane proposal.

As usual, this the dream of freaked out conservatives who think student radicals are dictating the course of higher education. Somehow these kooks get all kinds of mainstream coverage, despite the fact that their beliefs are entirely counter to facts and reason. As Henry Farrell says

…most mainstream American commentary about free speech in the modern American university labors under a misconception. It regularly suggests that out of control students and crazy professors are running the place. There is an entire intellectual industry of centrist and conservative commentary driving this narrative, including people like Bari Weiss, the proprietor of the Free Press, who made her bones by working with The David Project to attack Columbia professors for purported anti-Semitism. Marc Andreessen claims that “politically radical institutions” are driving a leftward shift by teaching students “how to be America-hating communists.”

Anyone who has day-to-day experience with actual American students knows that these claims are complete horseshit. Some students are left, some moderate, some conservative. Most are more interested in getting jobs than burning flags. America-Hating Communism 101 is not, actually, a required course on most campuses. Econ 101 often is. And those who are protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza? They have something to protest.

I know my students, and they’re diverse and you can’t pigeonhole them into the caricatures Weiss and Andreesen have fabricated. These students are here to learn — or to get certified for a better job — and they definitely do not sign up for a buttload of debt and years of work so they can tear down the establishment. What happens is they get into an environment where they are expected to pay attention to the world, and history, and politics, and they are outraged, honestly and righteously. You can’t change this, unless you think the university should be a propaganda mill that refuses to represent reality. It’s also the case that even if the student body was full of bomb-throwing radicals, it wouldn’t matter, because they don’t control our curriculum, and they don’t even control our big money investments, or the appointments of our faculty and administrators.

Ideally, I consider the students to be the voice of the university’s conscience, which is all too often ignored.

If you think students and a radical faculty are in charge, look at this news from Duke University.

Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) plans to implement new faculty productivity guidelines that would tie tenured professors’ salaries to external research funding, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle.

Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the school’s basic science units, which include departments ranging from biochemistry to neurobiology and various centers and institutes such as the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasingly difficult to come by due to slowdowns in grant review processes, an uptick in terminations and a lack of new funding opportunities since President Donald Trump assumed office.

Under the guidelines, each department must establish a minimum expectation for external grant funding. Tenured faculty members who do not meet the threshold — measured as a three-year average — would be given the option to either enter a 12-month “Safe Harbor” period, after which further inability to meet productivity standards will result in salary reductions, or consider career transition alternatives.

I guarantee you that the faculty did not approve massive salary cuts, tied to getting grants at a time when the government is destroying the apparatus of grant disbursement. This was a decision made in contradiction to faculty interests.

Farrell also made this lovely table that compares the perceived hierarchy of power within academia to the actual, little known (to the public, or to asshole pundits like Andreesen and Weiss) hierarchy.

I guess I’m at about level 4 in the distribution of power at the university, and even that’s misleading. If we were to plot the influence quantitatively, we’d have to use a power law distribution. Everything is in the hands of the board of trustees. Even where we faculty have some say in decisions, we can be overruled by the Board. Tenure, for instance, is proposed by faculty, but then has to be approved by the president, who then passes on the nomination to the Board, who can kill the idea without anything like a hearing or a discussion from the affected parties.

And students? Hah. Sorry. If students want to affect the administration of the university, they have to SCREAM and take over buildings and do all the things conservative hate, because they have no other options.

Am I a conspiracy theorist now?

I hate it, but this Epstein story is destroying my confidence in government, which was already in tatters by Trump’s election. Now Mike Johnson has shut down the house of representatives early, sending everyone home for an early vacation, in order to prevent a vote to release the Epstein files? That’s a blatant coverup. The secrets are dribbling out…now we learn that Trump is mentioned many times in the files, but we don’t know the context.

It’s also raising questions we should have considered long ago. How did Epstein transition from high school teacher to billionaire with a private plane and his very own island? Personally, I’d like to know how to do that, but if it involves sex trafficking I’ll pass. Is the market for young girls that lucrative? Who is buying that access?

I’m also wondering if giving someone a billion dollars flips a switch in their brain and turns them into predators on children, or if being a predatory pedophile makes it easier to become a billionaire. Either way, it’s another reason to outlaw billionaires.

Republican sycophant sucks up to vulgar philistine

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) snuck a provision into a bill to fund the EPA that decreed that the Kennedy Center opera house would be renamed for…Melania Trump, a woman with no artistic talent or inclination, but who, presumably, sometimes sleeps with the president.

It’s a cult, I tell you.

Anyway, it’s unlikely that the bill will pass, and even if it did, I imagine the next time a Democrat is elected (if one is allowed to be elected), this is one of those things that would be casually and quickly deleted. I kind of hope Trump’s entire effort to buy his way into an association with the arts would be expunged at the first opportunity, because his idea of art is nothing but tacky kitsch, thinly plated with gold-colored stuff.

The doctor says…

Finally saw the orthopedist, and we reviewed my MRI. The assessment is that it’s a very small tear in a place with a good prospect for healing, so the plan is…

“Follow up if symptoms worsen or fail to improve.”

I can resume light exercise, but if it gets worse or causes pain I’m supposed to call in for an appointment and they’ll reconsider surgery.

So it’s good news, I guess.

Atheists aren’t bubble-headed apologists for disasters

Gregory Paul makes an interesting point — atheist perspectives are underrepresented in the media. If there’s a disaster, they immediately go to someone who will babble some reassuring pablum about God.

What we do hear about without end is the theists’ view on the dreadful deaths of children. As per Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin who said, “By the grace of God, my family was safe,” after they by pluck and luck survived the Guadalupe River catastrophe. This detached view, in which the creator — who has the power to prevent dreadful random deaths — is ardently thanked for being selective about it rather than preventing it all in the first place, is the theme repeated as a matter of course. Typically by Christians after the latest natural disaster in the form of storms, the tornadoes that afflict the Bible Belt especially, wildfires, quakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, avalanches and the like. As per the flood survivor who said, “God, I know you brought me out, he marked me” (WashPost 7/11). But not dozens of girls. To that add the professional clergy and theologians who — despite their deep bias — the media persistently turn to to opine on why the latest killer event may appear hard to explain, but insist all must understand is truly in accord with the existence of a loving and wise creator.

Have you ever heard an open and assertive atheist be asked in a mainstream venue what those who do not believe in the supernatural think about natural tragedies and that is just so left field that let’s have a good chuckle at the notion. Do you ever see us atheos have a place on a panel of pundits to provide the nontheist perspective on anything on CNN or MSNBC? Of course not. Never happens. (You can check out secularfrontier.infidels.org/2022/06/theocancel-culture-discrimination-by-neglect-the-chronic-news-and-opinion-media-bigotry-against-atheists.)

Except…I have a counter-example! About eleven years ago, a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, destroying homes and businesses, and Wolf Blitzer was on the scene, interviewing survivors. At the end of this excerpt, Wolf tells Rebecca Vitsmun, You gotta thank the lord. Do you thank the lord? She replies, “I’m actually an atheist.”

So it happens sometimes, by accident, and the media personalities try to wedge the atheist into a god-shaped perspective. It doesn’t work. How can you talk to a person standing in front of the wreckage of their home after a natural disaster and ask them to be thankful? If it’s worse than a demolished house — it’s dead children — how dare you draft some pious airhead to tell you on television that it was part of a divine plan?

Paul explains what we atheists think about piles of suffering and dead children.

Until humans busted their scientific butts to produce modern medicine, half the children died. To the tune of 50 billion children tortured to early deaths. Largely by a too long host of cruel diseases that squeezed the life out of them. Smallpox and malaria alone have snuffed out tens of billions of little ones. The situation could not be worse because higher youth mortality would crash the human population. Even this very day, many thousands will succumb to microbes without the intervention of the divine.

Where, we atheists must ask you theists, is the grace in this? Where was the wise creator when the little girls at the Christian summer camp – yes, we note the irony – were living out the last moments of their short lives in lethal agonizing terror? Where was the grace of God when, as Jesus who Christians claim was God, was curing a few children via miracle spectacles while half the rest of kids around the world died as per the historical norm? These are entirely legitimate questions that believers must provide solid answers to. But they cannot. There is far too much in the way of premature death to do that. Instead, we hear platitudes and clichés that come across as a knee jerk cover up. As per the little flood victims are now in the arms of the same homicidally negligent Jesus who did not see fit to keep them safe in the first place.

Christians love to talk about the angels that protect the little ones. Where were those angels on July 4th in the flood zone? Why did the good with God Christians running the Mystic camp not ensure that none of their cabins were subject to flooding? But those are human beings and we big brained apes mess up all the time, atheists included. Why did the all-capable God not inspire them to properly protect their charges? Why did the immaculate creator of the entire universe put anyone in danger in the first place? Why did it not with a lift of its little finger ensure that massive rains not drench the Texas hill country and prevent the mess from the get-go? What have required mere, caring thought on its part. Having not done that, how could it stand by and watch the children praying for help as they experienced the tormenting drowning process which often involves vomiting (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8928428) while He in his perfect wisdom prepared to welcome them to paradise without their first making a mature choice on the matter?

That is what we — appalled at the Christian wave away — atheists think. As well we should. The problem is not with us. It is with you. Do you not get why so many reject the arrogant God that would be so indifferent about the endless suffering and early death of so many? It is you who need to do a big moral rethink – as increasing numbers are.

No wonder we don’t get much airtime. We tend to place the blame on human actions or inactions, rather than putting the guilt on a ghost in the sky.

I am suddenly craving a pizza from Detroit

I think the nearest Little Caesars to me is in St Cloud, about a 2 hour drive away. I think the company must hire people like Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash to make their pizzas.

Stopped into this Little Caesars just trying to get a $6 pizza and ended up in a full on action movie. Just as | grabbed my order, this furious dude barges in yelling about how | cut him off in traffic earlier. Before | can even respond, he throws a punch but then out of nowhere the guy behind the counter jumps over it like he’s been waiting for this moment his whole life and just beats the living hell out of the guy. The guy ran off and the cashier just dusted himself off. | said “are you ok man” and he looked me dead in the eye and said “B*tch, this is Little Caesars. We always hot and ready.”
Five stars. Will absolutely return.

Another problem with the Democrats

Adam Schiff is generally a good guy on the issues, but like many Democratic leaders, he’s wearing rose colored glasses and has a weird view of the past.

Reagan was an unholy nightmare. Trump may be worse, but please don’t paper over the crimes of Reagan: the death of so many people afflicted with HIV, Iran-contra, the enabling of right-wing media, training the electorate to accept brain dead idiocy in the president. The roots of our current problems were planted in the 1980s by the Republican apparatus, and we should not be treating Reagan as a paragon.

Would we be better off with Ronald Reagan in the presidency? I don’t think so.