Aw, shucks, I missed it

The Iowa state fair happened this past weekend, and it was a disgusting spectacle. Iowa has an oversized political reputation, solely because it has the first primary in the presidential election, so every Republican candidate shows up to shake hands and kiss babies and pretend they care about a small farm state, rather than because they enjoy fried-cheese-onna-stick or want to weigh in on the qualities of prize pigs.

There were two spectacles worth noting. One was the way the press fawned over this event, comparing the size of the crowds for various candidates and acting as if this was meaningful. A good healthy journalism wouldn’t care about the opinions of a self-selected mob of yokels and how many corn dogs they ate, they’d be talking about policies and records and, in one case, criminal history. But no, this was a celebrity spectacle with no weight at all.

The second was…Trump is back to lying again and hyping the imaginary size of his crowds.

I don’t think I can take another year of this bullshit. Narcissistic serial liars are so 2020.

By the way, the Stevens County Fair took place here last week — I couldn’t go, I’m trapped in a small room in our house cultivating chronic pain, but Mary went, and she said there was less knee-jerk MAGA nonsense and fewer Trump flags waving than last year, so that’s a slightly positive development. Also, Trump didn’t show up.

Oh god no, not this question again

I unlimbered my rusty, drugged-up voice to answer a really simple question today. Unfortunately, it’s the same goddamn stupid question I get from Muslim apologists all the time, and they don’t listen to the answer anyway, but I’ve been practically voiceless for a few weeks, so this was an excuse to, you know, speak again.

I can’t believe I have to start lecturing again in a week and a half.

Transcript below:

[Read more…]

If you want to discourage teachers from entering the profession…

Here is the way. Abigail Zwerner is the first grade teacher who was shot by one of her students, and she is suing the school district for damages. The school’s lawyers have come up with an interesting defense.

The motion was filed last week by attorneys representing the School Board and argues that Zwerner, who was shot in her classroom at Richneck Elementary in January by a 6-year-old student, is only entitled to file a worker’s compensation claim because the injury she sustained from the shooting is a “workplace injury,” and that the shooting was a hazard of the job.

James Graves, the president of the Newport News teachers union, says that argument is “ridiculous.”

“This is not military, this is not the police department. This is an education system,” Graves said in an interview Wednesday.

In a Facebook statement posted Tuesday, Graves said, “These lawyers have started a significant hurricane in our district by saying that being shot is part of what teachers signed up for.”

If you’re a teacher, you should expect to be shot at now and then? What other professions in America should be taking gun violence for granted?

Lawyers, maybe? Maybe if some of these lawyers get shot, we should just shrug and say, “Well, that’s what their job entails, you know.”

Skepticon NOW!

I’m missing my first Skepticon, which is going on this weekend. Unfortunately, I can’t travel at all. My son has tickets and invited me to the Grand Funk Railroad & Jefferson Starship concert tomorrow, and I had to turn that down, too. This old age thing is really crimping my style.

Skepticon stuff is happening online, at least.

I guess I’m reduced to doing everything virtually for now. See you there!

Sherri Tenpenny is not a doctor

Finally, one quack goes down. The notorious anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny has had her medical license suspended, at long last. It should have been done long ago.

Two years ago, a Cleveland area physician strode into the House Health Committee room and told state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize their hosts and “interface” with cell towers.

Her comments, the subject of widespread ridicule, triggered a swarm of 350 complaints to the State Medical Board and a chain of events that led to the regulators indefinitely suspending the medical license Wednesday of anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny.

Oh, yeah, the magnetized people claim. It’s as stupid as it sounds.

It was June 2021, just as scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines began to wane and health officials focused on the yeoman’s work of convincing hundreds of millions of Americans to take up the novel products. However, many conservatives sought to undercut this campaign, often under arguments about “medical freedom.” Tenpenny, speaking before a crowd of anti-vaccine activists, warned of purported dangers of vaccines with a firehose of debunked and misleading statements.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny said to the panel of lawmakers.

“They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks … There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.”

Behold my magnetic powers!

Although…it’s true. I’ve received many vaccinations, and I just tested it, and look, I can make pennies stick to my forehead! I’ve been able to do this for my whole life, though, and I can’t say it’s particularly useful. I guess I could entertain my granddaughter for a minute and a half with that trick. Or drive an anti-vaxxer into a frothing fury for a couple of years.

Unfortunately, stripping Tenpenny of her medical license won’t slow her down in the slightest. It’s not as if she’s been practicing medicine all this time, she instead peddles “alternative” treatments to the gullible. Being denied a license by The Establishment will probably enhance her reputation among her clientele.

Her podcast is still squawking lies into the æther, and she has the ear of influential people — such as Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general of Florida.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo recently appeared on the podcast of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, where he continued to make claims about vaccines that are contradictory to widespread medical consensus.

Medical experts have said Ladapo’s claims are dangerous, and that his very presence on the podcast — and other recent appearances on shows promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories — gives credibility and support to anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Lapado’s latest comments are part of a litany of dubious claims that have alarmed public health officials in Florida and across the country since he got appointed surgeon general more than a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

This is a guy who says the risks of the COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits for most people, who has blocked the use of COVID vaccines in Florida, and refuses to use a mask — but he is a Harvard graduate, you know. He’s also blatantly ideological and conservative, making his comments to Tenpenny particularly ironic.

Despite being the head of Florida’s Department of Health, Ladapo bashed a majority of the nation’s physicians for their vaccine beliefs, saying they cannot separate themselves from their ideologies and politics.

“Our colleagues, for the most part, can’t be brought back into alignment with reality,” Ladapo said on the podcast. “I don’t have any faith that most of our physician colleagues, sadly, can be rehabilitated.”

Tenpenny went so far as to compare current doctors with those in Nazi Germany who participated in or didn’t oppose the mass killing of and experimentation on people, namely Jews, citing a passage written into the first page of the foreword of Ladapo’s own book, which he promoted on the podcast.

Kudos on getting a license suspended after years of talking, but Tenpenny isn’t going to hesitate and is going to continue to poison the discourse for many more years to come — and she’ll make bank off it, too.

Behold, Matt Walsh, nakedly Nazi

You knew this had to be coming. Matt Walsh, the know-nothing pundit who got mad attention for asking “what is a woman?” and insisting on a fundamental distinction between the sexes, all to justify his hatred of trans people, is airing a different idea now: white supremacy, white extinction theory, the whole kit-and-caboodle of racist Nazi dog whistles. He’s promoting Great Replacement Theory now.

There are really two parts of this story. The first is the story itself, which is the demographic trend where whites are trending towards extinction in the United States. Like, that’s the way it’s headed. And then the other part of the story is the veil of silence around this issue, the wall that is erected around it. And I know you’re gonna say, well, you just read a story about it. So it’s not a silence. They can report on it. So you report and you celebrate diversity, and then you just move on. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it, and that’s it. You aren’t allowed to talk much about it. You certainly – you certainly can’t be concerned about it. You’re not allowed to express any concern. That’s unthinkable. To hear that whites are on their way to minority status and the white population is declining, the worst that you could possibly do is – to talk about it at all is already a problem, but to suggest that there’s any reason at all to be concerned about that, or to be anything less than thrilled by that development is incredibly racist, we’re told.

Notice how the first two thirds of that paragraph are to set up the idea that he’s being persecuted, that no one is allowed to say these stupid words, and how society is policing your thoughts. That’s essential to his strategy, that you consider that his claim is so obvious and strong that people need to censor it even before he makes it. He’s not even going to consider that his great idea is so stupid and indefensible that intelligent people are already tired of hearing it.

People who identify as white are declining in proportion to those who identify with other ethnicities. That’s it. That’s all that is happening. There is no extinction. No one is being “replaced.” It’s how biology works — our species reproduces by mingling DNA between pairs of individuals, so everyone is a hybrid of their parents. It’s also a product of arbitrary cultural biases: if a white person has a child with a non-white person, there is no more loss of identity than if they had a child with a white person, but because of bigoted attitudes, the child is considered non-white. So of course, by definition, the frequency of “pure” white children declines with every generation, even if there is no decline in the frequency of genes contributed by white people. It’s an invented problem with no basis in reality.

Walsh continues, still feeling the need to prefix his comments with the idea that he’s a brave truth-teller that people want to silence.

We know that it’s — like, it doesn’t even need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway because we all know that’s true. But we know that the continued existence of any other race of people is considered deeply important. And the preservation of the historical and traditional racial identity of any nation is considered deeply important. You know? So, for example, if there was an influx of white immigration to a historically Black country, and that was resulting in a giant demographic shift wherein it was becoming a predominantly white country rather than predominantly Black, this would be considered a major, major problem. And there’s no doubt about it. And yet, in the reverse, it is either neutral or cause for celebration. But really it should be a cause for celebration.

Uh, yes — the continued existence of people is important. I’d also add that preserving unique cultures is also valuable. That is not something to worry about here, because the American historical and traditional identity is not at risk, nor are any white individuals. The culture is thriving and expanding as more people contribute to it, which is what you expect of a healthy evolving population.

He seems to have confused what is happening in the US to colonialism, where an external culture invades, takes over, and works to eradicate the native population … you know, like white Europeans did to the native populations of the Americas. That’s what’s really at the root of his problem, though. He thinks that they will do to us what we did to them. Except that’s not applicable: there is no alien “they”. “They” is us. Immigrants are joining us, not conquering us. The white population is diminishing in relative frequency, not because “they” are murdering us, but because we’re happily having consensual sex with each other.

As usual, he then goes off with half-assed distortions of biology.

And you know what? This pertains even to the the animal kingdom. I mean — think if there’s a particular type of, I don’t know, hummingbird that’s going extinct. Even for that, we’re supposed to panic. And if I were to say, hey, whatever. I mean, what does it matter? We — so we don’t have that of hummingbird. We got plenty of other hummingbirds. What does it matter what type of hummingbird it is? What difference does it make? So, yeah, this type of hummingbird is — there’s more of that then there’s less of this. Like, who cares? If I say that, I’m callous because, no, it’s very important that we have all varieties of hummingbirds. Every variety is very, very important. We have to keep them all around. Every part, every animal in the animal kingdom, we gotta keep them all around. It’s extremely important. If any particular variety starts to dwindle, if any particular type of species of animal gets driven out of its territory, it’s a very bad thing. So, it’s interesting that we can see this with hummingbirds, but not with certain kinds of people — well, in particular, one kind of person, which would be white person. The preservation of the hummingbird community is more important than the preservation of the white race.

No. Just no. Race and species are not synonyms. The analogy falls apart from its onset, and is in fact an extremely common trope among racists. I won’t take it apart word by word because that job has already been done: read Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy by HL Norton et al. Here’s the abstract.

In 1956, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhounds and bulldogs…?” It reads as if it were posted on social media today. The analogy comparing human races to dog breeds is not only widespread in history and pop culture, but also sounds like scientific justification for eschewing the social construction of race, or for holding racist beliefs about human nature. Here we answer Haldane’s question in an effort to improve the public understanding of human biological variation and “race”—two phenomena that are not synonymous. Speaking to everyone without expert levels of familiarity with this material, we investigate whether the dog breed analogy for human race stands up to biology. It does not. Groups of humans that are culturally labeled as “races” differ in population structure, genotype–phenotype relationships, and phenotypic diversity from breeds of dogs in unsurprising ways, given how artificial selection has shaped the evolution of dogs, not humans. Our demonstration complements the vast body of existing knowledge about how human “races” differ in fundamental sociocultural, historical, and political ways from categories of nonhuman animals. By the end of this paper, readers will understand how the assumption that human races are the same as dog breeds is a racist strategy for justifying social, political, and economic inequality.

Just the fact that Walsh brings this argument up is an indictment, biologists can tell you that it is rank bullshit. It’s old-fashioned garbage that I’d expect of Nazis or the KKK, but Walsh takes it for granted.

Once again, have you noticed how you don’t have to probe a transphobe very deeply before you uncover a Nazi?

Not…great

After more than a week of narcotics and steroids, I decided to quit this morning — the fog and haze and insomnia were too much. It wasn’t quite cold turkey, because I started dropping the dosage a couple of days ago, but still, this is my first day totally drug-free.

It’s not going real well so far. The pain is back (but still much less than last week), and now I get to deal with diffuse feelings of nausea, and I’m still foggy and slow. It’s one of those lose:lose situations and I’m not having a grand time. I also keep getting reminded that classes start in a few weeks.

I will get better. Next doctor’s appointment is early Monday morning.

Jesus Christ, impeach him already

Clarence Thomas is a shameless crook. Yet again, ProPublica has done the legwork and exposed the corruption.

During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

This accounting of Thomas’ travel, revealed for the first time here from an array of previously unavailable information, is the fullest to date of the generosity that has regularly afforded Thomas a lifestyle far beyond what his income could provide. And it is almost certainly an undercount.

I see the words “luxurious paid vacation” and I have to scramble to the dictionary to figure out what they mean. Clarence Thomas takes for granted that a billionaire will charter a 737 for him.

It doesn’t matter how blatant or extravagant it gets, the other members of the Supreme Court will defend the lack of ethical oversight and the Republicans in congress will close their eyes. American “justice” is a joke.

Reading history will make you aware of the wall you’re about to hit

I’ve been reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin in the evening, when my mushy brain allows me to focus for a bit. It’s good, but weirdly on-the-nose for someone living in America in the 2020s.

A quick summary: William Dodd, an ordinary history professor, gets selected to serve as the American ambassador to Germany in 1933, largely because the usual gang of civil servants all said “Holy shit, no, Hitler is coming to power and that dude is nuts.” He agrees to it because he thinks he’ll be freed up from his many university duties to write his magnum opus, a multi-volume history of the Old South, which, spoiler alert, he’s never going to finish. I sympathize a bit — escaping committee work and teaching for a few years, to host an occasional social whirl among the wealthy people of Europe? Sounds tempting. Except for the “Oh, right, Hitler” part.

So he gets there and steps right into the back-biting internal politics of the diplomatic corps. He’s a middle-class, fairly conservative but politically liberal fellow, plunged into a social scene ruled on the American side by an axis of privileged, filthy rich Harvard/Princeton/Yale alumni who love indolence and the perks of their offices; they’re all maneuvering behind his back to undercut his austerity initiatives, and seem to spend more time defending their right to send lengthy telegrams across the Atlantic while partying to all hours and getting up at 10am than in dealing with the crisis at hand. Dodd is being undermined, while at the same time he’s acquiring a reputation as the Cassandra of American diplomacy, because he’s horrified by the Nazis.

Many of his peers are busy with propping up policies of appeasement — they don’t want their gravy train tipped over. They know Hitler is a jumped-up nobody, and they keep predicting that the sensible German people and their well-established representatives will eventually set the lunatic aside, nobody could possibly let him run roughshod over such a civilized nation. He’s a flash in the pan. Cooler heads will prevail.

Unfortunately, for those who know a little history, in 1934 the Night of Long Knives happens. Dodd, as a diplomat, knew everyone involved — Röhm, the leader of the brown shirts, lived just around the corner from the embassy. Himmler and Göring were familiar social acquaintances; his daughter, Martha Dodd, was sleeping with Rudolf Diels, commander of the Gestapo (she seems to have jumped into bed with any prominent Nazi she could find, and also with Russian NKVD agents — she was a liberal modern woman. She initially admires the Nazis, eventually becoming disillusioned and transferring her adoration to Russian communists. She was also a naive woman.) It’s stunning how much horrible history was happening right there in this corner of Berlin, in these few years of history.

From there, it descends into a seemingly inevitable spiral of chaos, and we know how that ended up. Dodd is eventually squeezed out and returns home to wander the lecture circuit, telling everyone how evil the Nazi regime was.

What most struck me, though, was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism. The Americans opposed Nazi policies of imprisoning and murdering Jews, for sure…but behind the scenes all the American civil servants are nodding and agreeing that yes, there is a “Jewish problem” and gosh, Jews sure have crept deviously into positions of influence, like Jews always do. These were the people of power and influence, all assuming that yes, Jews are undesirable, but it just won’t do to kill them outright like the Nazis were doing. Even Dodd was making these kinds of arguments, accepting the Nazi premise but only rejecting their methods.

Dodd’s wikipedia page makes this same observation.

Edward M. House, a veteran in Democratic Party circles since the Wilson administration, told Dodd that he should do what he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings,” but cautioned, “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.” Dodd shared House’s views and wrote in his diary that “The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or talents entitled them to.” Based on this view of the proper role of Jews in society, he advised Hitler in March 1934 that Jewish influence should be restrained in Germany as it was in the United States. “I explained to him [Hitler],” wrote Dodd, “that where a question of over-activity of Jews in university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the offices in such a way as to not give great offense.” Hitler ignored Dodd’s advice and responded that “if they [the Jews] continue their activity we shall make a complete end of them in this country.”

This kind of mealy-mouthed defense is ubiquitous in the book. There are no heroes, only a few people who had glimmerings of the consequences of the bigotry that they also shared.

The author makes the point that maybe the Nazi catastrophe wasn’t inevitable at all, that what it required were people of integrity to point out that it was all built on lies and hatred, but when the people you depend on to stand for what is right are all Ivy League dickheads who don’t even recognize the humanity of the Jewish people, all responses will be ineffectual and actually enabling. I felt like the diplomatic corps prior to WWII was made of an army of Tucker Carlsons. No wonder Hitler got away with so much criminality early in his career!

The book did not fill me with confidence about the future. I see the same phenomenon going on around me right now: we have media that are constantly making the case that Jews, or Palestinians, or black people, or trans people, or <name your hated minority here> are less than fully human, that we can abridge their rights because they are lesser beings, and we are becoming inured to this kind of language. Nick Fuentes is not some amusing comedian, the Proud Boys are not a fraternal organization, Fox News is not just echoing the perspective of a simple demographic. These are all kinds of monstrous haters who are building a foundation for an unimaginably evil future.

You can try to pretend it can’t happen here…but it’s happening here.