Bari Weiss is an agglutinizing agent for losers

It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies. Here’s a long story about how a few IDW types built a short-lived organization on connections to the rich. It features Bari Weiss, of course.

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

OK. The recipe begins with Weiss, Chen, Boghossian, and Ferguson, creating a rather shitty roux that has no taint of progressive values. Then they invented a label and an ambitious agenda.

Eventually, they settled on a name and a strategy. The organization would be called fair: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs.

Wait, wait, wait — FAIR already exists; it’s a progressive media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. It’s been around since 1986. I have to assume that the confusion was intentional, and that we’re off to a sleazy start.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been around since 1920. It’s a distinguished organization that has fought for our constitutional rights, including free speech, and these bozos want to replace it with an ideologically biased group of bitter reactionaries? I don’t think so. So they added more extremists.

Weiss and the other founders recruited an informal board of advisers—a mix of podcasters, journalists, academics, and lawyers. Among them were the media personality Megyn Kelly, the writer Andrew Sullivan, and the anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo.

Kelly, Sullivan, and dear god, Rufo? Can this recipe possibly get any more ugly and unpalatable? Sure can. They needed some rich sugar daddies, and they got ’em.

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Suzy Edelman, another donor, who gave fair a million dollars in 2021, wrote in an e-mail to Weiss, “It’s your courage that inspired me to join the movement—not just to reform what’s been captured, but to build new, wonderful things.” I know Weiss a little bit—we’ve hung out in professional settings a few times over the years. When fair was founded, she had just left the New York Times in a very public way, and she was focussed on launching new organizations. “I think we are in a moment of profound change in American life, in which many old institutions are crumbling or have lost trust,” she told me recently.

You should begin to realize that what we’ve got here is a tiny, cozy in-group of destructive, bigoted assholes who have captivated a few bigoted asshole multi-millionaires who were willing to toss them big pots of money. This is the root of our current American problem: we have a surplus of spoiled rich people who know very little but are philosophically committed to the idea that their vast wealth was hard-earned, or they wouldn’t have it. It’s easy to milk them of cash by pointing at some poor people and saying that they’re out to get you.

That’s what this whole story is about, petty bigots with buckets of inherited wealth, and grifters like Weiss who know exactly how to part them from their money. Just repeat “woke, woke, woke” at them and rely on their contempt for others to trigger donations.

Fortunately, the wheels started to come off Weiss’s FAIR gravy train pretty quickly. The thing is, grifters know how to get money, but they aren’t very effective at using it. The organization started to disintegrate in disputes over how nasty and mean they ought to be, and all they would do is talk, talk, talk.

Rob Schläpfer, a volunteer state coördinator in Oregon, told me that he worked on a plan to mobilize parents to attend school-board meetings, but it “didn’t go anywhere. I was just spinning my wheels.” He found it hard to get direction from the national office about what to focus on, or how his chapter’s work should fit into fair’s mission. As time went on, other volunteer chapter leaders around the country started calling and texting Schläpfer to vent their frustrations. “fair was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”

Oh, good. Please continue bleeding money that accomplishes nothing.

Then the initial crop of assholes started to jump ship.

There seemed to be a genuine philosophical conflict within the fair community. In September of 2021, two members of the advisory board, Rufo and the libertarian podcaster Kmele Foster, started squabbling on Twitter about Rufo’s methods for opposing critical race theory in K-12 schools, which Foster described as inviting “all kinds of reactionary hysteria.” Rufo resigned from the advisory board soon afterward. “The question with FAIR that I had was: what are the substantive wins the organization has accomplished? And it was very hard for anyone to explain this,” Rufo wrote to me in an e-mail. fair’s high-profile advisers were “transgressive enough to generate attention, but not transgressive enough to achieve results. It’s almost worse than doing nothing, as it creates the illusion of action and absorbs political energy that would be better spent elsewhere.”

Worst of all, the money was dissatisfied.

Behind the scenes, there was deeper trouble. Suzy Edelman, one of the donors who gave a million dollars in 2021, had started asking questions about whether her gift had been used appropriately, requesting fair’s receipts and copies of the contracts that it used for volunteers and staff. For months, Edelman had also been questioning fair’s approach, particularly on gender issues. “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy,” she had written in an e-mail. She noted that fair had positioned its programs as an “alternative” to mainstream D.E.I., or diversity, equity, and inclusion, training, but, she said, “You can’t ‘DEI-lite’ this issue.” (A spokesperson for Edelman maintained that her concerns about fair were not related to its politics, only its “governance and use of charitable funds.”)

Weiss and Bartning exchanged terse e-mails about Edelman in August. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote, referring to Harlan Crow.

Oh, dear. Grifters hate to lose a mark, especially a rich, gullible sucker like Crow. Poor Bari! If she gets a reputation for being an ineffectual, obvious money-waster, the rich people won’t talk to her.

Hmmm. Have any of Bari Weiss’s schemes ever accomplished anything? We should be pleased that she’s at the poisonous core of so many PR campaigns for the Right.

The lesson here is that “anti-woke” is a recipe for incompetence and failure — it’s just that it inspires so much suffering in its inevitable decay.

Mission actually accomplished

We did it! We got our poster done and printed!

We’re flying off to the American Arachnology Society meeting the week of 24 June, so we even finished ahead of time. There have been meetings where I’m still slicing up copy with an X-acto knife and adding Letraset text the night before — but those were the Olden Times. Now that we can just jiggle things on a computer screen and send it to a printer, now we get it done a week and a half ahead of time.

We also got our registration and housing paid for, and booked our flight to Syracuse…and there’s the catch. The meeting is at Cornell, and we don’t quite know how to bridge that last hour of the trip. There’s no public transportation from the airport to the university! (That’s much like UMM, only we’re 3 hours away from the airport.) We’ll figure that out this week, and if nothing else, we’ll throw money at an uber.

As you might expect, the poster is liberally covered with spiders, so I’ll refrain from posting it here — you’ll have to join my Patreon to see it…or come to the meeting! You’ll see even more spiders!

It’s all quantum

Where could these wacky ideas about physics have come from?

That UFO “whistleblower,” David Grusch, who so captivated Tucker Carlson with his credibility, is back and singing like a canary. He’s spilling all the beans about America’s secret UFO program.

Grusch, who received a college scholarship from the Air Force to study physics, did not describe the unusual aircraft as technology from another planet. I don’t want to necessarily denote origin, he said. I don’t think we have all the data to say, Oh, they’re coming from a certain location. Grusch proposed the vehicles the Pentagon is hiding could have come from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics, saying, We know there are extra dimensions due to high-energy particle collisions, etc., and there’s a theoretical framework to explain that.

It could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial and actually that it’s coming from a higher-dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here, he said.

In the interview, Grusch reiterated that he has not personally seen the evidence of nonhuman technology but that intelligence officials he spoke with as part of his role on the UFO task force have told him of its existence.

Grusch came so close to the truth. Of these UFOs he has never seen and never witnessed any physical evidence of their existence, he concluded I remember interviewing these personnel and thinking, Either these people are lying to me, having a psychotic break, or this is some crazy but true stuff that’s happening. But somehow he accepted his third option.

Christianity is a death cult

Do I need to explain this? Thulsa Doom was not a role model.

A religious cultist in Kenya did not get the memo, though. Pastor Paul Mackenzie has been telling his parishioners that they can meet Jesus sooner by starving themselves to death. The end result: mass graves.

The number of people who died after a Kenyan pastor ordered his followers to starve to death in order to meet Jesus has surpassed 300, authorities said Tuesday, and the death toll is expected to rise as more exhumations are planned.

The death toll increased to 303 after 19 more bodies were recovered from mass graves in the vast forested land in Kilifi County of coastal Kenya, where pastor Paul Mackenzie and his followers lived.

Coastal regional commissioner Rhoda Onyancha told local journalists that 613 people tied to the area are missing.

There are a couple of pastors in this region who have been misinforming their congregations in ways that lead to mass deaths — it’s like a morbid evangelical revival.

Children’s events — successfully poisoned by the right wing

Here’s more of what we can expect from the kinds of assholes who listen to the current conservative mania. Heidi Starr’s nine-year-old daughter was participating in a track and field event when…

“As my daughter was preparing to get up and throw, a man came out of the crowd, stepped forward and walked towards a parent volunteer and said, ‘This is a girls’ event — why are boys throwing?'” Starr told CBC News.

Starr said she then intervened and corrected the man, whose granddaughter was also participating in the event.

“Then the gentleman started insisting that I provide documentation in the form of a certificate proving that my daughter was born a girl,” Starr said.

Starr added that the man’s wife was also shouting at Starr and Starr’s ex-wife, saying they were “genital mutilators and groomers.”

The asshole denies shouting, claiming all he did was ask for a gender certificate, like that was totally inoffensive.

You might wonder how the daughter reacted to all this — as you might expect.

“She was physically vibrating. She was sobbing. She was in and out of tears all day till bedtime that day,” Starr said.

Given that, I won’t hesitate to post the assholes’ photo and names.

Josef and Krista Tesar

Sports are supposed to be fun. It’s hard to enjoy anything when jerks like that are prowling about questioning the participants identities and right to be there.

At this rate, the Right will starve themselves to death

Comrades, I am pleased to report another glorious victory over the running dog lackeys of the regressive Right: Cracker Barrel has been conquered. It is now ours.

As people across the country continue to celebrate Pride Month, one restaurant in particular let it be known that they’re in full support of the month-long commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride.

Earlier this week, Cracker Barrel took some of its customers by surprise when the restaurant shared a photo on its social media accounts of a rocking chair sporting rainbow colors.

The image included the following caption: “We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our 🌈 rocker). Happy Pride!”

You will also be relieved to know that this triumph does not mean the socialist vanguard is required to shop at Cracker Barrel, just as you are not required to drink Budweiser. This is a victory for the freedom to choose.

They might turn me into a Luddite at this rate

It’s all good, their lives were worse than average anyway

All these raving mad techbro loonies keep ranting about how AI, unless properly nurtured (and paid for), might lead to extinction, and how AI ought to be a high priority for humanity (meaning “give us money), and it’s confusing, because they use words differently than normal people. In particular, the word “extinction” means something very different from what a biologist might understand it to mean.

When TESCREALists [transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism] talk about the importance of avoiding human extinction, they don’t mean what you might think. The reason is that there are different ways of defining “human extinction.” For most of us, “human extinction” means that our species, Homo sapiens, disappears entirely and forever, which many of us see as a bad outcome we should try to avoid. But within the TESCREAL worldview, it denotes something rather different. Although there are, as I explain in my forthcoming book, at least six distinct types of extinction that humanity could undergo, only three are important for our purposes:

Terminal extinction: this is what I referenced above. It would occur if our species were to die out forever. Homo sapiens is no more; we disappear just like the dinosaurs and dodo before us, and this remains the case forever.

Final extinction: this would occur if terminal extinction were to happen — again, our species stops existing — and we don’t have any successors that take our place. The importance of this extra condition will become apparent shortly.

Normative extinction: this would occur if we were to have successors, but these successors were to lack some attribute or capacity that one considers to be very important — something that our successors ought to have, which is why it’s called “normative.”

The only forms of extinction that the TESCREAL ideologies really care about are the second and third, final and normative extinction. They do not, ultimately, care about terminal extinction — about whether our species itself continues to exist or not. To the contrary, the TESCREAL worldview would see certain scenarios in which Homo sapiens disappears entirely and forever as good, because that would indicate that we have progressed to the next stage in our evolution, which may be necessary to fully realize the techno-utopian paradise they envision.

I think maybe “we” and “our” might mean something different to them, too, because the words don’t include me or my family or my friends or even distant acquaintances. Heck, they probably don’t include most of the life on this planet.

Later in his book, MacAskill suggests that our destruction of the natural world might actually be net positive, which points to a broader question of whether biological life in general — not just Homo sapiens in particular — has any place in the “utopian” future envisioned by TESCREALists. Here’s what MacAskill says:

It’s very natural and intuitive to think of humans’ impact on wild animal life as a great moral loss. But if we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain), then we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing.

The lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average…who assesses that “worse”? People? TESCREALists? I was just watching an adorable little Theridion constructing a cobweb in a signpost — what was “worse” about that? It’ll probably thrive all summer long and leave behind a family of spiderlings who I’ll see building cobwebs next summer.

I don’t think the monarch butterflies and mayflies consider the expansion of Homo sapiens to be a good thing either — they’re dying and declining in numbers. Were passenger pigeons grateful for what we brought to them? I think MacAskill is playing a weird numbers game here. He thinks he can arbitrarily assign a value to an organisms life, either negative or positive or “average” (relative to what, I have no idea), and if it’s less than zero…pffft, it’s OK to exterminate them.

People who think that way about animals tend to eventually do the same thing to people, you know.

So where does this leave us? The Center for AI Safety released a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.” But this conceals a secret: The primary impetus behind such statements comes from the TESCREAL worldview (even though not all signatories are TESCREALists), and within the TESCREAL worldview, the only thing that matters is avoiding final and normative extinction — not terminal extinction, whereby Homo sapiens itself disappears entirely and forever. Ultimately, TESCREALists aren’t too worried about whether Homo sapiens exists or not. Indeed our disappearance could be a sign that something’s gone very right — so long as we leave behind successors with the right sorts of attributes or capacities.

Again, the extinction they speak of is not the extinction we think of. If their strategies lead to the death of every person (and animal!) on the planet, but we leave behind blinking digital boxes that are running simulations of people and animals, that is a net win.

I’m beginning to worry about these people. If I assign them a value of -1, will they all conveniently disappear in a puff of smoke?

This is why administrators don’t teach

Academics get constant training — it seems like every week or two the university trots out a new “module” and duns our email with notifications that we are REQUIRED to take it, and if we defer the training to a more convenient time the notifications don’t stop. It’s a lousy system, but necessary. It’s just that the methods are so poor. For example, this article on sexual harassment in science offers up a few criticisms.

Sexual harassment includes forcing people into sexual activity, giving unwanted sexual attention to someone and making unwanted comments or threats to someone based on their gender. The negative effects of sexual harassment also apply to the people who witness it and the organizations involved. The first thing that experts say needs to be overhauled is traditional sexual harassment training.

The computer-based format of some training modules is familiar to anyone starting a new job, including us. We remember laughable scenarios that were, at best, out of touch with how real people behave, or showed only the most extreme examples of harassment. The training was unrealistic, unmemorable and something to click through as fast as we could. Such passive, simplistic training typically fails, as sociologists Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University found in a Harvard Business Review analysis in 2020.

Training needs to be more in-person, according to experts. People can interact with a live instructor who has specialized knowledge of awkward topics and how to talk effectively about them. The trainers can take the backgrounds and ages of people in the group into account, answer questions in real time, and tailor their program to the organization; what people at a nonprofit might need could be different from workers at a big-box store or in an academic setting. And even in academia, training for scientists who work in the field could be different than for those who work in a lab.

This past weekend, after a week of emails telling me I am REQUIRED to take training in “Fundamentals of Disability Accommodations and Inclusive Course Design,” I did it. It was fundamentally terrible. I am 100% in agreement with the importance of the topic, and I took it very seriously and cleared my calendar and went through this self-paced online program in about an hour and a half. It consisted of a series of simple web pages emphasizing specific points, interspersed with 2-5 minute videos of faculty and students talking about how they solved certain problems. There were also short quizzes (a question or two) occasionally. It was totally trivial. I quickly realized that all I had to do was respect the students and work with them, the core lesson of the exercise, and I’d get everything right. That’s what I want to do, of course, but even if I were a student-hating psychopath, I could have easily breezed right through it all, and gotten my required email notification that I had taken the training and done well.

I’ve taken all the sexual harassment training the university offers, and many others on racial sensitivity and grant management, etc. They’re all the same, screen pages and short canned videos. Like the article says, the “training was unrealistic, unmemorable and something to click through as fast as we could.” It’s unfortunate — they can do better. The best training I had here was on implicit bias, which was not done on a computer, but in a room with other faculty and a specialist who came in and talked to us and answered questions interactively. It also helped in that faculty who were opposed to the whole idea of the training publicly exposed themselves and made for great counter-examples.

I’m just thinking that this is a university, and we have a lot of people who are very good at teaching, yet somehow we have to take these training courses that are the modern equivalent of those horrible filmstrips we had to watch in the 1960s. Imagine if I were to teach my genetics course in the style of these online training courses — I’d be hauled in front of an academic tribunal and chastised severely for my incompetence at my job. You couldn’t even run an online course in any academic subject with this degree of rote key-clicking and low information density pages.

If universities were serious about rooting out and correcting sexual harassment, they have to do a little more than the equivalent of putting a check box online that says “I am not a sexual harasser.” That would take a little more money and investment of expertise, though.

A lesson for parents of trans kids everywhere

The Washington Post has a nice article about Christine Jorgensen, the woman who became famous in the 1950s for her transgender surgery. There’s the usual, expected tales of bigotry — exclusion from bathrooms (that never changes), discrimination, prurient curiosity about her genitals, the New York Post declared that she wasn’t really a woman, etc. — but one thing stood out for me. When she went off to Denmark for her surgery, she informed her parents, and they replied back:

It was also time to tell her parents the reason for her trip, which she had withheld for fear of causing them hurt and confusion. In the letter that was soon to be shared with the rest of America, she reassured them their daughter was “healthier and happier than ever.”

Though her parents struggled to grasp the full meaning, they cabled back: “We love you more than ever.”

Awww. That’s how it should be for everyone — there are a lot of parents today, 70 years later, who need to learn what loving your children involves.