The common prefix “trans” seems to discombobulate them. Here’s a cis woman who mentioned she’s getting a trans vaginal ultrasound, outraging the usual mob of baying buffoons:
Are we really expected to take these ignorant clowns seriously?
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.
An 8-year old boy in Bolivia picked up a black widow spider and urged it to bite him (this isn’t as easy as you think, black widows are shy and reluctant to bite) because he wanted to become Spider-Man. This is a worthy goal, but his methods weren’t particularly effective. A doctor explained:
“These black spiders with red backs are black widows. They do not cause anyone to become Spider-Man—on the contrary, they are putting lives at risk,” Vásquez said.
The kid is fine, but this has happened before!
In 2020, a similar case occurred in the rural Bolivian town of Chayanta, in the Andean region of Potosí, involving three children aged 8, 10 and 12 respectively. The trio provoked a black widow spider to bite them with the same objective. Doctors also managed to successfully treat the children in that incident as well.
Clearly, further public education is necessary. The children of South America must have it explained to them that the procedure requires a radioactive spider.
Hey, any millionaires/billionaires out there want to shovel money at me to feed spiders radioactive food and allow them to bite me?
Yesterday, I asked “How can obvious fraud Avi Loeb continue to bamboozle?”, and of course lots of people were happy to answer. He has a sugar daddy named Charles Hoskinson.
Charles Hoskinson, the charismatic founder of Cardano, one of the foremost blockchain platforms, has embarked on an unprecedented expedition to investigate the mysteries of outer space. Hoskinson has taken his passion for exploration to new heights by searching for aliens and UFOs in uncharted regions of the universe. This audacious endeavor exemplifies Hoskinson’s daring and the insatiable human curiosity that compels us to explore uncharted territories.
Charles Hoskinson’s search for aliens includes examining claimed UFO encounters and anomalies and examining them from a scientific perspective. He works with specialists from various disciplines, such as astrophysics, astronomy, and data analysis, to learn more about these puzzling events. Hoskinson hopes to create data-driven approaches that can help discover trends or anomalies that might point to extraterrestrial activity by utilizing his knowledge of blockchain technology.
Oh. It’s a science fraud milking a crypto fraud for money. Parasites on parasites on parasites all the way down. Somehow, that’s less distressing than learning they’ve pulled shenanigans on legitimate scientific institutions, but still, at the root, they’re taking money from gullible investors and pouring it into a big magnet at the bottom of the ocean.
I also learn that Hoskinson is a backer of George Church’s pie-in-the-sky company Colossal, that plans on using biotechnology to resurrect mammoths and dodos and thylacines. They won’t. But they’ll all get lots of press and persuade non-scientists to cough up cash.
Hey, any rich people with a deficit in understanding and reason want to fund my research on comparative life histories of local spider populations? I could make it weirder by speculating that spider webs reveal linear seams between the polygons that make up our universe, and therefore could be a means to access outer dimensions of existence. I could do a lot with $1.5 million, the amount wasted on Loeb’s expedition.
I should be grateful to Avi Loeb. He’s done so much to besmirch the power of the phrase “Harvard professor,” which journalists like to deploy as evidence that someone must be a super-smart guy when it means nothing of the kind. Someone must be able to see through the bullshit in his latest claims, right?
A Harvard professor said Monday he may have uncovered evidence of alien life in the universe and told Americans it would fundamentally change their understanding of their existence.
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb said Monday on “Fox & Friends” that he examined an object moving through space
faster than 95% of stars near the sunthat hadmaterial strengthand was tougher than most rocks.The professor, who is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, explained that he could not
quantifythe object that he was studying just yet.
He’s got nothin’, but he’ll babble about nothing to get his airtime on Fox News and his tabloid coverage.
What actually happened is that a meteor plunging through the atmosphere over Papua New Guinea melted and exploded, and Loeb rushed to the area, trawled a magnet through the ocean, and pulled up some tiny metal spherules that he wants to pretend are alien artifacts.
Here, want to see some of his evidence?
Enhance!
Yeah, that’s it. They’re doing an isotope analysis and plan to publish a paper on it. I’m not sure what result that they expect to get that would constitute evidence of alien life — they’re going to find that they’re mostly iron, and any reliable isotope data might show that they’re billions of years old, as we’d expect from an extraterrestrial rock.
Fortunately, some scientists are speaking out.
Now, though, a number of scientists have countered Loeb’s claims. The New York Times piece, for example, points out that Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, explained that the meteorite would have been completely incinerated entering Earth’s atmosphere if it was traveling at the speed that Loeb claims.
Desch went as far as saying that Loeb’s comments constitute “a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method, and it’s so demoralizing and tiring.”
Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario, concurred, suggesting that Loeb shouldn’t make such bold proclamations during the early analysis phase — it’s not uncommon for detected events to appear interstellar at first only to be chalked up to a measurement error.
I think the reason that Loeb still has his position and his appointment to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is that it is “so demoralizing and tiring” to deal with gullible journalists who’ve fallen for this ridiculous charlatanry.
Hey, journalists: here’s the real question that popped into my head when I read this story. Avi Loeb was able to charter a ship (expensive!) and crew (more expensive!) and load it with some specialized mining gear (not cheap, I imagine) and drag it back and forth across the ocean floor, while getting photos taken of his smug, grinning face. He has sent samples to various labs around the world to be assayed, not something you’ll pay for out of pocket.
Who’s paying for it? I would be shocked if this barebones speculation and literal fishing expedition could have passed peer review, and if it did, there are some committees at NSF that need to be flensed.
So please, this is journalism 101. Follow the money.
I’m trying to plan some alternative teaching options for the Fall, since I might be temporarily incapacitated for a bit — I’m waiting on a call from podiatrist right now, which might define some of my limitations. One of the obvious fall-back strategies would be to do some lectures remotely, since we’re all well-trained on using Zoom nowadays. Except that now I learn Zoom wants to use us.
Zoom has rolled out a controversial update to its terms of service, adding a clause that allows it to use customer data for AI and ML training.
The pertinent clause is quoted below:
You consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable Law, including for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models), training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof, and as otherwise provided in this Agreement. In furtherance of the foregoing, if, for any reason, there are any rights in such Service Generated Data which do not accrue to Zoom under this Section 10.2 or as otherwise provided in this Agreement, you hereby unconditionally and irrevocably assign and agree to assign to Zoom on your behalf, and you shall cause your End Users to unconditionally and irrevocably assign and agree to assign to Zoom, all right, title, and interest in and to the Service Generated Data, including all Proprietary Rights relating thereto.
Those bastards. This is a sneaky way of violating privacy, confidentiality, and our ownership of classroom content. If they announced that my lectures could be lifted wholesale and sold for use by anyone else, that would be less of a violation than this. They figure they could use a computer proxy to take all that content, massage it, refilter it, and then distribute it without attribution in the guise of AI — no one will be able to blame or credit me as a source, which is an essential part of the way science works.
They’ll also be able to steal my students’ contributions, although mostly they’re all silent black rectangles on the screen. They will chime in with good stuff now and then, though, all of it to be grist for the AI machine.
Also, people use Zoom for business meetings, where real money is at stake. I wonder how they’re going to take to the idea of a digital spy lurking in the background?
Or how about medical consultations? Are those to be AI fodder, too?
I hadn’t heard of this guy, Richard Hanania, until recently — but I sure was familiar with his old pseudonym, Richard Hoste. He was one of the more hateful, obnoxious, stupid racists who was busy stuffing the internet with lies a decade ago. Now I learn, in one of the most thorough, devastating journalistic takedowns I’ve ever read that Hoste and Hanania were one and the same, and that he’s broken into the mainstream with the complicity of conservative billionaires.
A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.
Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.
I remember Hoste, because I’ve long kept half an eye on nasty little websites like Taki’s Magazine, The Unz Review, VDARE, the Occidental Observer, and anything linked to the Pioneer Fund. These are the places some of the most openly racist people, like Richard Spencer or Steve Sailer, let it all hang out nakedly. I’ve always marveled at how they can write such vile, repugnant articles in their safe little hugboxes full of racists, and then walk out in public without shame, even to friendly appreciation from notable academics. It’s one of the tells I recognize for closet racists — people who praise Sailer, for instance, are the kind of slimeballs who read VDARE approvingly, even if they’d never dare to write such things themselves.
Now I’m going to have to add “following Richard Hanania” as another marker for the shy racists.
You’re on notice, guys. Scuttle for the kitchen cabinets as fast as you can, the light has been turned on.
Anyway, a major data leak from Disqus has exposed Hanania’s history, and it’s interesting to see how a low-life troll mainstreamed himself and started grabbing attention and money from more respectable venues. First, he dropped the pseudonym and was writing under his real name, Hanania. Then he started writing somewhat less inflammatory, but still crackling with racism, op-eds and articles that he’d submit to big-name sites, where he’d get picked up by sympathetic editors (they’re everywhere). It also helps to cozy up to rich white people, many of whom already share his views.
The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.
Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.
Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.
Yes, he has a “think tank,” a term that is long past its past-due date. Hanania’s is called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. It’s run out of his house, and mainly seems to be a drop-box for donations that pay his substantial salary. The function of CSPI is…
In addition to being a laundering service for handing out money to reactionary academics, it is a paper mill for “studies” that back up reactionary talking points, to be spun into articles and opinion pieces with headlines such as “Social trends causing rapid growth in people identifying as LGBT, report says” (from the ideological astroturfing Sinclair Broadcast Group), “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” (WSJ) and “The new class war is over identity” (Washington Examiner) — the latter being an anti-LGBTQ screed that ended, “My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.”
It’s a profitable gig, collecting donations from insufferable rich Republicans and shuffling it into bad publications that pollute the body politic, but there’s no “thinking” involved in a think-tank. But it paid off for Hanania! He could use that illusion of serious scholarship to work his way up the grifter’s ladder.
Hanania was making a name for himself. By 2022, he was selected as a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center — funded through right-wing donors including billionaire Harlan Crow — is led by executive director Carlos Carvalho. “I have no comment,” Carvalho told HuffPost when asked about Hanania.
Hanania was also tapped to be a lecturer for the “Forbidden Courses” program at the University of Austin, the unaccredited school funded by venture capitalists and founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, now a prominent right-wing influencer herself. The university did not respond to a request for comment about Hanania.
Earlier this year, Hanania spoke to the Yale Federalist Society, the school’s chapter of the conservative legal organization, about what the government has done to “discriminate against whites and men.” The chapter did not respond when asked for comment.
And this October, Hanania is scheduled to teach a seminar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The school did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
He may be dropping a few rungs off that ladder, though. Bari Weiss has said she didn’t know him and wouldn’t have hired him if she had. Oops.
The University of Austin, founded by a group including Bari Weiss in reaction to progressive campus culture and promising freer speech, has drawn a line at the right-wing writer Richard Hanania, after HuffPost revealed that he’d written in favor of eugenics and racism under a pseudonym.
“Richard Hanania has no affiliation with UATX. He was invited once as a speaker. Like many other institutions, we were completely unaware of his pseudonymous, racist writings. Had we known, we would not have invited him,” a spokesman, Hillel Ofek, told Semafor in an email.
His invitations to speak at the Federalist Society probably still stand — they eat up the racist white nationalist stuff there. He’s probably going to face some opposition at Stanford, I hope, but you never know. Apologists for hate seem to have infiltrated many higher levels of society. You don’t have to worry about Hanania’s prospects, he was already gearing up to jump to a new grift.
Hanania mentioned all of these men [Andreesen, Sacks, Ramaswamy, Thiel] in a June Substack post while describing what he celebrated as the “Tech Right,” a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”
The cult of “longtermism” has swept through Silicon Valley in recent years, with Musk and Thiel among its most well-known acolytes. It’s a worldview that often prioritizes the health of future generations of humans — even ones millions of years hence — over people currently living in the here and now, suffering and getting by on planet Earth. (Musk’s goal to colonize Mars, for example, is a longtermist project.)
Its adherents are often obsessed with IQ scores and scientific racism, and the famous computer scientist Timnit Gebru has criticized longtermism as “eugenics under a different name.”
The scholar Émile Torres has also noted that longtermism’s “transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of ‘posthumans’ is eugenics on steroids,” a recapitulation of 20th-century beliefs that ushered in “a wide range of illiberal policies, including restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations.”
It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that Hanania has emerged as a scribe for this new “Tech Right.” After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.
“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.
“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”
New grift, same as the old grift.
The rational reason to reject eugenics is, of course, that we know where it led when it captured “the hearts and minds of policy makers” over a century ago: to suffering and death and a world where an asshole like Hanania can thrive.
P.S. I neglected to mention that another important rung on the racist grift ladder is publishing in Quillette. You will not be surprised to learn that Claire Lehman, the creepy mastermind behind Quillette, still supports Hanania.
Ha ha, fooled you. I’ve been getting steadily worse. My ankle is totally fucked up, my whole foot is swelling like a balloon, and to top it all off, the problems are spreading to my knee. I’ve been reduced to lying immobile hoping some random twitch doesn’t trigger spasms of pain.
Last night was the worst. I’m trying to find a position I can sleep in, rearranging limbs and whimpering pathetically at every twinge, when Mary suggests we go to the ER. “No,” I whined. “I have to man up and deal with this in my manly masculine stupid way. I can’t admit that I can’t deal with this!”
Around 2am I turned to her and said “I can’t deal with this. Take me to the ER, please,” and she did.
So I was shortly stretched out on a table and a nurse was sticking an IV in, and then the Dilaudid flowed. O Sweet Relief! Then another liter or three of blood was extracted to pay for it, and I got lots of blood tests (which came back mostly normal). We’ve got to figure out what was going on, so there were a great many needle sticks as the doctor tried to draw fluids out of my joints, both the ankle and the knee. He succeeded, and slurped about 75mL of Mtn Dew out of me.
If I installed a tap in my knee, I could apparently get free Mtn Dew* at will.
The fluids have all been sent up to a lab in Alexandria. They’re to see if I’ve got an infection, or weird sharp crystals in solution damaging the tissues. He didn’t think it was an infection, and my uric acid results were normal, so he’s just being thorough. It’s time for some thoroughness here.
It’s also time for some pain management. I’m now on NORCON every four hours, for the next 5 days, and prednisone once a day for the same days. I’ve been on this before, and know what to expect: insomnia, diffuse anger at everything, and a wobbly, semi-drunken perspective on the world. So I’ll be ready to blog, in other words.
I’m also aware that I’m getting a few opioid doses here. There have been limits set on their use, and I’ll respect them. These things are scary. I’m just hoping I get an effective treatment before I have to stop taking the potent drugs.
I’m meeting a podiatrist tomorrow, and what will then follow is a solid plan of treatment. For now, it looks mainly like wearing the horrible boot and confinement to my house, where Mary will wait on me hand and foot. Maybe I should order a little silver bell from Amazon? Yeah, no, I don’t want to take her for granted.
*Warm, flat Mtn Dew that mainly tastes of salt. Maybe PepsiCo should think of a new flavor, Mtn Dew Synovial Goo.
A new announcement from the Holy Republic of Texas:
The largest school district in Texas announced its libraries will be eliminated and replaced with discipline centers in the new school year.
Yep. They’re shutting down the school libraries. And what, you may wonder, is a “discipline center”? It’s where you send the troublemaking students to get them out of your hair.
Teachers at these schools will soon have the option to send misbehaving students to these discipline centers, or “team centers’” – designated areas where they will continue to learn remotely.
This is getting worse and worse. Now you might be curious about what has prompted this sudden decision to eliminate libraries and turn them into detention camps? It’s Texas, so it could just be cussedness and a love of ignorance. But no, they have a specific excuse.
News of the library removals comes after the state announced it would be taking over the district, effective in the 2023-24 school year, due to poor academic performance. Miles was appointed by the the Texas Education Agency in June.
That’s Texas logic. You’ve got a school system with poor academic performance, so you step in to improve it by preventing the kids from reading books.
Think it will work?
