We have another Podish Sortacast coming up this weekend, and the theme is “problematic favorites.”
Uh-oh. This could be bad. Can it be myself?
Quick, make some suggestions in the comments, to spare the world an hour of me talking about wicked me.
I got a mention in the latest issue of the college newspaper, the University Register. Only in the April Fools’ issue, unfortunately, and they misspelled my name, of course.
“The only current known readers of the UR are PZ Meyers and one of his spiders.”
Not mentioned is that PZ Meyers only manages to skim the paper 5 days after it was published.
Or that the spiders only read at a first grade level, so far.
Wow. The Wisconsin loser, Daniel Kelly, is really pissed off about having to concede.
(Skip ahead to 3:40)
It’s hard to take his accusation that the Protasiewicz campaign was despicable, when Kelly campaigned with a version of the Willie Horton ad.
Conservative former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly’s campaign for a vacant seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is running an ad on social media that is nearly a shot for shot remake of the “Willie Horton ad” run by supporters of former President George H.W. Bush during his 1988 presidential race against former Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
…
On Tuesday, Kelly’s official Twitter account posted his campaign’s version of the ad, which shows pictures of Kelly and his liberal opponent, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, over a simple blue background while a narrator details the sentence she delivered to Quantrell Bounds, a Thiensville man who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl and posted a video of the incident to Facebook.The ad, which includes a filter to make the video appear as if it’s playing on a VHS tape and match the period-specific look of the original, states that Protasiewicz “lets criminals off easy.”
It’s OK if you are a Republican, you know.
Also, they are extremely upset that Protasiewicz’s campaign for a judgeship was political. Wait, what? Republicans have totally politicized the courts, have been actively campaigning to get conservative judges installed, and now they’re complaining? Look at the US Supreme Court — if you don’t think that’s a politicized court, you need to get your ability to think checked. Also, and even I consider this weird, the state Supreme Court positions in Wisconsin are elected. They’re by nature political.
The bluntness of the Democrats’ message in Wisconsin inspired outrage on the right and worried chin-stroking from some liberals, uneasy with the concept of such openly partisan judicial elections. Republicans here warn that “the rule of law” might be replaced by “the rule of Janet,” and that if she wins, hyper-partisan court races will become the norm.
Protasiewicz and her allies say that they already were, especially in Wisconsin. After Dobbs, which put abortion rights back in the laps of state legislators and courts, the trend only accelerated.
“My value is that we have fair maps,” Protasiewicz said at the Tuesday night forum. “My value is that people should be able to make their own reproductive health care decisions.”
OK, Democrats, get over it. How can you be uneasy about “openly partisan judicial elections”? Elections, man. If you don’t recognize that people are going to be partisan over political decisions like gerrymandering and health care, you’re going to lose.
Several things that make me happy occurred.
Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former public school teacher, was projected to win Tuesday’s mayoral runoff after promising to increase investment in social programs to address public safety fears in the nation’s third-largest city.
The Wisconsin supreme court was flipped to a majority liberal
Liberals claimed control of Wisconsin’s high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election.
Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the state’s election maps “rigged.”
This is the one I cared about most, because it’s the state next door, and I’ve got a grandchild living there. Wisconsin has been on a long slow ugly slide to the dark side, and this is a welcome and meaningful reversal. Also — a Democrat campaigning on abortion rights won? Please, Democratic party, realize that this is a winning issue for you.
I think that one thing that has been dragging Democrats down for decades is the timidity of conservative Democrats who want to be Republican Lite and refuse to embrace what the party stands for — progressive values, equality, and labor (they still suck on that last one).
It’s grown a bit today. Finland has joined the alliance.
I’m a bit bothered by that hole in the North — where’s Sweden? It seems they have applied to join NATO, but Turkey is being a pain in the butt, kind of a Minchin of Asia Minor.
But membership applications must be approved by all existing NATO countries. And Turkey positioned itself as a spoiler, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using the process to extract concessions and score domestic political points. Although he ultimately came around on Finland, he has continued to hold out on Sweden, citing Stockholm’s refusal to extradite those he calls “terrorists” affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
Charles XII would not have been happy. There he was, in exile in Turkey, when he rushed back to Sweden specifically to make sure they wouldn’t make peace with Russians.
Eventually, in the autumn of 1714, their warning letter reached him. In it, those executive and legislative bodies told the absentee King that unless he quickly returned to Sweden, they would independently conclude an achievable peace treaty with Russia, Poland and Denmark. This stark admonition prompted Charles to rush back to Sweden.
He would have wanted Sweden to be part of NATO, I’m sure.
We won’t mention that when he got back to Sweden he decided to declare war and invade…Norway? Where he was killed? History is complicated. I think we can safely say we’re living in one of the more complicated times in history.
Marjorie Taylor Greene got some free PR time on “60 Minutes”. She used it to assert that Democrats are pedophiles who sexualize children.
CBS anchor Lesley Stahl was shocked to hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stands firmly behind her frequent claim that Democrats are “pedophiles.” On “60 Minutes,” Stahl pressed Greene on her use of the slur, and the Georgia Republican defiantly responded that it’s the truth: “They support grooming children.”
“They are not pedophiles,” Stahl rejoined incredulously. “Why would you say that?”
OK, Leslie Stahl…I would ask, “Why would you let that baboon on the air?” I would also ask of any of the higher-ups at CBS, “Why did you let that slur air? Have you no editors?”
Back to you, Leslie: “Why did you make such a pathetically feeble response? You knew going into this what kind of nastiness and lies Greene would deliver, weren’t you at all prepared?
I knew this shitshow was coming on ahead of time, and chose to not watch the show (not a difficult decision, “60 Minutes” hasn’t been relevant for a long time.) Apparently, the American TV watching public felt the same.
Maybe someday the powers-that-be that fill our homes with “news” selected only for its controversial nature will realize that they are driving the culture wars they also deplore. The Right is a hate group.
After marriage equality triumphed, the “pedophile” smear against Democrats morphed into something stranger: the deranged charges of child trafficking that drive the QAnon conspiracy theory. When those accusations proved obviously false, right-wing media figures and MAGA Republicans such as Greene seamlessly shifted to widely applying the “groomer” term to Democrats advocating for tolerance of trans people, especially adolescent trans care and classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues.
The through line here, as historian Brandy Schillace points out, is that the right has recoiled both at the prospect of happy gay families and at young trans people finding better lives with their own parents’ loving support. The connection, Schillace told me, is “resistance to seeing homosexuals or transgender people as part of families,” carried out by associating LGBTQ people with “child predators.”
Stop treating them as a respectable part of the discourse.
Jesus. Greene is doubling down in a new ad.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1643048198502772736
That is grossly dishonest.
Also admit that you’re just trying to recover the title of Worst State in the Union from Florida.
Texas legislators have proposed a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state.
Never mind that this is a blatant attempt to establish an official state religion, or that it’s going to face overwhelming legal challenges, or that every non-Christian child is going to be insulted and harmed by this stupid poster, or that every Christian bully is going to be empowered to torment Jewish and Muslim kids (yeah, it’s a Nazi kind of bill.) This is simply a bad law. I’m sure most teachers in the state, even the Christian ones, would prefer that the state support them with better salaries, more supply money, and better facilities.
Maybe they should also dictate that the posters be mounted on steel plates that can be used as shields, because they’re sure as hell not going to do anything more substantial to prevent school shootings.
Do you want to know how sociogenomics works? Here you go.
If this is “the science,” the science is weird. We’re used to thinking of science as incrementally seeking causal explanations for natural phenomena by testing a series of hypotheses. Just as important, good science tries as hard as it can to disprove the working hypotheses.
Sociogenomics has no experiments, no null hypotheses to accept or reject, no deductions from the data to general principles. Nor is it a historical science, like geology or evolutionary biology, that draws on a long-running record for evidence.
Sociogenomics is inductive rather than deductive. Data is collected first, without a prior hypothesis, from longitudinal studies like the Framingham Heart Study, twin studies, and other sources of information—such as direct-to-consumer DNA companies like 23andMe that collect biographical and biometric as well as genetic data on all their clients.
Algorithms then chew up the data and spit out correlations between the trait of interest and tiny variations in the DNA, called SNPs (for single-nucleotide polymorphisms). Finally, sociogenomicists do the thing most scientists do at the outset: they draw inferences and make predictions, primarily about an individual’s future behavior.
Sociogenomics is not concerned with causation in the sense that most of us think of it, but with correlation. The DNA data often comes in the form of genome-wide association studies (GWASs), a means of comparing genomes and linking variations of SNPs. Sociogenomics algorithms ask: are there patterns of SNPs that correlate with a trait, be it high intelligence or homosexuality or a love of gambling?
Yes—almost always. The number of possible combinations of SNPs is so large that finding associations with any given trait is practically inevitable.
I’m not just being mean when I say it’s garbage science. “Chewing up data and spitting out correlations,” especially when correlations are ubiquitous, is not a productive approach to much of anything.
Where will it take us? That’s easy to see.
Advocates of sociogenomics envision a prospect that not everyone will find entirely benevolent: health “report cards,” based on your genome and handed out at birth, that predict your risk of various diseases and propensity for different behaviors. In the new social sciences, sociologists will examine the genetic component of educational attainment and wealth, while economists will envision genetic “risk scores” for spending, saving, and investment behavior.
Without strong regulation, these scores could be used in school and job applications and in calculating health insurance premiums. Your genome is the ultimate preexisting condition.
There’s precedent. The article mentions how Simon Binet invented the IQ test as a tool to identify and help students who were lagging in school…and then within decades discovered “that people were being sterilized for scoring too low”. I know that if I’d been assigned a genetic “risk score” with my family history, I and my brothers and sisters would have been doing manual labor for our short lives.
Also, I still want to know how this pseudonymous eugenics research program with it’s 15 new hires of “young, often charismatic scientists” is getting funded. Following the money would be a good idea here.
Trudy and Doug (of Oglaf fame) post amusing sketches on their Patreon sometimes. This one is high art, it made me laugh and cry at the same time.
Trump is supposed to be ‘arrested’ tomorrow (which probably means he shows up at a courthouse, is photographed mercilessly while treated with great deference, then retires to a luxurious hotel room to scribble on Truth Social about his martyrdom). Nothing much of substance will happen, but all the networks will be full of false piety and claims that this is an exceptional and significant event, which it isn’t. And of course all the morons will be raging with their battery of flimsy rationalizations.
Sadly, all our news sources will take these excuses very, very seriously and parrot them continuously. Which is why I’ll be ignoring the news for a few days. I hope no catastrophes that might affect me happen! Zombies, please stay dead until next week, maybe. We’re getting another blizzard tomorrow so you’re not going to be getting around very well anyway.
