Here’s a good message from Rebecca Watson: you should get out and do something other than work.
I suspect it’s a little too obvious what my passion has been for the last few years, and I won’t even ask you to guess. Instead, tell me what you’ve been doing for fun!
My wife and I tend to wake up far too early — just this morning she was complaining that she woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Me, I’m a lazy bones who snoozed until 4:30am.
But here’s a possibility: there are spiders that go hunting for sleeping prey at night, the Enoplognatha, or candy-striped spiders. All we need to do is get our boots on, gulp down some coffee, and drive out to a few places we know of that are frequented by hapless pollinators. Actually, maybe we should be checking out our backyard garden in late evening/early morning.
You know, you could help out, too. They’re pretty little spiders.
He starts his little essay with an observation he claims is true.
“The army of unfuckable hate nerds”—Marc Maron’s term for the mass of young men who pollute the internet with their misogyny. “They play video games all day,” the comedian said on his podcast, “then they watch MMA, then they spend the evening jerking off to … porn, then they put a few hours” into attacking women online.
He’s right, of course. There are hordes of these young men (and, no doubt, of not-so-young ones). They congregate on Twitter, in comment threads, on forums and platforms like Reddit, Discord, Kiwi Farms, and 8kun, the successor to 8chan. They trade in misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds. Their words are violent and vile.
OK, but I would have gone on to qualify that with a “not all men,” because I do think he’s talking about a small vocal minority of horrible young men. That’s not Deresiewicz’s tack, though. Instead, he’s going to ask his readers to sympathize with them, because — brace yourself, he’s going to merge with the mob of misogynists — women are bad and have it so easy.
Any young woman who is even moderately attractive will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men. Young men, meanwhile—those losers, those loners, those apes—are left to pick their psychic zits on the periphery.
There’s more. Young women can have sex whenever they want. For most young men, persuading a woman to sleep with them is like trying to crack a safe. You understand that it’s theoretically possible, but you have no idea how to do it. Which means that you’re stuck with your hard-on. Unfuckable? No one needs to tell you that. You are unfucked: unwanted, unattractive; in the most literal sense, unloved.
Wow. No wonder he saw truth in Maron’s description. It’s because he was one of those awful women-hating young men, and he never outgrew it! He’s unable to see the world through the eyes of the women he describes, a world where they are rewarded for being subservient and dependent on older men, where they can advance by clinging to the coattails of men, where they are expected to submit to sex at will with men who might kill them.
I was a young loser once, too, but I managed to get over it by not thinking of women as bodies to be exploited, but as my peers who were trying as best as they could to make it through life. There are no excuses for “misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds.” But for Deresiewicz, the problem now is misandry. After stereotyping young women as having it easy, he thinks the solution is that we have to stop stereotyping young men and treat them with love and respect. Sure. Too bad he has no respect to offer women.
Man, Deresiewicz just let his ugly self hang out exposed, thinking that more misogyny would justify young men’s misogyny. It just doesn’t work that way.
I tried this PhD simulator game. It wasn’t fun at all, and I washed out in the first year…that is, it was quick and painful. Everyone knows grad programs are anything but quick!
This might just be the final straw for me. The head Twit is pissed off and flinging lawsuits at Mark Zuckerberg for launching Threads, the Twitter alternative, and since they called off the childish plan to fight each other, now Musk has an even dumber suggestion.
Look. Guys. You’re both toxic to your brand. We all want to see less of you, not more. Musk only appeals to weird libertarian Nazis and people who have fallen for his techie facade; Zuckerberg is a dead-eyed charisma void beloved of racist grandmas. The more you put your faces on your social media service, the more I’m going to attach unpleasant associations to using that service.
I’m still on Twitter, for now, but not happy about it. I’m on Threads, unenthusiastically, but I can’t link to my pzmyers account there because, for unfathomable reasons, Threads, like Instagram, is only supposed to be used on your phone. I prefer Mastodon right now, because there are no billionaires marking their territory there.
I think I’ll just hunker down on Pharyngula. Bring back RSS!
So disappointed. We found some old graves of dead Westads, and that’s about it.
Damn few spiders. I don’t know why. We were tromping around in nature preserves around Fertile, but spiders were scarce, we only found a handful. We didn’t even see many insects, other than ants, which were flourishing in the sandy soils of the old Lake Agassiz shoreline.
I was reduced to taking pictures of <shudder> flowers, out of a lack of worthy subjects.
All right, time for me to go home.
After completing our top-secret mission yesterday, we’ve allocated our day today to exploring the ancestral homeland. My mother was born in Gary, Minnesota in 1939, although she quickly escaped to the fjords of Washington state. My grandparents, Paul (1917-1989) and Nora (1915-1998) spent their youth in Fertile and Gary. My great-grandfather, Peter(1880-1970), and great-grandmother, Christina (1885-1974) lived here until the whole family made a great exodus West after WWII.
But it goes back further still! My great-great-grandparents, Jens (1850-1939) and Marit (1849-1933) all lived here, too! And before them, Marit’s father, Ole Solem (1821-1902) and Jens’ father, Dyre…but there the records start getting murky. All I know is that Dyre was born in Storen, Norway at some unknown date, and died in 1874.
Our plan is to visit a cemetery or two, and drop by the towns of Fertile and Gary, and there’s the Prairie Smoke Dunes Scientific and Natural Area to check out (of course we’re looking for spiders as we go). Those plans were complicated by the discovery that the Polk County Fair is going on in Fertile today…so we might have to stop in there for a bit, too.
Man, this place is flat. We’re on the old lake bed of Lake Agassiz, and I guess I’m not surprised that a bunch of old Norwegians fled this place for one with evergreen forests, mountains, and an ocean. They were probably put here to crush their intrinsic desire to build fleets of longboats and go raiding.
Within limits, that is. The Freethoughtblogs crew is talking about atheism shortly, and invites you all to hector us with questions.
It was a plain white insulated box, tightly sealed, no hint of its contents. We drove north a hundred miles to our clandestine destination, there to make the exchange.
We met the North Dakotan operatives at a nondescript Dairy Queen in downtown Crookston. I quietly slid the box across the table. I accepted a bowl of ice cream. Mission accomplished.
We told no one the contents of the box. It was whisked away to undergo detailed analysis by scientists at the University of North Dakota. I won’t reveal what it is, even under torture. There’s no way you can make me tell. Try your worst!
I’m sorry, the last day to register for the International Conference on Creationism was 3 July, so it’s too late for you. It will be held at Cedarville University, a glorified Bible college in Ohio.
It’s sponsored by a fine assortment of organizations dedicated to promoting ignorance:
I don’t think you’ll miss much. One of the things that struck me about the list of speakers at this meeting is just how familiar they all are. These are mostly the same old frauds who’ve been parroting nonsensical lies for years, in some cases, for decades.
I have to compare it to real conferences. There, you also find the old establishment giving review talks in plenary sessions, but the real meeting, the interesting and exciting new stuff, is given by hordes of grad students and post-docs presenting their current research. It’s a rich and complicated event with lots of people at all stages of their career talking things they’ve done that, mostly, no one else has done before.
Creationist conferences, not so much. It’s mostly old fuddy-duddies rehashing tired old arguments that have been repeatedly debunked and dismissed, and you have to pity any younger people who have been deluded and dragged into this mess. It’s just sad.
Also, is including representation from a few fringe ‘researchers’ at a Canadian university sufficient to call it an “international” conference? At the international meetings in the US that I’ve attended, I’m used to seeing a majority of the sessions led by European and Austrialian and Asian scientists.
They also tend not to be sponsored by religious institutions.
