Missives from Dystopia…I mean, America

I hope all the gun-fondlers have tissues at hand, because they’re probably going to need some cleanup. The rest of us are going to need puke buckets.

Recently, Sig Sauer won a huge military contract to provide the next generation of squad weapons. These will be the replacements for the existing M4 and SAW. They will be better at punching holes in people! I guess that’s what you want for the military.

The SIG-LMG lightweight belt-fed machine gun and SIG MCX-SPEAR Rifle are purpose-built to harness the energy of the SIG FURY 6.8 Common Cartridge Ammunition enabling greater range and increased lethality while reducing the soldier’s load on the battlefield. Both the SIG-LMG and MCX-SPEAR deliver significant weapon and technology advancements to the soldier and provide a solution for battlefield overmatch in comparison to the current M249 and M4/M4A1.

FOR THE FUCKING MILITARY. Sig Sauer, evil hell-sucking demon corporation that it is, is not satisfied with the billions they’ll get from the army, so they have also announced a civilian version of the weapon. Because we need it, apparently.

“This is a weapon that could defeat any body armor, any planned body armor that we know of in the future,” then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told the Army Times in 2019. “This is a weapon that can go out at ranges that are unknown today.”

…

“It’ll shoot through almost all of the bulletproof vests that are worn by law enforcement in the country right now,” said Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive who is now a senior policy analyst with the Giffords Law Center and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America.

I am no fan of the cops, but I don’t think selling a cop-killer is a good idea. I also don’t want to imagine what this thing could do to small children. I suspect it won’t be long until we find out.

The only saving grace here is that the thing costs $8,000. That will not deter any of the fanatics, unfortunately. Of anyone planning to buy one, I have to ask…what the fuck is wrong with you, sicko?

We’re not done with news from the hellscape, though.

Somebody suggest to one of the reality TV shows that moving a team of MAGA-hat-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving yahoos who have bought an MCX-SPEAR into some desolate wasteland somewhere where they have to fight Funny Dancing Robot Dogs to the death. I wouldn’t watch it, and I wouldn’t want to guess who’d win, but I’d be hoping for mutual extermination.

An important lesson

Do not make your observatory look like a giant pill bug.

That’s how you get giant spiders, you know.

I was not fooled

Yesterday, there was a brief paroxysm of optimism in the press. A law codifying same-sex marriage passed the House!

Nearly 50 House Republicans voted to write same-sex marriage into law Tuesday, joining all Democrats in a heavily bipartisan vote that would’ve been considered unthinkable a decade ago.

Democrats loudly cheered from their side of the chamber as the bill passed 267-157, with 47 Republicans backing it, including members of GOP leadership such as Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and National Republican Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.). Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) voted no.

47 Republicans in favor of marriage equality? That’s nice, but I can do math. 157 Republicans voted against it, and 157 is greater than 47 by a lot. I can also do a little psychology, and I wonder how many of the pro votes were from politicians putting on a show while trusting that the Senate would block it?

Amanda Marcotte thinks the same way I do, and she put the correct interpretation of this vote.

In response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the Democrat-controlled House has teed up twin bills, one to protect same-sex marriage and one to protect the right to contraception, out of concern that the conservative majority is coming for those rights next. It’s a totally justified fear. In his concurrence on the Roe overturn, Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly called previous decisions to legalize contraception and same-sex marriage “demonstrably erroneous” and called on the court to “correct” those rights like they “corrected” the right to abortion.

These two bills are almost certainly doomed to fail, because the Republican minority in Congress has a near-absolute power to kill bills through the abusing the filibuster. That’s what happened when House Democrats tried to protect abortion rights. There’s little reason to think Republicans have any more affection for the right to prevent pregnancy or allowing LGBTQ people to marry for love.

Tuesday, this was proved when a whopping 78% of Republicans in the House failed to vote for marriage equality. While the bill passed due to a Democratic majority, it’s near-certain that Republicans in the Senate will filibuster any attempt to protect same-sex marriage. And yet, if you glanced through mainstream media headlines, you’d think that Republicans have wrapped themselves in the rainbow flag and are celebrating same-sex marriage these days.

…

“47 House Republicans vote to write same-sex marriage into law,” Politico declared, failing both to give the 100% of Democrats who voted for it credit and ignoring the 78% of Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage rights.

The CBS headline highlighted the 47 Republicans who voted for the bill over the 164 who voted no or refused to show up. Even the BBC, which is usually better than this, played along with “Republicans help pass House gay marriage bill.”

That is correct. Those 47 Republicans are merely the lice-ridden, reeking merkin covering the repulsive pubes of the degenerate puritans of the Republican party. Don’t be fooled as Politico was. (Knowing Politico, they’re probably a willing part of the wig, anyway.) Repealing legalized same-sex marriage is part of the official Republican party platform!

The usual suspects are also loudly belittling the bill while also planning to repeal same-sex marriage and outlaw contraception.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene threw a tantrum declaring that the bill was unnecessary because “no one is taking away gay marriage.” She then admitted that she was voting against it because “I believe that marriage is a union made by God between a man and a woman.” Rep. Jim Jordon of Ohio thundered that Democrats are trying to “attempt to intimidate the United States Supreme Court,” a talking point that only makes sense if the plan is to have the court overturn same-sex marriage against the will of the people. (And only if you believe the Supreme Court’s “right” to vacate all laws Republicans don’t like is absolute.) Sen. Marco Rubio, who is up for re-election in Florida this year, said he would vote against the House bill to protect same-sex marriages, calling it a “stupid waste of time.”

No doubt about it: Same-sex marriage is popular with the public. Then again, so are abortion rights. The opposition to same-sex marriage comes from the exact same minority of people — call them Christian nationalists — who oppose abortion rights. The GOP answers to this small minority and not to the larger public. That’s why they are dismantling democracy so that the more liberal majority simply doesn’t have a say in what our laws around marriage and reproductive rights are. And, just as with the attack on abortion rights, Republicans know they have to use deflection and subterfuge to advance their agenda so that they can snatch the right to same-sex marriage away without most of the public realizing that it’s happening until it’s too late.

Those same Republicans said there was no way Roe v. Wade was on the table for repeal, and then, thwip, it was suddenly gone and they were rejoicing. Look for the same magic trick to be pulled on all of our rights.

Woo-hoo! Fortune has arrived!

I got an offer this morning to host a 30 second commercial on my next video — and they’d pay me $1800 for it. Whoa, is a little spot on a video by a little-known YouTuber like myself worth that much? No, it is not, but the money would be nice, and I delude myself into thinking I at least contribute a little knowledge on those things. A niggling temptation wormed its way into my brain.

I was briefly entertaining the idea enough to look up the company making the offer.

It’s one of those crypto/NFT scammer companies.

Well, that made it easy: HELL NO.

At least I was reminded I should get off my butt and implement a couple of the video ideas I have in my head. It’s just that right now I have so many spiders and so many egg sacs that demand my attention and I have to get this developmental timing series done before summer ends and I’m suddenly teaching 3 classes again…

Skepticon…next week!

At this time next week, we’ll be piling into the car to begin the long drive to St Louis. We’re going to take our time and stop frequently to take walks and seek out spiders of Iowa and Missouri, and we’re also planning to stretch the trip over two days — our first goal is to stop for the night somewhere around Cedar Rapids. Then we arrive at Skepticon on Friday.

It’ll be fun, but it’s also a test — this is my first public meeting of any kind in a couple of years. I am reassured by the fact that this meeting has sound pandemic policies in place. You have to have a vaccination card if you want to attend (don’t forget yours at home), and you’ll have to wear a mask inside the facilities, even at the traditional Saturday night dance, Skeptiprom. It’s all free, but you do have to register.

You might also want to order a t-shirt online before it’s too late. It’s got dinosaurs on it. You can’t go wrong with dinosaurs.

It looks like my speaking slot is at 10:00 on Saturday. I’ll be talking about how racism has tainted genetics for over a century (a cheery way to start the day!) and how we ought to remediate that with better concepts about how inheritance works.

Portrait of a whiny narcissist

Alan Dershowitz is terribly hurt by his social stigma, and did a long interview in the New Yorker which is basically nothing but Dershowitz having a pity party. What makes it worth reading, though, are italic asides in which he gets fact-checked.

Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.” [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]

Or my favorite:

The Abraham Accords. So I played a central role—not a central role, an important role in that. I helped. So they were celebrating that at the White House. I was there anyway because it was the day after I made my speech in the Senate, so I was invited to come. They assigned seats. They sat me right in back of Mike Pompeo, who had been my former student at Harvard Law School. Trump made a very bad joke, and people laughed. I didn’t laugh. [He did.] I thought it was a bad joke. My wife laughed. I didn’t laugh. I patted him on the back, and I said, “Mike, this, too, will pass. You’ll be remembered for what you did in the Middle East.” That was it. That was the entire encounter. I don’t know Mike Pompeo—

I would never have imagined that a serious article about Dershowitz could ever be funny, but this one is hilarious.

Does Jesse Singal still get writing gigs?

He’s a creep.

At least, no publisher ought to commission him to write about trans issues. There’s just so much information damning him as an untrustworthy actor.

This tweet bugs me.

When anyone talks about “biological” sex or “biological” males or “biological” females, it throws up a red flag for me. What does that mean? They don’t say; there are all these unstated assumptions behind it. I have to guess that what they mean is something about penises and vaginas and chromosomes and hormones, but those are all less absolutely deterministic than they imagine. Singal is a guy who writes about sex and gender a lot, so how can he be so casual and sloppy with his words?

And then I learn he’s part of a cabal of cis journalists who coordinate their agenda behind the scenes. Singal, of course is chatting away there.

Singal posted these messages in the discussion forum of a closed listserv he belongs to, hosted on Google Groups. The listserv, per its “About” page, aims to provide an “off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics and wonks.” It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing). These members include New York Times best-selling authors, Ivy League academics, magazine editors, and other public intellectuals—in short, a lot of important people who influence public discourse through their written work. They use the listserv’s forum to discuss current events, news from their respective fields, articles they’ve read, articles they’ve written, and other topics of public importance. There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties: whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women’s prison; Janet Mock’s contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan and the “Twitter mob” she inspired; Elinor Burkett’s New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood; comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal; erasure of the word “vagina”; saying “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women”; and a number of Jesse Singal’s articles over the past few years.

None of these discussions brought trans voices to the table because the group has never had any out trans members, at least as far as I can tell. “I really wish we had some trans people on this list, it’s a real void we have,” posted an award-winning investigative journalist in a thread about Singal temporarily leaving Twitter last December. “I’m not interested in sharing this list or any other space with someone who is going to insist on nullifying and erasing my existence and experience as female,” a prominent futurist in progressive news media wrote back. The exchange demonstrates two different means of excluding trans people from the discussion: passive exclusion (empty calls for inclusion that don’t lead to action) and active exclusion (we must keep them out). At the time of this exchange, the listserv had existed for nearly a decade. If the group’s members really wanted to bring trans people to the table, they could have done so at any point. The fact that they never did suggests that the group’s members—400 prominent, influential figures in academia, media, and publishing—would rather keep trans people at a safe, anthropological remove where they can talk about trans people without speaking to trans people directly. A less generous reading of this exclusion would say that they don’t see us as potential intellectual equals and, thus, don’t read our work.

Awww, how sweet — they sure would like to have some trans members, unless they somehow “nullify” cis people’s experience of their sex. I’ve met other men and women, cis and trans, and none of them have ever made me question my identity. Someone needs to get out more!

The final nail in the coffin ought to be this lengthy and thorough deconstruction of Singal’s devious anti-trans history. Here’s just a taste:

One reason we can confidently assert that Singal is distorting the narrative (whether consciously or in accordance with his own biases) is because he did consult people capable of fact-checking him for the article—he simply didn’t use their input. Singal interviewed multiple trans women for the piece, including trans writers Julia Serano and Parker Molloy, but their comments appear to have had little impact on the final draft. After it was published, both writers spoke out about several inaccuracies of fact and framing. They had addressed these points in their interviews and were ignored. Molloy’s response offers a nuanced critique of Singal’s pro-GIC arguments; Serano’s rebuttal contains crucial historical context about “how both ‘gay conversion’ and [Zucker’s style of] ‘gender reparative’ therapies share the exact same strategy of coercing gender non-conforming children to behave in a more normative manner.”

That interview was, it appears, the earliest contact between Singal and Serano, and he did not take her criticisms well. According to her, he lied about her views on transition to outrage his Twitter fan base. This would become an example of an alleged pattern of behavior by Singal. First, he is critiqued by trans people or allies. He misrepresents their positions to incite backlash online, or simply screenshots or quote tweets them to direct harassment their way. Trans writer Emily VanDerWerff said her experience with being misrepresented and harassed included “death threats, rape threats, invitations to commit suicide, [and] constant misgendering.” Singal contacts critics, threatening to sue. He contacts their employers. He sends them abusive emails. When someone reports a fact about him that he finds unflattering or releases a critique he doesn’t like, he frivolously threatens to sue and demands publications issue corrections—then howls about not getting them on Twitter. At this point, it’s a little bit of a joke on trans Twitter that every trans writer or academic, no matter how minor, is eventually subject to a Singal meltdown and volley of threats.

Singal’s behavior is unprofessional, to say the least. Julia Serano, when targeted by Singal, felt she had to temporarily leave social media for her safety. Another one of Singal’s trans targets was fired after he repeatedly contacted her boss. Singal’s habit of consistently and viciously attacking his critics poisons the well; it deflects any chance of real criticism, since it allows him to claim that any given critic simply personally dislikes him. He has, of course, helped ensure that this is the case by treating them poorly. This bad behavior extends beyond minor Twitter slap fights—it’s also a means of warping the conversation, punishing and dismissing dissenting voices before they can even speak. Leveling threats and directing abuse at sources and experts in this way goes beyond mere unprofessionalism—for a journalist, it’s genuinely unethical.

I think it’s clear that anything Singal writes on trans issues is biased, unreliable, and untrustworthy. Yet he still gets published in high-profile magazines! What do you think: do publishers and editors not realize how awful he is on these topics, or they’re all just awful people who share his ugly views?

Whatever shall we do without a few cops around?

The city of Morris, my little town, has disbanded its police force. Yay!

Local leaders in one western Minnesota city have voted to disband the police department, which has dwindled to just two officers, including the chief.

The City of Morris, like other communities across the country, is dealing with changing attitudes about policing and challenges in recruiting and retaining officers.

Morris, with a population of about 5,200 residents, has budgeted for eight full-time officers and an administrative specialist.

The Morris City Council plans to sign a contract for law enforcement services with the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office and shut down a police department that has been around for more than 140 years.

Aww. I don’t think anyone will miss that relic. And yes, the county sheriffs will now take over any necessary peace-keeping duties, or more likely, ticketing traffic violators, which is mainly what they do.

“It’s a sad day. Nobody wants to see that happen,” said Blaine Hill, city manager. “People ask, ‘How in the world could a town the size of Morris not have a police department?’ We live in a different world now.”

Nobody? I wanted to see it happen, so Mr Hill is wrong. Also, again, the police don’t do all that much around here.

Commenters on the Fox News story are predicting dire consequences.

There are several banks in town. I don’t see what the police would do anyway; lounge around outside the buildings waiting for the bad guys to go away? We don’t have much of a crime problem here — there’s some drug trafficking, like everywhere, and occasional vandalism and theft, like everywhere. The police don’t play much of a role in preventing any of it. They’re more likely to take reports after the fact. Or maybe shoot a few bystanders. This isn’t the Roaring Twenties of a century ago, and we don’t have Bonnies and Clydes shooting up banks with tommy guns. It’s so much more profitable and safe to be a Republican and loot towns at your desk, and the police do nothing about that.

Policing is being turned over to the county sheriff’s department, who will serve multiple small towns in the area. I don’t think it will make much difference, except in maybe being more economical.

Then there’s this bizarre comment…

Errm…”Minnesota Nice” is not a good thing — it refers to a flavor of passive-aggressive superficiality. Please, let it die that slow and ugly death. Also, this is not a “large city”, and it wasn’t “spoiled kids” behind this change — it was a decision by the bean counters and our city council, which is packed with old tiring conservatives.

But it’s a Fox News comment section, what else can you expect?

They didn’t even realize how badly they were crushed

This was amusing. A graduate of the Lenski lab got into a conversation with a couple of creationists about — would you believe? — the Lenski experiment. They argued with him about the results of the experiment! Of course, the creationists learned nothing.

Gutsick Gibbon provides some commentary, in particular explaining how creationists don’t even understand the concept of fitness.