YouTube, your ads suck

I checked in on my latest video, and the first thing I see is an ad stuck on the beginning, an ad for this nonsense:

It was cheaply made and cheesy, with bad audio and bad lighting and bad video, of a guy going on and on about how this beanie will block 3G, 4G, and 5G electromagnetic waves because it has silver threads woven into it, and how those waves will fry your brain and make you nauseous and sick and cause cancer and who knows what else. It’s pure quackery. Google must be desperate if they’ll sell ads to these kinds of cheap charlatans, and market snake oil to the kind of audience that would watch my cheap & cheesy videos.

Remember Milo Yiannopoulos?

Boy, that guy plummeted from far right wing darling to persona non grata fast. Now he has been banned from Parler, the “free speech” website, or more accurately, the “free speech for fascists and racists” site. You’d think he’d fit right in there.

He had taken to declaring that he was going to publicly post Ben Shapiro’s phone number, in the name of free speech, and then he started suggesting that he’d give a $500 bounty to people who murdered immigrants.

Fabulous. Soon I’ll never ever have to hear about Milo again.

You go to a panel discussion, and then discover the other panelists are promoting a eugenics article from Areo

I am done with this discussion at last. Now I have to get cracking on my genetics lecture for tomorrow. It never ends! (No, it does sort of end. I get a four day weekend, beginning at 12:50pm tomorrow, so I will catch up.)

Anyway, I include my part of the panel below. I kept it mostly cool, except at the end I blew up a little — the article we were given to prompt the discussion was crap from Areo, AKA Quillette Junior, and I was furious. Why? There were two philosophers on the panel. They could have suggested any of a number of serious philosophy articles by reputable bioethicists, and instead we got an article by a known eugenicist/HBD wackaloon/racist. So I called them out at the end. It’s that so many people were completely oblivious to the rancid eugenic thought permeating the whole article.

Not that it mattered. One of them continued to reference Jonathan Anomaly throughout. Ugh. We should have higher standards than that.

[Read more…]

I don’t know whether I’m mad or stupid

A while back, I volunteered to participate in a university forum on designer babies. It’s happening tonight via Zoom. So I teach a class this morning, have a student doing her capstone experience, a senior seminar, at 1, go in to teach an in-person lab at 2, come home at 5 to have dinner, and then hop online at 7 to experience two philosophers ganging up on one biologist, and when that’s over, prepare for tomorrow’s class.

I’m at least one of those two things in the title, but maybe you can think of a third. Yeah, I’m inviting you to diagnose me and call me names. I need the flagellation.

I hope more Xians catch on to the big lies they’ve been sold

Isaac Bailey is not an atheist, but he makes the atheist case strongly.

I’m struggling to hold fast to my Christianity— because of Donald Trump. Not exactly Trump himself, though, but the undying support of the self-professed Christian pro-life movement that he enjoyed. My faith is in tatters because of that alliance. And I am constantly wondering if I am indirectly complicit because I dedicated my life to the same Jesus the insurrectionists prayed to in the Capitol building after ransacking it and promising to kill those who didn’t do their bidding.

If Christianity can convince so many to follow a man like Trump almost worshipfully—or couldn’t at least help millions discern the unique threat Trump represented—what good is it really?

Yeah? What took you so long, Mr Bailey? This isn’t a problem that suddenly appeared years ago — it’s been a property of the American political establishment since day one. It’s gotten worse in relatively recent years, since at least the 1950s, when the evangelical Christian movement was sinking their claws into our government, making lip service to Christianity a prerequisite for running for office. Where were you in the Reagan years, when cloaking oneself in piety and patriotism while practicing the politics of greed became de rigeur? This behavior flares up regularly in American history, where Christianity surges up and wrecks the country. How can you miss the corrupting influence of religion, and the hypocrisy of its most vocal advocates?

He seems to have been caught up in the most successful propaganda campaign American Christianity has waged: the “pro-life” movement, in which we get people worked up over a medical procedure and tell them it’s baby murder. It’s not, of course, but it has become such a deeply ingrained dogma that embryos are people from the instant of conception that you’ll never talk them out of it, and that lie is the wedge they hammer in to tell you that you have to vote Republican or you’re a baby-killer. But Mr Bailey is finally starting to see through it.

Trump oversaw a 200% increase in civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria during his first year in office. He presided over more than 460,000 COVID-19 deaths, far outpacing any other industrialized country. He repeatedly demonized a group of men, women and children seeking refuge in this country from the violence and uncertainty they faced in their own. A man picked up an AR-15-style assault rifle and committed a massacre in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after becoming convinced Jews were responsible for the despised caravan of vulnerable brown people. He murdered 11 people; how could Christians have supported the man whose conspiracy theory he quoted?

The body count didn’t end there, though. Trump incited an insurrection that resulted in at least five deaths, dozens of injuries and a stain on America’s reputation so severe it will be harder to get other countries to take us seriously when we demand that they honor life and not commit human rights abuses. Aided by “pro-life” Supreme Court justices, Trump was able to fast-track 13 federal executions during the final months of his presidency, the most by any president in more than a century. Even the abortion rate slightly increased in the middle of Trump’s term, a reversal from major declines during Barack Obama’s two terms in office.

If you can’t quite see yourself leaving Christianity fully (I did, it felt good and honest), at least let’s recognize that politicians claiming holy moral authority are all lying and that they are the last people you ought to elect to office.

My day begins again, darn it!

I went to bed last night with bees in my ears. My tinnitus is acting up something fierce, which usually happens when I’m feeling stress, and I regard as a kind of built-in siren telling me things are getting bad and maybe I should slack off a little bit. It’s also a bad sign when you go to sleep half-hoping you don’t wake up again. But I did, and here I am, and there’s all the work I have to do. I would actually have preferred if all of that had died, rather than myself, but we both survived, me and my nemesis.

Anyway, what’s up is that I typically teach what is called a 3-2 load, where one semester is a little heavier than the other. I guess I should say 2-3 in my case, because this spring is my killer, with an extra course to be taught. Further complications: stupid goddamn pandemic. I’m teaching everything online, which involves rethinking everything as I go, basically throwing out 20 years of material or re-writing it. Second complication: we were hit with pandemic rules in the middle of spring term last year, making a hash of this course then, and I’ve been wrestling with how to do it right this time around. So I’m second guessing everything I guessed at last time, and hoping it works better. Third complication: last spring, we just threw up our hands and gave up on the lab, sent all the students home with some sample data, and had them work through the theory. This year, while absolutely nothing has changed vis-à-vis COVID-19 (we’re worse off, if anything), we’ve gone ahead and implemented the lab, with the difference being that each section has been split into three sections to allow social distancing for the students, while greatly expanding my lab load.

I’m feeling it. Boy am I feeling it. We’re only about a quarter of the way through the semester, but I think I aged a decade this past year, so I’m not quite the agile, youthful, enthusiastic teacher I was in 2019.

I think, though, I can get a break by turning play time into a scheduled obligation. That’s my plan for today, anyway. Work all morning on grading, then take an hour or so off at noon to play a video game, then back to the salt mines to finish grading and write a shiny new lecture for class tomorrow. Yeah, that’s all.

At noon today I’ll live-stream a little more No Man’s Sky. I’ve taken advantage of a little loophole in the game’s mechanics (actually, the fabric of the universe in the game is totally broken, and the conservation of mass and energy no longer applies) to make myself a multi-millionaire with no effort at all — it’s not cheating if violations of the laws of thermodynamics are explicitly written into the game rules — and have decided to lounge about in a busy spaceport, watch the pretty starships fly in, waiting for that perfect space truck or space yacht to land, and then muscle in and wave mega-millions under the pilot’s nose and buy it. Standing around doing next to nothing for an hour? I’ll host a little Q&A and talk nerdy while I’m doing it, and y’all can weigh in on which starships you like best. It’ll be relaxing. I need relaxing for a bit.

The plan is to buy a big space truck to hold all my stuff, and maybe a vicious sleek little fighter. Later, like the typical space billionaire I’ve become, I’ll turn to piracy. That’s what all rich people do, right?

Now — back to work. I can get a few dozen exams graded before noon, right?