Ha ha ho ho

I went into the office to pick up my mail, among other things, and look what someone sent me!

Oh, look, it has a cute little reindeer sticker! It’s probably a Christmas card. How sweet!

Although, as I do with all mystery mail, I checked the return address. “Living Way Lytle Creek”…my spider sense is tingling. The back of the card confirmed my expectations.

Everything beneficial that atheism has ever contributed to society is referenced herein…. Does anyone want to guess what’s inside? Go on. I bet you can.

[Read more…]

This is for real?

“A Recipe for Seduction,” a Lifetime Original mini-movie:

Hard to believe, but it is real, and just as tawdry as you might expect. It’s actually a maxi-commercial.

KFC had teamed up with Lifetime to deliver its own holiday mini-movie – “A Recipe for Seduction,” which will air on the Lifetime channel on Sunday.

The 15-minute mini-movie (or jumbo-commercial) features Mario Lopez, who has also starred in other Lifetime features such as “FelizNaviDAD.” Lopez will take on the role of Colonel Harland Sanders in the film.

It’s getting a lot of press, so it’s already successful…which means we can expect more cheesy depictions of company mascots appearing in bad miniature dramas. Look for the Borger King to appear in one of those Hallmark holiday movies with royalty, or the Little Caesars guy to show up on the History channel, or McDonald’s Grimace on Shudder.

How will we pay for it?

Get ready, you’re going to hear that question a lot from the Republicans in coming years. Just keep this in mind:

The fossil fuel lobby has actively worked in many countries to protect their subsidies and avoid the imposition of carbon taxes. Doing so protects their profits.
US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education

Funny how cutting oil subsidies and defense never end up on the chopping block.

Pinker does automatically love the Patriarchy

Steven Pinker rushed to defend an overpaid Eton school teacher who had been fired for making a video called “The Patriarchy Paradox”. You can watch it if you must, but it’s incredibly bad — he seems obsessed with movie portrayals of men as being an accurate representation of True Masculinity. His first examples are of Marvel superheroes: The Marvel movies showed that in popular culture, masculine archetypes, such as Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man, described by the philosopher Edward Feser as a patriotic soldier, the son of a heavenly father come to Earth, and a strutting capitalist alpha male, retain their appeal. The whole thing sounds like that. He relies mainly on fictional sources, bad statistics, and biased presentation of data to make a case for the intrinsic superiority of men, therefore justifying patriarchy. I mean, really, how can anyone be persuaded by this bullshit?

He then uses a clip from Goodfellas of Henry Hill beating up his neighbour for molesting his girlfriend as evidence that ‘male aggression is a biological fact… whether we like it or not’ (25:42). He also seems to agree with Scarface’s Tony Montana’s observation that ‘first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women’ (29:12), as if psychotic, murderous, cokehead gangsters are a valid voice of reason.

It is notable that many of Knowland’s arguments would not look out of place on an incel Reddit forum. Knowland repeatedly says that women use their sexuality to their advantage, stating that they can ‘exploit their power of sexual choice to get males to compete to do things for them’ (22:32). This is classic incel rhetoric: believing that women use their sexual appeal to manipulate and control men, and that if men can’t get sex, it’s because of women withholding it from them. This is a terrible message to teach teenage boys. The problem is not a discussion of such claims, the problem is with Knowland’s presentation; his lack of analysis, his failure to question the assertions made in his video. If this incident raises questions of free debate, then where’s the debate?

If you’re so deluded that you can’t tell that Henry Hill and Tony Montana are psychopathic monsters and the villains of those movies, you aren’t fit to be a teacher.

But, surprise surprise surprise, Steven Pinker was among the very first well-known academics to try and defend this guy and make ludicrous claims of protecting academic freedom, and even bigger surprise, he now admits to never having even seen the video!

Keep this in mind if ever you have to evaluate Pinker’s opinion on anything.

I heard about this case last week as I was deep in the throes of grading, and the first thing I did before judging this Knowland guy was to check out his video, and then I judged the hell out of him.

By the way, that video has 5.7K upvotes and only 524 downvotes. YouTube remains a cesspool of misogyny.

Tragic trace fossil

I went out for an early morning walk today, and was brought up short by this reminder of the terrible Minnesota Pyroclastic Mud Flow of 1998…an entire family wiped out, leaving behind only these imprints from their flailing, panic-stricken limbs.

Maybe I’m projecting, though, with a lot of flailing going on here as I dread having to buckle down and finish all my grading. I think I can get it all done today if I push hard.

I need an economist to explain this to me

Or maybe a psychologist. OK, I sorta understand the wacky mindset of those people who obsess over gold — they want the heavy shiny stuff, because it seems more solid and real than the abstraction of numbers in a bank account, and if you are a bit paranoid, you might want that apparent reliabilty of an expensive metal under your mattress. It’s the kind of thing that gets advertised on talk radio, with an audience of terrified old people (and your goal is to terrify them even more), so Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck rely on that gold advertising money.

But this mystifies me. Why would these same people then turn around and trust…a credit card? The latest iterations of stupid conservative talk radio, like Dave Rubin, are now promoting something called the Glint card, which is a credit card which claims to be based on gold.

I don’t understand the psychology here. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t trust bank accounts, where your money can be whisked away with a flicker of bits in a computer, why would you then turn your precioussss into another abstraction?

Dreading how this could end

It feels like it’s going to drag on forever.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the official GOP Twitter account is blasting out the idea that good Republicans will die fighting to overthrow the rule of law in their state.

Fine. Die, then. Hold your breath until you turn purple. Kick and scream on the floor. Having a tantrum won’t change the fact that Biden won. I’m also kind of pissed off that it’s Biden, rather than a real progressive Democrat, but I’m prepared to work through the process.

By the way, we’ve run into this @Ali character the Arizona Republican Party is re-tweeting. The last time I heard of him was when he and Jacob Wohl toured downtown Minneapolis trying to smear Ilhan Omar, unsuccessfully, and made a false report of a crime. He has a history that wobbles around silly and ugly.

After one of the first 2020 primary debates, Alexander went viral claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t an “American Black,” because she was of Jamaican and Indian heritage, instead of descending from African-Americans who had been forced into Antebellum-era slavery. Alexander was convicted of two felonies in 2007 and 2008, and has a track record of publicly noting people who are Jewish. He made a sensationalist video with right-wing snafu generator Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer, the Islamaphobic failed Congressional candidate, wherein Wohl seemingly fakes the group receiving death threats during filming.

If you aren’t willing to die, at least continue to entangle yourself with the Rabid Right.

Progress!

This is a huge grading day — final grades are due on Wednesday. But I took a brief break this afternoon to take a few pictures on this frosty foggy day.

This is my favorite photo, though.

That’s a screenshot of the piece of the Canvas window for my cell biology class: usually, that big white space lists all the assignments awaiting grading. They’re done! Nothing left to grade! It hasn’t been that clear since mid-September!

Cell bio is done, two more classes to go (they were much smaller than cell, though, so they won’t take as much time.)