How did @Glinner become such an ass?

I tend to have a very hostile reaction to people flinging around lawsuits over the internet. It’s gotten worse lately, I can’t imagine why.

So Graham Linehan (TERF, Gender-Critical Feminist, flaming twit, whatever) saw a video over the weekend and immediately contacted his lawyer. I think he’s a bit touchy about his ugly history.

And here’s the video. Maybe Linehan was just feeding the controversy to help popularize it?

The title is accurate. Linehan does want to eradicate trans children; among the points the video makes, backed with citations from the scientific literature, is that conversion therapy is torture that does harm, increases unhappiness, and makes the victims more likely to commit suicide. Does he plan to go to court to defend his coterie of transphobic fanatics and their distortion of reality?

Quite possibly the worst insult ever delivered

That poor woman. Heidi Klum was savagely abused.

Klum told us, “A lot of people got mad at me. I was called, for example, ‘a white woman.’”

I am reeling in shock. How dare anyone slander her by accusing her of have a light-skinned ancestry and certain female attributes. It’s cruel and vicious, possibly the worst thing you can ever say about anyone.

Except…she was at least spared the ignominy of being called a “white man”. Those guys are the worst. I may be one, but it would be mean to remind me of it.

What’s Jordan Peterson been up to?

Recent photo

We haven’t heard much from him lately. Last year, you couldn’t go on the internet without groaning over yet another fanboi raving about how wonderful Dr Peterson is, he changed my life, don’t you know, and his self-help book is the greatest, and millions of people everywhere have turned their life around with his advice. He was raking in so much money from Patreon and his best-seller book that he was certainly able to live a life of indolence and leisure, and of course, as the master of giving advice to others, he was sure to be living his life as an exemplar of moderation and reason.

Nope. Peterson has been living in ‘absolute hell’. We learn about all this from his daughter Mikhaila, who has been promoted to being “a well known speaker on diet”, eliding over the fact that she has no training or qualifications in nutrition.

  • He acquired “a severe addiction to benzodiazepine tranquilizers”. Really severe.
  • He claims to have started taking them because of his “autoimmune reaction to food”. This is also why he started his bizarre all-beef diet. (By the way, one of the side effects of benzodiazepine is constipation. The man has been corked up for a while.)
  • Getting off of a benzodiazepine addiction is tough; withdrawal seizures are common, and they can kill.
  • North American doctors are aware of this, and wanted to wean him off the dangerous addiction with other drugs. Therefore, they are all puppets of the pharmaceutical companies.
  • So he flew off to Russia to get treatment, where the doctors have the guts to treat him as a man should be treated.
  • The Russian doctors put him in an induced coma, presumably as a consequence of his seizures. And his pneumonia.
  • He nearly died several times.

  • Jordan Peterson has only just come out of an intensive care unit, Mikhaila said. He has neurological damage, and a long way to go to full recovery. He is taking anti-seizure medication and cannot type or walk unaided, but is “on the mend” and his sense of humour has returned.

I’m glad he’s well enough now to laugh, but I would have just told him to stand up straight and clean his room. That would have fixed him right up.

Do people still take advice from this horrific wreck of a man? Not to blame victims of disease or accident, but all of his problems seem to be self-inflicted.

That settles what I’m doing tonight

My wife reminded me that tonight is the Democratic debate. I noted that tonight is also the premiere of the Birds of Prey. I had to think for a moment: crappy super hero movie that I’ll probably dislike, vs. the best show the Democrats have to offer?

Yeah, I’m going to the movies.

I trust my wife to fill me in on any substance offered in the debate. I think both choices are going to be fluff.

What’s with these MFing spiders in this MFing lab?

There hasn’t been much fertility in this lab, and I don’t know what’s going on. The spiders are getting weird and lazy. Here’s Yara (last seen here), who has been building thick clumpy cobwebs and also assembling debris into a nest — she’s partly obscured by a wood shaving here. The strange thing is above her, and to the left.

Those are unhappy looking eggs enclosed in a thin web, not an egg sac. I can say with some confidence that they’re not going to develop.

This is awkward and annoying. Next week I’m going to sterilize cages with alcohol and set up new frames and repopulate, hoping this problem will go away. Maybe they’re stressed? Maybe they’re just old and lapsing into decrepitude?

Conversational gambit…failed

I listened to your suggestions. So, this morning when I made my trip to the bait shop to pick up wiggly things and the clerk made a friendly remark about fishing, I said, “Oh, I’m not fishing. I use these to feed my spider colony.”

He hesitated for a second, gave me a funny look, and reacted as if he was going to pretend I didn’t say that. He gave me my change and didn’t say another word. I may have derailed his brain, and he didn’t have an easy reply to mind.

I’m not taking your advice anymore, especially if a mob with torches and pitchforks shows up outside my house tonight.

The only article about “electability” you need to read

Normally, my brain shuts down when some political pundit uses the word “electability” — I know what’s coming. That’s what media people say when they’re about to start babbling about who is in the lead in a horserace to avoid having to discuss the substance of their policies. Policy is hard, but regurgitating poll results is easy, and if there’s anything we know for certain it’s that the talking heads on the TV are mostly idiots. Maggie Koerth nails it, though, announcing that You’ll Never Know Which Candidate Is Electable.

Political scientists study electability, but electability ain’t no science. Instead, researchers say, it’s basically a layer of ex post facto rationalization that we slather over a stack of psychological biases, media influence and self-fulfilling poll prophecies. It’s not bullshit, exactly; some people really are more likely to be elected than others. But the reasons behind it, and the ability to make assumptions based on it, well …

“[Electability] is this vague, floppy concept,” said Nichole Bauer, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “We don’t know who is electable until someone is elected.”

Please, could someone tell this to Chris Cilliza or Chuck Todd, just to name two among many who need to be punched in the face and sent back to school and told to learn something before they start trying to influence the electorate?

How I will respond if you insult my cooking

I need to memorize this speech, just in case.


Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK!

Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more — only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin’ tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye — a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself — forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!

Come to think of it, that is a generally useful response to any complaint. A student tries to tell me my exam was too hard…”Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Amanda! HAAARK!” etc.

The Lighthouse is such a great movie — it, and Willem Dafoe, were robbed in the Academy Award nominations. They ought to swap out that boring, self-indulgent, overlong piece of mobster dreck, The Irishman, and replace it with this. It’s a disgrace that Dafoe has never won the award.