This semester is much better than Fall term (which was hellish), but I have one complaint. Wednesdays are my bad day: I’ve scheduled two different classes back to back with minimal time between them. I hope I don’t confuse the content when I get into the classroom! My morning is going to be all about packing my brain with the data I need to teach.
If you just want to listen to something soothing because the world sucks so bad right now, I have news for you: 31 years of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, 1983-1994, is now available in one place online. Start here with this playlist.
Some of us might need this.
He’s denying the worst of the claims, while admitting that he did have sexual relationships with his accusers. They were all consensual, he says.
As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.
I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.
This is the “bitchez be lyin'” defense written in the gentle romantic style of Neil Gaiman. It doesn’t add up. So he was in a happy, positive, respectful, consensual relationship with women who have all mysteriously changed their minds and started misrepresenting his sensitive style of making love as brutal sadomasochistic assaults? Why? What changed “positive and happy” to tears and trauma? There’s a massive plot hole in his fantasy.
His real sin was not being open and feminist enough.
And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.
I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel.
Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.
This is a dim acknowledgment that gosh, he did something wrong in his past relationships. He’s not sure what, but maybe he wasn’t as emotionally available as he ought to have been. Yeah, demanding that he be called “Master” is a sign of his clumsiness in relationships. But he’s learning! He’s a better person now!
At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.
Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.
Something sordid went on. We don’t know all the details, fortunately (the Vulture story had more than I could stomach as it is), but “Yes, I had sex with the babysitter, but it wasn’t as rough as she claims, and besides, she wanted it” isn’t the strong defense he thinks it is.
I spent the last several hours at the city council meeting for Morris, Minnesota, along with a huge mob of other Morris residents. The object of our political activism was a park, Morris’s East Side Park, which is kind of like the Central Park of our small town. It’s only 2 acres, containing a band shell, lots of trees, grass, picnic tables, and in one corner, some playground equipment. It’s a pleasant little place where lots of families play and where one citizen likes to look for spiders.
A local business, Superior Industries and West-Mor, enthusiastically and generously made plans to invest $2 million into turning Eastside Park into a destination park, paving over one bit of it to make a parking lot, building a massive and rather garish child’s playground paved over with poured-in-place rubbery polymer, and chopping down about 16 of the trees. One problem: they didn’t bother to tell us residents until about a month ago, although city council knew about it before we did.
Many of us descended on the council meeting tonight, talking for hours, the overwhelming majority of us presenting objections. We weren’t given enough time to review the proposal, it had been rushed through the council without going through the usual protocols, this was going to change the character of the park, there were other locations that would be more suitable, the location was far too small, etc.
One weird thing is that the proponents of the park were now emphasizing that it was going to be an inclusive park with handicap access. No one is against inclusion, and I failed to see what was particularly inclusive about a climbing structure and swing sets and slides, and they didn’t say what was more inclusive about it than the existing park, but OK.
The arguments didn’t matter. The council had already made up their minds. They ignored the will of the people and voted to approved the plastic monstrosity that will replace the grass and trees in the park.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
A meteorite crashing into the ground was caught on a home security camera. Neat!
The Center for Inquiry has been ideologically captured by the wingnuts. We’ve known this for a long time, since it was basically bought out by the Richard Dawkins Foundation. CFI has announced a conference coming up in July, in which Richard Dawkins will hand out his annual Richard Dawkins Award to someone he considers worthy. Can you guess who it’s going to this year?
Keep in mind that in the past it has gone to Bill Maher, despite all the groans from the CFI membership.
Do you have a guess?
I’ll spill the beans. He’s giving it to…JOHN MCWHORTER. Jesus christ. He’s one of that small group of anti-DEI freaks who have melted down over the idea that non-white non-men might actually have something to contribute to society (face it, that’s what all the anti-woke/anti-DEI goons are about, that idea that white men are not the pinnacle of civilization.) Here’s a bit from Elie Mystal’s review of McWhorter’s last book.
McWhorter’s central thesis is that being woke — by which he seems to mean acknowledging the ongoing fact of bigotry, systemic racism and the resulting forms of oppression — is a religion. Not “like” a religion — McWhorter refuses to hedge this contention with simile. No, McWhorter argues that people who advocate for anti-racism policies, racial sensitivity training and (of course) “critical race theory” are all part of a religious movement with its own clergy. (Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all been ordained, apparently.) He argues that this religion’s “Elect” has taken over the country and “rule[s] by inflicting terror” on those who dare to speak against it. Along the way, he warns that it is “coming after your kids” with a breathlessness that makes him sound less like a thoughtful academic and more like a conspiracy theorist looking for hidden critical race messages in the menus at Chuck E. Cheese.
He’s also an author on that terrible “politicization of science” paper that complained about how science not kow-towing to the far right’s racism is an example of “politicizing”, while ignoring people like Chris Rufo.
The madness of King Dawkins continues its descent. I suspect that McWhorter was hand-picked by Dawkins specifically because they both endorse that “woke mind-virus” nonsense.
I’m sorry, I’m just now learning that congress has passed legislation to force the sale of TikTok. This is just weird…our uber-capitalist nation is trying to control an independent Chinese corporation?
Wait, not sorry. I don’t use TikTok, so in a personal sense, I don’t care. I’ve glanced at it, and it’s the worst social media app out there — it’s nothing but blipverts for idiots and posers. I never saw the appeal, although it does seem to be extremely popular.
Oh wait, sorry again, Facebook is definitely the most atrocious, evil, terrible social media app. I abandoned that so long ago that I’d forgotten how awful it was. Instagram is bad, too, but I do have an account there, and for the same reason I clung to Facebook as long as I did — I’ve got family who use it, so it’s nice to keep up with them. Although that useful function is being diluted by the fact that I’m seeing family photos interspersed with mobile game ads that I don’t want to play and vapid photos of young women just standing there, smiling at me. I’m a crotchety old man, I just want to yell at them to do something, say something, tell a joke, do you think being pretty is sufficient reason to interfere with my interactions with people I care about? It’s not good.
The solution to my grumpiness is simple, though: don’t subscribe to TikTok, unsubscribe from services that don’t appeal, let people who do like them use them. That feels almost…libertarian to me, but OK, not meddling seems like a good approach.
But then I learn that Trump has an alternative solution. He wants Elon Musk to buy TikTok.
Can you imagine, after seeing the hash he’s made of Twitter, how much worse Musk would make TikTok?
These guys all make the worst possible decisions.
I can imagine much worse, but I didn’t want to make you all sick
You know, the old “two great tastes that taste great together” slogan, only the opposite of that — two awful things that become even more awful when combined? I tried imagining something unpleasantly yucky, and then picturing a completely different yuk, and then mixed them up in my imagination, and only succeeded in making myself mildly nauseous.
Then I discovered that Answers in Genesis had done the exercise for me. They have announced that they are combining the idiocy of young earth creationism with the hype of AI, and then I felt extremely nauseous.
We’ve been talking about doing this project for some time now, and I’m excited to finally announce a brand-new tool to help you find answers to your questions: AI Genesis. This chat tool, an extension of our website, has been under development and testing for months, and we’ve now rolled out a beta (test) version for anyone who has an account on our website.
You can ask our AI a wide variety of questions, such as:
• What was the shape of Noah’s ark?
• What’s the best evidence for a young earth?
• Is Genesis derived from ancient myths?
• What happened to the dinosaurs?
• Are the Gospels trustworthy?
• How can I share the gospel with someone who is trans?
I don’t have an account on their website — I haven’t even tried, but Ken Ham has gone all fatwah on my butt so I doubt I’d succeed — but I’m confident that they’ve implemented a glorified chatbot to deliver highly filtered creationist messages to their audience. One thing I have to commend AiG for is that they’ve hired some competent people to manage their internet presence. Have you looked at their SEO? Try to use Google to find specific details about AiG, and instead you get page after page of fluff written by AiG proponents. It’s amazingly useless.
But then, Google pretty much sucks nowadays.
A new species of funnel web spider has been discovered in Australia — the largest of its kind, and possibly the most venomous, most deadly spider in the world. The news reports, though, aren’t full of scary stories and people going “ooh eek, kill it with fire” stuff. The words you’ll hear in this short report are “happy” and “proud”.
I’m beginning to think I might have been born in the wrong country.
The idea that we should be able to separate the artist and their art is an idealistic one, but I just read this exposé of Gaiman’s history of sexual abuse, and no, just no. Every gentle, thoughtful, open-minded word he ever wrote was a lie. The image he presented was a facade, while what was lurking behind his illusion of gentility was a rapist, a selfish brute, an ex-scientologist steeped in that privileged nonsense.
He deserves obscurity and contempt. Actually, what he deserves is a felony conviction and jail time. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the deserving don’t get what’s coming to them.
