You mean there are limits to how racist you can get on TV?

I guess there are some lines you don’t get to cross. ABC went ahead and gave Roseanne Barr her own show, in spite of a history of terrible Trumpisms and lunatic conspiracy theories — they must have known she was a bomb ticking on the set. But she finally went too far when she made racist comments comparing a former Obama official to an ape, and ABC gave up on dealing with her and cancelled the show. I feel for her co-workers (and especially Wanda Sykes, who quit first), but this is what happens when you agree to work with a terrible human being.

It’s too bad ABC didn’t factor in the repugnance of their star. I think this will mean that Roseanne will be persona non grata almost everywhere…but maybe she can still get a gig at Fox News.

Pewdiepie is up to his old tricks again

He’s just being noticed for his sexism rather than his racism this time.

An ongoing feud between Felix Kjellberg, better known as Pewdiepie—the most popular YouTuber in the world—and popular Twitch streamer Alinity Divine, is a perfect example of how women are still objectified, vilified, and exploited in the gaming community, simply because they are women.

Earlier this month, Kjellberg, who has more than 63 million subscribers…

Stop right there. Have any of you ever watched Pewdiepie? I’ve seen a few of his videos, which I watched incredulously. He plays games with a kind of goofy running commentary, punctuated with squeals and other funny noises. He is talentless. He is uninformed. He isn’t particularly interesting. His only contribution is that he plays video games, just like you do, so he’s kind of the vidya equivalent of the guy you’d drink a beer with, I guess, and he’s famous for being a celebrity, which is about the most worthless kind of fame there is.

His popularity is mystifying. But maybe not: we’re looking at it the wrong way. He is the product of a runaway YouTube algorithm, one of the hidden rules behind the internet, which as we already know, has all kinds of spurious, exploitable side effects.

Little Baby Bum, which made the above video [I will spare you all the link to the video–pzm], is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. With just 515 videos, they have accrued 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views. Again, there are questions as to the accuracy of these numbers, which I’ll get into shortly, but the key point is that this is a huge, huge network and industry.

On-demand video is catnip to both parents and to children, and thus to content creators and advertisers. Small children are mesmerised by these videos, whether it’s familiar characters and songs, or simply bright colours and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos — one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhyme or cartoon episodes into hour+ compilations —and the way that length is marketed as part of the video’s appeal, points to the amount of time some kids are spending with them.

It begins to make sense. Pewdiepie is just another Little Baby Bum who appeals to another, but equally childlike, segment of the market. I don’t give him credit for consciously exploiting the algorithm, though — I think he just stumbled onto the formula and is profiting mightily from it.

Just remember that when someone touts their number of followers on YouTube (or Twitter, or a blog). Those numbers are mostly meaningless and only tell you that someone has hit a sweet spot in the medium’s artificial algorithm, which inflates noise into a mysterious cultural significance.

It’s all men’s fault

This is a good essay on incels, which makes kind of a universal point.

It is men, not women, who have shaped the contours of the incel predicament. It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.

It’s been that way for a long time. Hasn’t everyone been saying for decades that all of the men’s complaints about feminism are actually misplaced — that feminism is all about addressing concerns that affect men and women, that anti-feminism is a self-inflicted wound? That’s certainly been my perspective on it, and my own self-interest is in enabling feminism to reduce the insanity in the relationships between the sexes that is, in part, produced by the asymmetry between them.

And no, incels and MRAs, no one owes you sex. Quit trying to shoehorn human relationships into a pattern of capitalistic transactions. (We can also blame rampant capitalism for anyone believing this is a problem that can be solved with buying and selling commodities, or that “sexual market value” is even a real thing. Libertarians have fucked up everything.)

I forgot how much work babies are

We took the grandson to the zoo this morning, which involved walking a few miles up a hill and around and around winding pathways. His grandparents are now totally wrecked and lying back with aching feet and the general malaise of exhaustion.

I don’t know why we do this. Oh, OK, he’s cute.

And he did seem to have a grand time at the zoo.

We just do the fun parts! I can’t even remember how fatiguing little kids were, but I’m getting reminded.

Do not play gotcha games with @upulie, even if you are a billionaire

You all know I’m not a fan of Elon Musk — I think he’s something of a looter, a guy who’s good at PR (usually) and knows what bandwagons to leap upon. But lately he’s been working so hard to confirm all of my biases against him.

He announced a plan to fund a media watchdog site that would rank news sources…which is a fine idea, except that his criteria seemed to be self-serving. A news source that was critical of Elon Musk would be “fake news”, obviously. And then what happens? Musk endorses a propaganda site run by a sex cult.

But what really annoyed me was his ignorance and arrogance when he sneered at Upulia Divisekera because she studies nanotechnology.

So Upulie responded with a whole series of tweets outlining the importance of nanotechnology. But guess what? After his initial snipe, he just ignored her altogether. I think that means that she kicked his ass.

At least a nice summary of the Musk mythos emerged out of that mess.

This is what we do

These are rosaries confiscated from illigal immigrants by the Customs and Border Patrol, salvaged by a custodian at the processing station.

Here I am, a guy who despises religion and sees no magical value at all in these items, and I have to say that that is inhumane. This is not right. This is wrong.

…Kiefer sees his project as a counterweight to C.B.P.’s dehumanizing practices, which yank everyday objects from the contexts that imbued them with meaning. He hopes not just to draw people’s attention to those practices but also to evoke the value the objects must have once had to their owners. “I’m doing something different,” he told me. “I’m presenting these deeply personal objects in a way that is reverential and respectful.”

Yes, that something has no value to me does not imply that it has no personal value to others. We can only strip these away if we first decide the others have no value — we’re in the midst of a great effort to dehumanize anyone who opposes a certain narrow set of selfish values.

If we can take away their rosaries, we can also lose their children. We can break up families.

For months, stories have abounded of families separated by immigration authorities at the border: Three children were separated from their mother as they fled a gang in El Salvador; a 7-year-old was taken from her Congolese mother who was seeking asylum; and so on, in reportedly hundreds of cases. In almost every case, the families have described heart-wrenching goodbyes and agonizing uncertainty about whether they would be reunited.

According to the Florence Project, an Arizona nonprofit organization that provides legal and social services to detained immigrants, there have been more than 200 cases of parents being separated from their children since the beginning of the year in the state alone.

But don’t worry! They have a rationale for what they’re doing — they are being intentionally brutal as a deterrent to immigration.

In a May 11 interview with NPR’s John Burnett, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly referred to family separation as something that would be a “tough deterrent” to migrant parents who may be thinking of bringing their children to the border.

It might work. I’m beginning to think the United States of America is a terrible place to live, myself. This is a time-honored strategy on the right…for instance, it’s how Ted Nugent avoided the draft.

I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard, really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’ kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, piss the whole shot. My pants got crusted up.

See, I approached the whole thing like, Ted Nugent, cool hard-workin’ dude, is gonna wreak havoc on these imbeciles in the armed forces. I’m gonna play their own game, and I’m gonna destroy ’em. Now my whole body is crusted in poop and piss. I was ill. And three or four days before, I started stayin’ awake. I was close to death, but I was in control. I was extremely antidrug as I’ve always been, but I snorted some crystal methedrine. Talk about one wounded motherf*cker. A guy put up four lines, and it was for all four of us, but I didn’t know and I’m vacuuming that poop right up. I was a walking, talking hunk of human poop. I was six-foot-three of sin. So the guys took me down to the physical, and my nerves, my emotions were distraught. I was not a good person. I was wounded. But as painful and nauseous as it was — ’cause I was really into bein’ clean and on the ball — I made gutter swine hippies look like football players. I was deviano.

It’s the Ted Nugentification of America!