The lying theocrats are winning in Alabama

The legislature in Alabama has passed an evil bill to deny women autonomy. This is a transparent attempt to do great harm to the citizens of their state, but only if they are women.

The Alabama bill, which passed 25-6, is even more restrictive than prior state-level abortion laws, and it includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions. Six of the Senate’s Democrats voted against the bill — one abstained — and they staged a filibuster into Tuesday night after debating the bill for more than four hours, with senators discussing the role government should play in legislating what a woman can do with her body and the definition of life.

After a Democratic amendment to the bill that would have provided exceptions for victims of rape and incest failed 21-11, Democrats railed against the prospects of young crime victims having to carry the resultant fetuses to term and having to then live with their assailants’ children for the rest of their lives.

It’s a purely Republican bill, promoted by dumbass Republican men. They fought fang and claw against any exceptions, any amendments, and also shot down an amendment that would have required the state to pay for the medical bills of unwanted babies for three years. This is not pro-life. It’s pro-misogyny.

All those voting for the bill were men. All Republicans. When signed into law by Alabama’s governor, women who have abortions will face no sanction, but doctors performing them could face “10 years in prison for attempting to terminate a pregnancy and 99 years for actually carrying out the procedure,” BBC reports. The only exception is for saving the life of the mother.

There’s a deeper logic behind this: they want this law to go to the Supreme Court, because their plan is to use the stacked judiciary to over throw federal laws — they want to impose their godly will on everyone, in every state. They are not content to oppress only the women of Alabama.

During floor debate, Sen. Clyde Chambliss (R) led the effort for passage of the ban. Its purpose is, Chambliss said, “So that we can go directly to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe v. Wade.”

Apparently, there has been a surge of these kinds of bills all across the country. Abortion foes have been emboldened by the appointment of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and are confident that he’ll tip the balance in favor of religious tyranny. That, and that Trump has been busy packing the courts with incompetent ideologues approved by the Federalist Society.

This is one of the many ugly legacies of the last presidential election. Also note that these “pro-life” people are the ones cheerleading for us to bomb the people of Iran.

Now we’re all sad and alone

We just got back from dropping Skatje and Iliana off at the airport — they’re on the way home. Now I have to go back to being my usual sour, cranky, black-hearted self.

I snapped that picture after telling Iliana, after a long, unpleasant drive, that now she gets to go home to her daddy. I think she only understood one word of that, but it was the important word.

Would you pay $600 for a liter of water?

Yet another reason to break out the tumblers and guillotines.

If you read the review of various over-priced bottled water brands, you’ll discover there exists a profession called “water sommelier”. Yeesh.

Meanwhile, in Flint, Michigan…

Whales just want to say hello

Who wants to go swimming with sperm whales? Their sonar is so intense that they can kill animals with a focused click, but here are some free divers playing with them.

(The video overstates some of its inferences — you can’t predict higher brain functions from the presence of spindle cells, or simply from the size of the brain — but it’s still powerful stuff.)

That’s some adaptation they’ve got, and still we killed them to scoop out the oil in their heads.

5,000 year old crime

Well, this is a dreadful image. It’s a reconstruction of a mass burial in Poland from 5,000 years ago. It’s mostly women and children who were murdered.

The interesting thing about it, illustrated above, is that they did DNA analyses of all the bones and figured out the family relationships.

Evidently, these individuals were buried by people who knew them well and who carefully placed them in the grave according to familial relationships,” they note.

Based on their research, the authors gained a startling glimpse into the families’ relationships. For example, they discovered that four of the individuals were brothers, but did not all share the same mother – though the similarities in the two women’s DNA suggest that their mothers may have been related.

One of the mysteries in the grave is the absence of older males in the grave, except for one father. This has led the authors to suggest that they were the ones who buried the people in the grave, who are mostly women and children.

Based on the nature of their injuries, the authors suggest that the people in the grave were captured and executed, rather than killed during fighting. This would fit the broader context of violence between competing groups at the time, in which women and children were often taken as captives.

The forensic analysis of the nature of the crime is fascinating, but the picture of Neolithic family structure more so, and this was a terrible tragedy that struck these people.

Now we just need to track down the individuals responsible for this horrific act and bring them to justice.

Follow the money

We’ve been castigating Twitter and Facebook for providing a permissive environment that fosters the growth of fascists and Nazis — and that absolutely is a problem that needs to be addressed — but there’s one major player on the Internet who hasn’t been confronted quite as much. Sure, Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer has been shut down multiple times and is constantly struggling to find a stable host, and yes, Gab got shut down for a while, but they keep bouncing back. But 8chan, which might well be the root source of the persistent infection, never seems to have a hiccup. It just keeps going and going and going, fostering a toxic troll culture that occasionally erupts out of its petri dish to poison other environments. How does it do that?

All we need to do is look at who covers 8chan’s payroll.

What’s 8chan’s secret? It can all be traced back to its owner, Jim Watkins and his company NT Technologies. Watkins has created a mostly self-contained system where he hosts the 8chan domain without the help of third parties. And it’s allowed 8chan to remain on solid footing while its contemporaries struggle. While Watkins couldn’t stop Google from delisting 8chan from its search results, people who wanted to find it still knew where to go.

But Watkins still needs an outside source of cash to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and staff that keep 8chan running. A significant source of the site’s funding is Amazon.

Fascinating. Who would have thought America’s richest man, a multi-billionaire whose company has ruthlessly stomped all over all competition, might be a negligent slumlord who enables a slimy underground to fester? Inconceivable.

But that’s where a significant fraction of 8chan’s income comes from. They’ve cut themselves off from the sources that even give a marginal fuck to policing their output, which means they are isolated from vulnerable dependencies, and are getting by on a revenue stream from selling audiobooks through Amazon. They’re peddling total crap, but it’s enough to get the trickle of cash they need to maintain the site.

The site’s videos star attractive Filipina women who deliver pro-Trump news in heavily accented English. And at a time when most news sites obsess over generating traffic from Facebook, The Goldwater largely ignores that platform. Instead, everything it does is catered to the trolls, alt-righters, Trump sh*tposters, and other anonymous members of the internet’s most deplorable message board, 8chan.

8chan is living on ads for one product, their cheesy audiobooks, that is sold through one outlet, Amazon. They can do this because Amazon don’t care. There have been other occasions when people have noticed that Amazon continues to support hate sites despite all protests. Amazon is only about the money.

Watkins’ selection of Amazon as his financial lifeline to the outside world is not an accident. The company does not run away from websites that others deem toxic. When thousands of advertisers abandoned Breitbart after the right-wing website featured racist categories like “black crime,” Amazon continued to run ads on the site.

Of course they put up a policy that tries to look benign, but it’s basically a cover story that they freely ignore.

According to the policies it puts up on its own website, Amazon prohibits the sale of items that “promote or contain materials or activity that is hateful, harassing, harmful, invasive of another’s privacy, abusive, or discriminatory (including on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age).” This would seem to rule out Breitbart and 8chan. But when asked about the apparent contradiction, the company did not respond to a request for comment.

You know they just say that so they can quickly yank out anything that gets the attention of the media and that might harm the reputation (that is, profit) of the company. Well, the media just noticed 8chan is funded by Amazon deals. I’d like to imagine they’d do a fast PR move to protect the company, but they’re so big they don’t care anymore.

Maybe it’s time to break them up so a certain venal plutocrat named Bezos would have to care.

Grifters gotta grift

This is a true rags-to-riches story. Brian Kolfage was broke.

According to the source, Brian Kolfage personally confided that was “broke” last year after his “really fake” news empire collapsed and Facebook “deplatformed” him.

So what did he do? Did he go on welfare? Did he beg the nanny state for a handout? Did he flop on a street corner and beg? No! He did what any red-blooded American go-getter would do: he started a GoFundMe page.

His page raised $22 million to build a wall on our southern border, to out-Trump Trump. He really out-Trumped Trump, because the wall still wasn’t built, but Brian Kolfage isn’t broke anymore.

That anonymous source shared an Instagram post highlighting Kolfage’s recent purchase of a fine seagoing vessel which they believe is “close to a million dollars.”

Yay! Capitalism works!

Sam Harris’ very special pleading

Sam Harris has a long interview with Kara Swisher (1’40”! transcript here), which even in written form puts me to sleep. Fortunately, Paul Campos has extracted some of the more bizarre, Sam-defining bits for me, and gets right to the problem of the Intellectual Dark Web. They pooh-pooh the harm and danger of white nationalism and racism and general bigotry, trivializing it and suggesting that it’s not important, which allows them to fan the flames of racial bias while neatly divorcing themselves from its outcomes. What stuns me is his argument for doing this: white nationalism is an ideology, but it’s not a religion, therefore it’s not as bad?

The difference I would draw between Christchurch, a white supremacist atrocity, and what just happened in Sri Lanka or any jihadist attack you could name, the difference there is that white supremacy is an ideology, I’ll grant you. It doesn’t link up with so many good things in a person’s life that it is attracting psychologically normal non-beleaguered people into its fold. It may become that on some level.

It doesn’t have all the elements of a true religion. I mean, there are ways in which it’s entangled with certain forms of Christianity. Again, there’s not a death cult of martyrdom forming there. It’s conceivable that one could form there. I’m not ruling out the white supremacists for causing a lot of havoc in the world. But in reality, white supremacy, and certainly murderous white supremacy, is the fringe of the fringe in our society and any society. And if you’re gonna link it up with Christianity, it is the fringe of the fringe of Christianity. If you’re gonna debate a fundamentalist Christian, as I occasionally do, if I were to say, “Yeah, but what about white supremacy and all the …” He’s not gonna know what you’re … It’s not part of their doctrine in a meaningful way.

Where I come from, a bad idea is a bad idea, and we don’t excuse it if it avoids being entangled with a religion. I’m comfortable with saying religion is a bad idea, but it is only one member of a much larger class of bad ideas, especially problematic when you’re trying to give a special status to a category as broadly diverse and amorphous as religion.

What’s particularly obnoxious about this twisty exercise in special pleading is that it is so transparent in what he’s trying to do: he is once again straining to make the case that Islam is uniquely evil. That only Islam is a “death cult of martyrdom”, that any instances of Christianity inspiring mass murder are weird outliers that can be ignored, while any instances of Muslims committing mass murder are truly representative of the faith. If I had to argue against such a ludicrous claim, I’d take a twofold approach.

First, if you’re gonna debate a fundamentalist Muslim, and you were to say, “Yeah, but what about suicide bombers and all…”, that Muslim is likely to be annoyed that you’ve brought up an insulting stereotype and is going to tell you that murder is not part of their doctrine in any meaningful way, and that terrorism is the fringe of the fringe of Islam. They might also point out that Harris seems to be deeply ignorant about the religion (I’ve seen him handwave away the assessments of Arabic speakers and researchers in the field of Middle Eastern culture), and that his popularity is entirely a consequence of his appeal to equally ignorant bigots.

Secondly, though, I’d explain that many Western nations, built on Christian foundations, seem to be entirely comfortable with prolonged, brutal warfare against Islamic countries, which makes uncaring mass murder a rather significant element of our ‘faith’, and that what we’ve been doing is ongoing oppression that empowers the terrorist fringe of a fringe. I’d point out, as Campos does, that the rising of the Right has succeeded in taking over our government, and is a greater internal crisis than any distant threat from angry foreigners in oil rich countries, no matter what their religion.

I mean who doesn’t recognize that white supremacy is absolutely at the ideological core of the political movement that at the moment happens to control the government of the most powerful nation in the world? Sam Harris, that’s who!

And as for the claim that there’s no connection between white supremacist ideology and fundamentalist Christianity, that would seem to be belied by the fact that fundamentalist and/or evangelical Christians make up by far the most significant voting bloc in the coalition of white supremacists and conservative ethno-nationalists (but I repeat myself) who have taken over the Republican party and most of the government of the United States.

A bad idea is a bad idea. I don’t care if it’s sponsored by a fringe of a fringe, or by mere ideologues, or by Christians or Muslims, or even by bizarrely popular atheists — racist claims that have no foundation in legitimate science and that are used to further discrimination and hatred must be opposed. Sam Harris is one of those deplorables who deserve condemnation.

He’s so oblivious and dim, too. When asked what can be done about all the racists taking advantage of social media, here is his reply:

[T]here’s just no way for us to keep track of what’s on our platform, right? So you know, the AI can’t do it. If we turn up the filter on white supremacy, we’re going to catch too many ordinary Republicans and we’re even going to catch certain Congressman, right, and we might even catch the president, and so that doesn’t work.

A scientist would say that, if we objectively tune our filters to detect expressions of white supremacy and racism, and we then find that we catch a bunch of “ordinary Republicans” who we already know are wont to spout off racist remarks, that’s a sign that the filters work. Harris’s bias is pretty naked there.