Rod Dreher gets email

Just like I do! But instead of mocking the wacky beliefs of his correspondents, Dreher likes to praise them and agree with them. I guess he gets better letter-writers than I do.

But no! This guy is nuts. He senses omens of cultural armageddon in the Academy Awards. He is apparently very concerned that the Best Picture award went to a movie that was all about…bestiality. It’s not just cats and dogs living together, it’s human women copulating with fish! That’s all that movie was about!

Full confession: I very much liked The Shape of Water, although I would actually have favored Get Out winning the big award. It’s a nice, gentle story of love triumphing against adversity in a fantastic context. I guess that makes me a sexual prevert and degenerate now.

They haven’t seen the movie, but these two are aghast at what they think is the plot.

He’s talking about The Shape Of Water, a movie in which the female protagonist falls in love with a humanoid amphibian, and has sex with it (“cod coitus,” according to Sonny Bunch). The reader continues:

Even more astounding is that no one seemed to care: the critics, the media and now the Academy all applauded at director Guillermo Del Toro’s “boldness”. The Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film winners — respectively about a pederastic love story and a trans woman fighting prejudice — look almost tame in comparison, though they’re symptomatic too.

But the movie is so much more! The villain, the excellent Michael Shannon, is a deeply conservative, materialist man who is also a kneejerk Christian — see? Dreher’s ilk have a prominent role in the movie. One of the protagonists is a gay man. The heroine is a disabled poor woman with a mysterious past, who also seems to have gills. The “humanoid amphibian” has supernatural powers, and is actually a kind of god, worshipped in his native land.

There’s so much they could have hated if only they’d seen the movie.

But gosh, they must suffer greatly at the movies if the idea of a trans woman fighting prejudice repulses them. They see everything as an attack.

I agree with the things you say most of the time, but something I think you miss is how the turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.

This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.

The Shape of Water is not a revenge story. It’s a love story about people finding happiness outside of conventionality. If you want to see a movie about rancor and revenge and people who attack those who are different, the remake of Death Wish is playing right now. I’m sure torture-porn is more in keeping with Christian values.

Dreher ends with an apocalyptic warning:

Listen to me, conservative Christian readers:

  • there are no politicians on earth capable of turning this tide of decadence; the power of culture is far too strong;
  • you cannot expect your children to be salt and light to a culture that gives its highest honor to a movie celebrating bestiality as an act of liberation, and a “love letter to love”;
  • soon, people who believe the things you do will be regarded as perverted and dangerous to the common good; are you ready for that?

You had better be ready for that. The handwriting is on the wall, and the cracks are widening in the foundations.

Again, if we’re going to prognosticate on the future of our nation based on movies, The Shape of Water gives me far more hope than Death Wish. I’d rather see a love letter to love than a celebration of bloody violent murder.

How decadent is your aristocracy?

Ours is getting pretty creepy. They’re buying blood from healthy young people to inject into sickly old fucks, and they’re gathering at ritzy gala events to learn how they too can become techno-vampires.

It’s called The Young Blood Project — that’s a nice ghoulish name, at least. A Florida doctor is carrying out a “clinical trial” which you can pay to be part of (a warning flag is already being thrown), in which you, if you’re old enough (hey, I qualify!) will be transfused with plasma obtained from young men and women. While I’m the right age, though, it’s apparently going to cost $285,000 to sign up. I dunno, man, get a bunch of blood or a Porsche 911 R? Decisions, decisions.

This “study” also has some serious design flaws.

Mixed but intriguing evidence in mice doesn’t yet justify testing this idea in humans, much less charging them a huge sum to sign up. And the study uses neither blinding nor a placebo group, design elements considered essential for rigorous medical research.

“There is no way under heaven that they will be able to convincingly show whether this works or this doesn’t work. It’s a trial that is designed and destined to provide no valuable information,” said Dr. Steven Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who performs bone marrow transplants. He called the scientific hypothesis “incredibly far-fetched.”

Really, it probably isn’t going to work.

Maharaj has not published any animal studies testing the procedure he’s proposing to try in humans. He did, however, publish a paper last year documenting a study in which he infused three cancer patients with white blood cells from young donors who had been injected with G-CSF. The trial was originally intended to enroll 29 patients, but Maharaj did not answer questions about why the paper featured results from only three of them.

Asked by STAT for citations in the published literature that provide the scientific basis for his new trial, Maharaj pointed to six studies. One was conducted on human cells in lab dishes. The other five were conducted in mice; they found that, after being exposed to the blood of young mice, old mice had less abnormal thickening of their heart, grew more nervous tissue, and saw improved cognitive function, among other changes.

Man, in the old days all you needed to become a vampire was to get bitten by a creepy old fuck in a cape. Now you gotta be rich, you’ve got to shuttle to Florida once a month, you have to get all these needles, and then at the end you get to hope that maybe you’ll be able to name the camel on a cognitive assessment test.

That settles it, I’m going for the Porsche. Can one of you break the news to my wife that I’m planning to spend 10 years salary on a penismobile?

I get email

It used to be that I’d only get ranty, incoherent, ill-informed email from devout Christians. I guess we’ve won and converted them all to ranty, incoherent, ill-informed atheists now. Victory!

You are a stalker

Why do u continue to stalk Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and shermer and other NA.[Define “stalk”. You seem to think it synonymous with “criticize”. Does that mean you’re stalking me?] You vermin. You are obsessed. Just leave these people alone. [meme?] You have target. You really think you are smarter then a PhD in neuroscience.[All bow down before the Ph.D. in Neuroscience] Sam Harris is like really really smart [who else is like really, really smart?], you couldn’t get a PhD in that field.[I don’t know why I find that amusing]

You side with irrational blue hair women [More accurately, I don’t use hair color as a criterion for deciding who I side with]. Hysterically pathetic “girls” not women [I knew there’d be misogyny in here — there always is]. Sam is more of a man than you’ll ever be. [Oh. Degrees of manhood — so he’s agreeing that gender is not binary?] That’s logic [I missed the logic bit there]. Where suppose to trust a buzzfeed journalist. A retart could get a degree in journalism.[A journalist would know to spell and use proper grammar] Only the top 1 percent get into neuroscience. [Source? Top 1% of what?] You wonder why majority of people choose Harris over your inquisition [Source?]. A Harvard graduate vs were did you get your degree from a community college. [University of Oregon, Institute of Neuroscience, 1985] Hahahah. Lawrence a mit grad. You really think an mit grad is a rapist? [Impossible. No rapes ever occur at MIT. Also, I don’t think anyone has accused Krauss of rape. Why do you bring it up?] We will win this war.[With your logic?] Notice how na movement is a hundred times bigger than your movement.[What is “my” movement? I wish I knew. Also…Source?] I wonder why?[Because you just made up a number?] Hmmmmmm. #loser [I am crushed. You are #winning!]

Whoa, RDF/CFI says the right thing

For once.

I am truly surprised, actually.

Would someone care to write a standard inclusion rider for conference speakers?

Frances McDornand gave a speech at the Oscars in which she asked everyone to include an “inclusion rider” in their contracts. Like most people around the country, I had to google it to find out what an “inclusion rider” is.

What the heck is an inclusion rider? It’s a way to make Hollywood more equitable. Actors sign contracts when they are cast in films, and they have the ability to negotiate for riders, or additional provisions. An inclusion rider is a stipulation that the minor roles of a film reflect the demography of where the film takes place, including a proportionate number of women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals and people with disabilities. Big name actors who have leverage in negotiations could put this stipulation into their contracts and drastically change representation in film.

Hey! Why don’t we have such a thing for speakers at atheist cons (maybe you do, and I just don’t know about it)? This would be so useful. You want me to speak at your event? Great! But part of the deal is that I don’t show up and discover that I’m one among a big roster of nothing but old white men.

Or maybe you don’t want me anyway, and that’s fine — but what would be really powerful is if all those popular old white men also had an “inclusion rider” in their contracts that would motivate conference organizers to be a bit more balanced in their lineups if they want Big Name Atheist to join their meeting. It might also be revealing to find out which Big Name Atheists don’t want to leverage greater inclusivity in the events they grace.

My one obstacle is ignorance. We made a big push to have reasonable harassment policies at cons a few years ago. Maybe this would be a good next step: if someone who knows the legalese to craft a basic boilerplate conference speaker contract, I’d be happy to use it and would include it in any of my agreements to speak somewhere as a requirement. If enough of us start using such a thing, conference organizers would have to accommodate to them and figure them into the speaker lineups they put together.

Or they could just start automatically rejecting speakers who expect an appropriate gender and minority balance. That would be good to know about a conference, too.

(Psst. Science conferences, too. Any event where there exists a more desirable class of speakers — use your power to promote more diversity.)

EST+Scientology+Ayn Rand? Sign me up!

If I wanted to build a horrible chimeric religion to get rich, that would probably be a profitable combo…but I’d have to be totally rotten at the core to be able to do it. Just like Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, who founded a cult called variously NXIVM or the Knife of Aristotle.

There are innumerable articles on NXIVM and Raniere that are worth your time, including this 2010 piece in Vanity Fair that claims Raniere took advantage of several wealthy heiresses, among other alleged victims. What everyone seems to agree on is that NXIVM shares DNA with Scientology, but mostly appears to be a direct descendant of the ‘70s self-investment movement EST. Most in my age range know about EST from its appearance in recent seasons of FX’s The Americans. NXIVM goes a step further than either, with ex-members reporting harems, color-coded hierarchy dress codes, deep sexism, and other assorted basic bitch cult moves—especially litigation against journalists and anti-Raniere voices. There’s also a website devoted to tracking the group, which seems like it shouldn’t be alone in this. After all, Raniere has been on the cover of Forbes magazine. He’s not hiding from anything.

So NXIVM focuses on internal truth and a re-prioritized set of internal ethics, mostly ripped from the objectivist pages of Ayn Rand, which I think solves the mystery of “Why fake news?”

Talk about your unholy hybrids…it’s terrifying that people actually fall for this kind of poison.

An interesting development

Mike Adams, the “health ranger”, the con artist behind Natural News, has been kicked off YouTube. Apparently it’s because he has long been promoting hateful conspiracy theories, but I’m surprised it hasn’t been because of his life-threatening quackery, or his twisted racism. He’s a red-skinned American Indian, you know.

So he’s gone. Now Alex Jones is feeling existential dread. YouTube is threatening to throttle his channel for all the nonsensical conspiracy theories he peddles, and advertisers are finally stampeding away.

Can we hope that the NRA is next?

I know all the freeze-peachers will be shrieking about this abridgment of the freedom of conservatives, but it’s really not a conservative/liberal thing. It’s about lies. There should be disincentives to fraud and lying and fomenting hate, and that goes for the entire range of the political spectrum. Dangerous health advice ought to be punished rather than rewarded, and that’s the purview of not just the Right, but also the Left. Racist garbage ought to be flagged and not be a recipe for shoveling money via clicks. Let the NRA make their blood-soaked propaganda, but don’t let them use YouTube to monetize it.

The Internet had such promise, but now it’s used as a convenient sewer pipe to drench us with lies. A crackdown on dishonesty would be a nice corrective.