If you don’t like punching Nazis, you’re going to hate this

What do you think of a man who threw flares at ICE vehicles and buildings?

An armed man was fatally shot Saturday after throwing what authorities called “incendiary devices” at an immigration detention center in Washington state and trying to set a commercial-size propane tank on fire, according to Tacoma police.

About 4 a.m., 69-year-old Willem Van Spronsen threw “lit objects” at buildings and at cars in a parking lot, police said, causing a vehicle to go up in flames. Court records show the man was arrested last year at a protest at the privately owned detention center, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement called the man an “anti-immigration enforcement protester.”

There’s an argument to be made that he was committing acts of violence and that he was a terrorist. I’d disagree; a terrorist is trying to intimidate civilians with fear, while Willem Van Spronsen was targeting the tools of institutional oppression to stop terror. Violent, yes; terrorism, no. Read further in the article, and buried in bland language is the purpose of his act.

The attack came as thousands protested at ICE facilities nationwide ahead of the agency’s planned mass arrests of undocumented immigrants on Sunday. The Trump administration has said it will target about 2,000 families for deportation, focusing on as many as 10 cities. Seattle is not among the cities reportedly being targeted.

The Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma Tideflats is owned and operated for ICE by a private company called the GEO Group, according to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which puts the facility’s capacity at 1,575 — one of the biggest immigration detention centers in the country, the group says. As ICE faces calls to improve conditions for migrants in its custody, some have called on the government to stop using privately run detention centers.

There is the truly criminal act, the state terrorism we stand by and watch: private companies paid by the government to imprison innocents for being born in the ‘wrong’ place.

He wrote a farewell letter. He knew he was going to die.

He wrote,

there’s wrong and there’s right.
it’s time to take action against the forces of evil.

evil says one life is worth less than another.
evil says the flow of commerce is our purpose here.
evil says concentration camps for folks deemed lesser are necessary.
the handmaid of evil says the concentration camps should be more humane.
beware the centrist.

He was right. Will Van Spronsen is a human being who acted against evil.

ICE imprisons, tortures and deports hundreds of thousands of people and the brutality and scale of their harm is only escalating. We need every form of resistance, solidarity and passion to fight against ICE and the borders that they defend. Will gave his life fighting ICE we may never know what specifically was going through his head in the last hours of his life but we know that the NWDC [Northwest Detention Center] must be destroyed and the prisoners must be freed. We do not need heroes, only friends and comrades. Will was simply a human being, and we wish that he was still with us. It’s doubtless that the cops and the media will attempt to paint him as some sort of monster, but in reality he was a comrade who fought for many years for what he believed in and this morning he was killed doing what he loved; fighting for a better world.

I am totally out of sync with my community

I went to this movie last night.

I’ve never heard such vocal unanimity from the Morris people as we left after it was over.

“Worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said one attendee.

“I would have walked out halfway through if you weren’t watching it,” said another.

“What the hell did I just see,” someone chimed in.

I loved it!

It’s all deadpan humor and cynicism, mocking the genre and subverting expectations, with a plot that meanders meaninglessly, occasionally puncturing the fourth wall and letting the actors go full-on weird. The only resolution for anyone is ultimately being eaten. It’s a bitter commentary on capitalism, America, human shortsightedness, environmentalism, and the inevitable futility of battling stupidity. It’s my kind of movie.

But then, I’m a Jarmusch fan, which puts me in a minority already — Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Dead Man are two of my favorite films.

P.S. See? I don’t hate every movie I see at the theater.

P.P.S. I knew the Scots are all aliens.

Why, hello Mrs P. tep!

Today I’ve been prowling around, acting suspicious around my house, still trying to work out this macrophotography thing. I just now found a lovely Parasteatoda doing her business in a nook on the side of my house, so I had to snap a picture. My house has rather orange siding, which accounts for the warm tones of the background.

I caught her in the act of wrapping up her prey. The flies are everywhere today…eat more, ma’am. Many more.

Then I noticed in a little cranny another treasure — she has an egg sac nearby. Sorry to say, I’m going to steal it. More embryos for the development lab!

“We are all feminists now”?

According to Steven Pinker, at least. I guess he’s never looked at Reddit or YouTube or any online community that fails to expunge the riff-raff, where feminism is equated with cancer. Kate Manne really dismantles his claims and his oblivious arrogance here. He has some weird ideas about rape.

Pinker is also getting chewed out for his contribution to Epstein’s defense.

In other disturbing news, Harvard faculty kept right on meeting with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for raping children. Not only did Acosta give him a generous outcome, the faculty at our most prestigious university continued to treat him as a generous patron.

Gardens are savage, brutal places

Mary is almost as into the spider thing as I am, but while I’m specializing in dirty dark cobwebby garages, she’s cultivating a garden and letting me know when she spots the arachnid denizens of bright sunny spaces. So she tells me she’s spotted a pair of spiders on the pea plants, and she thought they might be mating. I toddled out with my camera to see what the fuss was about, and here’s the wee little yellow critter ambling about on a leaf. I’m going to say it’s a tetragnathid.

It kept going back to the other spider, but I couldn’t get a good look at its partner. I tried to get it a good angle.

Then, when I finally do get a good shot at what it has down there…oops. Definitely not mating. It’s killing and eating the other spider, which I still can’t identify, in part because it’s trussed up and getting gnawed on.

Should I be worried that my wife can’t tell the difference between making love and being murderized?

Hey baby baby baby

Finally, our colony is producing again! Lyanna has made an egg case, and she’s tending to it in a maternal way.

Excuse the quality of the picture — I tried to photograph her without disturbing her at all. The bold red and white is just the outside of the Coca Cola box we used to make a cardboard frame.

Also pending are Daenerys, Gilly, and Cersei who have gigantic bellies right now and look like they’re ripe to start pumping out eggs for us.

Pinker speaks up at last about Epstein!

Finally. Pinker has a letter posted on another blog in which he strongly repudiates Jeffrey Epstein. I’m glad to see it.

I’m happy to share my encounters with Epstein.

The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him, and always tried to keep my distance. Friends and colleagues described him to me as a quantitative genius and a scientific sophisticate, and they invited me to salons and coffee klatches at which he held court. But I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante — he would abruptly change the subject ADD style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack, and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data. I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he “voted me off the island,” presumably because he was sick of me trying to keep the conversation on track and correcting him when he shot off his mouth on topics he knew nothing about. But Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with (Alan Dershowitz, Martin Nowak, John Brockman, Steve Kosslyn, Lawrence Krauss) and so many institutions he helped fund (Harvard’s Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, ASU’s Origins Project, even Harvard Hillel) that I often ended up at the same place with him. (Most of these gatherings were prior to the revelation of his sex crimes, such as the 2002 plane trip to TED with Dawkins, Dennett, the Brockmans, and others, but Krauss’s Origins Project Meeting came after he served his sentence.) Since I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments.

In the interests of full disclosure, there was another connection. Alan Dershowitz and I are friends and colleagues, and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute. While he was representing Epstein, he asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document. I did it as a favor to a friend and colleague, not as a paid expert witness, but I now regret that I did so. And needless to say I find Epstein’s behavior reprehensible.

Since some of the social-media snark insinuates that I downplay sexual exploitation, it may be worth adding that I have a paper trail of abhorrence of violence against women, have celebrated efforts to stamp it out, and have tried to make my own small contribution to this effort.

My review of the history of rape and battering in The Better Angels of Our Nature begins:

“Rape is one of the prime atrocities in the human repertoire. It combines pain, degradation, terror, trauma, the seizure of a woman’s means of perpetuating life, and an intrusion into the makeup of her progeny. It is also one of the commonest of atrocities.”

The lengthy section lauds feminist writers like Susan Brownmiller who first documented the prevalence of rape and the historic indifference to it, and who called for concerted measures to eliminate it. I then refute the cynical assumption that those measures are idealistic or utopian, that nothing can be done to combat violence against women until some distant day in the future in which the patriarchy is finally dismantled or human nature changes. On the contrary, I show that this campaign has achieved considerable success: rates of sexual assault and domestic violence against women have dropped dramatically since data were first kept by Bureau of Justice Statistics, and societal tolerance has plummeted as well. (I updated the data In Enlightenment Now.) As far as I know I’m the only writer who has documented and celebrated actual progress in reducing violence against women, and argued that this progress shows that the effort is not futile and should embolden us to press for greater reductions still.

Given my longstanding distaste for everything Epstein, it’s galling to be publicly associated with him based on some photos and mutual associates, but I suppose this is one of the dubious perquisites of fame (by academic standards). And it’s a particular hazard in the era of social media — last year I was featured in a New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal called “Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A”; this year I appear to be Exhibit B.

There’s still a problem. He “disliked” and had a “longstanding distaste” for Epstein, and finds his behavior “reprehensible”, yet still he appeared at multiple events with him, assisted in an indirect way in his defense (which he now regrets), and this is the first time he has openly repudiated him. This is confirmation of what people have found objectionable about Pinker, that he is silent in the face of repulsive behavior, that he let Epstein associate himself with Harvard and took advantage of the Epstein jet, and only now, after he’s finally getting dragged off to his just reward (maybe), does he come out with this stuff. I first publicly criticized Jeffrey Epstein in 2011, and I didn’t even know him and have never met him! What took Pinker so long?

Also repulsive: that Pinker uses this opportunity to plug his book, to argue that somehow describing how violence against women has generally declined is somehow a defense of his failure to address violence against women in a specific case, and most annoyingly, that he is “the only writer who has documented and celebrated actual progress in reducing violence against women”. Right. Because everyone but Steven Pinker has been just fine with the status quo.

Wanker.

By the way, the author of that blog who famously insists on civility and honesty, has allowed a comment to stand in which it is claimed that I have been accused of rape. Not mentioned is that the guy who made the comment, Rich Sanderson, is also the guy who made the accusation, and has an unsavory reputation as an obsessive liar. He is, of course, a longstanding member of the commentariat there, as are several slymepitters.