Gab is back

Dammit. The racist social media site found a new sugar daddy willing to host their hate. In case you were unfamiliar with what Gab does…

Gab has become the most visible of a collection of services catering to people mainstream companies such as Twitter and Facebook have rejected as too hateful, extreme or threatening in their posts as part of a crackdown on extremism.

Which is astonishing. Extremists who are too hateful or threatening for Twitter and Facebook gravitate there. Given that Twitter and Facebook are incredibly accommodating to Nazis and other bigots, that’s hard to imagine…but my brief glance at Gab was to see a horrifying mess of naked anti-semitism on display. It was briefly, too briefly, shut down when hosting providers balked at providing service to a site that allowed that flaming anti-Semite who murdered 11 innocent people because they were Jews to flourish. But no worries, they managed to find a company that was fine with Nazi memes and dindunuffin jokes and murder planning to take them on.

Epik founder and CEO Rob Monster [appropriate name] echoed that sentiment in brief interviews with The Seattle Times on Sunday. Monster likened his company to a utility provider and said he supports free speech. He praised the operators of Gab and said he believes they will curate the site appropriately.

“I do believe the guys that are on the site are vigilant,” Monster said. Monster said on Epik’s website that his company was serving as Gab’s domain registrar but not its hosting company. KUOW was the first to report on Gab’s new ties to the Seattle area.

Yeah, Seattle. My hometown. So embarrassed. Unfortunately, the Pacific Northwest is a weird place that is generally liberal and progressive, but it’s also got a long history of racial segregation that has allowed a minority of terrible racists to prosper. Some of the worst, most regressive, most vile people I’ve known came out of the Northwest, some in my own family, but at the same time most of the people I knew were knee-jerk liberals. Almost all white, of course.

But this Monster guy is flatly delusional. Vigilant? Appropriate curators? With the announcement that it was back online, the first comments were all “blame the Jews” stuff.

Meanwhile, this Monster guy is blathering on about Free Speech and the heinous crime of de-platforming and the Founding Fathers and entrepreneurship, all as a smokescreen to justify providing support to a site that is basically the worst shit filtered out as too ghastly for other terrible social media sites, where awful people gather to enflame each other and applaud murder. Monster sounds like one of those glib libertarian jerks, but Torba is a Christian fanatic — a dreadful combination.

Could we at least draw the line at “free speech” that is nothing but hate speech intended to incite death and destruction?

Look on the bright side, UK!

I know there are changes coming, but you just have to make the best of them. For instance, the Brexiteers are trying to legislate animal pain out of existence.

The Tory Government has outdone itself when it comes to neglecting animal rights this week – by effectively declaring that all animals (apart from humans, of course) have no emotions or feelings, including the ability to feel pain. While debating the Brexit bill, MPs voted not to transfer into UK law the parts of EU legislation which recognise animals have sentience, and can feel pain and emotions.

You’d think that they’d have noticed that Charles Darwin, who was as British as they get, wrote a whole book (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) on the subject, and came to a different conclusion. But sure, you can discard your history of scientific endeavor.

The good news is that if pain and suffering and emotions can be taken away with just the right omission in your law books, Brexit is going to go well. Just deny the emotions. Don’t stop with animals, just erase all human concerns away. If you reject their existence, you’ll be able to stand silently through all kinds of loss and deprivation with a stiff upper lip, and not much more. If you need occasional relief, just poke a Tory with your umbrella — they won’t care, they’re in an even more advanced state of unfeeling. It’s like a witch’s mark, only all over their body.

You won’t be alone, either. The US is going to get a major stress test tomorrow, and I’m trying to deal with it by denying all emotions, too. I may have to get myself comfortably numb to make it through the next few days. Akvavit might help.

Was that really the best photo they could find to put on a billboard?

It’s bad enough they’re equating him to Jesus, but did they have to go with the gape-jawed goofy-eyed look with his tiny hand waving about?

Jupiter is a big fan of Ayn Rand, I hear

Jordan Peterson was asked to write a foreword for a new release of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is truly by Jordan Peterson. It is straight-up raging capitalism.

Here’s some thoughts—no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us—and will be with us—always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege, and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewelry, and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives, and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasize above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the Free World will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion—not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.

There will always be poor people, just as there is an unequal distribution of mass in the planets, where the biggest planets strove the hardest to be magnificently big. So what if Pluto is so small it got kicked out of the planet club? It should have tried harder.

Unfortunately, I predict his fans will defend this lunacy fanatically, rather than recognize that the guy is one of a minority of colossal loons who have hoarded all the crazy for himself, leaving only faded scraps for the Peterasts to feast upon.

Incels strike again

There’s been another shooting by an incel, and when you read about the hateful stuff he actually believed, you will be surprised that anyone made it through life with that degree of bullshit festering in his head.

But then, read this account by a medievalist of the warped notion of “courtly love”, and you’ll notice this is an ancient and familiar trope. You’ll never be able to watch “Camelot” again.

Analyze this statement

I am accused on YouTube of being a liberal snob and parroting the radical left’s blank-slate narrative that everything we do is socially constructed by someone who offers up his ironic credentials: he’s a STEM student in a major university.

Dave Bloom 1 day ago 12 Subscribers
@PZ Myers By the way, your general undertone of ‘you plebs lack the intelligence sufficient to grasp my brilliance’ is just more liberal narcissism. I’m a STEM student in a major university. Someone apparently thought my logic was adequate.

I just found that hilarious. He is valid because he’s on the bottom rung of a socially constructed hierarchy! Apparently, that hierarchy is genetic and evolutionarily deep, because Lobsters.

By the way, everything is socially constructed. Everything is genetic. You can’t separate the two.

When will people learn that debate is just noise to distract you all?

This week, an organization calling itself the “Munk Debates” hosted an event in Toronto. Even knowing that much, I would have rolled my eyes — these public debate shows, whether it’s Munk or Pangburn or whatever otherwise tedious troll has decided to stake their reputation on hosting assholes arguing with each other — are a waste of time. This one in particular was a debate between David “Cheerleader for Bush & the Slaughter of Muslims” Frum and Steve “Proud Racist” Bannon on the subject of “Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal”.

This was rather like inviting Ken Ham and Kent Hovind to debate on whether the future of science is creationism or evolution. That, too, could be presented as a “public service” by allowing ideas to be “vigorously contested,” but it would be a lie. Debates never accomplish anything. I very much like this summary of the process by Tabatha Southey:

The truth is that while debates can be fun to watch and some people are very skilled at doing them, debates very seldom change anything, especially minds. In fact, in the real-life debates, the audience vote found that “opinions remain entrenched—neither side wins,” as the Munk Debates tweeted, after announcing that Bannon had won. It’s fitting that the Munk masquerade ball ended with fake news. These kinds of things are mostly advertisements for the people involved. Debates are the exhibition basketball of academia and politics.

Regardless of whom public opinion deemed the “winner” of our all-too-real Bannon vs. Frum debate, merely placing Steve “Camp of the Saints” Bannon up on that stage only boosted his rightly flagging mainstream influence. People like to endlessly chide that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”—but the truth is, no one ever chased off a desperate showman with a spotlight.

Yeah, it was a ridiculous conclusion: the Munk Debates announced that, on the basis of a comparison of pre- and post-debate surveys, Bannon had swayed the most attendees. It turned out that they’d counted wrong, and no one had changed their minds in the debate. No one should be surprised, especially when it’s a couple of conservatives differing only in degree debating liberalism.

I have a suggestion for all the debaters out there, happily riding the gravy train provided by impresarios selling tickets to on-stage conflicts between opposing views (it’s great! They get to milk both sides for money!): just tell them no. That’s hard when they’re waving big money at you, but we’ve got to kill this debate culture, which is really just a pretense masking reactionaries finding excuses to present the illusion that their ideas are equally credible with their opponents. Tell them no, but give them an alternative: you’ll give them a talk or discussion with the audience on their stage, but you’re just not going share a platform with racists or religious lunatics.

I got to play educational games for a couple of days

It’s a great job when you get to do stuff just for fun. For the last few days, I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota, consulting on their new exhibit? Theatrical performance? Interactive game? called Infestation: The Evolution Begins. It’s a 3-part project funded by NSF to help teach key concepts of evolution to kids, and it’s looking pretty amazing.The first part is done, and it’s a theatrical event where the concepts are explained entertainingly, and the audience are introduced to little imaginary creatures called VISTAs. If you go to SMM today, you can watch the whole show yourself, get certified as an official VISTA handler, and get a sticker. A sticker! I got one! Oh, boy!

It stands alone, and is a fun demo. But there’s more! Not available to the public yet, but I was part of a team of consultants brought in to comment on/criticize/maybe improve some preliminary versions of interactive games that follow from Part I. Eventually, kids will be scurrying all over the museum to solve puzzles and address challenges that will require them to learn about biology and evolution. For now, it was just a troop of aging game designers, cognitive psychologists, theater people, museum curators, educators, and biologists running around trying out rough versions (some of the game rooms weren’t quite as polished as they will be). They’ve made great progress on Part II of the project, and I think, maybe, they’re hoping to have it available to the public this summer? Next fall? I’m getting an inside look at what it takes to build a professional and quite elaborate interactive exhibit in a museum, and I’m exhausted just thinking of all the labor and thinking that is done.

I had a lovely couple of days hanging out with the fantastic people who work behind the scenes at SMM — did you know real museums have large staffs of people who are doing, you know, science? — and my fellow consultants, like Scott Nicholson and Jonathan Tweet, who some of you may have already heard of. If you think combining “education” and “games” is going to flop at both, think again. This is serious stuff in the service of fun and learning.

We get to go back at some later date, once Part II is fully operational, and when Part III is in a preliminary state — we had some suggestions, but that bit is still up in the air, as it’s supposed to be a capstone that brings everything the kids learn together. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. You should all be looking forward to a trip to SMM next year when the magic is all ready for prime time.

Friday Cephalopod: They’re going to outbreed us!

Here they come, the legions of cephalopods. Massive aggregations of brooding octopuses were found near Monterey Bay.

That’s not all. The University of Georgia had a single octopus in their aquarium, Octavius, presumed male, until they discovered a surprise one morning.

“I noticed this cloud of moving dots and I realised, ‘Oh my God, she had babies. There are babies. There are babies everywhere.’ And a sort of panic ensued,” aquarium curator Devin Dumont told Mary Landers at Savannah Now.

“I immediately started scooping them out and putting them in buckets and there were just buckets and buckets and buckets full of tiny octopi.”

Finding a tank full of baby octopuses (or octopodes for language pedants) would certainly be enough to shock anybody into mixing up their Greek and Latin word roots.

I, for one, welcome our breeding swarms of transgender octopuses, and will greet them as saviors when they emerge to release humanity from its misery.