No poors allowed

Our administration wants to slide in new rules to keep those poor people out of the country.

In a 447-page proposed rule issued on Friday, the administration proposes sharply limiting legal immigration for those that aren’t already wealthy and privileged.

The proposed rule would favor granting permanent legal status to immigrants who make more than 250% of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that means an income of $62,750 per year.

This exceeds the median household income in the United States.

I will only accept this if it is applied retroactively, meaning Trump’s immigrant grandfather and all of his descendants must leave immediately. It means I’ll also have to move to Norway or Sweden, but that’s a small price to pay.

Why free speech is sometimes a curse

John Oliver rips into the Republican efforts to prop up Kavanaugh in the first 9 minutes, but go ahead and watch the rest where he describes Facebook as a toilet. A lot of it is spent on how Facebook blithely allowed inflammatory hate speech to flow in Myanmar, with the excuse that they didn’t have enough people fluent in the language to police it, but I have to say — they allow it fo flow pretty freely in English, too.

Another account

Here we go again…another woman, Deborah Ramirez, has stepped forward to testify about Brett Kavanaugh’s drunken behavior at Yale. It’s a story vetted by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, two journalists with a rock-solid reputation.

Will the Republicans finally withdraw this nomination? If they push it through, all they’ll accomplish is to diminish the authority of the Supreme Court still further.

Maybe the Intellectual Dark Web isn’t as profitable as they dreamed

Oh, look. “Pangburn Philosophy” the guy who’s been sponsoring these talks by alt-right asshats all over the place, maybe isn’t doing quite so well lately.

Can’t pay his speakers? Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz refusing to go on stage? Wow.

Can this get any more embarrassing for them?

Whoops. There go Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Whatever will happen to this conference?

They just lost 4 of their 5 headliners. That’s a catastrophic collapse.

From now on, I’m going to send all those obnoxious Peterson cultists to Adam Rutherford

I hope he enjoys them, because I’m more than a little tired of those obtuse wankers. Rutherford is writing about what makes humans unique, and isn’t shy about pointing out that most of the pop sci claims are nonsense.

Because sex and gender politics are so prominent in our lives, some look to evolution for answers to hard questions about the dynamics between men and women, and the social structures that cause us so much ire. Evolutionary psychologists strain to explain our behaviour today by speculating that it relates to an adaptation to Pleistocene life. Frequently these claims are absurd, such as “women wear blusher on their cheeks because it attracts men by reminding them of ripe fruit”.

Purveyors of this kind of pseudoscience are plenty, and most prominent of the contemporary bunch is the clinical psychologist and guru Jordan Peterson, who in lectures asserts this “fact” about blusher and fruit with absolute certainty. Briefly, issues with that idea are pretty straightforward: most fruit is not red; most skin tones are not white; and crucially, the test for evolutionary success is increased reproductive success. Do we have the slightest blip of data that suggests that women who wear blusher have more children than those who don’t? No, we do not.

Peterson is also well known for using the existence of patriarchal dominance hierarchies in a non-specific lobster species as supporting evidence for the natural existence of male hierarchies in humans. Why out of all creation choose the lobster? Because it fits with Peterson’s preconceived political narrative. Unfortunately, it’s a crazily poor choice, and woefully researched. Peterson asserts that, as with humans, lobsters have nervous systems that “run on serotonin” – a phrase that carries virtually no scientific meaning – and that as a result “it’s inevitable that there will be continuity in the way that animals and human beings organise their structures”. Lobsters do have serotonin-based reward systems in their nervous systems that in some way correlate with social hierarchies: higher levels of serotonin relate to increased aggression in males, which is part of establishing mate choice when, as Peterson says, “the most desirable females line up and vie for your attention”.

I’m definitely buying his new book, The Book of Humans: 4 Billion Years, 20,000 Genes, and the New Story of How We Became Us when it becomes available in March. I’ve been praising his last book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, to everyone I know, and I just learned that it’s going to be used as a text in one of the anthropology electives offered at our school. He’s an author you must not miss if you’re interested in good explanations of evolution and genetics.

America is Animal House

The Washington Post has a good story on Christine Blasey Ford, and let’s get this out of the way: she’s also a product of wealthy, preppy, privileged, private school and country club culture. I despise those people. That they are the class that dominates politics is one of the big problems with this country.

But she got out — she fled as far as she could from the kind of people that Brett Kavanaugh instead chose to wallow with. The kind of people who thought getting drunk until they vomited was the height of fun.

Every summer, the “Holton girls” would pack into a rented house for Beach Week, an annual bacchanal of high-schoolers from around the region. The prep schools that formed Ford’s overlapping social circles usually gathered at a Delaware beach town each year. Kavanaugh, in his senior-year yearbook, cited his own membership in the “Beach Week Ralph Club.”

Like Kavanaugh, Ford was part of that alcohol-fueled culture. But those unchaperoned parties, at beach rentals and Bethesda basements alike, frequently left the girls feeling embattled.

“The boys were pretty brutal,” Evers said. “They would do what they could to get you drunk, and do whatever they would try to do to you.”

And then those boys go on to become lawyers and politicians, and do whatever they would try to do to the American people.

I have to say that this Twitter thread (read it all here) pretty much has American culture pegged.

Remember those cheap comedies from the ’80s, like Porkies or Revenge of the Nerds? I remember laughing at them, but what they were really doing is instilling in us a forgiveness for the excesses of Asshole Culture. Sure, they’re committing rape, they’re humiliating women, they’re praising turning the tables on bullies by becoming bullies yourselves, but boys will be boys, and isn’t it funny to peek in the girls’ showers or their bedroom windows and see boobies?

Try watching them now. They haven’t stood the test of time, and are painful to see, because now (I hope!) we can all see that the underdogs are all privileged white boys who have managed to succeed only by finding a new group of victims, usually women, to exercise power over. They are stories about clawing your way up the hierarchy by stomping hard on people, where you win by being cunning and brutal and making your opponents suffer, and your reward is getting the girl, whether she likes it or not.

And today, Cthulhu help us, it’s the people who absorbed those messages who now run the country.

You know, it pains me to say it, because I loved the anti-establishment message of another of those ’80s comedies, Animal House, and it actually does have some funny moments, but…it’s part of the problem. It celebrates sexism (don’t you like to see boobies?), and it is underdogs battling the privileged, but it’s two frat houses fighting for dominance. It’s the frat system that is the problem, and no one ever seems to think of leaving the whole rotten edifice. Then the hero is Bluto Blutarski, who is a crass, crude, ignorant failure who uses bluster and unearned confidence to claw his way up the ladder…he is the archetype of Trump. Real-life Blutarskis are not funny anymore.

It is sort of funny in a laugh-through-the-tears, ironic way that in the closing credits of the movie, they say that Blutarski goes on to become a US senator. It’s too true. That’s why we can still laugh. But do you still laugh when you see all the Blutos actually running congress? Becoming Supreme Court judges? Getting elected president? I don’t think so.

Traps are so manly

I love this video — it speaks the truth.

Although, I have to confess, the bit at the end is a manly punch to the gut, because it’s too true — I never told my father I loved him, and he never said it to me, not because we didn’t, but because Real Men don’t talk about it. I’m not a particularly macho kind of guy, but this poison has affected even me.

I blame the voice of Pappy Jack, and I’m gonna beat him up if I ever meet him.