They’re afraid! And not very bright.

Nazis loooooove Nietzsche. Or at least, their idea of Nietzsche — the problem is that they don’t understand him. It does make for amusing reading to see someone with a basic understanding of his philosophy tear into Richard Spencer’s juvenile comprehension.

Nietzsche was a lot of things — iconoclast, recluse, misanthrope — but he wasn’t a racist or a fascist. He would have shunned the white identity politics of the Nazis and the alt-right. That he’s been hijacked by racists and fascists is partly his fault, though. His writings are riddled with contradictions and puzzles. And his fixation on the future of humankind is easily confused with a kind of social Darwinism.

But in the end, people find in Nietzsche’s work what they went into it already believing. Which is why the alt-right, animated as they are by rage and discontent, find in Nietzsche a mirror of their own resentments. If you’re seeking a reason to reject a world you don’t like, you can find it anywhere, especially in Nietzsche.

It reminds me of that quote from A Fish Called Wanda.

Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it.

But while they’re just dull-witted apes, they’ve got a dangerous agenda and can do great harm to the country. That’s why it’s good news to learn that the Nazis are terrified right now.

In the days since the Charlottesville rally and as white nationalists have been identified in photos on social media, white supremacists have fretted —often self-pityingly—about the risks posed by social media mobs bent on exposing their identities. In one forum thread on the Daily Stormer, which recently went dark after being cut off by both Google and GoDaddy, a user lamented that the peril of doxxing made attending a rally too scary for him. “The thought of getting outed as ‘white supremacists’ to our employers and possibly losing our jobs is a horrifying prospect,” the user Ignatz wrote. If forced to choose between a rally, which could bring him unwanted exposure, or supporting his white family, he says he would choose the latter.

That’s a bit alien to me — I have the kind of job, with tenure, that would allow me to come out as a white supremacist with little risk of losing my income (losing the respect of all of my colleagues is another thing). I don’t, not because I’m afraid of getting fired, but because this white superiority bullshit is wrong. And I can also use those protections to openly decry racism and misogyny, as every tenured professor should.

Those in the movement who would dare to self-doxx are in the minority, though they exist. “Of course you’re going to have some of those guys who are out there publishing under their own names like Richard Spencer, and there’s constant arguments among the right wingers about whether everyone should [go public],” says Hankes. In the forums, one user struck a defiant tone after being doxxed, vowing “never to cuck out” despite public threats against them. “But, by and large, people are scared because of the exact same reasons you’d expect,” says Hankes. “It’s hard to get a job, hard to make a living, hard to have a normal social life when all your friends and family know you believe in ethnic cleansing.”

It seems just to me. You should have a hard time fitting in and finding support from your community if what you do is advocate is the murder and forced emigration of members of that community.

It’s only appropriate to close with another movie quote, and yes, I am aware of the irony of the fact that the humans in this movie are the fascists.

Dysfunctional academics

The Avital Ronell story was ugly enough, but now more critics are emerging. This one is from a former colleague of Ronell’s who was displaced by her as head of the department, so there’s some obvious disgruntlement that might warrant dialing it down a few notches, but even so…the German department at NYU was a dysfunctional mess, largely because of Ronell’s ego.

Before I offered Avital Ronell her job, I’d had many in-depth conversations with her. She engaged my queries with what seemed like understanding. She said she’d throw herself into the building of an integrated study and research program. She promised actively to contribute to department research, conferences and publications. Once she had assumed the position, however, she broke all her promises. She did her best to sabotage the program. She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research. Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism. Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable unless it cited Derrida and Ronell.

Whoa. No one would stand for that kind of nonsense in any department I’ve ever been part of — to dictate content in student work is simply not done. Somehow, I suspect that citing Ronell to criticize her work would not be acceptable.

From her second semester onward Professor Ronell reigned with an authoritarian hand, gloved in her well-proven hypocrisy. Instructors whom I had brought to the department either submitted to her regime or lost their jobs, always according to the letter of the law and in discussion with the dean, never in consultation with members of the German department. Once, she drafted a secret dissenting opinion against the unanimous decision of a commission and submitted it to the dean. The protest we as a department made to the dean against the dismissal of a junior professor fell on deaf ears. He would make no decision that ran counter to the will of the chairperson. The cynicism of Professor Ronell’s reasoning was hard to beat. The dismissal of this junior colleague was in this professor’s best interests, she explained, for she would not have felt comfortable in the department. In fact, Ronell wanted this colleague to leave because she was not prepared to be subservient. Someone else was found to fill in. Sure, the new hire had no experience, but at least she was ready to submit to Professor Ronell.

Now that I have seen — some deans see their role as one of imposing their vision of the discipline in the department. It never works. It only demoralizes the faculty.

The quality of teaching in the department unraveled. The carefully planned program of teaching German literature was ignored. Many students arrived in the department with minimal knowledge of German literature or history. The courses that were meant to correct this no longer existed. Now philosophy, from Hegel to Judith Butler, was taught. But multidisciplinarity quickly deteriorated into dilettantism. Students were encouraged to take philosophy seminars at other universities. Soon, students who had learned about deconstruction and feminism in Paris, but who had no idea who Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth and Alfred Döblin were, were no exception in the department. As one student told me, “We study in a German department where French theory is taught in English.”

I am amazed even today that we succeeded in preventing the inclusion of a clause in the German department’s charter that would have exempted students from mastering the German language. It was Professor Ronell who, in all seriousness, made this suggestion. In fact, however, she admitted students who spoke English and French, but not a word of German — but they had studied in Paris and proven in their term papers that they were Derrida connoisseurs.

She tried to make knowledge of German optional in a German department? OK. That sounds a bit off. That’s like a biology department deciding students can graduate with no knowledge of biology, as long as they know some physics.

And then the article gets brutal.

Now, however, a few commentators will have us know that the case of Ronell is a fresh example of the oppression of a leftist feminist by conservative white men. This political polarization is crude, and its goal transparent: This is war, and ranks are closing around Ronell.

Leftist? Avital Ronell’s father figures are Martin Heidegger and, often quoted and paraphrased, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Who could possibly describe them as left-leaning theorists? If Ronell has a political agenda, it is the liquidation of the legacy of 1968.

In the German newspapers Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ronell has been elevated to the “shining light” of feminist studies. I had to read this description twice before I could believe my eyes. Anyone trying to find a substantial contribution to feminist thought in her work will be searching for a long time. And “shining light”? If pure ignorance did not produce this phrase, then it is simply the reality-denying militancy of ideology. If “light” is supposed to refer to the Enlightenment, this is also a perversion of standards. Few other books in recent years have served the Counter-Enlightenment as well as Avital Ronell’s books. Her hypocrisy serves the commentators’ lack of insight. She likes to cast herself as diabolical and loves the color black — but only in the sanctuary of her inner circle. As soon as her audience grows beyond those confines, she performs a new role, namely, that of the fragile and vulnerable woman.

Everyone has an ideology. That she told everyone what her label was supposed to be doesn’t mean she fit it well, and we should not judge (or avoid judging) people because of the banner they fly. Leftists can be bad people, too.

You, thou, they, who?

I’ve got to thank my students, who helped me out with this pronoun stuff. It’s a habit, but it’s not too hard to break.

Yes, practice—I am trying my best to master this new way of using they despite the fact that, make no mistake, it’s hard. In contrast to the deliberateness of writing, speaking casually is a largely subconscious, not to mention very rapid, act. In addition, pronouns, like conjunctions and suffixes, are a very deeply seated feature of language, generated from way down deep in our minds, linked to something as fundamental to human conception as selfhood in relation to the other and others. I’ve been using they in one way since the late 1960s, and was hardly expecting to have to learn a new way of using it decades later. I thought I had English pretty much under my belt.

We’ve been trained for years to address people one way, and he doesn’t even mention one aspect to it: not acknowledging the gender of the person you’re talking about has been considered offensive.

But as McWhorter explains, “they” is fine as a plural pronoun, has been for centuries, and has only been shunned by those weird grammarians who try to impose the structure of old dead languages on English. I’ve been finding it easier and easier to adapt to reasonable pronoun usage.

Interesting. Tennis is a 3-player game?

I don’t tennis, and I don’t watch the game on TV, so I’m always being surprised by new facts. For instance, women’s singles tennis is actually a game between two women and a man sitting in a high chair, who is an asshole.

Chair umpire Carlos Ramos managed to rob not one but two players in the women’s U.S. Open final. Nobody has ever seen anything like it: An umpire so wrecked a big occasion that both players, Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams alike, wound up distraught with tears streaming down their faces during the trophy presentation and an incensed crowd screamed boos at the court. Ramos took what began as a minor infraction and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies in the history of tennis, all because he couldn’t take a woman speaking sharply to him.

I guess this means Carlos Ramos won the US Open. Does he get a trophy? At least, do some sports journalists meet him in the locker room to stick a microphone in his face and ask him what was going through his mind during his big win?

I don’t understand sports, but I think I understand masculine arrogance.

True Facts about DEVO

I did not know that Devo was founded in the aftermath of the Kent State massacre.

With campus shut down until the fall and nowhere to go, Casale and friends would decamp to the Akron home of Mark Mothersbaugh, a part-time Kent State art student whose graffiti art had caught Casale’s attention. Parsing through the aftermath, the pair began collaborating, drawing on Dada and other Interwar art movements to create bizarro, disconcerting takes on agitprop posters, 50s ad graphics, and religious pamphlets. They also started playing music—Casale on bass, Mothersbaugh vocalizing over an early Moog synth—hoping to capture the sound of things falling apart.

Even before the shootings, Casale says he’d felt American society regressing. He even had a name for the phenomenon—“devolution,” or “devo” for short—an art and literature concept he’d conceived with classmate and poet Bob Lewis, who also played in the band for a brief stint. It was a response, Casale says, to the failed promise of utopian progress peddled by post-WWII politicians and consumer culture. But what began as an in-joke, fodder for late night discussions and Casale’s graduate work as an art student, took on a new gravity and urgency in the wake of the Kent State shootings.

I did not know anything about the band’s history, but I did figure out that they were all about subversion and highlighting the malignant influence of all-consuming capitalism on the country. It’s nice to see it spelled out. Although it’s not as if Devo was ever subtle.

No one talked about brands in the 1970s in the way the word is used today. Brands were limited to Cheerios or Levis or Marlboros. Other than The Who making a joke on their Who Sell Out LP, and Captain Beefheart on Safe as Milk, there wasn’t even a nod to the irony of “rebellious” rock acts being part of the mainstream, corporate, commercial grind. I was quite aware of that disparity from the beginning. We knew that rebellion and its various poses (leather, chains, long hair) was obsolete and cornpone. We played with that conflicted duality in all that we presented, musically and visually, because that was central to the whole concept. There was nothing we did that was not on purpose. Nothing that I could not articulate. We were a a self-proclaimed canary in a coal mine warning people about the emerging dangers of technology as a god to be worshipped, rather than as a tool to be exploited, and the centralized Corporate Feudal State that seemed to be barreling full speed ahead.

Our brand was real freedom, rather than freedom as an advertising campaign where the consumer was told how to be free. We were performance artists when there was not a label for that either. We were pioneers who got scalped. We were roundly criticized and called “sell-outs” by the rock press for creating self-designed merchandise. We were attacked by preeminent music critic, Robert Hilburn, for integrating film with our live show, where characters and objects were in sync with our musical, theatrical performance. He said, “If we wanted videos, we could go to an arcade. Rock ‘n’ roll or stay home Devo!” Maybe we should have stayed home. But then no one would agree that De-evolution is real as they readily do today.

They were prescient, but they could do nothing to stop the forces of de-evolution. And now we live in the Age of Trump.

Congratulations to Nick Fish

He’s been named as the president of American Atheists, succeeding David Silverman. He’s a good, safe choice, having been involved in AA’s affairs for years, and he’s always come across as one of the good guys in my conversations with him — keeping in mind that we’re both white men, and we have the remarkable ability to see each other in the best possible light. In terms of experience alone he was probably the best candidates, although I do wish the committee that appointed him had put a higher priority on diversity.

I thought this comment on the announcement was a good one, though.

I thought this was a perfect opportunity for American Atheists to appoint a woman and / or minority as president. I just can’t get excited about another white dude.

Yeah. I have nothing against Nick, but at a time when atheists need to find common cause with other social justice movements to remain relevant, he’s got an uphill climb in front of him. He will have to work twice as hard to overcome the stereotype that a white dude is going to be privileged and blind to the major conflicts in his movement. He doesn’t have to — it’s really easy for us to coast — but he’s not going to make a mark if he doesn’t work to correct the stigma of atheism.

I have a suggestion for him. Start with that announcement. Right after the comment I quoted above, there is a triggered dude sealioning away about racism against white people. He’s going on and on. Someone at American Atheists, not necessarily Nick Fish, ought to stomp on that crap hard. That’s the kind of idiocy that has to be nipped in the bud, or it’s going to get worse…has been getting worse.

Then there’s another kind of comment.

Well hopefully he won’t be a liberal cuck!

I hope he will be. But if AA is just going to allow that kind of toxic noise to pollute the discussion, he’s doomed no matter what. Shut it down.

Then there’s a bunch of comments that really surprised me.

They could have picked a good-looking one !

Why did they have to use the photo with a mean looking face? Is that really what we want to say about who we are?

Is it just me or he looks creepy

Wow. Criticisms of his appearance? Good luck dealing with those assholes, Nick.

And finally, these twits:

I didn’t know my atheism had a president?

“Named” as new President? I really don’t care. I’m sure the stocks won’t be sky-rocketing over this news. But, was he named president, or voted in as president? I don’t recall seeing a ballot. Didn’t Castro call himself President too?

American Atheists is a professional organization, emphasis on organization, with rules and responsibilities and officers, so god damn fucking of course they have members with specific roles. I am so fed up with these clueless atheists who are so stupidly against any and all authority that they refuse to acknowledge the importance of expertise and regulations and duties within a function unit above the level of the individual. Someone has to do the work, dudes, and clearly it ain’t gonna be you shit-shovelers. You don’t like it, you don’t have to be a member.

I know there is going to be disappointment that a woman or minority did not get this prominent position. But to overcome that setback in opinion, the next step is to crack down on the racist/misogynist element in organized atheism. Be an accomplice with the minority community that is poorly represented in the leadership to take steps in the right direction, and maybe we’ll all see you as an asset.

Also, don’t use your authority as a way to canoodle. Just generally good advice all around.

Spider update!

Bad news, everyone. Fred is dead. Betty ate him. I’m hoping he at least fulfilled his biological destiny before getting his guts sucked out.

More bad news: as I expected, baby spiders are murderous little cannibals, and there’s been a fair bit of fratricide going on, even though they had plenty of fruit flies strolling about. I’ve now separated them all and the survivors now have their own little chambers with their own little fruit fly to gnaw on.

I made a quick video update. Don’t watch it if you’ve got the arachnophobia.

Here’s a story about a lab that has a substantially greater investment in spider science than I do.