What will destroy America now?

We’ve got a crumbling infrastructure, we’ve got a know-nothing fool in the White House and a mob of sycophants for Wall Street in congress, climate change is going to inevitably wreak havoc on us, and kids are taking AR-15s to show & tell so they can murder their classmates. All these are minor concerns compared to the true danger to our way of life: the Academy Awards. The wingnuts’ heads are spinning over who won an Oscar.

“The Academy Award ceremonies this week provided the best film and best director Oscar to a violation of the worst possible sexual sin mentioned in Leviticus chapter 18,” Swanson said on his radio program today. “Maybe I’ll just leave it there, I don’t want to defile the ears of my listeners. But this was another milestone in the moral degradation of Hollywood and the nation itself. What it did was it presented the ultimate sexual depravity—and, again, I don’t want anyone thinking what this is—but the ultimate sexual depravity as presented in Leviticus 18 is presented in this movie as a tender and romantic and a beautiful thing. Even saying that is just disgusting.”

Swanson proceeded to read a passage from Leviticus 18 in which God warned the Israelites that they would be destroyed if they dared to engage in such depravity.

“God says, ‘Be careful, I might just bring this to you if you violate my law to the level of egregiousness contained in the moral commands in Leviticus 18,’” Swanson declared. “It’s these abominable practices that are being committed in this nation today and glorified at the highest echelons of the nation.”

The psychology of these people is actually kind of interesting. There are large numbers of people who are obsessed with a distorted version of sexual purity, and they gather in large numbers in buildings called “churches” or “congress”, and they reassure each other that they are the clean ones and everyone outside their narrow little group is dirty. This is not a movie about bestiality; it’s a movie about a sentient being with physical differences from human beings, and that has them frothing in revulsion.

I wonder if they’ve actually seen it. I haven’t seen a lot of fundamentalist fury at the other aspect of the movie that is in defiance of their puritanical mores — the casual acceptance of masturbation and female sexuality as perfectly normal and healthy. It might be a good idea to smuggle showings of The Shape of Water into megachurches to show to the congregations. It might have the same effect on theocrats as Slim Whitman’s yodeling had on the invaders in Mars Attacks.

Just when you were thinking the skeptic movement couldn’t get worse

Ooh, 16 September? I’m sorry, I think I have an appointment to scald my skin off with a bucket of boiling hot vomit that night. I guess I’ll have to pass.

Lawrence Krauss should look at that and be reassured that this too shall pass. You can be an alleged rapist and still be invited to share the stage with one of the Big Names, and that Big Name will still welcome you. It’s quite the cozy little boys’ club.

I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It

How often have you heard those fiercely principle free speech activists say that? Too often. How often do they actually mean it? Rarely.

Here’s a perfect example.

On March 3, a small team of conservative activists converged on Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif. live-streaming their actions on Facebook with this description: “Infiltrating Berkeley’s Marxist Hive.”

“Fucking Commie scum,” shouted one conservative activist, taunting the bookstore employees who met them at the door. He wore an American flag on his shoulders and a “Make America Great Again” hat. “We’re gonna burn down your bookstore, you know that right? he said.

I’ve been to Revolution Books in LA, and they also have stores in New York and Chicago that I know of. I like the people there. They also have a thoughtful and wide range of books, and they’re about more than just selling books — they’re community activists, and they work hard to support the poor, ex-cons, anyone. They’re about as Christ-like an organization as you’ll find anywhere, far more so than most churches. So it’s shocking/not shocking at all to see the MAGA crowd threatening to burn them down, and actually making prolonged assaults on their right to exist.

Marxism is at the heart of the bookstore, founded upon the ideals of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party and author of The New Communism. These values make the store a favorite target of conservative activists, and 2017 brought a wave of intimidation and confrontation. Last September, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos made a brief visit to Berkeley, an event that drew police from around the region. That evening, a band of between 30 and 40 right-wing activists stormed Revolution Books. The attackers also recorded that episode on video, rattling windows and confronting patrons.

Following that initial incident, activists orchestrated eight more visits to the store—posting their exploits in online videos. In one clip, a protester elbows a bookstore supporter in the face, smashing his glasses.

The harassment extends beyond physical confrontations. Right-wing activists also “dox” their targets, sharing opponents’ personal information online. In digital forums, these activists have released contact information for bookstore employees, patrons, and supporters. Revolution Books has received up to 60 calls a day from people mocking or threatening the store.

OK, I can’t get into Bob Avakian myself; if you don’t either, fine. But that shouldn’t matter. How can you use free speech to such an extent that you demand that Nazis be given free reign, while threatening and harassing people who sell books? The alt-right has killed people; Revolution Books offers them employment, help, and information. Yet I’ve heard almost nothing until now about this kind of abuse.

The “free speech” pretense is all a lie.

It’s International Richard Herring Explains to Clueless Men That 19 November is International Men’s Day Day

It’s International Women’s Day! Congratulations, ladies, on the one day a year we’ll acknowledge your existence, but you still aren’t getting a raise, and hey, why should we hire you anyway when you’re just going to get pregnant and go goof off with babies instead of doing your work?

To add further insult, the internet is going to be full of indignant stupid men whining about why women get a special day and they don’t, which means someone has to clean up the garbage. Richard Herring has volunteered to do the cleanup, and has begun his long day of informing dull plodding fools that there is also an International Men’s Day on 19 November. It will be simultaneously entertaining and infuriating.

He’s also using it as an opportunity to raise money for Refuge, a charity for women and children who are victims of domestic violence, so you could also donate to that.

It’s not just the internet

I was listening to Monette Richards and Steve Shives talking about #MeToo this morning while preparing for my class. It’s a good discussion, and I only objected to one thing: they talk for a bit about how social media, YouTube, Facebook, etc. was enabling a bold new wave of rotten people. I’m old enough to remember a time before any of those things, and before the internet even.

It was bad then, too.

But it was different. Case in point: look at the John Birch Society. They were thriving in the 50s — they were more mainstream then — and the 60s, and they were peddling some heinous, hateful shit, even without a YouTube channel. They were recruiting racists, they were putting together marches, they were setting up their own private conferences. Even as a pre-teen I was exposed to their horrid dogma (and was repulsed by it — you know you’re pushing bad propaganda when even an 8-year-old can see through it). They were a minority, but they were influential, in a very bad way, and they were more cloaked.

I think the difference is that back then, if you supported an evil organization, whether it was the KKK or the John Birchers, you would proudly tell them, but you didn’t have a bullhorn to announce to the public at large that you were signing on with the bad people. It was more of a surreptitious growth, just as damaging, but you weren’t seeing it flamboyantly displayed. Nowadays when you think the alt-right is just peachy, you openly support it with an upvote or repost on Facebook, or you leave an ugly misspelled comment on YouTube, and everyone knows, oh yeah, those assholes have another fan.

But the point is that those supporters were doing the same thing way back when. It was just quieter. Nowadays the big difference is that everyone is wearing big bold colors that declare where you stand. I don’t know whether that’s better or worse, because the awful reactionary conservatives were pretty pernicious even without their own Facebook fan page.

You can also wear big bold colors that say you are on the side of righteousness by supporting the conference Monette is organizing, Secular Women Work. Attend or get a t-shirt by donating to their kickstarter.

Ken Ham has some peculiar ideas about taxonomy

He kind of wants to throw it out.

How odd. You know, the classification system he’s complaining about was formulated by Carl Linnaeus, who happened to be a pre-Darwinian Christian who also believed in a literal creation of different “kinds” by a god, just like Ham, but without some of the dogmatic stupidity. He’s the one who put humans in the animal kingdom.

Of particular interest is the fact that Linnaeus classified the human species in the animal kingdom. In different editions, he made numerous modifications to the details, but “man” was now part of the natural world, though distinguished by “his” soul. The term “homo sapiens” to describe our species (literally: “know thyself”) is due to Linnaeus, in the third edition.

The reasoning was straightforward. He thought all organisms were created by his god, beetles, camels, and salmon as well as humans, so he had no reason to separate out Homo sapiens as a distinct, exceptional creation event, unlike all those other species.

I think Ken Ham’s religious purity has been tainted, and he’s leaning towards accepting a natural history for animals, and is desperately shoring up human exceptionalism as a refuge for his incomplete beliefs.

He’s probably going to burn in hell for that.

Thinking like a biologist again

This morning, my wife and I went to the gym, and because the weather the past few days has been the worst — there’s a thick layer of slick ice beneath all the snow — we decided to walk rather than take the car. That may have been a mistake. It’s dangerously slippery for feet as well as wheels, and Mary did take one unpleasant fall (but she’s OK!). It was slow plodding, but the one good thing is that it took us long enough to do the hike that I caught up with my podcasts.

So, as I was picking my way carefully across the glaciers that are our sidewalks, I listened to this episode of Serious Inquiries Only, “Are We Headed for Another Depression? with Dr. Robert S. McElvaine”. Spoiler: the answer is probably, by the way. But they were talking about the history of our two political parties, and how even, over a hundred years ago, the Republican economic policy was all about rewarding the rich and allowing the benefits to trickle down, while the Democrats were all about rewarding the poor and middle class and allowing the benefits to rise up. They cite Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech, which is mostly about monetary policy and is ineffably boring to me, but does include this paragraph:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Reagan didn’t invent trickle-down economics, it’s been the nasty heart of the Republican party for a long time. They’ve been wedded to evil economic policy for a long time.

But then they also pointed out that the Democrats of that time, especially the Southern Democrats, endorsed wicked social policies, being against civil rights and equality, but then as we all know, in the Sixties, thanks to the infamous Southern Strategy, the Republicans adopted the regressive civil rights stance of the Southern Democrats, and there was a major recombination event. Before 1960, the Republicans had bad economic policy + better (at least, neutral) social policy and the Democrats were better economic policy + terrible social policy. After the Recombination Event of the Southern Strategy, Republicans were bad economic policy + terrible social policy, while the Democrats were better economic policy + better social policy.

OMG, I thought, this was elementary genetics. This is bog-standard theory for one of the benefits of recombination — it can combine deleterious alleles at different loci into single individuals who can then, by their elimination by natural selection, purge the gene pool of multiple bad alleles at once. For example, as mentioned in this recent paper.

Current theory proposes that sex can increase genetic variation and produce high fitness genotypes if genetic associations between alleles at different loci are non-random. In case beneficial and deleterious alleles at different loci are in linkage disequilibrium, sex may i) recombine beneficial alleles of different loci, ii) liberate beneficial alleles from genetic backgrounds of low fitness, or iii) recombine deleterious mutations for more effective elimination.

Cool beans! Now the Southern Strategy makes biological sense to me, at least.

All we need to do is purge the country of the Republican party, and we clean out two deleterious traits at once. That’s something to look forward to, anyway.

Most Minnesotans would like better gun control laws. Most.

A Minnesota Democrat, Linda Slocum, has proposed some sensible gun control regulations for the state.

Slocum’s bill would expand the definition of assault weapons and ban those weapons, prohibit many private gun sales, outline felony charges for possession of bump stocks, silencers and high-capacity magazines, restrict ammunition sales to licensed dealers, and outlaw gun ownership for individuals who fail to pay court-ordered child support.

Those restrictions sound reasonable. Heck, they sound excellent, and I’d vote for Slocum if she were my representative. However, you can guess what happened next.

Thousands of angry emails have poured into the office of state Rep. Linda Slocum (D-Richfield) since she introduced the proposed restrictions, but one of those stood out, reported KMSP-TV.

“He threatened to kill me,” Slocum told the TV station. “(He said,) I have my gun, and I’m ready to come and get you — and it was very threatening.”

Other messages compared her to Hitler, called her a whale or included lewd comments and profanity, but Slocum said she would seek charges if that man called again.

One of Slocum’s aides received what he described as a threatening call while working late on Feb. 26, but state police investigated and decided not to press charges, reported the Pioneer Press.

“He said, ‘You better hide because I have my gun and I know where you are,’” said legislative assistant Adrian Benjamin, who reported the threat to capitol police — which then passed on the report to the Minnesota State Patrol.

And there you have it. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to get rational gun laws in this country — because so many of the gun-fondlers are irrational, violent lunatics, and they are armed.