Raining!

We’re in the middle of one of those summer thunderstorms — you know, the constant rumble, a deluge of rain, occasional flashes of lightning arcing against a light gray sky. I did my rounds this morning, going to the gym, tending to fish, getting soaked to the bone despite carrying an umbrella (they are useless when it’s windy), and I passed through the science building atrium, which is roofed with these large skylights that rumble when the rain drums on it, and caught a quick video on my phone. It doesn’t do it justice — I should go in with my good microphone and just capture the sound for an hour or two. It’s very soothing.

Important safety tip: the science atrium is not the place to hang out if there is a tornado alert. Any other time, it’s great, but during a tornado it might just rain shards of glass.

Has anyone ever been inspired by a school administrator?

I’m asking sincerely. I’m sure it happens. I just don’t know of any cases. I can think back and make a long list of teachers who got me excited about diverse topics, but administration is a thankless job, and there isn’t as much opportunity to interact with students in a positive way.

And then, of course, way too many administrators are craven bullies. Like the nameless “officials” who cut Lulabel Seitz’s commencement speech at the instant she criticized the school. It’s at about the 4 minute mark in this video, which also includes Seitz giving the uncensored version.

Here’s what was cut:

“The class of 2018 has demonstrated time and time again that we may be a new generation, but we are not too young to speak up, to dream and to create change, which is why, even when some people on this campus, those same people —” Seitz said before the mic went off. Her speech, then barely audible, continued, “… in which some people defend perpetrators of sexual assault and silence their victims.”

People in the audience began yell, “Let her speak!” School officials did not turn her microphone back on.

Seitz has accused another student of sexual assault, and the school administration closed ranks to silence her. But we can attach a name to at least one of them!

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the school’s principal, David Stirrat, stands by the decision, saying, “We were trying to make sure our graduation ceremony was appropriate and beautiful.”

How sweet. Are you also as concerned about making sure the sexual assaults on your students are appropriate and beautiful?

David Stirrat, you are why I do not have fond memories of any high school administrators, who were all button-down conservative a-holes who were more interested in providing cover for business and religious leaders in the community, and not at all about helping students.

Morris just became a little more civilized

We now have a coffeeshop that is open on Sundays!

My plans to see Morris become a happier place are advancing. I have a list.

  • Coffeeshop with longer hours open every day

  • A regional airport

  • Henry Kissinger chokes on his own blood and dies

  • A good bagel place

  • A deep water seaport to the Pacific Ocean

  • For the entire Trump family and their cronies to be arrested and convicted for corruption and fraud, and to spend the rest of their lives in jail or in poverty, whichever makes them more miserable

  • World Peace

See? I’m not asking much.

Sometimes, old people have strange ideas

A novelist I’d never heard of has things to say.

Modern men are turning to gay affairs because they are “terrified” of women, Jilly Cooper has suggested.

That makes no sense. I’m afraid of X so I do Y? I have a fear of heights so I’ve decided to take up cave diving. Right.

I think gay men are gay because they are attracted to men, not because they’re necessarily repelled by women.

And hey, by this logic, shouldn’t all women be lesbians?

In a somewhat scathing verdict, the famously racy novelist said that men also cry “all the time”.

Men have as much capacity for emotion as women. This one is at least true in the spirit of the answer. I don’t understand what is “scathing” about the comment.

She added that women wear short skirts but have “do not touch tattooed across their knees” – and said she was “worried” about the effect the Me Too campaign may have on views of courtship.

She is an erotic romance novelist, I guess. I’m getting the impression I wouldn’t like her books very much, since her romantic heroes must be bold men who see a skirt as an invitation to get under it, and the heroine better not complain about it.

Back in my courtin’ days, in the long long ago, #MeToo wouldn’t have affected me, and I would not have been afraid of women, because I never intimidated anyone into forced sex, nor did I harass anyone or take inappropriate liberties with women. I think that’s the case with most men.

It’s only the assholes who should be afraid.

Retired for “health reasons”

One thing I’ll agree with: Karl Kjer was one sick fuck. He was an entomologist at UC Davis who quietly retired “for health reasons” in 2016, and no one bothered to publicly mention what was learned in 2015.

“When I first started working with Kjer, we were going to set up a really nice imaging system for publications or just high-def microphotography [of] specimens we were going to use for his research,” the junior specialist said. “Since we did not get our imaging system first, we decided to kind of prepare for it, and so he [Kjer] asked me to order two hard drives.”

After opening files on just one of the two university-purchased hard drives stored in Kjer’s office over Winter Break, the junior specialist and volunteer found a lot of “terrible images that he recorded of quite a lot of women without them knowing.”

“There was a lot of folders of internet pornography that he downloaded, and we kind of closed the window and looked at each other like, ‘What did we just find?’” the junior specialist said. “At a later point, after we looked through it and made notes [of] when they were taken, when did he last access them — they were spanning at least all the way back from 2010, up to 2012, 2013. A lot of them said that he was still accessing them up to 2015, when I was working.”

In addition to the internet pornography stored on the hard drives, the junior specialist estimates that there were more than 10 videos Kjer had recorded himself, including a video of him installing the camera in the bathroom in his home in New Jersey. It appeared the camera was pointed at the shower and some individuals being filmed were partially clothed while others were nude — “all of them definitely did not know they were being filmed or imaged at the time.”

He had been clandestinely filming students in his bathroom, and filing the videos away in his porn collection on hard drives he purchased with grant money. That’s enough to get one fired, but not enough to bring down public shame on their heads, I guess. Gwen Pearson has some cogent comments on the university’s efforts to dismiss him on the down low.

Pearson discussed what she says is a pattern in the scientific community where a male professional will engage in inappropriate behavior, resign and quickly find another job.

“Right about the time they’re called on it, and proceedings begin, if they resign, it’s over because they’re no longer an employee and the university no longer has any sway over that,” Pearson said. “Very often what happens is […] someone will get in trouble and resign, start over at a new institution and their bad behavior doesn’t necessarily follow them from institution to institution.”

An example of this pattern, which Pearson discussed, is that of the accusations of sexual misconduct as well as research misconduct aimed at University of Kentucky Professor of Entomology James Harwood, who subsequently resigned from his position. The university decided not to pursue an investigation after Harwood’s resignation.

“I’ve seen it happen a couple of times where someone resigns and back channel talk is all — they get caught doing something they shouldn’t have done — and they get a new job,” Pearson said. “It really baffles me why, when there’s such a huge pool of talented scientists, why do we keep rehiring people who we know behave badly?”

I get it. Universities don’t want to have to deal with an ugly mess in their own back yard, so it’s in their interests to quietly shuffle the bad actor away. It’s a strategy for evading responsibility, and that’s how it persists.

Hate doesn’t necessarily win elections

Some of you may have seen this awful video that was making the rounds a while back.

In May, Jazmina Saavedra streamed video of herself harassing a transgender woman in a Denny’s bathroom. For half an hour, Saavedra paced in the restaurant, shouted at the transgender woman through the stall wall, and laughed with a friend about how she carries a stun gun and pepper spray for situations like that.

“So, that guy is violating my right to use the ladies’ room here, and he’s saying he’s a lady! Stupid guy,” Saavedra said in the video, which Facebook removed.

The most appalling thing about it was Saavedra’s smugness: she was full of sanctimonious and self-righteousness as she harrassed this poor woman who was just trying to use the bathroom, and she also made unsupported accusations that she was a drug user. And the thing of it is, Saavedra was the one who posted the video of her own disgraceful behavior! She was proud of it!

She was also a Republican political candidate at the time. Good news: She lost the election in a landslide. We need more happy results like that.

Describing a problem isn’t an explanation

Once again, we’ve got people behaving badly, and numerous think pieces popping up stating that people are behaving badly. Here’s a reasonably good example with a good summary of the problem that somehow doesn’t resolve anything: Why are (some) Star Wars fans so toxic?

I don’t know about you, but when I see a question posed as a headline, I expect that somewhere in the body there will be an answer proposed and argued. We do get a good description of the problem, at least.

It’s a poisonous tributary of fanboyism that appears again and again. Earlier this week, Kelly Marie Tran, the Vietnamese-American actor who plays Rose (and the first WoC in a lead role in the saga) deleted all her Instagram posts. While Tran hasn’t specifically stated that online trolling is the reason she left social media, since the release of The Last Jedi in December she’s been on the receiving end of a torrent of online abuse. Some comments voiced dissatisfaction with the character of Rose itself, or deemed it necessary to attack Tran personally about her performance. Others were more concerned about her gender and her race. For an idea of what she’s been dealing with, one individual even went so far as to amend Rose’s entry on the Wookiepedia Star Wars wiki to read, “Ching Chong Wing Tong is a dumbass fucking character Disney made and is a stupid, retarded, and autistic love interest for Finn. She better die in the coma because she is a dumbass bitch.” If constant invective like this is the reason for Tran leaving social media – if she thought it best to sever the unbroken line of communication between her and the type of person who thinks sending this to a stranger is the right thing to do – then you can hardly blame her.

That individual? Total asshole. An embarrassment to his mother and his entire family line. Someone who ought to be fired from his job, his girlfriend ought to leave him, his computer and his phone thrown in a dumpster, and who should be quarantined until he gets extensive retraining in how to be a human being. But what is the problem with Star Wars fandom? (And note that we could substitute lots of different things for the words “Star Wars”: atheism/skepticism, veganism, Unix, beanie babies, science, whatever). The question is “WHY?”, not “WHO?”

I am so goddamn familiar with this ongoing problem that it doesn’t help to see another turd bobbing about in yet another genre punchbowl. I’m cynical enough to expect the situation to arise everywhere, and I don’t think it contributes to a solution to try to analyze the punch, rather than the turd.

Anyone who followed GamerGate is probably already drawing parallels between the misogyny of that sorry affair and these hissy fits in reaction to harmless pieces of family entertainment. The most vocal offenders in Tran’s case, as always, are an infinitesimal minority of the millions around the world who enjoy the films, or at least don’t feel the need to harass those they perceive as being to blame if they don’t. These males – and it is males – feel they have ownership over a piece of entertainment: that geekdom is their safe space, theirs alone, and the newfound mass popularity of the genre is bringing a lot of casuals into their hitherto predominantly straight, white, male dojo. Diversity isn’t what some of them want. Which is bizarre, considering the benefits of diversity are what quite a lot of sci-fi is actually about. But it’s not what these people believe they paid for, and therefore see themselves of having part-ownership of. The sense of entitlement is staggering.

OK, there’s something odd going on here. I know about fandoms, I’ve participated in a few. At their purest, they’re easy to describe: it’s people meeting and saying “You like this thing, too? I love this thing!” and jumping up and down while simultaneously gushing about their favorite part. I’ve seen it at science fiction conventions, and at evolutionary biology meetings. It’s beautiful. It’s community. It isn’t flawless, because there are always those annoying human problems: there’s always someone competitive who has to show that they love that thing more, and there are bad attempts to gloss over misbehavior, like that Big Name fondles young fans, because they love the thing so much that we mustn’t mention anything that might taint it, but this feels like something different. This isn’t the usual clumsy, socially maladroit behavior of overly-enthusiastic geeks, or the fumbling efforts to willfully avoid seeing bad behavior.

This feels like something intentional and malicious.

You know you can belong to multiple fandoms at once, right? When you talk about the people in Star Wars fandom, you’re actually talking about a collection of very different overlapping interests. There are the cosplayers who see it as a target-rich environment with many exotic costumes, but they may also view Final Fantasy fandom as another fine place to play. There are cinemaphiles who just adore the approach to technology of the movies, and look at other science fiction movies through the same lens. This is not a problem. It’s actually a plus when people with different perspectives on the same thing interact.

Except…I think there’s another kind of fandom that has been growing for decades now. Let’s call it the Dark Fandom, or DF for short, just to pin a label on it. This is a fandom that celebrates snideness, jeering, crudity, and taking a dump in the punchbowl. It’s 4chan/8chan. It’s a substantial chunk of Reddit. It’s YouTube comment sections. It’s community, too. It’s people coming together and saying, “You hate feminism? I hate feminism even more! High five!” or “Hey, you like trashing parties? Let’s invade rec.pets.cats and piss off some normies!” (Yeah, this has been a phenomenon since the early days of usenet).

This isn’t necessarily a problem with Star Wars fandom. It’s a problem with that segment of Star Wars fandom that overlaps with the DF. Or the atheists who are card-carrying members of the DF. Or the gamers who enjoy a particular video game, but think the game culture could use some more DF. Just as cosplayers might want to participate in a fandom with cool costumes, these people want to join in with more cool shitposting.

That’s the real problem. The question is what are we going to do about it?

We need ways to identify DF members, first of all. I’ve generally found that anyone who is proud to have participated in 4chan, for instance, is almost always pure poison. Anti-feminism isn’t a coherent position, it’s simply a pathology of bros, so that’s a useful marker. But 4chan was anonymous, not every discussion is about feminism, and people can use DF tactics for all kinds of causes.

We need to ostracize the DF. We all sort of do this already: someone who is disruptive and who contributes nothing but complaints and bitterness tends to be unwelcome at meetings and in any kind of productive interaction. But all too often we let them linger on, maintaining an association. We usually think of a synthesis of overlapping fandoms as a good thing, and we like to consider a diversity of interests to be a strength. But the DF is a cancer that weakens us when we allow it to persist.

We need to help people get out of the DF. It’s only a first step to kick out members of the DF — we also need a way to let them back in if they change. We need standards of behavior for our own fandoms, so people understand what it takes to be a respectable member of the Star Wars fan club, or whatever.

The bottom line is that we need to recognize that not all fandoms are good, not all are compatible, and take steps to deny associations with shitposting Dark Fandoms, like the ones flourishing in various media right now.