Who came up with this stupid idea?

Students in Parkland, Florida are now expected to use transparent plastic backpacks, as a way to prevent future mass murders. This makes no sense.

The “$1.05” tag is meant to suggest how much the NRA pays per student to Florida government officials to kill gun laws.

The article goes on to discuss “better” alternatives, like installing metal detectors at all entrances. I don’t get it. These are all pointless superficial measures to avoid addressing the problem at its root, the easy availability of weapons that have no utility other than mass murder. The kids are going to be so pleased that their worth has probably increased by several dollars more: (NRA donations + cost of backpacks + cost other useless measures) / number of Florida students. Yay!

First step in writing about others is self-awareness

Check out this thread. A man tries to prove that he can write good woman characters, and all of his writing samples are like cheesy porn.

Then it descends into parody as the women on the thread are challenged to “describe yourself like a male author would”.

So I thought about how a male author would describe me, and given my experience with the nastier side of the internet, it was easy: they would just write “cuck”.

Maybe it would help if we fired all the oracles and listened to the criticisms

I have my disagreements with Chris Stedman — he’s kind of representing the ooey-gooey side of atheism, while I’m typically on the harsh, strongly worded side (I know, you’re surprised). So, goddamn it, I hate it when I have to admit that he’s right, and that my side has been too accommodating to the fanatically godless side, which just luuurves ’em some alt-righties.

I’m still an activist, but after nearly a decade of active participation in online atheism (a loose community of forums, blogs, YouTube channels, and fandoms of figures like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and writer Sam Harris), I mostly stepped away from the online side of atheism a few years ago. One of the biggest reasons for this was my growing concern over its failure to adequately address some of its darker currents—such as overt sexism, racism, and anti-Muslim bias.

I’ve been backing away myself, and I was smack in the middle of online atheism for years. It’s for the same reasons.

By neglecting to address its darker currents, online atheism has perhaps unknowingly planted the seeds for the alt-right’s harvest. Three years ago Reddit’s atheism subforum, perhaps the largest community of atheists on the internet, was found to be the website’s third most bigoted—meaning not just tolerant of overt displays of bigotry, but actively supportive of them. Last year, the Daily Beast revealed that the study’s most bigoted Reddit subforum, the Red Pill, was founded by Robert Fisher, a Republican state lawmaker who is also an atheist.

The problem is more widespread than figures like Spencer and Fisher, too. While championing liberal views on some issues, many of atheism’s most prominent advocates—the majority of whom are, like me, cisgender white men—have expressed troubling sentiments that align with views held by the alt-right and faced little to no consequences.

Last year Sam Harris hosted Charles Murray—who has famously argued that black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs than whites—on his immensely popular podcast, calling Murray a victim of “a politically correct moral panic.” Harris has in the past called for profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.” (When I challenged him on this, he suggested I “wear a t-shirt stating ‘There is no God and I am Gay’ in Islamic countries and report back on [my] experiences.”) Outspoken atheist Bill Maher rightly came under fire last summer for using racist language on air. He has also argued that “most Muslim people in the world do condone violence,” told “transgendered” [ sic] people to be quiet, and gave alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos a sympathetic interview on his HBO show. Lawrence Krauss, a popular skeptic who now faces numerous sexual harassment allegations, has criticized the #MeToo movement. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist in the world, has mocked women for speaking out about experiences of sexual harassment, shared a video ridiculing feminists, and railed against “SJWs” (short for “social justice warriors,” a derisive term for social justice activists). Look beyond atheism’s biggest names and you will find vocal Trump supporters like author Robert M. Price and immensely popular atheist YouTubers with more than a million subscribers. Their views are likely shared by more atheists than many would like to admit.

Yeah, what good is atheism as a philosophy if it can’t even find within itself a reason to condemn Nazis, bombing campaigns against Muslim countries, and discrimination and harassment against women? I know that several of the big organizations, like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and American Atheists, are quite clear that they are pro-feminism and anti-Nazi, but it seems like the base have been drifting away to the siren song of the anti-Muslim, racist right (or, as they prefer to call themselves to the point that the word has lost all meaning “centrists”).

Trav Mamone has identified one of the deeper problems in the atheist movement.

One thing I suggest is getting rid of the concept of the atheist celebrity. By declaring just a handful of prominent atheist activists to be the movement’s leaders, it creates a hierarchal system where the same arguments against God get repeated ad nauseam, and newer ideas about how to put humanist values into action are ignored. Everyone should be a leader in the atheist movement, whether that person is fighting for church and state separation in a small town in Pennsylvania or creating a community for liberal atheists living in the Bible Belt. Martin Luther King once said, “You don’t have to know the theory of relativity in order serve.”

There’s always got to be a figurehead, apparently — even MLK has become one. I agree wholeheartedly that we have to get out of that stupid “four horsemen” mindset and recognize that an effective movement has ten thousand leaders, and no one is just a follower, and we’re always ready to criticize, and listen to criticism. Another of our problems is that our “leaders” have been remarkably thin-skinned and unwilling to tolerate disagreement, let alone act on it to change course. We need to be more adaptable.

Until we achieve that kind of breadth and resilience, though, clearly we need to make Trav the King of Atheism. All bow down and worship their wise words.

Sullivanian mendacity

As if we should have ever doubted it, Andrew Sullivan let his racist freak flag fly again in his column in New York magazine, which seems to be his venue of choice for exposing the tendencies he typically denied before.

Last weekend, a rather seismic op-ed appeared in the New York Times, and it was for a while one of the most popular pieces in the newspaper. It’s by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard, who carefully advanced the case that there are genetic variations between subpopulations of humans, that these are caused, as in every other species, by natural selection, and that some of these variations are not entirely superficial and do indeed overlap with our idea of race. This argument should not be so controversial — every species is subject to these variations — and yet it is. For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans. Our large brains and the societies we have constructed with them, many argue, swamp almost all genetic influences.

Humans, in this view, are the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution, the only species where, for example, the natural division of labor between male and female has no salience at all, the only species, in fact, where natural variations are almost entirely social constructions, subject to reinvention. We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates, to be written on solely by culture. All differences between men and women are a function of this social effect; as are all differences between the races. If, in the aggregate, any differences in outcome between groups emerge, it is entirely because of oppression, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. And it is a matter of great urgency that we use whatever power we have to combat these inequalities.

That last paragraph is jaw-dropping — apparently, he thinks he has accurately described the views of the academic left, of people like me. He has not. This is a collection of willful lies and distortions.

the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution: I’ve only ever heard this absurd claim from the kind of racist who accuses opponents of “cultural marxism”. It is stupidly false. No one thinks humans have somehow ‘escaped’ evolution.

the natural division of labor between male and female: He gives himself away with that magic word, “natural”. What is that natural division of labor? I’m going to guess it’s whatever the current status quo says it is.

natural variations are almost entirely social constructions: There’s that word, “natural”, again. We know there are genetic variations. They’ve been mapped and catalogued. No one denies them. How they are translated into behavior and culture are largely unknown.

We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates: Oh, fuck you, Andrew Sullivan. “Blank slate” is another magic phrase from the conservative playbook. Let’s pretend that leftists deny all human nature, when what scientists actually say is that human behavior is complex and plastic and can’t be wedged into the rigid categories that conservatives would like to claim are the only “natural” behaviors.

Whenever someone tells me that anyone who disagrees with their narrow views must be a “blank slater”, all I see is a great big blinking neon sign appearing above their heads that says “WRONG”. If you rely so grossly on mischaracterizing your opponents position, you can be disregarded.

Sullivan provided further evidence for that a little farther down.

I felt a genuine relief reading the op-ed because it was so nuanced and so low-temperature; it reflects precisely my own thoughts on the subject; and it’s hard to smear a Harvard geneticist for being a white supremacist (the usual gambit).

Oh god.

  1. On a matter that is life or death for some people, on a belief that has led to centuries of oppression, that allows the police to get away with murdering people because of their race, Andrew Sullivan thinks that being cool and nuanced is a virtue. There are times when a righteous anger is the only appropriate human response, and this continued casual approval of racism and sexism is one of them.

  2. Yeah, we know, you like the op-ed because it reflects your own fucking racist/sexist views. That is not an endorsement.

  3. Holy shit, seriously? You know that Harvard is an elitist organization that for years was at the forefront of the eugenics movement, right? Just a taste, from a Harvard zoologist:

    In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that “racial crossing” benefited neither. “From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race,” he wrote. “From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.”

    It’s damned easy to rightfully accuse a Harvard geneticist of white supremacy (not that I’m saying that of Reich). Since when did being a Harvard professor give you immunity to holding bad ideas?

Andrew Sullivan’s opinions on this matter are pure garbage, badly supported, and full of dishonest misrepresentations. There are qualified responses to Reich’s op-ed — they are made with respect for his actual scientific contributions while pointing out that he has bungled the interpretations of actual scientists who study the genetics of human populations. This statement, signed by a number of scientists, is a good example.

Reich frames his argument by positing a straw man in the form of a purported orthodoxy that claims that “the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.” That orthodoxy, he says, “denies the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations” and is “anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations.”

This misrepresents the many scientists and scholars who have demonstrated the scientific flaws of considering “race” a biological category. Their robust body of scholarship recognizes the existence of geographically based genetic variation in our species, but shows that such variation is not consistent with biological definitions of race. Nor does that variation map precisely onto ever changing socially defined racial groups.

Reich critically misunderstands and misrepresents concerns that are central to recent critiques of how biomedical researchers — including Reich — use categories of “race” and “population.”

No wonder Sullivan liked it. Like him, it builds an argument around straw men.

Why I have come to detest April Fools Day

Remember when you were kids, and people would prank each other with mild little jokes, and it was OK at first, and then it would get a bit tiring as the day went on, and as you got older the tiring phase would come earlier and earlier in the day? Well, I’m 61 goddamn years old, and the tired bit started at 12:01 am, like it does every day.

But that isn’t all. The fools have taken over, 365 days a year. Have you heard of Q/Anon? Here’s the inside dope.

There is a high-ranking official in the government calling themself Q, who is privy to dramatic state secrets that they have chosen to reveal on 4chan. Q claims the country is actually run by a gigantic pedophile ring (this is an echo of PizzaGate) fronted by the Democrat party, and that Donald Trump is a super-genius who has been playing 13-dimensional chess with everyone. Robert Mueller isn’t actually investigating Trump; that’s a ploy to distract everyone, while Mueller is actually preparing surprise indictments against Obama and the Clintons, basically overthrowing all of the Democrats and vindicating himself while saving the entire country from child-traffickers. Any day now it’s going to happen. Obama and Hillary will be in jail or kicking from a gibbet s o o n. It’s a weird old scam built on obscure, cryptic fragments of text delivered to a receptive audience that built one of the scummiest citadels of hate and lunacy on the internet, touted by conspiracy theorists like Roseanne Barr and led by rat-fucking cockroaches like Jerome Corsi.

If you’re one of those pitiful poseurs who think some goofy blog post or twitter comment or facebook meme is the high-larious highlight of your wit and humor, give up. Q/Anon has outpunked us all. There’s no further point to even trying.

I suggest we repeal April Fools altogether. Or maybe recast it as November Fools and schedule it for the day after our elections, cause we all sure got screwed on that date in 2016.

I let my kids watch Ren & Stimpy!

And I even got a laugh out of watching it, too. Now I learn that the creator, John Kricfalusi, was a sick, manipulative pedophile. He actually groomed a couple of young fans, encouraging them to be animators, then brought them out to work with him, and at least one of them, he had live with him. He seemed to regard young girls and women as his trophies.

Sometime between 1998 and 2000, Mora went to a party at Kricfalusi’s house that has bothered him for years. He remembered Byrd, who was no older than 20, was drunk and seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness when Kricfalusi called Mora over to him. “And then he pulled out these Polaroids of Robyn basically — how can you say it? — going down on him. … He’s like, ‘What do you think of that?’”

Byrd doesn’t remember Kricfalusi taking explicit photos of her; she also wasn’t aware, she said, that he showed explicit photos of her to other people. But Wyatt recounted an interaction with his then-boss that was similar to Mora’s. He said that at a party at Kricfalusi’s house between 1999 and 2002, Kricfalusi showed him “a stack of Polaroids” of Kricfalusi and Byrd having sex. He never mentioned the photographs to Byrd, nor did he confront Kricfalusi about the interaction. During another party at Kricfalusi’s house, Swarr said the artist pulled out a binder of photos that showed Byrd naked in his pool. “It was gross,” Swarr said. Affecting a gruff voice when he spoke as Kricfalusi, Swarr recalled, “He was like, ‘Oh, you like that?’ I was like, ‘No!’”

He encouraged this relationship when he was in his late 30s and 40s, when when the girl was 13 or 14.

It’s distressing that he was surrounded in his working relationship with this team of animators, and they knew he was carrying on with these teenage girls, and he was bragging about the sexual nature of the relationship (which would not be OK, even if they were his age), and no one spoke out. No one brought this to the attention of authorities. He was making cartoons for a children’s network, and no one thought this was important enough to mention anywhere.

His lawyer has made a statement now, though.

The 1990s were a time of mental and emotional fragility for Mr. Kricfalusi, especially after losing Ren and Stimpy, his most prized creation. For a brief time, 25 years ago, he had a 16-year-old girlfriend. Over the years John struggled with what were eventually diagnosed mental illnesses in 2008. To that point, for nearly three decades he had relied primarily on alcohol to self-medicate. Since that time he has worked feverishly on his mental health issues, and has been successful in stabilizing his life over the last decade. This achievement has allowed John the opportunity to grow and mature in ways he’d never had a chance at before.

I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him.