All over a stupid video game

BoingBoing has a good summary of yesterday’s lethal swatting incident. It’s a messy and really stupid story, so I’ll give my even more abbreviated summary:

Party 1 (going by some dumbass pseudonym) gets into a dumbass argument about a video game with Party 2 (another dumbass pseudonym). Party 1 dares Party 2 to swat him, and sends him an address of another, innocent party. Party 2 then asks Party 3 (dumbass pseudonym, you get the drill) to phone in a kidnapping/murder story to the police, because he has a history of pulling dumbass stunts like that. Cops roll up to innocent house, innocent, unarmed man answers, dumbass cop murders him on the spot.

Parties 1, 2, and 3 are all accomplices in murder, and deserve lots of jail time. Trigger happy cop is an incompetent who must at least be fired, but also deserves jail time, as does the entire police force that fosters this kind of hyper-violent form of ‘peace-keeping’.

Actual predictions: Party 3 is such a flagrant ass that he’s going to get a long sentence. Parties 1 and 2 will get slapped, but probably not as much as they deserve. Trigger-happy cop will get a paid vacation and the respect and honor of his fellow thugs. Players of violent video games will continue to be dumbasses, and violent video game publishers will make more profits selling games to dumbasses. And the world will continue to spin about its axis.

Innocent man will still be dead.

Weed Nazis?

There are Nazis in Eugene, Oregon! I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise: Eugene is a very white city, Oregon has an intensely racist history, and the University of Oregon has had some, errm, incidents in its past, but it’s also extraordinarily liberal/progressive, so it’s disappointing to see it in the news now for its few noisy neo-Nazis, some of whom are profiting from the marijuana trade — Weed Nazis are now a thing.

That stubborn legacy of bigotry persists in Eugene, where city officials this year have recorded nearly 60 hate crimes, up from 44 last year. Officials said vandalism and graffiti made up 20 percent of the hate crimes reported between January and October.

Statewide, hate crimes were up 60 percent in 2016 from the previous year, representing one of the largest increases of any state, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

In 2016, Eugene had more hate crimes than any other place in Oregon, said Brian Levin, director of the center.

I’m sure no one is surprised that Nazis are feeling empowered nowadays — they’ve installed a few in the White House. It’s also sad, though, that my old neighborhood is featured in the story.

The city’s Whiteaker neighborhood, a vibrant arts and entertainment district, attracted a rash of Nazi-inspired graffiti in February. Residents and business owners also awoke during that time to find the area leafleted with recruitment fliers that proclaimed, “Diversity is a code word for white genocide.”

Yikes. We lived with our two little boys, one just an infant, on Clark street, and I remember it as a quiet residential neighborhood with flower gardens, a nice view of Skinner’s Butte, and a short walk to the Willamette River — I’d take my oldest on little red wagon rides across the footbridge to the movie theater. And now it’s got Nazis. That’s just not right.

At least Eugene also has a vibrant and active antifa presence, which helps.

Slogging through the sludge-pit of YouTube

I’ve been experimenting with making YouTube videos (I’ll put up another one this weekend!), in part because it’s a fun challenge, but also because I’m constantly horrified by how atheism is represented in that medium. I expect creationists to be nattering dinglebats, but when atheists come along and be raging assholes, it’s always disappointing. In the last few days, an unpleasant example has shown up in the comments to this video.

SwolllenGoat: why do you disable ratings like some creotard?

I ignored him for a bit — that “tard” construction is a pretty good indicator that he wasn’t worth engaging — but I’ll tell you why.

Ratings systems are evil. Old timers may recall I mentioned them as an option on blog comments some time back, and most of you were horrified at the idea. All it does is foster tribalism, and then the stupid little stars become a tool for factions to anonymously snipe at one another.

I’ve seen it on YouTube. The ratings on YouTube videos are often useless — they’re only used for virtue signaling by one group or another. When we did some FtB videos a while back, it was obvious, since we’d have these hour-long videos, and within minutes of putting them up, the anti-SJW kiddie campers were clicking madly to downrate them. So I don’t use them.

I didn’t feel like explaining that to this guy, so I gave him a short answer.

PZ Myers: Because of people like you.

You know he wasn’t going to be satisfied.

SwolllenGoat: what kind of person am i?

I ignored him.

I did look at his YouTube page, though, and the “related channels” for this guy include Atheism-Is-Unstoppable:

Devon Tracey, or Atheism-is-Unstoppable (channel name) is a moderately popular YouTube atheist. Most of his content consists of Anti-SJW/Regressive screeds common amongst YouTube atheists. Occasionally this manifests itself in extreme rhetoric, which can sometimes be argued to be mildly racist, and is occasionally too much even for TheAmazingAtheist. He is also notorious for blocking people who disagree with him and for doxxing a couple of those he didn’t like. Due to these antics, many YouTube atheists, even those who share his general views, have denounced him.

And Bearing:

Bearing, or Patrick Connolly, is an Australian anti-feminist who, after failing as a musician, actually thought it would be a good idea to quit his dayjob as a real estate agent in order to focus on his next scam on how to get money without working: a shit YouTube ‘career’. Which basically, in traditional Aussie fashion, consists of nothing more than calling people cunts while producing the anti-sjw community’s equivalent of low-effort clickbait.

Hard pass. Case in point why YouTube atheists have such a shitty reputation.

But he was persistent.

SwolllenGoat: C’mon PZ

What ‘kind of person am I?

Why so butthurt when I pointed out you’ve disabled ratings just like one of those sad creationist dipshits?

Maybe you should block me next?

Shut down the comments entirely?

You know whats funny?

Answers in Fucking Genesis does not disable ratings,and they are flat out retarded

YOU do disable em

How things change…………….

That a clear demonstration of exactly the kind of person I want to just fuck off. So I thanked him for being so obvious.

PZ Myers: Thank you for answering your own question so effectively.

Now the fun begins. He starts raging at me. Note: he posted this while thinking I had blocked him. I don’t quite understand why he’d bother if he thought he was blocked, or how he reconciled the fact that all of his comments appeared on the video with his martyr complex, but he did go scurrying off to use an alternative login to get past his imaginary ban.

SwolllenGoat’s AudioBook Archive: Bwaaaahaaaaahaaaa

You sad little man

You blocked me for daring to ask a question

C’mon PZ

Tell us

What ‘kind of person am I?

Why so butthurt when I pointed out you’ve disabled ratings just like one of those sad creationist dipshits?

Maybe you should shut down the comments entirely?

You know whats funny?

Answers in Fucking Genesis does not disable ratings,and they are flat out retarded

YOU do disable em

How things change…………….

He typed it twice in two accounts, to be sure!

SwolllenGoat: Im sure that made some sort of sense to you,inside yer head,before you typed it

Rest assured it makes no actual sense,eh?

So,come on,what kind of person am I?

The question asking kind?

The atheist kind?

The liberal kind?

You have ratings disabled like some garden variety creotard because of atheist liberals who ask questions?

I remember the good old days of YT…………back when we atheist types would mock creotards because they disabled ratings and closed comments sections,or blocked users and whatnot

LOOK at yourself PZ

You are them

How sad

I don’t know. I might end up disabling comments if this is the kind of irrational atheist dork who’s going to show up and posture like an ass. I’ll keep ’em open for at least the next few videos, though.

It’s unfortunate that these gomers are unable to LOOK at themselves.

Never go back and read the books you liked as a youngster

I have fond memories of reading James Michener’s The Source as a teenager — in case you are unacquainted with that author, his schtick was to pick a geographical place and then write a long episodic novel covering its fictional history over thousands of years. The Source is about a mound in Israel, so he writes a chapter about a family at the dawn of agriculture growing wheat there, a small town and their Ba’als, a crusader castle, a group of soldiers in the Arab-Israeli War, you get the idea. It’s a series of vignettes in the long history of this region.

I had a cheap copy of this book I hadn’t read in decades, and just started skimming the beginning. The framing device in this novel is the story of the archaeological excavation at the site led by a man named Cullinane, digging up artifacts that are then used as the centerpiece of each story. And that is the problem. It’s unreadable. It was published in 1965, and it shows.

The first sign of trouble is the characters, who fit awkward stereotypes of The American, The Israeli, The Palestinian. The members of a kibbutz are helping with the labor of the site, and the story spends way too much time talking about how beautiful and scantily-clad the young women are. An Israeli woman named Vered Bar-El is a Ph.D. with substantial credentials as Israel’s “top expert in dating pottery”, but the story starts going in a strange direction. Cullinane is day-dreaming about marrying this petite, pretty girl with flashing eyes working at his side — she has given him no signals anywhere in the story that she’s at all interested in him romantically. In fact, we learn that she’s engaged to another scholar working there…a fellow that Cullinane tries to convince himself is not right for her. And then, suddenly, with no real reciprocal development between the characters,

And then one night in mid-July as he inspected the dig in moonlight he was alerted by someone moving along the northern edge of the plateau, and he suspected it might be a worker out to steal a Crusader relic; but it was Vered Bar-El, and he ran to her with a kind of release and caught her in his arms, kissing her with a vigor that astonished both of them. Slowly she pushed him away, holding on to the lapels of his field jacket and looking up at him with her dark, saucy eyes.

WTF? And this is treated as perfectly ordinary behavior in the field? She, a scholar with a fiance, is not at all shocked at this unprofessional behavior by her team leader? Michener was apparently incapable of imagining this scene from a woman’s perspective.

It makes me sad. I read this book in my teens and it went right over my head, and I just thought archaeology sounded neat and fun and interesting. I wonder how a teenaged girl would have felt about the discipline if they read that — dig leaders get to fantasize about the women working with them, and abruptly give them vigorous kisses.

Now I’m also wondering how common this casual dismissal of women was in the popular literature that might have influenced people’s choice of careers.

Too much Star Trek

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s a guy who thinks the replicators on Star Trek are real. Maybe it’s another article from the delusional weirdos of the Singularity Hub. Maybe it’s just that I get really annoyed with physicists who think they understand biology. But yeah, Thomas Hornigold believes that we’ll be able to make desktop replicators that will make anything you want.

These tiny factories will be large at first, like early computers, but soon enough you’ll be able to buy one that can fit on a desk. You’ll pour in some raw materials—perhaps water, air, dirt, and a few powders of rare elements if required—and the nanofabricator will go to work. Powered by flexible photovoltaic panels that coat your house, it will tear apart the molecules of the raw materials, manipulating them on the atomic level to create…anything you like. Food. A new laptop. A copy of Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside. Anything, providing you can give it both the raw materials and the blueprint for creation.

Just copy biology! It’s not physics, it’s got to be easy!

In recent years, progress has been made towards this goal. It may well be that we make faster progress by mimicking the processes of biology, where individual cells, optimized by billions of years of evolution, routinely manipulate chemicals and molecules to keep us alive.

All we need is energy from the solar panels we’ll build with our replicators to power our replicators!

Suddenly only three commodities have any value: the raw materials for the nanofabricator (many of which, depending on what you want to make, will be plentiful just from the world around you); the nanofabricators themselves (unless, of course, they can self-replicate, in which case they become just a simple ‘conversion’ away from raw materials); and, finally, the blueprints for the things you want to make.

Let me just point out some basic biological realities.

Biological machines are not generic synthesize-anything machines. Enzymatic reactions are narrowly specific: they require very specific inputs (not just a bucket of dirt) and they are honed by evolution to produce very specific output — not just a particular molecule, but a particular chiral form of that molecule. There are very few general, ‘programmable’ molecular machines — ribosomes come to mind — but that’s only going to be useful if you want to produce proteins. Proteins are remarkably flexible, but still, they’re not sufficient if you want to make solar panels, or batteries, or a car.

He trivializes the difficulty of making the ‘blueprints’. I presume he’s thinking of genes, which are not blueprints, and that you’ll just be able to feed in the ‘language’ of your replicator, and it’ll build something complex for you. We don’t understand all the processes that build a cell, so that’s a long way off, and you have to consider the nature of what organic processes assemble. Are you going to build a cell phone made of meat, or wood, or chitin?

He’s also trivializing the energy requirements. You’re going to have to provide your bio-replicator with chemical energy — or you’re going to have to include a fairly complex mechanism for transducing electrical or light energy into chemistry. It’s doable, cells do it all the time, but it’s still a rather elaborate process with more energy losses.

And then there are the raw materials. Water & dirt? You mean organic carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, and oxygen and hydrogen — fertilizer and gases and water. Can you grow a stalk of wheat in your cubicle? If you can’t do that, what are you doing babbling about the far greater task of fitting a whole farm, fields and livestock, plus an electronics factory, plus an IT department, all into a box on your desk, with negligible requirements for energy or feedstocks. And it has to come preprogrammed with the capability of synthesizing anything.

Singularitarians. They’re the 21st century version of happy clappy religious fanatics.

Why you shouldn’t let virginal sex-haters write sex advice

From Reddit:

The common mode of sexual intercourse is not even natural. Our genitals are not for pleasure, they are for procreation, and that occurs when two people are very much in love and wanting to reproduce. Nature takes its course when the couple are asleep laying naked and embraced. Procreation occurs by the vagina acting as a vacuum, drawing the flaccid penis inside to a climax and eventually, ejaculation.

The vagina then releases the penis, all the while not disturbing the peacefully sleeping couple.

Forceful sexual intercourse is unnatural.

Before you start screaming “POE!”, note that I don’t give a fuck about poes. If they’re saying it, they’re saying it. I also looked into this person’s posting history, and this is all they write about, how yucky sex is.

You didn’t really want to read Milo Yiannopoulos’s book, did you?

You may recall the scandal: Yiannopoulos got a $250,000 advance from Simon & Schuster, which was then cancelled after it was revealed that Yiannopoulos was saying all these nice things about pedophilia. Yiannopoulos then turned around and is suing Simon & Schuster for $10 million over that cancellation, which is probably a terrible mistake for him, because the publisher’s defense is that it was a very bad book, unsuitable for publication, and that it wasn’t just his endorsement of pedophilia that got him canned.

To that end, their defense in the lawsuit was to include the entire draft of the text, with the editor’s comments. They’re hilarious. You can tell the editor hated the book. Some of the highlights are included in this twitter thread.

Apparently, you can download the whole thing via the New York county clerk’s website, where it is filed. I didn’t, because goddamn, Milo’s 15 minutes are totally up.

History will eat the rich, but unfortunately they’re dragging the rest of us down with them

Brad DeLong has a few words of warning for the rich plutocrats who support Trump and are enjoying the ill-gotten gains of their gigantic tax cut. Pay attention to history, because it really sucks to be rich under a tyranny. You’ve created a machine that sucks wealth upward, and when you’ve got all the money, you become the target.

To be blunt: a social democratic middle-class society is much better society in which to have a large stock of entrepreneurial, inherited, or rent-derived wealth than is a communist society. But it is also a much friendlier society to the wealthy than is a fascist society. And social democracy and fascism—hard or, if you are lucky, soft—are the only options the future will allow: tertium non datur.

The political descendants of the politicians today you support who lead chants of “lock her up“ will be the greatest threat to the liberty, the wealth, and perhaps even the lives of those of your grandchildren and great grandchildren who are plutocrats. Look ahead into the future a little bit. Do not focus on the pile of moolah under your nose.

It did not take long for the breakdown of elite political norms provoked by the desire of the political military plutocrats of the Roman Republic to aggrandize the benefits of the post Hannibal creation of the empire to lead the vultures home to roost. In Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica led a mob of senators into the street, shouting “Now that the consul has betrayed the state, let every man who wishes to uphold the laws follow me!” to murder the tribune Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and annul the Lex Sempronia Agraria as too great a distribution of the profits of empire away from the oligarchy. Ten years later Lucius Opimius armed himself with the legal figleaf of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum before murdering Tiberius’s brother Gaius and 3000 of Gaius’s affinity. Thus was the Roman Republic set on to the “why speak of laws? we carry swords” road of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, and Octavian—and that road ended at a place where the wealthy found themselves attainted and executed at the pleasure of the princeps in order to fund bribes to praetorians.

Under the Roman Empire, the way to become the subject of a treason trial wasn’t necessarily to have committed treason — it was to have a big pot of wealth that the Emperor wanted. Look up the law of maiestas. Look up delatores. If we go down that path,the rich are going to have to hide, or face death, disgrace, and most intolerable to you greedy motherfuckers, confiscation of all of your properties by the Top Dog, whoever that is.

We aren’t going to last as long as the Roman Empire, though. One thing about an imperial tyranny where a few authoritarians can lay down an iron law is that it can last quite a long time — 1500 years of bloody imperial Roman history was quite impressive. We’ve added something novel to the mix here in the United States of America: we’ve given all the citizens a megaphone, and every lunatic fringe element is babbling away. The likes of Alex Jones gibbering away incessantly in the background, the transparent propaganda of Fox News hypnotizing the foolish, militias popping up everywhere with ludicrous interpretations of the Constitution, megachurches peddling death cult Christianity — in addition to undermining democracy, the right-wing authoritarians have normalized crazy. Destabilizing the country is what they want, but they’re going to reap what they sow.

You know, I grew up in the shadow of The Bomb, where there was fear of a looming apocalypse everywhere. We thought that what was going to kill us was our dangerous technological brilliance — we were just too dang smart for our own good. We were wrong. It’s our ignorance that is going to destroy us, our contempt for the social sciences and humanities, our dismissal of the importance of history, sociology, and psychology in maintaining a healthy, stable society that people would want to live in. A complex society requires a framework of cooperation and interdependence to survive, and without people who care about how it works and monitors its functioning, it’s susceptible to parasites and exploiters and random wreckers. Ignorance and malice allow a Brexit to happen, or a Trump to get elected, or a Sulla to march on Rome to ‘save the Republic’.