Once upon a time, there was a Supreme Dark Lord…

…and he decided to enlighten (endarken?) the masses with two great endeavors.

One was to write a comic book about superheroes who fight SJWs. OK, silly, but go ahead, make your story about people with superpowers bopping evil immigrants and antifa.

The other was to…start a university? An online university? A…Voxiversity?

All right, he’s got to be fucking with us. You have got to watch this thing: It’s an animated pop-up book. It opens to “Religion and Philosophy”, which features Vox Day in ridiculous fantasy spiky armor and a spiky throne and a skull. Because of course it does. That’s exactly how we advertise the philosophy department at my university. It’s also precisely how I picture John Wilkins.

Page two is “Male-Female Relations” which features another fantasy warrior-man and a playboy bunny standing atop a pile of nubile women who are dead or something. I guess it’s his alternative to a women’s studies department. I take it he’s going to be teaching gender caricatures.

Page three is “History, Immigration, and War”, with a gigantic suit of golden armor wielding a huge flaming sword. Popping up out of the top of the suit of armor is a tiny Trump-head wearing a baseball cap, like a tiny pimple atop an engorged, inflamed, veiny testicle. In the background, a horde of Pepe the Frog cartoons are driving tanks.

Cut to a dead-eyed, middle-aged man who introduces himself as Vox Day, and assures us that tens of millions of people will want to watch the series of videos he’s calling “Voxiversity”, which the social media giants are trying to silence, so you should send him money.

You are reading my description and refusing to believe this could possibly be true — it’s got to be some kind of over-the-top joke. But no. Watch the video. I was underplaying the cheesiness.

Nobody takes this bozo seriously, do they?

Am I too old to join the Merchant Marine?

Probably, darn it. I had uncles who were in it, and sailed the same routes in the video below, and they had a few stories. There are positives: like the isolation and repetitive mundane tasks and long stretches where nothing happens. There are negatives, like the isolation and repetitive mundane tasks and long stretches where nothing happens. But man, the peacefulness and beauty of the sea sure are tempting.

Mythcon was, as expected, crapola

Sargon of Akkad “won” his interview with Thomas Smith. I’ve only seen a few short clips (the con organizers are going to be selling the videos, so they were limiting recording), and it was deplorable. Carl Benjamin aka Sargon sat there with a smirk; Smith would try to confront him with something, like the time Benjamin dismissed a victim of sexual assault by declaring “I wouldn’t even rape you”; then Benjamin would say “Yeah!”, turn to the audience and wave his hand, and the place would erupt with cheers and laughter. He didn’t need to reply, he had a claque on hand to howl approval no matter what vileness was brought up, who would howl the louder the more vile the Sargon quote was.

The speakers/attendees who backed out before they got on stage were wise. This was a theater packed with giggling misogynists.

I also saw a small bit of the “Armoured Skeptic”. He stood on the stage reading from a handful of papers, and made absurd declarations, such as that adding social justice to atheism made it a religion, that there was a god of SJWs, etc., etc., etc. It was unprofessional and ridiculous.

I pity the well-meaning people who stuck it out. Sargon won by being more disgusting than reasonable people could tolerate. Remember that next time Mythicist Milwaukee puts on a conference — it will be only for the dregs of atheism.

Robin Ince on PC

Robin Ince has a few words about political correctness.

Political correctness means different things to different racists homophobes misogynists concerned citizens. For some, it is a mindless removal of offensive words based purely on doctrine, they are cancelling the racist jokes for no other reason than statue 8 paragraph C. Some people cannot believe you may not make homophobic jokes and quips about rapes because you’re playing it safe rather than because you’ve thought it through and, via a combination of empathy and reason, you’ve decided it may be a better night without those jokes. You haven’t banned those jokes, you’ve just come up with other ones.

This is why I think PC can be good for comedy. It makes you think about what you are saying and why you are saying it. You still have the freedom to say it, you just might have spent a little more time thinking why you are. The cost of free speech when well-used is to think about its value and what you want to use it for.

So true, not just for comedy, but for any kind of communication. If you aren’t thinking about your audience, you aren’t being effective. You can spit on a Bible in front of an audience of atheists, but if you’re trying to talk to a group of creationists, you’ll lose them immediately and they won’t bother listening to you. “Political correctness” is a bullshit term used to disparage something important: thoughtfulness and honest discussion. Complaining about political correctness just means you’re admitting that you have zero interest in listening to the other side.

A question of character

Trump on the Howard Stern show:

I was at Mar-a-Lago and we had this incredible ball, the Red Cross Ball, in Palm Beach, Florida. And we had the Marines. And the Marines were there, and it was terrible because all these rich people, they’re there to support the Marines, but they’re really there to get their picture in the Palm Beach Post… so you have all these really rich people, and a man, about 80 years old—very wealthy man, a lot of people didn’t like him—he fell off the stage.

So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died. And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him… he’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible. You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red. And you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor unconscious, and all the rich people are turning away. ‘Oh my God! This is terrible! This is disgusting!’ and you know, they’re turning away. Nobody wants to help the guy. His wife is screaming—she’s sitting right next to him, and she’s screaming.

What happens is, these 10 Marines from the back of the room… they come running forward, they grab him, they put the blood all over the place—it’s all over their uniforms—they’re taking it, they’re swiping [it], they ran him out, they created a stretcher. They call it a human stretcher, where they put their arms out with, like, five guys on each side

I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say he’s OK. It’s just not my thing.

Now, San Juan Mayor Carmen Youlin Cruz:

Trump, from his golf course in New Jersey:

How can anyone be surprised? We’ve elected a callous narcissist. A psychopath. A corrupt and greedy monster. A sane and responsible republic would have gotten rid of him long ago, but we also have a corrupt and greedy Republican party in control of everything, and they do nothing. They’re also more concerned with blood getting on their marble floors than with human lives.

WTF did I just read?

Wanna read some classic science fiction from 1958? No you don’t. You will decide that all men are evil; you won’t believe that this monstrosity got written at all, and that it was then actually published. It’s The Queen Bee, by Randall Garrett. The basic story: spaceship with a handful of men and women gets stranded on an earth-like, habitable planet. The men of the crew immediately announce that their destiny is to populate the world, with the assistance, willing or not, of the women. There’s a law, Brytell’s Law, that says they must. They need the women, because they’ll have no purpose in life if they can’t procreate. And they have rules about how to maximize genetic diversity that require pairing off in strict rotation.

You can tell this is some kind of perverse male fantasy.

But there’s a problem: one of the women refuses to be used this way! She’s also useless (she’s a clothing designer, and not useful clothes, but frilly flimsy women’s clothing), and violent in her resistance. So the men come up with a solution. I read it.

Damn. It’s a pdf. I can’t set it on fire, and I can’t afford to throw my computer in a dumpster with a bucket of napalm and set it on fire. Maybe it would make more sense to gather up all the men and throw them in that dumpster with the napalm, me included. Gah. Unclean.

Thanks, Gary Farber. You’ve destroyed the last trace of hope I have in humanity. Although I suppose Randall Garrett is more to blame.

A brilliant comparison to counter homophobes

A gay Muslim man is going through conversion therapy, when an idea comes to him.

“After deciding against suicide, I decided to change my sexual orientation,” says Khaled. “I started reading articles on the internet, successful stories about people who managed to turn straight. I realized that I needed a professional help, so I started my journey with therapy, psychiatrists, and physiologists. Horrible experience in the Arab world.” Mainly because their general approach seemed to be less “pray the gay away” and more “shame the gay away.” Khaled explains: “Most of them make you feel guilty, and that you are not a good Muslim … Some of them treated me in a bad way, as if I’m disgusting, though some of them felt sorry for me … The last one was horrible. He used to give me exercises of watching naked women and [masturbating]. It was awful, I used to cry every time I did that.”

Finally, after all the humiliation, Khaled had an epiphany. “At the end, and in the last session with him, I asked him ‘What is the fruit you hate the most, and can’t eat?’ He said ‘banana.’ I asked him … ‘What is the one you love the most?’ He said ‘mango.’ I said to him, ‘If you can change, and love bananas and hate mango in three months, I will continue with the sessions.’ Of course, he answered that it is impossible, and that’s when I became totally OK with my sexuality … God is fair, he won’t punish me for something I didn’t choose. Being gay is part of my life.”

It’s a great story, but there’s one unfortunate thing about it. I asked myself, how can you possibly hate bananas? And then I asked myself, how can you hate mangos? And then I realized that I must be bi.