Blade Runner 2049

I saw Blade Runner 2049 last night. I have very complicated feelings about it — I can’t say whether I liked it or not. I mean, I liked it, but it’s not like I can say it was a fun evening, or wheee, let’s get on the roller coaster again, or gosh, I sure wish I could have one of those flying cars. It was also simultaneously unexpected and exactly what I should expect from this movie.

The trailer is not representative. It sets it up as an action movie, when it’s not. Not really.

It is remarkably slow paced. There are fight scenes, but there’s more weight in scenes of Ryan Gosling slowly walking through a bleak dystopian landscape. The Earth is a dead world, and you’re made to feel it. At the same time, there is an ongoing struggle for identity: who is human? What is human? Is that disembodied AI that is present only as a hologram a person? She shows more emotion than many of the “born” humans — Jared Leto plays the head of the evil corporation as a visionary but soulless techno-futurist — and some of the replicants are angry and passionate. Your theory of mind gets a workout in this movie. The key conflicts are all in your head.

Go into the theater in a meditative mood, and you’ll probably enjoy it. Walk in expecting a slam-bang thriller, and you’re going to leave thinking “WTF did I just see?”. Or you’ll fall asleep somewhere in the middle.

Other things of note: the imagery is gorgeously depressing. The world is a high-tech garbage heap where people scavenge like rats in the neon-lit debris. The score is amazing. It’s got echoes of the old Vangelis score, but at times it rises into this industrial howl that has you wondering whether that was music, or a sound effect? It’s effective either way. I noticed that the patriarchy isn’t dead in 2049, either — there are weird landscapes with monumental, crumbling statuary, all of nude women, and roaming the streets are multi-story glowing holograms of, of course, more naked women. I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test, either, unless two women, at least one of whom is a replicant, talking about another replicant, who just happens to be coded male, counts. There’s also a cold-blooded execution of a female replicant for having the wrong eye color, and another newly created replicant, naked, shivering, obedient, and female (of course) is casually stabbed and bleeds to death so Niander Wallace can make a point about the disposability of individuals. I get the point. It’s part of the theme of the movie. But that it is always women who get disposed of so vividly steers it in the direction of misogyny.

Don’t worry, though, lots of men get offed, too — it’s just that they tend to be masked and in uniform or blown away at a distance so you don’t have to think about their humanity. The disparity is distinct enough that I was wondering if it was intentional or just a thoughtless reflection of conventionality. Just like it had me wondering whether the characters were robots pretending to be people, or people who just happened to be robots. It’s the kind of movie where you’ll tie your brain into knots trying to think about what’s going on, and whether you’ll like it or not depends on whether you enjoy that sensation.

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people don’t like getting their brains twisted up (which is OK, I like a good popcorn movie, too, and this is not a popcorn movie), and the box office is disappointing. I guess it might be a “disaster” or a “flop” if all you count is how many tickets it sold, so the accountants might be unhappy. All I care about is that I bought one ticket and got personally challenged for a few hours by a movie with high ambitions.

Increasing mediocrity

Atrios nails it.

Is over the past several decades, our discourse progressed something like this:

Guys, they’re racists.

Sensible Center: No, they just believe the very important science that suggests that black people are stupid. Also, crime and poverty. Black people are poor and get arrested a lot and stop&frisk is not racist so stop saying that. QED

Guys, they’re white supremacists.

Sensible center: No, they’re just celebrating the very important heritage of the Confederacy, which is their history, even in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which were very important Confederate states. I don’t see any actual Klan hoods. Maybe they are white nationalists, which just means they want to preserve their culture. QED

Guys, they’re Nazis.

Sensible center: Actually, I don’t see much evidence (some, but not too much) of anti-Semitism, which seems to be an important feature of Nazism, right? I mean, the obsession with George Soros and the word globalist is simply political. Obviously they have some views about race which liberals don’t support, but it isn’t racism, and it certainly isn’t Nazism.

Nazis: hey, uh we’re Nazis.

Sensible center: No, I really don’t think you are.

Nazis: No, really, we’re fucking Nazis. Heil Hitler! Check out my Nazi tattoos! We’re Nazis!

Sensible center: This is disturbing, but Stalin was bad, too, so, really, both sides.

Having just suffered with being dragged into a twitter conversation where one of those people was seriously trying to argue that as long as rules and behaviors don’t actually, literally use the “N word”, they aren’t racist, I am familiar with this logic.

When will we learn? More importantly, when will the media learn? When someone says they’re a centrist and starts making excuses for the right, we just have to say, “Fuck that guy.”

Good science is done on Puerto Rico

People are still trying to simply survive in Puerto Rico, so your first efforts to help should be directed at more general causes. But in addition, universities and labs have been disrupted by the hurricane, and it’s going to take time and money to get the science flowing again. The Society for Developmental Biology is coordinating efforts to help developmental biologists on the island get back on their feet, so here’s a place where you can contribute:

In view of the extensive damage caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria to the laboratories of our colleagues in Puerto Rico, the Society for Developmental Biology has set up a relief grant program in order to facilitate the continuation of research programs in those labs or at another temporary host location. We come to you to ask for help matching (or surpassing) SDB’s seed funds ($20,000) to the program. This will allow us to provide a higher level of assistance beyond SDB’s current capacity. You may earmark your contribution via SDB’s website on the donation page, https://www.sdbonline.org/donations by clicking Puerto Rico Relief Fund.

Investigators at institutions located in Puerto Rico who are currently conducting research projects in developmental biology may apply for a grant. Priority will be given to current SDB members. Funds may be used for replacement of organisms, reagents, supplies, travel to host lab by PI or his/her trainees, core facility usage fees at host institution, etc.

It’s true what you suspected: all men are secret scumbags

I guess I’m going to have to read more of the traditional women’s magazines. Elle has a good writeup on the two scandals of the week.

The first is the revelation that Harvey Weinstein is a serial sexual harasser. I did not know that he recently published a mea culpa.

In a statement published by the Times in full, Weinstein writes,“I came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” and that “I cannot be more remorseful about the people I hurt and I plan to do right by all of them.” However, he’s also announced that he plans to sue the Times, with his attorney Charles Harder insisting that the story “is saturated with false and defamatory statements about Harvey Weinstein,” so it’s unclear exactly which faults Weinstein is admitting or how far his remorse goes.

Hang on there, Harvey. I came of age in the 60s and 70s, too, and that’s not true. Women did not suddenly become human beings in 1980. There were assholes then just as there are assholes now, but many of us did not treat women the way Weinstein did. Stop blaming it on the era. Harvey was and is simply one of the assholes.

And what’s with the lawsuit? It’s a NY Times article. The NY Times is always cautious and guarded and timid and surrounded with lawyers, and it’s not as if the article made shrieking claims that couldn’t be traced to sources. What exactly does he object to? I can understand why he’s being vague, though; if he gets nitpicky with some irrelevant little detail, it’s just going to make the accusations he can’t defend stand out even more.

Also, people who fling around frivolous lawsuits to silence people who criticize them are slime.

The second scandal is that dump of Breitbart emails that revealed what a gang of Nazis they are. I guess I was distracted by that repellent video of Milo vamping to “America the Beautiful” while his fans were giving him Nazi salutes that I overlooked a key fact: Milo was a front for a horde of mainstream journalists who used him to inject misogyny and racism into the discourse.

Consider that Buzzfeed article, which left so many of the women I know feeling rattled and peeved. The bulk of the article was dedicated to illuminating the hidden media ecology of the alt-right, and Breitbart’s ties to white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. But many women were alarmed, not by what it revealed, but at the extent to which it confirmed their own suspicions about male colleagues.

The Breitbart slime machine, as per Buzzfeed, is fed by a network of “sleeper James Damores” — “vexed but silent for fear of losing their jobs or friends, kvetching to Yiannopoulos as a pressure valve.” The emails that Buzzfeed provides show Yiannopolous and his co-conspirators discussing female peers’ sex lives (Anita Sarkeesian’s ex was the topic of one e-mail), suggesting new lines of attack (tech reporter Dan Lyons questioned Zoe Quinn’s birth sex), spotlighting articles and authors that they thought were deserving of a pile-on, and otherwise using a burgeoning fascist movement to promote their apparent grudges against female and non-binary colleagues.

Besides reaching out routinely to flaming white nationalists for advice, Milo was getting voluntary input from otherwise staid journalists who let their hair down and their misogyny fly free in private emails. One of them was Mitchell Sunderland, who publicly makes noise about being a feminist while privately siccing professional misogynists on a “fat feminist”.

In one email that Buzzfeed cites, Milo is implored to “[p]lease mock this fat feminist,” a reference to feminist author and New York Times columnist Lindy West. All the emails are bad, but this one stands out because it was sent by Mitchell Sunderland, the one-time managing editor of Broadly, VICE Media’s women’s vertical. Sunderland has publicly said that one must “love feminism” to work there.

If Sunderland “loves” feminism, feminism should get a restraining order. The Buzzfeed cache suggests he used his repartee with Milo to go after feminist writers and organizations. Once, while he was still at Broadly, he sent his Breitbart contacts a Broadly video about the Satanic Temple and abortion rights; “do whatever with this on Breitbart. It’s insane,” he wrote. The next day, the smear appeared on the site: “‘Satanic Temple’ Joins Planned Parenthood in Pro-Abortion Crusade.” It’s hard to tell if Sunderland was consciously anti-choice and anti-feminist when he took the job at Broadly, but what is true is that he learned the lingo of feminism well enough to get paid for it, turning out reams of #content wherein he mocked fake male allies and critiqued the shallowness of various women’s feminism.

Mitch “Lying Sack of Shit” Sunderland has been fired. No word yet on whether the other closet sleazeballs exposed in the email have met a similar fate.

I do think it’s sweet that so many garbage humans have been exposed to the light of day by their common connection, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Does David Marchant believe he provided a quality learning experience?

Multiple women are filing sexual harassment charges against a prominent geologist, David Marchant. After reading the accusations, if true, Marchant is not at all suited to a life of teaching.

Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.

One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.

“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.

As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

That isn’t just sexual harassment, it’s sadistic abuse of a student who is dependent on her instructor and isolated from any support network of any kind. There is also corroboration from other students who were in the field with them.

Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.

I would hope they feel guilt. Allies ought to speak up when they hear of these things.

Speaking of allies…

Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”

Jesus fucking christ. An academic reputation ought not to shield you from criminal failures to meet your academic obligations as a scholar and a teacher and a citizen of a research community. Bringing in grant money is not the weregild for mistreating those in your care.

I’m impressed with Willenbring for persisting in the face of such traumatic abuse to earn a career of her own in science. I’m not at all impressed with Marchant, no matter how many publications and grants he might have.

Chasing those sweet, sweet Dave Rubin dollars

It seems some in the atheist movement are casting an envious eye on the money to be made by pandering to the alt-right crowd. They’re easily spotted — they’re the ones protesting that they really are liberals (usually with a “classical” or “neo” as a prefix, or a ” but” as a permanently attached suffix), while they spend all their effort on chastising Leftists or Black Lives Matter activists or Progressives or anyone who is fucking pissed off at the state of the country, and ignoring Nazis and white nationalists to complain that the people who consider the treatment of black folk to be discriminatory and historically and currently oppressive are the real racists. I just wish they’d be honest and recognize that they’re aligning themselves in favor of Nazis in the name of Free Speech, while working hard against progressives, because they shouldn’ta oughtnota say them there things.

The latest repeat offender in this game is Dave Smalley, who has written another of his one-sentence-per-paragraph declarative jeremiads. How dare The Left call Ben Carson a “white supremacist”? (no attribution given). How dare The Left call Gad Saad a “Nazi”? (no attribution given). How dare a Black Lives Matter activist tell white people “Get your own damn people, and tell them to stop being racists!” (no attribution given). And then he says, Is this not prejudiced? Is this not discrimination? Is this not segregation?, only a few sentences/paragraphs later to piously declare, I didn’t call her names. I’m not labeling her as a racist. She’s just toxic. That’s better. No name calling here, no sir!

Gah. The hypocrisy and dishonesty are infuriating. Could all you guys just admit that you’re right-leaning and that you use the claim that you’re a centrist as an excuse? (While failing to note that the American version of the “center” is somewhere close to fascism everywhere else in the world.) I prefer a straightforward wingnut to these chickenshits who like to pretend they’re liberal.

Anyway, I’m not going to delve into a sentence by sentence deconstruction of this foolish sucking up to delusional deplorables since, fortunately, the Utah Outcasts did a great job taking it apart.

I’m just going to remind you all that the people who protest the loudest that they aren’t really Nazis are the ones who enable the Nazis, and all too often are hiding the fact that they identify with and sympathize with Nazis more than they do progressives. If you have to whine and cry and repeat over and over again that no, you aren’t conservative, no, you’re not on the same side with white supremacists, you might want to ask yourself why so many people that you claim to be allies with are thinking that.

That’s gonna leave a mark. Here’s another post ripping into Smalley.

Is this what men are supposed to aspire to?

Story after story plays out in the same tawdry way. A man becomes rich and influential, with a reputation and fans and a secure life. I try to imagine myself in that position, and it’s not too hard; I’m not rich or famous, but I’ve got reasonable income that means I don’t have to worry, children who’ve grown up and made me proud, and a stable, happy, long term relationship. What if I were an order of magnitude more wealthy? What if I was powerful enough to have clients who relied on me to further their career?

I like to think that if I were in such a position, I’d use it to help people who needed it, would use my greater influence to shape the world in ways I like, would be able to do more to help my family. There’d be a bit of selfishness, too, of course — I’d have more computer toys, more books, more nights out at fabulous restaurants with my wife. At least, I think that’s what I’d do with more luxury.

But apparently not. As a man, if I were wealthy and powerful, this is what I’m supposed to want.

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

There’s more. There are years of Weinstein using his abilities to play cheap sexual games with the women in his employ.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

I don’t get it. It’s so pathetic — Weinstein is an otherwise normal man, wealthier than most, with a career that lets him fund (and profit from) the production of art, and this is how he uses his power, to play cheap, needy games with those with less power, to attempt to get momentary pleasures out of the suffering of others? To rise so high in one’s own domain and then to use it in such a shabby, contemptible way…why? And it happens so often, with recent examples of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. What disease lurks in men’s hearts that this kind of childish, cruel, pointless behavior emerges as they get older and richer?

At least it makes me happy that I’m unambitious enough that I don’t desire to rise out of my ordinary middle-class life — who knows what kind of monster I’d turn into if I had a million dollars? But it does suggest that we need to start a charity to save the poor pitiful Hollywood moguls and spoiled heirs and corporate big guns. We need to restore their humanity and rescue them from the emergence of the poisonous imago dwelling within them by taking most of their money away and distributing it to the poor. It’s the only decent thing to do.

I wonder what the threshold for spawning the horrible man-child incubating within us men-folk is? I don’t think it would be ethical to do the experiment to find out.

Or it could be that Harvey Weinstein is and always has been a terrible human being.

Time to nuke the fault line and split the rift deeper

Thomas Smith wraps up his experience at the Mythcon conference. It wasn’t good. It’s clear that Carl Benjamin is a waste of time, as are his followers. He ends with the suggestion that next year, if they double down and invite yet another group of shitlords, let ’em have a shitlord conference…but if you’re anyone with a drop of social awareness and even a hint of conscience, don’t participate and don’t attend. The only problem with that, unfortunately, is that white supremacy has become a fruitful path to become YouTube-famous, so they’ll still have an audience. They just won’t have prominent mainstream atheists, and they’ll also be lacking all the atheists who support social justice (the only atheists worth listening to). Dig the rift deeper, and cut them loose.

Meanwhile Skepticon is about a month away, and if you want to help out the decent side of atheism, donate to help it happen.

Matt Dillahunty delivers his position on the conference.