Bad sex

Pssst. Wanna read some porn? The short list for the Literary Society’s Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced. You can also read some longer excerpts, if the short quotes in the first link are insufficiently repellent.

I almost liked this one.

She gave a yet deeper, moaning sigh. Like breathing in he saw the word he had said shiver and expand inside her. Her arms moved now, and flexed: out of here, Venus de Milo. He watched the death-life fill her growingly. She grabbed and caressed him with more muscle, more zest, than ever before. Her long lean arms were spider arms, while her kisses roved and dug.

‘I see it,’ he said. ‘You are the female praying mantis, devouring her mate.’

‘I am. You are. I shall eat every shred of you.’

‘Mouthful by mouthful.’

But nah. The author is just trying to trick me with the spider allusions, but there’s no substance here.

Actually, all of the choices are out of date and obsolete. They’ve all been superseded by one brief tweet on Twitter.

Mmm-mmmm. Now that’s bad sex.

He did it. They finally let Sergio Canavero carry out a head transplant.

I said it couldn’t be done. That the proposal was unethical. That Canavero couldn’t possibly get a spinal cord to regenerate. Then his head transplant volunteer rejected the plan.

Apparently, Canavero found new volunteers, and went ahead and did it. The result is even more horrifying than I ever predicted.

I think I’m going to be sick.

You fools! You argued over whether you could, when you were supposed to care about whether you should!

The War on Thanksgiving?

I am weary after many years slogging in the trenches, drafted to serve in a war I didn’t want to fight. Every year, in December, we’re called to go over the top and assault the Christmas redoubt in our bloody war on the name — never mind that we never actually do, preferring to sit back and sip our wine and enjoy a feast instead, it’s the thought that we’re expected to clamber over barbed wire to somehow force people to say “Happy Holidays”. It’s tiring. And the truth is, I don’t really give a damn. It’s just the fucking Christians wanting to pretend to be persecuted again.

And now, this silly escalation.

OK, which of my fellow Lefties was asking for this? Was it you? I didn’t hear a word about this until Trump suddenly started whining about how we’re attacking him. Come on, people! We’ve got to be coordinated about these attacks!

Again, I don’t really care. I don’t celebrate a bunch of long-dead Europeans feasting at the onset of their invasion of a new continent, I just like the day off, visiting with my kids, and seeing my students recharging with their friends and families before the conclusion of a semester. If that’s the War on Thanksgiving, I guess I’m a combatant. Once more.

They better not try to declare a War on Halloween, though. We have the witches on our side in that one.

Tony Robbins, super-creep

There’s been a new development in the Tony Robbins case. It ought to be enough that he’s a charlatan with no skills other than a glib line of patter who gets millions of dollars every year for telling people what they want to hear, but he also has a history of harassing young girls. There is, as seems to be common in these cases, a long line of accusers.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News published a series of investigations revealing how multiple former staffers and fans have accused Robbins of sexual misconduct over three decades. Ten women have said Robbins groped them, exposed himself, or sexually harassed them while they were at his seminars or working for him, and nine of them said they were upset by his actions. Other records showed that he had berated victims of rape and domestic violence. He has denied every allegation and accused BuzzFeed News of “flat-out lying.”

Afterward, former SuperCampers reached out to BuzzFeed News about the 1985 incident. Reporters then contacted other former campers and staffers — dozens of whom independently recalled hearing about it. Many also remembered a heavily sexualized seminar delivered by Robbins to campers as young as 13. Several said they had been waiting years for a reporter to contact them. This is the first time Robbins has been accused of assaulting a minor — and it is also the first allegation of sexual misconduct by the guru that could be corroborated by eyewitnesses.

Robbins is following the usual play book of these predators — hit-and-run sexual encounters, denial, accusing his victims of trying to get his money, denial, shaming women, denial — but there was one more box he had to fill in on my bingo card. He had to file a lawsuit against anyone who reported his behavior.

Bingo!

Bonus points for filing in Ireland, of all places. It turns out that Ireland has extraordinarily slack defamation laws — the entire burden of proof rests on the defendant, with everything skewed to benefit wealthy people who are offended that someone dislikes them. It’s an interesting twist on the usual strategy of filing a SLAPP suit in states that lack strong anti-SLAPP laws. He has instead gone international in his venue-shopping. He’s rich, he can afford to kick the peons where ever he wants.

We win!

Good news, everybody! The Richard Carrier lawsuit is kaput. He finally, after 3 years of this nonsense, approached our lawyer and begged for mercy: he agreed to walk away from the lawsuit with prejudice if we agreed to do likewise and promise not to hurt him anymore. This is a comprehensive surrender, agreeing to quit harassing me, Amy Frank, Lauren Lane, Stephanie Zvan, Skepticon, The Orbit, and Freethoughtblogs with his legal bullshit. Here’s the SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT if you want to savor our victory a little more.

We still have to finish paying off our legal debt, so we’ll still be begging for donations for a while. If you’re one of those terrible people who supported Carrier in his attempt to silence people, I hope you appreciate what a bad investment you made, and excuse me while I dance on your failure, losers. Your champion is crawling away, defeated.

Minor accomplishments!

Minor, but I intend to celebrate them.

  • I gave the students a pop quiz Friday, and got it graded by Saturday! In fact, I am completely caught up in grading for the first time this semester.
  • I got an exam written for Monday delivery! I could look on the dark side of that, in that it means I’m only caught up until tomorrow, but I’m going to pretend that writing a new and original exam is a good thing.
  • The temperature in my office is currently around 33°C, which is miserable and made getting the work done harder, but I finished anyway. On the bright side, my sweat glands work!
  • I revamped a lot of things for FtB, with some more on the way, and all the other bloggers here are happily tearing through old applications, saying yes or no. I guess I was the bottleneck holding everyone back. But I’m not anymore!
  • This is going to be a short week since there’s some sort of holiday on Thursday. We’re planning to bring my oldest little boy, Alaric, home for a day. We’ll probably continue our tradition of putting up the Atheist Tree while he’s here, preparing for Atheistmas next month.

I guess that’s four good things with one in the works. It counts!

Blackberries everywhere

Growing up south of Seattle, one of the omnipresent features were the blackberries — everywhere I walked, along the roads, in abandoned fields, along the railroad tracks, there were these impenetrable walls of blackberry brambles. They were a nuisance, but it was great in August because it was like all the paths were lined with candy, you could just pluck huge quantities of fat berries while hardly trying.

But today I read about the history of blackberries in that area, and it starts out disappointing — they’re non-native, introduced by Luther Burbank — but it just keeps getting more OH NO LUTHER YOU DIDN’T.

He started selling a new book that he’d written in his catalogs, The Training of the Human Plant.

Burbank wrote that the crossing, elimination and refining of human strains would result in “an ultimate product that should be the finest race ever known.”

He considered the U.S. the perfect place to practice eugenics, because, at the turn of the century, there were immigrants coming from all over the world. He wrote:

“Look at the material on which to draw. Here is the North, powerful, virile, aggressive, blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more impetuous South.

“The union of great native mental strength, developed or undeveloped, with bodily vigor, but with inferior mind.”

Administrivia

It’s long overdue, but we’re in the midst of cleaning up some of the chaos in the management of Freethoughtblogs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean firing the CEO with a hefty golden parachute so he can retire to his mansion, but we are reopening the application process, which has been neglected for a long long time.

One of the reasons for the neglect, besides the CEO’s laziness, is that we changed a significant bit of how we operate: NO ADS, therefore NO FUNDING, therefore our bloggers don’t get paid anymore, unless they work out independent sources of income (Patreon, for instance). We’re also facing a SLAPP suit…but don’t let that scare you, our bloggers aren’t subject to that, just me, personally. We do provide a space to write, and of course, the dubious benefits of associating with a rabid mob of SJWs.

If you applied to blog here in the last two years, you don’t have to resubmit, we’ve still got it on file, and we’re just now in the process of injecting the sluggish beast of our review machinery with potent drugs to stimulate it back into life.

There may be a few other projects that rouse themselves to shamble onto the stage in the near future, since there are also a few other developments, to be announced later.

Gahan Wilson is dead

Oh, this is sad. Gahan Wilson hasn’t produced much new in recent years — he has been suffering from dementia — but I discovered his work in the 70s and loved it. He and Gary Larson plucked my brain out and shaped it before stuffing it back in my cranium.

“I won’t bring any more friends home unless you let me play with them first!”

His work was always distinctive and recognizable, and unlike anyone else’s. That’s a great legacy.