Legal wrasslin’ indefinitely prolonged

Hello, everyone. How was your day? I got to drive all across the state to sit in court and quietly listen to a little man call me a liar twice, and then drive back again.

Briefly, today’s hearing was strictly procedural. Richard Carrier filed a defamation lawsuit in the state of Minnesota against me, after the statute of limitations on such suits had passed. He had to argue that tolling the statute was a reasonable thing to do do.

He had sued a bunch of us in Ohio, and failed because the venue was inappropriate — none of us lived in Ohio, and he had only just moved there himself1. Ohio basically told him they weren’t going to let him move to their state for the purpose of suing a lot of random people in other states. He argued that because, while he was out of the statute of limitations for Minnesota, but was still within the statute of limitations for Ohio, where he was ineligible to sue me, we ought to pretend the part of Ohio law that defines when you can sue someone in Ohio ought to apply here in Minnesota, and that because he was busy suing us in his failed effort in Ohio, that ought to have stopped the clock for purposes of his Minnesota lawsuit. It was very twisty. It must be fun to pick and choose pieces of different state laws to cobble together a legal justification for doing whatever you want.

Our lawyer, Marc Randazza, argued that that rather defeated the purpose of Minnesota’s statute, and that there were good reasons to limit how far back you can go to fish up mean things someone said about you and sue them for it, and it opened the door to endless suits. How can you apply an Ohio law to Minnesota when Ohio has already been determined to not have jurisdiction?

Another excuse Carrier had was that I had displayed the post he was suing me for in a YouTube video, and that should count as resetting the clock on the defamation. That’s interesting, because it means he gets to silence me no matter what — any mention of my accusation means he gets to sue me again. He even said that: if this hearing rejects his tolling of the limitations, he’ll just refile another lawsuit based on the last time I mentioned his banning. Infinite harassment! Yay!

I also learned what he specifically objected to in that post. It was this paragraph, and specifically the mention of “persistent, obnoxious sexual behavior in defiance of specific requests that he cease”2.

Whoops! Guess I just reset his imaginary clock again!

Anyway, Randazza pointed out that everything I said was a statement of what I’d been told, that it was even backed up by documents that Carrier himself put in evidence (the emails between Carrier and Dadhaboy are clearcut examples of persistent obnoxiousness, for one thing). The whole suit is going to get thrown out eventually, so why not cut it short? The judge said that his role there was just to make a judgment on merits of his procedural argument, unfortunately. Which is fair, even if these procedural technicalities allow him to carry on his legal harassment indefinitely.

That’s where it all stands, unsatisfactorily. Randazza made his arguments that Minnesota limitations apply, Carrier made his that he gets to bring in Ohio law, there was some discussion of the contents of the suit that Carrier brought in in his own filing, and the judge said he’ll make a ruling when his workload permits, which may be months and months away. So we wait. If the judge agrees with my lawyer, we’re done, the lawsuit is thrown out. If the judge decides to let Carrier have his way, the process will linger on, we’ll have a trial and discovery and all those fun things which will drag the sleaze in Carrier’s history into the light. Both have their advantages — Randazza would love to bring this to trial on first amendment grounds — but I’d rather just have it over and done with.

It’s not over and done with yet.

1He accused me of lying when I said I thought he lived in Northern California, where he had been living up to something like a week or so of filing suit. I guess he thinks I should know where all the bloggers here are living all the time*, especially him, because he’s so special.

2He accused me of lying and making that up, that it was just my opinion. Nope. It’s what I was told when I asked his accusers. We’ve got the receipts. They’re in his own legal filings, actually.

*I don’t have a clue, mostly. I put the tracking devices in their heads, like I was supposed to, but I told them they had to change the battery every year, at the same time they changed them in their smoke alarms. Just stick the AAA battery in their right ear, positive end first. They keep screwing it up! Wrong ear, wrong way around, I suspect some are stuffing the battery in a different hole altogether.

Don’t forget our legal defense fund!

My wife is leaving me!

Yep, she is. She has been drawn to the siren call of grandbabies, which is far more potent than any lure this old poopyhead could possibly put out, so in a few weeks she’s taking off to San Antonio to hang out with Knut. For THREE WEEKS. I might descend into total madness in that much time. She might return to discover I’ve turned the house into a haven for spiders to escape the chilly onset of winter, and that I’m releasing swarms of fruit flies to feed them while I gibber and caper within the silk-shrouded walls of our once lovely home. It’ll be all her fault.

What really annoys me, though, is that she’ll be away over Halloween, and will get to take Knut out trick-or-treating for the first time. That’s my job. Meanwhile, the kiddies will be fleeing in terror from our house in Morris, except for the ones that get snared and wrapped and drained.

I don’t think my students will let me cancel class for three weeks so I can tag along.

See you in court!

The next step in the never-ending nonsense that is the Carrier lawsuit takes place tomorrow, a hearing at the Warren E. Burger Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in St Paul, at 1:30 in the Devitt Courtroom. Richard Carrier will be there — he has to be, since he’s acting as his own lawyer (there’s some common phrase that ends, “has a fool for a client”). Our lawyer, Marc Randazza, will be there, because that’s his job, and I’m looking forward to seeing him perform. I don’t actually need to be there, since it’s going to be a battle between a lawyer and a “lawyer” on some point of law, but since I’m the one getting sued for over…

…I should at least be there to witness the fate of my financial future. Besides, Randazza has a reputation for arguing well, and I’d like to see him in action.

If anyone else would like to witness this war of words, it is an open court and you can sit in attendance. We’re absolutely not looking for cheerleaders or any kind of rousing participation by attendees, but if it doesn’t go on too long maybe we can meet up afterwards to talk about it.

As always, we’re still looking for donations to support our resistance against this SLAPP suit. Our colleagues at Affinity and sterr have also been carrying out sales and auctions to raise money for the effort. Lawyers are expensive. I just want the foolishness to end.

When rationalism goes wrong, it really goes wrong

I could almost believe this little essay, You Can Learn How To Become More Rational, is pure satire, except that I’ve seen too many people sincerely holding these nonsensical views, and it cites a source that is packed to the gills with precisely this advice. It takes pains to tell you where their authority comes from.

LessWrong is a community blog devoted to “refining the art of human rationality.” The blog is led by artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky.
A charitable organization which Yudkowsky founded has received $1.1 million from Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky has given a talk on rationality at Thiel’s hedge fund.

Oy. The vampire wanna-be has lots and lots of money, and he gave some to Yudkowsky, therefore these must be good ideas. Rationality!

Then comes a list of 10 things you can do that range from banal to LessWrong dogma and cant, but I’m only going to mention the last one…because hoo boy, it’s a doozy.

10. Become More Awesome.
Possible means: master mental math, learn mnemonics, play n-back, become a lucid dreamer, learn symbolic shorthand, study Esperanto, exercise, eat better, become a PUA (if you’re a single male), deliberately expose yourself to rejection so you become less afraid of it, learn magic tricks or juggling, memorize information using spaced repetition, understand Bayes’ theorem, become a faster typer, challenge your senses by wearing a blindfold, eye patch, or colored goggles, stop using your dominant hand for a week, learn self-defense, or get trained in First Aid.

Wow.

I mean, that’s just…wow.

So, learn gimmicky party tricks and become an asshole pick-up artist is the same as being “awesome”? Rationality!

I hereby refuse to ever be awesome. I’ve got better things to do.

Unless…if I wear colored goggles for a week, will Peter Thiel give me a million dollars?

Needs more murderous space monkeys

See this photo? That’s the whole movie.

The movie playing in Morris this week is Ad Astra, so I went to see it. No, really, the reason I see a lot of bad movies is because we have one movie theater, it gets one new movie a week, and so I’ll go no matter what it is, and sometimes I’m trapped in some tepid piece of crap for a few hours, and sometimes I’m surprised with something unexpectedly enjoyable. That’s life, a throw of the dice.

This week, it was snake eyes. Ad Astra is part of this peculiar genre that has taken over “realistic” space movies: the poorly written plot that is covered over by focusing, sometimes blurrily, on a solitary sad-eyed handsome astronaut against a background of blinking lights and switches. See also First Man. See also Interstellar. This one features Brad Pitt, so if you like his looks, you will get to linger over them for long, long stretches of time while he’s acting stoic and emotionless. The camera violates his personal space nearly constantly so you can see how he doesn’t react to anything intensely.

If you don’t like staring at Brad Pitt (what’s wrong with you? He’s a very good looking man), you can stare at intricate space technology. The opening scene is of Pitt working as an astronaut, which seems to be the role of maintenance engineer, on the gigantic space antenna — it’s a huge gadget with a base on the ground and a skyward stalk stretching out into space, bristling with spiky things and girders and solar panels and semi-random girders, and Pitt is climbing down a ladder, as are many other brightly-colored space suits, to fix something or other. Then, explosions. Bodies blown out of a habitat to plummet from space to the earth. Astronauts flailing frantically in their suits as they fall. But Brad Pitt remains totally calm as he tumbles to Earth, informing Mission Control that he’s going to get his spin under control, and he does so, opening a parachute when the atmosphere is thick enough to land safely.

He then goes blank-faced into a psych eval, which he does often in the movie, talking at a computer and self-reporting that he’s fine. We learn that his heart rate never exceeds 85 beats per minute. He is the perfect space robot.

The movie then destroys itself with backstory and explanation. The giant space antenna is a colossal project dedicated to … searching for extraterrestrial intelligence? It’s a kind of techno-cult object assembled to communicate with aliens who have not been detected, but hey, cool, let’s build this immense Tower of Babel. We learn that Brad Pitt’s dad was also an astronaut who was lost decades before on a mission to Neptune, the object of which was … you guessed it, to aim telescopes and antennae outwards to search for aliens. There’s a weird obsession underlying this whole movie project.

Further, we learn that the explosion on the space antenna was caused by inexplicable “power surges” that are causing all kinds of explosions and disasters on Earth, killing tens of thousands of people, and threatening the stability of the entire solar system!!!. These mysterious space zaps are emanating from Emperor Ming the Merciless — wait, no, this isn’t Flash Gordon. It doesn’t have enough enthusiasm to be Flash. No, they come from — duh duh dunnnn — Neptune. Pitt’s dad is alive, and he is somehow using his space ship’s antimatter fuel to destabilize the solar system and fling energy surges at Earth. Why, we don’t know, and mild spoiler here — we never find out. His dad is obsessed with communicating with aliens, and how this translates into zapping Earth is never explained.

So now the plot is set up. The Space Bureaucracy is going to send unflappable Brad to Neptune to tell his dad to stop farting antimatter at the Earth, and if he won’t, to blow him up with a backpack nuke, because he’s so calm and emotionless, I guess. Off he goes on what the writers imagine would be sci-fi wet dream, lots of spaceships and zooming off to other planets. Except they’ve also got to make it “realistic”, which means “boring”, which means they’ve got to spice it up with “action”, which demolishes most of the movie’s credibility.

They go to the moon. For some reason, the they then have to drive moon buggies a long ways across the lunar surface to their next step, and they are set upon by Moon Pirates in their own moon buggies. It makes no sense, but OK.

The next step is to fly to Mars. They get in another fancy new spaceship with the usual ESS esthetic, lots of tunnel tubes and messy panels and cables and plumbing hanging out, and set course for Mars, a 17 day journey, which tells me they’re going pretty darned fast. Except there’s a mayday halfway there! They just stop to call on a mysterious derelict space ship (there is zero awareness of the problems of navigation, or fuel), and climb aboard. Murderous space monkeys! I was relieved. Finally, they had some actors who were expressing some genuine emotion, even if it was bitey clawing rage.

I think I was empathizing with the space monkeys at that point.

They get to Mars, where Brad sits in a booth to send a scripted message to his Dad on Neptune. Again, why he had to be on Mars to do that, I don’t understand. He goes off-script and gets a tiny bit emotional while sending a live message to Neptune, which pisses off the Space Bureaucracy so they tell him he’s going home and doesn’t get to go to Neptune.

So he does something perfectly normal: he drives across Mars to the launch site, swims through a huge underground Martian lake, climbs up into the rocket as it’s taking off, gets into a fight with the crew, and kills everyone. Emotionlessly. Accidentally. He didn’t mean to. They shouldn’t have come after him. I guess Brad Pitt is playing a robotic space psychopath here.

The journey to Neptune is about 6 months of Brad Pitt moping and floating in an empty spaceship growing a stubble. It’s played in real time. He finally meets his suicidally stupid dad who, like his son, had murdered the crew of his spaceship, and stupid things happen. I’ll just tell you one: to escape Dad’s ship, Brad rips off a surface panel and uses it as a shield as he jumps up through the flying rocks of Neptune’s rings, which smash into his shield and splatter, doing no damage to him or his trajectory.

God, this movie was awful, scientifically illiterate, and unforgivably tedious. And yet, it’s got so many glowing reviews! I really don’t understand that, unless maybe all the other reviewers were mesmerized by Pitt’s stony face and were so enthralled by his masculine hunkiness that all their higher brain functions were paralyzed.

Poor Jordan Peterson

I guess it’s a good thing that Jordan Peterson never professed happiness as a goal in life.

“It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you’re unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable. It’s not something to aim at – because it’s not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you’re unhappy? Then you’re a failure. And perhaps a suicidal failure. Happiness is like cotton candy. It’s just not going to do the job.”

I hate having to agree with Peterson, but I do on this one point, despite having a mostly happy life myself. Misery is always going to intrude, whether by chance or the actions of others or your own failings, so don’t judge your worth by whether there’s a smile on your face.

So, sad to say, Mr Peterson is rather miserable right now.

She [Jordan Peterson’s daughter] says that her mother’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgical complication created an unbearable amount of stress for the family, and particularly her father. A doctor prescribed clonazepam, or Klonopin, to help him cope with the anxiety it caused. Clonazepam is an anti-seizure medication that is also prescribed to treat panic disorder.

After her mother went into remission, Peterson attempted to get off the drug on his own. This caused terrible withdrawals, his daughter says. “The reason we’re in New York is because dad’s in rehab using other medications to try and get off this clonazepam.”

All sympathy to the man. His daughter says he’s going to use this experience in his next book, because he really does need to improve his understanding of addiction and get away from his previous simplistic prescriptions.

Peterson’s YouTube videos routinely amass hundreds of thousands of views. In these videos, as with his writings, he lectures people on how to lead a successful, fulfilling life. In 2017, he advised people to cure addiction by replacing the substance or activity, such as smartphone use, with “something better.” The behavioral psychologist has provided advice that some may call over-simplifications about addiction on multiple occasions.

Maybe he’s not happy, but he has a learning opportunity here.

Dramatic wars begin with a grievous setback that makes everyone desperate to fight back, right?

I isolated myself in a coffee shop, buckled down, and pounded straight through my grading. I got it done! Early even! The students…well, umm, there were some rough spots. The mean was about 65%, brought down by one specific page where they had to do some math, and it was a massacre. I was imagining that page soaked in blood, with more pouring out of my wicked pen, and was getting a little uneasy. I know what we’re going to be going over in the next class!

Now, though, I get to go home, where my wife has some chore involving the picket fence I’m supposed to do, but once that’s over, I’ve got to honor the completion of one onerous task (if not the outcome).

I’m thinking I’ll sit back and read the new Joe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred. It seems appropriate, very grim-dark, with lots of close-fought bloody battles. For that 65%, you know, which is barely passing and means half the class is getting Ds or worse so far.

(The title does not reflect my feelings towards the students, who are my brave compatriots in the struggle to master cell biology.)

Casting The Princess Bride

There are rumors going about that someone wants to remake The Princess Bride, and some people are going batshit, as if this is some grand heresy that should never be done. You know me, I’m fond of breaking sacred cows, so I’m going to go the other way — the movie should be remade, it must happen, to the point where I’m willing to help them with ideas. I have some casting suggestions that will make sure this is the very best Princess Bride it can be!

Buttercup: Paris Hilton.

Westley: Tommy Wiseau.

Inigo Montoya: Nicolas Cage.

Fezzik: Steven Seagal.

Vizzini: David Spade.

Prince Humperdinck: Kirk Cameron.

Count Rugen: Rob Schneider.

Miracle Max: Shane Gillis.

Valerie: Jenny McCarthy.

I’m torn on who should direct. Uwe Boll or George Lucas?

Anyway, I’m sure this movie, with the right talent, will be a glorious success. I wish the studio the best!

(See, when I get a good night’s sleep, I get all cheerful and optimistic and positive and all that crap.)

A shocking development

I went to bed at 9 last night, and woke up this morning at 7:30. My whole body is staggered at having gotten a full night of sleep and waking up feeling rested. My schedule for the day is wrecked, but I don’t know…I could get to like this.

Alas, I seem to be well rested for a long day of nothing but grading exams and labs. I expect this strange feeling to be demolished in short order.

Why is my name so hard to spell?

I just gave the first exam of this semester in cell biology. I have a tradition of making the first question of the first exam an easy, obvious gimme…and here’s the first question this year.

I skimmed through the exams and quickly discovered that several students gave the wrong answer.

I’ll assume that they grossly overanalyzed the question — I said it wasn’t a trick question, which obviously means it was, or that there was some subtle twist hinted at in the phrasing, or something. Or that my last name is some arcane mystical phrase that shifts in the eyes and minds of its beholder, and that if any ever perceived its true nature they would go mad.