How can anyone find this to be a bad idea?

When I’m feeling cynical, I’d say that Mattel has figured out another way to extract money from people…but honestly, this is also wonderfully nice. They’re making a Down Syndrome Barbie. Every kid deserves a little happiness and recognition of their existence.

Unfortunately, and predictably, right-wing a-holes are mocking the idea. Here’s Steven Crowder and his crew sniggering at the retards over this toy.

Crowder recently announced that he was getting divorced (he’s also pissed that no-fault divorce means his wife has the right to leave him). His reaction here might explain why his ex-wife got fed up with him.

Why aren’t you moving to Minnesota?

You know we’re one of the good states, right? Look at us, being all sane and wholesome and supportive of all of our citizens.

That’s a rally for LGBTQ+ rights at our state capitol. It’s not that big, but that’s only because those rights aren’t as threatened here. In fact, our legislature just passed an important set of bills.

The Minnesota Senate Friday passed a trio of proposals aimed at legally safeguarding people who come to Minnesota for abortion and gender-affirming care and outlawing what’s called conversion therapy for minors.

The moves come as states around the country have banned or seriously limited access to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and after 12 states – including Minnesota’s neighbors Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota – have banned gender-affirming care for minors.

We want more people to live freely right here, so come on up!

Supporters said the bill showed Minnesota would treat all people with respect and love.

“I wish that other legislatures across this country shared our values. They don’t. But guess what? If you need gender affirming care — and that is life-saving care, it’s medically necessary care. If you need it, you can come to Minnesota,” said Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten, DFL-St. Paul, one of the bill’s cosponsors. “If you’re scared, or you’re looking for a new place to build your family, we want you here in Minnesota. We want you to take refuge here.”

We also have a budget surplus — we went woke, and we’re thriving here.

In the first State of the State address of his second term, Gov. Tim Walz detailed his vision for how a new Democratic trifecta in charge of Minnesota government would leverage a historic budget surplus for a new “Minnesota Miracle.”

Speaking to a joint session of the Minnesota Legislature on Wednesday night, Walz highlighted many of Democrats’ priorities, including billions more in spending for schools, families and the state’s most vulnerable. The more than $17 billion in new spending Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party members have planned aims to cut child poverty by roughly 25 percent and make the state the “best place to raise a family.”

“We have the resources. We have the shared vision. And for the first time in half a century, we have the political will to get this done,” Walz said at the conclusion of his roughly 30-minute speech. “So let’s not waste this opportunity. Let’s get to work building a state we’re proud to raise our kids in.”

We also have Republicans. Every news story has to leaven the good news by bringing on some dour Republican ass who whines about how we’re not torturing trans kids enough, and how we ought to give more tax breaks instead of providing services to everyone, and praying for a Ron Desantis to come along and flay the Democrats, but ignore them. They’re in the minority.

Are you packing up yet? We want you here, every one of you. We definitely need more people to populate our universities, but everyone is welcome.

The downsides: well, it does get a little chilly up here, but probably the worst thing about Minnesota is we might get a little smug about our superiority to our benighted neighbors. When you’re One Of Us, though, that’s not so much of a problem. One of Us, One of Us, One of Us!

I was wondering what that stench was

I have been informed that the Slymepit is dead. The Slymepit was an online forum that was set up in the wake of Elevatorgate, when a small group of atheists decided to set up a base from which to hurl racist, sexist, homophobic slurs at Social Justice Warriors like Rebecca Watson, Stephanie Zvan, Jey McCreight, and many others, including me. It was one of the uglier sides of the internet, although its fans viewed it differently.

The Slymepit, a long-running atheist discussion board heavily involved in the A/S activism ‘Schism’, is shutting its doors after a ten-year run. Creator and host, ‘Lsuoma’, decided that the conversation, often humorous, insightful, and informative, but also at times pugnacious, scurrilous, or garrulous, had strayed too far from the site’s original purpose of “exposing the stupidity, lies, and hypocrisy of Social Justice Warriors.” Live commenting has therefore been shut down, with ten years of comments and user-created artwork archived.

(If you’d like to see examples of the Slymepit’s creativity, RationalWiki has you covered.)

OK, fine, you get to elide over the Slymepit’s many sins during its funeral. Goodbye, you won’t be missed.

Although I’m immensely amused by this comment:

The Pit’s greatest strength was always that it never took itself seriously. That really frustrated those who so fervently hated and obsessed over us.

Dude. The pit was frenetically abusive, regularly focused howling obscenities at individuals who dared to think social justice was an important cause, and took itself painfully seriously. You were on a mission to destroy people.

As for the “obsession” part — your little clubhouse of haters rotted out and collapsed six months ago, and no one, other than your fellow bigots, even noticed until now.

If anyone wants to find the Slymepit gang today, they’re usually hanging out on Jerry Coyne’s blog.

Springtime

Just yesterday I was savoring the rapid retreat of the piles of snow heaped up by the roadside, enjoying a nice long walk on sidewalks that were not covered with ice, and anticipating the flourishing of spiders everywhere — I even released about a hundred surplus lab spiderlings in my yard and garage. Today…

Cold. Windy. Light snow. Spring!

Maybe social media shouldn’t be for profit?

Here’s a radical idea: social media and capitalism are not a good match. Everyone is trying to force-fit human social interactions into a pay-to-play capitalist box, and it’s just not working.

Parler — remember Parler? One of those Twitter-substitutes fueled by conservative billionaires, promising no content moderation at all, used to plan the January 6 insurrection? That Parler? — just died. It will not be missed.

Parler, the self-described “uncancelable free speech platform,” has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a “strategic assessment.” The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says.

The Parler website is now a simple page containing only today’s press release announcing the acquisition, which was completed without financial terms being disclosed. “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp.

“While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities—even extending beyond domestic politics,” the press release said. No timing for a return was mentioned.

Yeah. The uncancelable has been canceled by market forces, as a luxury that wasn’t a “viable business.” It wasn’t. It takes a real shock to get conservatives to recognize reality.

Then there’s Facebook. Facebook makes money, although the amount is declining, but it relies on selling people’s personal information to marketers — it’s less a social media company than a colossal siphon for collecting data that it can manipulate and sell to those who want to take advantage of users. What it offers as an inducement to draw in those users is the worst of human nature, giving grifters and attention-seeking fools free reign. Facebook is great if you want to sell trash to the gullible and demolish democracy as you go, but Facebook is what you get when you fully meld social media and capitalism. It’s not a good example.

Ah, Twitter. Poor Twitter. It was fun while it lasted, but now it’s been taken over by egomaniac and incompetent businessman, and is being run into the ground by a bad man whose “focus appears to be on cutting costs and making Twitter profitable.” On the one hand, I feel like we should kill it while the Nazis are lying on the ground, helpless and twitching, but on the other…it turns out that Twitter has been integrated into the world-wide disaster response network.

For years, Twitter was at its best when bad things happened. Before Elon Musk bought it last fall, before it was overrun with scammy ads, before it amplified fake personas, and before its engineers were told to get more eyeballs on the owner’s tweets, Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.

We started taking it for granted, that buried in the noise was a genuine public good that could be used to help people. That wasn’t a side of the service that made money, though. At least, not until some soulless clever dicks decided that maybe they could exploit that capability for their profit, unaware that the utility vanishes when you start demanding cash to save people’s lives.

Unfortunately, the platform is becoming less useful as a way of monitoring chatter about developing events. Twitter announced on February 2 that it would end free access for researchers to its application programming interface—a mechanism that allows people outside the company to gather and analyze large quantities of data from the social-media platform. Relief workers have frequently used API access to determine where supplies and other resources are needed most.

Four days after the company’s API announcement, a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing at least 46,000 people. In an enormous geographic area, API data can help narrow down who is saying what, who is stuck where, and where limited supplies should be delivered first. Amid complaints about what abandoning free API access would mean in that crisis, Twitter postponed the restriction. Still, its long-term intentions are uncertain, and some public-spirited deployments of the API by outside researchers—such as a ProPublica bot tracking politicians’ deleted tweets—appear to be breaking down.

Social media can be a valuable tool for a society, but not when some capitalist or autocrat somewhere is monitoring it to milk every drop of advantage from it so they can actively harm its users. That’s the fatal flaw: the free flow of information is a strong social good, but when people exploit it for profit it’s no longer free.

Layers and layers of grifting

In its heyday, Silicon Valley was flush with money (OK, it still is), and was a magnet for tech talent…and also for the con artists who wanted to skim off the surplus. Among the many frauds is Eliezer Yudkowski and his LessWrong community. Here’s a fascinating letter that boldly airs the accusations.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.

MIRI was founded as the Singularity Institute in 2000 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent thought leader in the Less Wrong “rationalist” community. Less Wrong is a community blog (also founded by Yudkowsky,) that claims to be dedicated to the art of human rationality. Yudkowsky has written over 300 blog posts, several books, and a popular fanfiction that gained him the status of a minor celebrity, especially among fellow “rationalists.” The “rationalist” community in the Bay Area, which is fairly tight-knit, features group housing, where members live together and sometimes work together.

Yudkowsky’s ideas had members of the Less Wrong community convinced that Yudkowsky would bring about singularity and save the world. Yudkowsky has positioned himself as one of a small class of people focusing on global catastrophic risks, while teaching his followers that the ethical thing to do is to either work directly on AGI, or get a high-paying job and donate to MIRI. Many of the people in the Less Wrong community took Yudkowsky and MIRI very seriously. Until recently, most of MIRI’s donations came from within that community, with some members donating tens of thousands of dollars to the cause. The original team at MIRI was composed partially of top contributors to the community’s blogs, like Nate Soares, Luke Meuhlhauser, and Anna Salamon.

While these bloggers weren’t as popular and admired as Yudkowsky, they were widely trusted by the community. And at events like the Workshop on AI Safety Strategy (WAISS) run by CFAR, people would suggest ideas like taking out life insurance that would pay out to MIRI, and then committing suicide to further the cause.

Working at MIRI conferred a kind of special respect as someone who Yudkowsky and other prominent members thought were worthy to save the world. To young teenagers enamored with the Less Wrong community and its stated ideals, it’s easy to see how kids could’ve been coerced into having sex with adults working at MIRI.

Yeah. They actually suggested that members of the community with mental health concerns take out life insurance policies, that it would be a greater benefit to the high ethical causes of the group than their continued existence. They also recruited (dare I say “groomed”?) teenagers to join up and frolic with their middle-aged leaders.

Testimony from community members alleges that several underage young teenagers were having sex with the 30- and 40- year old researchers working at MIRI, especially between 2007 and 2014. The list of people accused includes (but is not limited to) the director and senior research fellow, and a former executive director who is now working at the Open Philanthropy Project, a major donor to MIRI.

Perhaps relatedly, this was going on around the time MIRI was accepting significant financial support to the tune of $50,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, even after his conviction for prostituting children. Yes, that Epstein.

MIRI’s entanglement in statutory rape was one of the worst kept secret in the Bay. Many rationalists are keen to say that the age of consent is an arbitrary number, and favor treating young people as fully-grown adults. So, it wasn’t much of a secret that older individuals in their 30s and 40s were having sex with teenagers. And perhaps that’s why when nearly a hundred people in the Bay Area Rationalist Community Safety Discussion group (BARCSD) saw insiders discussing whether the perpetrators had successfully evaded the statute of limitations for statutory rape in reference to MIRI, the members of BARCSD collectively shrugged. Additionally, one of the former underage teenagers was in the group, and admitted to having sex with much older adults, though this failed to interest the BARCSD.

Multiple comments were edited or deleted once members realized legal consequences were possible.

This is a group that communicated online extensively, and it’s revealing that now it’s sinking in that they’ve left a trail behind them, and are busy deleting old posts that might incriminate them.

Yudkowski always did seem like a pretentious phony to me, and it’s good to see that some people are catching on.

What are they teaching in journalism school nowadays?

Another mass murder by an asshole with a rifle, on a day ending with the letter “y”. But this article! Jesus!

The suspect in a Monday morning massacre at a Louisville bank has been identified as a 23-year-old former varsity hoops star and finance grad-turned-banker who livestreamed the horrific attack.

Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the suspect as Connor Sturgeon, who worked at Old National Bank’s downtown Louisville branch.

Gwinn-Villaroel said Sturgeon was livestreaming as he used a rifle to open fire at about 8:38 a.m. in the Old National Bank Building, which houses the bank and a variety of other businesses, killing four people and injuring nine more, including three police officers. Sturgeon was killed after exchanging gunfire with officers, she said, but it’s unclear if he was killed by police or by self-inflicted gunshots.

The article briefly mentions the victims by name, but after that, it’s got a more important job to do. It spends 22 fucking paragraphs going on and on about what a nice normal guy the killer was. The governor of Kentucky has to tell us what an “incredible friend” he was, they interview old high school friends and buddies from his college fraternity, they reach the depths of banality by getting a quote from the husband of a neighbor.

Sturgeon “seemed like a real normal dude, every day he’d wave to me,” Allgeier’s husband, Michael, added.

What the fuck? The mass murderer was known to sometimes wave to people? This is news? I learned nothing from it other than that the killer was otherwise a mundane person who lived an ordinary, if privileged, life before going on a shooting rampage. The article says nothing about the victims, short of naming them, and should have been slashed to bits by an editor before publishing.

And it took three ‘reporters’ to cobble together this unquestioning story about a bad man.

I hope they feel a little bit of shame today.