Cancel Culture strikes again!

Poor Mary Nicosia. She’s a victim. A wealthy, white victim of racism.

Nicosia spent much of her time at the mic complaining about the cruelty of cancel culture, saying she’s suffered since Jones announced his suit.

The mom teared up about the “unbearable pain” caused to her and her family by the lawsuit by Jones, noting how she was suspended from the board of the Landmark Society of Western New York.

“To see our entire world collapse in a matter of hours was bewildering, it was like a bad dream,” she complained.

Incomprehensible! How could this happen? She just held a Juneteenth party for her rich white friends with buckets of fried chicken and bottles of Hennessy — oh no, that has nothing to do with stereotypes — and then, while explaining herself, it’s revealed that she runs a horribly racist Twitter “parody account”. Ooops. But no, she doesn’t have a racist bone in her body!

I’d love to hear what this crap is “parodying”.

Oh. Her lawyer claims it was about making fun of liberals.

Nicosia’s lawyer, Corey Hogan, displayed the invitation for the party at the presser in an effort to absolve his client of racism, saying it was called the “1st annual Liberal Smashin Splish Splash Pool Party.”

Hogan insisted it was intended to mock liberals, and was about politics, not race, and claimed the KFC buckets were not intended to hold meaning. Most of the decorations, he said, were meant to be “liberal bashing.”

Her husband, a dentist, is also complaining that he was victimized.

Nicosia’s husband, Dr. Nicholas Nicosia, also spoke, insisting that “there’s been nothing with any interaction with us that would even suggest that we’re racist.”

Instead, he complained, it was “cancel culture” — calling it “an organized, malicious, well-orchestrated, politically charged attack” motivated in part because they were seen as a “snooty couple that lives in a big mansion.”

“It took me 32 years to build my reputation, and less than two hours to destroy it,” he sniffed.

I think he was carefully crafting a reputation that, once it was exposed outside their little bubble of entitlement and privilege, was seen to be hateful and horrible. It wasn’t cancel culture that brought it down, he’d just spent 32 oblivious years building a rotten life.

How sad. She coulda been another Libs of TikTok.

You mean professors aren’t kings?

What exactly does it mean to be “cancelled”? That seems to be an infinitely flexible word when used by its “victims”. Popehat straightforwardly recounts a recent event of some interest to me — students walked out on an academic lecture. Horrors!

Mr. Silvergate is a Harvard graduate and professor, crusading attorney and defender of rights, repeatedly published author of important books, founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, and a sought-after gripping speaker. He has not been fired, expelled from any organization, depublished, or even (so far as I know) shunned on Martha’s Vineyard. Here’s what happened: he was invited to speak to private high-school students on the subject of free expression, he used the racial epithet commonly known as the n-word in the course of accurately quoting the title of Prof. Kennedy’s book, he did so several times, some of the students walked out, he continued to speak with the rest of the students, later the school sent its community an apology for the epithet being used in the classroom and said it was inappropriate, and the school wouldn’t print Mr. Silvergate’s response. In other words, some people (rightly or wrongly, rationally or irrationally) didn’t like some of his free expression and responded with their own free expression. If there have been other consequences, he hasn’t mentioned them.

That was it. Students left in disgust, and the school apologize to the students and refused to engage the speakers again. This was being “cancelled”. Now you might say “Popehat is a lawyer!” and that therefore he cannot be trusted, so I stooped to looking at the source, an essay on…ugh…Quillette. It turns out Popehat was right on. The cancelee speaks:

The lessons taught by this sad tale are sobering. One is that it is apparently acceptable for students to signal their disagreement with a speaker by walking out of an assembly [Yes, it is. Students are not a captive audience] rather than subjecting his or her ideas to the testing that vigorous dialogue allows [Dialogue is not a test. It is especially not a test when one side is a seasoned professor or lawyer and the other is a high school student. You do not have a right to beat up kids.]. We know that practices from higher education have permeated the K-12 world, and that today a third of college students believe that it is sometimes or always acceptable to shout down speakers [Irrelevant. He wasn’t shut down.], or to try to prevent them from speaking on campus[Irrelevant. He was allowed to speak; they just decided they would rather not bring him back.]. Another 13 percent believe that is it sometimes or always acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech [Irrelevant. This did not happen here.].

Another lesson is that the educational authorities at a storied academic institution are so afraid of offending the sensibilities of censors that they would rather discourteously [Discourteous? Here’s what the school said to students: “As members of the Milton community, we know not to use the ‘n-word’ due to its repugnant history and connotation. Thus, it was shocking and uncomfortable to hear the word voiced multiple times by Mr. Silverglate.” Rather mild.] ignore a guest speaker’s request to respond to a mistaken charge than permit the airing of a full debate [“DEBATE ME BRO!” No institution has an obligation to give you a platform.]. What happened at Milton is hardly an attractive display of diversity, inclusion, or equity. [I think respecting the student perspective is a fine example of DEI.]

This is juicy stuff for the yahoos at Quillette. A few people point out that he wasn’t “cancelled”, but a majority seemed to welcome the opportunity to rant about the “n-word”, and for some reason, go on and on about “trannies”. It’s always about hating someone.

Who woulda thought Popeye was so precious to Republicans?

Randy Milholland, creator of the webcomic Something Positive, has busted into the big leagues and is now responsible for the Sunday Popeye strips. He’s doing a fine job!

I hates debate trolls, too! He’s also refreshing a few things about the strip.

After nearly a hundred years in existence, the Popeye comic strip is reportedly getting a woke makeover, with the strip’s latest cartoonist promising more ethnic diversity and “more characters who aren’t heterosexual.”

Cartoonist Randal K. Milholland described the Popeye character as being “gender fluid,” citing old episodes in which the plot required Popeye to dress in drag.

“I [want] to bring in more characters who aren’t heterosexual,” Milholland said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News. “I don’t live in that purely straight white world, and I don’t think a lot of other people do either.”

Good news, I would think. Unfortunately, that quote is from Breitbart, where talking about “a woke makeover” is like waving a strip of red meat at a very stupid and confused bull who has forgotten what a normal diet is and thinks an all-meat meal is exactly what real bulls eat. The comments section is bizarre — the idea that a comic strip might include non-straight characters enrages them.

It’s got 600 comments and they’re all as detached from reality as that sample! Did you know that having a gay character in a comic strip represents the Neo-Maoist erasure of history and destruction of culture? They also kind of lose the plot somewhere in there and start ranting about black characters in comic books, all while periodically quoting the Bible. I don’t think any of them are very tightly moored to reality.

I’m starting to pity Texans

It’s easy to hate the demented fucks they keep electing, but then the citizens of the state have to live under the inanity they produce. Maybe some day they’ll figure it out, but until then, they get to suffer the consequences of their actions.

So now they’ve got conservative ‘educators’ who specialize in double-think.

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction.

The group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum change requests. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms.

Uh-oh. If the goal is to not “feel discomfort”, there goes math. You know, one of the things we need to do in education is stretch brains a little bit, which does cause some stress. Hiding the reality of slavery behind euphemisms is not education.

I hope you all had a pleasant Juneteenth

Except for these guys.

I hope they were miserable and frustrated and seething with racist anger all day long.

Franklin Police said one of the groups consisted of people carrying signs that read “White Lives Matter” and “Stop White Replacement.” They added that another group, who said they were a buffer between festival-goers and the other group, included people who were armed and wearing ballistic vests.

Members of each group were also reportedly handling out pamphlets saying they are protesting because “the anti-white system is committed to our physical genocide” to festival attendees before police arrived.

Juneteenth is supposed to be a community celebration; you get together and have picnics and talk with each other. Why would you need AR-15s or bullet proof vests for that? The signs also help explain their intent — these were simply dumbass racists.

Also, I’m curious. These were probably the same people who were outraged at mask mandates, yet here they are, willingly wearing masks. Do you think they’ve had a change of heart, seen the rising infection numbers, and decided to protect themselves from COVID?

The curse of the middle-aged white man

Pity me! I’m part of the most oppressed demographic in the world! I know because my fellow middle-aged white men tell me they’re suffering.

Look! Here’s James Patterson!

James Patterson, a best-selling author with an estimated net worth of $800 million, opened up about how difficult it is for white men to find work in publishing and Hollywood.

The thriller novelist said white male writers experience “another form of racism” in an interview with The Times published Sunday, lamenting the plight of older white males. “What’s that all about?” Patterson mused. “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.”

It’s so hard to be a mystery writer who churns out formulaic pot-boilers that grace the shelves of every airport bookstore in the country.

And what about Christopher Eccleston?

Christopher Eccleston, star of Doctor Who, Thor: The Dark World, and The Leftovers, said in a new interview that straight white males are “the new pariahs of the industry,” though he also acknowledged that more diversity in film and television is a good thing.

In a conversation with Times Radio (via Deadline), Eccleston noted, “Quite rightly I’m a dinosaur now. I’m white, I’m middle-aged, I’m male, and I’m straight. We are all seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein et al. And I can feel that the opportunities are shrinking, as they should do.”

I love how these articles always set the stage by first telling us how many hundreds of millions of dollars they have or what movies and TV shows they starred in, before quoting their sad little whimpers. You know, this isn’t a case where these people have lost opportunities or are making less money — they’re just finding that now they might have to rub elbows with people who are not middle-aged straight white men. Patterson is correct, it is another form of racism…it’s just that the racist here is himself. Maybe it’s just the same old racism?

If we’re seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein, though, you have to recognize that one reason is that a lot of straight white men enabled him and profited from him and tolerated his behavior.

Losers!

Idaho is a lovely state, with mountains and lakes and beautiful rolling hills and prairie. My parents eloped to Coeur d’Alene, because the age of consent was low there and 16-17 year old could get married without parental consent. I had friends who went to college at Washington State University specifically because it was right next to the Idaho border, where the drinking age was 18. WSU was a bit of a party school, although it also has a commendable recommendations as a good college. I’ve driven through the state many times — it’s on the route from Minnesota to Seattle, and also from Salt Lake City to Seattle.

It’s just too bad the state is full of losers, racists, and fascists.

They’ve also got a lot of good people, don’t get me wrong. There was a big Pride event planned for this weekend, so there are liberal, open-minded, interesting people living there. But it’s also home to swarms of redneck religious fanatics and white nationalists.

That Pride event could have been a disaster, when those two worlds collided. They would have, too, if the police hadn’t been tipped off that a mob of suspicious characters had plans to intentionally disrupt the event.

Police in Idaho arrested 31 people who had face coverings, white-supremacist insignia, shields and an “operations plan” to riot near an LGBTQ Pride event on Saturday afternoon. Police said they were affiliated with Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group whose founder was among those arrested.

Authorities received a tip about a “little army” loading into a U-Haul truck at a hotel Saturday afternoon, said Lee White, the police chief in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a city of about 50,000 near the border with Washington. Local and state law enforcement pulled over the truck about 10 minutes later, White said at a news conference.

Many of those arrested were wearing logos representing Patriot Front, which rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

They had to change their name after one of their own committed murder. At least the new name doesn’t associate them with the whole of Idaho, just that lamentable part of the state packed with yahoos, the northern panhandle.

In a news release posted on the group’s website, the Panhandle Patriots encouraged the community to “take a stand” against the LGBTQ “agenda.” It also suggested without evidence that “extremist groups” were trying to hijack the event to provoke violence and said the group would change its event name to “North Idaho Day of Prayer” in response.

It must have been a rough day for the police, given that many of them would have sympathized with the wanna-be rioters. I’ll give them full credit for doing their duty, though, even though the Patriot Front idiots made it easy for them. Don’t you know you don’t assemble in public first, you send everyone in via separate routes with instructions to condense at a specific time and place later? See, if you neglect to pay attention to the Commies, who know a thing or two about infiltration and guerilla warfare, you’ll keep making these boneheaded mistakes.

I wonder what “agenda” they were opposing? Near as I can tell, the LGBTQ agenda is simply to be allowed to exist with all of the rights accorded to citizens. Also, they are the extremist group, and I have to wonder what group they were trying to scapegoat with that claim.

Oh well, all’s well that ends well. Here’s what the Panhandle Patriots got:

If the roles were reversed and it had been the gay folk who ended up zip-tied and kneeling, the fascist wanna-bes would have strolled down the line with a pistol and murdered a few innocent people. Since the people doing the arresting are still constrained by the rule of law, fortunately, they were instead charged with a misdemeanor and released on $300 bail.

They’ll be back.

Thank god for James Stephanie Sterling

I’m a pathetic excuse for a gamer — I’m not very good at the vidyagames, especially not the ones that require fast twitch reflexes — but still, I have to watch all of James Stephanie Sterling’s videos about games and the gaming industry. Watch this one and you’ll see why — let’s all call out those cowards everywhere who whine about not being political, not realizing that the luxury of pretending to shun political positions is in and of itself a political position.

I totally agree that one of the defining characteristics of conservative and centrist liberals is craven cowardice, desperately hiding from the consequences of their bad ideas.

What are the responsibilities of geneticists?

Still works. Just replace “philosophy” with “genetics”

Janet Stemwedel has published an essay in Scientific American. It’s good. You should go read it. It’s also on a subject that I, someone who teaches genetics to college students, worry about. All you have to do is look at racists on the internet, or any of those gomers of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, and you’ll find them chattering away about their version of genetics, citing genetics papers they’ve read or glanced at, but barely understand, and drawing sweeping, and unlikely, conclusions from, for instance, GWAS studies. We’re all so interested in what we can do that we aren’t cautious enough about saying what we can’t do, and what are the invalid interpretations that can trap people searching for genetic certainty in their genomes.

She has some strong suggestions.

For one thing, they [scientists] must be frank and vocal about the weakness of studies that purport to find correlations between race and differences in traits like intelligence or propensity violence. This includes methodological weaknesses like treating IQ as a good proxy for intelligence, or treating “race” as something with clear genetic grounding. A finding that particular genes or sets of genes are associated with a complex behavior does not demonstrate a causal relation or rule out the importance of environmental factors—and indeed, the assumption that genes and environment vary independently is usually false. An average difference in a trait associated with a set of genes between two populations does not rule out that the individual variations within those populations may be greater than the average difference between populations. All of which is to say it’s hard to draw conclusions that are strong, clear and well-supported from much of this work. To the extent that race science is just bad science, scientists have a duty to call it out, rather than letting it stand unchallenged.

I’ve been thinking that I ought to incorporate one of Richard Lewontin’s books into my genetics class — something like It Ain’t Necessarily So : The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, maybe. The catch is that in a traditional genetics course, we have an obligation to teach the core concepts, and taking time to teach about how genetics is misused is sometimes premature.

For another thing, scientists must do some soul-searching about why they are so motivated to look for evidence that traits like intelligence or propensity to violence are written in our genes, or that they would be different for people in different racial groups. Of all the bits of truth they could discover about our complex world, why this focus? Could it be that scientists are following their preexisting hunches, biases that come from being humans living in a culture built around those biases—or that funders are seeking scientific validation for their biases? Any scientist who dismisses this possibility has forgotten that objectivity requires the communal project of scrutinizing scientific conclusions to find how they might be mistaken.

I’ve got a few awful books on my bookshelf, often written by evolutionary psychologists, that make me wonder about the mental state of the authors. They have some grand theory about human behavior that I know can’t possibly be backed up by significant genetics research, but apparently the public wants that nice pat answer to explain why everything is the way it is.

Also, a lot of those kinds of books seem to be written by professors of marketing. Seriously, if you see a book that purports to be about biology, and the author is employed in a business school, don’t waste your time. Which leads into Stemwedel’s next point…

There’s a further question scientists ought to ask themselves when reflecting on why they study the scientific questions they do: What will the knowledge I’m building be good for? How could it be put to use? Do scientists imagine that a finding of genetic differences in intelligence among racial groups would be used to drive more school funding to Black and brown communities, or as a justification to focus school funding on white communities? Or that a finding of genetic differences in propensity for violence among racial groups would be used to do anything but double down on current overpolicing of communities of color?

In the case of James Watson, for example, I think he’s made a career of trying to buttress evidence that he is an intrinsically superior person. They didn’t call him Lucky Jim for nothing — he stumbled into a major discovery, and I wonder if he wonders what might have made him so fortunate. It can’t possibly be that anyone with the right training could have done it, so he finds a refuge in the fact that he’s Scots-Irish. Others know that the status quo has treated them well, so they want to perpetuate what is currently a racist society for the benefit of themselves and their children. Others, I think, are so steeped in a culture of racial bias that they don’t even think about it — black people must be inferior, so let’s search for a rationalization for holding what is an odious belief.

It’s probably a messy mix of all of those things, and more. I’m pretty sure that if genetics has broad fuzzy edges that psychology is probably even worse.