These people are embarrassments, part MCCXVII

Our president, and Stephen Miller, are colossal fucking bigots.

Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They all have AIDS, he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never go back to their huts in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

If the impeachment doesn’t happen soon, when does the revolution begin? Because, you must remember,
a substantial part of the electorate, the part that voted for him, probably agrees with those statements.

It’s possible

This is a good article about the alien bubble silicon valley is rolling around in. What shocked me most was this one incredibly stupid comment.

On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics, he wrote.

If it helps, Altman himself is gay.

No, it doesn’t help.

Altman himself is an entrepreneur, which seems to mean he hustles and shuffles money around, but hasn’t actually accomplished anything himself. He certainly hasn’t said anything novel about physics — he’s a college dropout, and his physics knowledge is probably somewhat less than mine, which isn’t saying a lot. Go ahead, check out his Wikipedia page, and tell me what he has done.

And that’s my objection to his statement — he has zero evidence for the idea that tolerating homophobia benefits science, or that a culture that actively promotes tolerance by rejecting bigotry is somehow equivalent to an oppressive culture that punishes people for their sexual orientation. I’ll just point out that it was people saying disparaging things about gay people that led to the chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. Germany had many prominent scientists and engineers in the 1930s, and supported science well, but also had the idea that Jews were bad, and so America was gifted with Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs. One of my graduate advisors, George Streisinger, was a Hungarian Jew whose family fled the Nazis.

These are all equivalently stupid.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about women if we want them to be able to say novel things about computer science.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about black Americans if we want them to be able to say novel things about refrigeration technology.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about Jews if we want them to be able to say novel things about biology.

When you string it together that way, one thing that you ought to notice is the word “people”. Who? What people? It is the assumption about the identity of people: they are non-gay, non-woman, non-black, non-Jews. They are, of course, rich white men, like the ones who populate the Silicon Valley tech bubble. We have to allow rich white men to say whatever they want in order to allow them to reinvent bodegas, reinvent the bus, reinvent food, and do all those other irrelevant things that will make the privileged richer.

It’s possible. It’s possible. It’s possible. “It’s possible” is not an evidence-based statement in support of a policy. It is the kind of open-ended, vague weasely string of words disconnected from cause and effect that allows great evil to thrive in the crevices of its ambiguity.

It’s possible that if we cook and eat the flesh of Sam Altman, we’ll become immortal gods on Earth. Won’t know until we try.

I need to get to know more Degenerate Lesbian Jews

Do you remember Janis Ian? I mainly recall her one hit song, “At Seventeen”, but as it turns out she’s also an advocate for LGBT rights and is a science fiction author. Sounds like the kind of person I could get along with.

Unfortunately, some people have a different opinion, like the schmuck who wrote a screed titled Degenerate Lesbian Jew Singer Janis Ian Blasts Trump for Not Inviting His Enemies to WH Party. He’s mad because she criticizes Trump openly…another plus mark for Ian. Our schmuck, though…you should read his interpretation of “At Seventeen”.

Wikipedia reminds those who have forgotten that when Janis Ian was 14 in 1965 she had a hit song promoting the idea that white girls should be having sex with Negro males.

Actually, Janis Ian (born Janis FINK) eventually came to realize it wasn’t males that caught her eye, but females. She herself never married a Negro, although she did marry a white man before ending that marriage and “marrying” a woman.

As is central to the Jewish temperament, she’s not happy unless she’s being critical, while acting holier-than-thou.

In short, she’s a disgusting animal who would inspire any “Nazi” to scream, “Gas the kikes!”

Janis Ian’s response is wonderful. I think Degenerate Lesbian Jews must be very nice people, but shrieking white racist Nazis, not so much.

Just another company boss

Trouble for Tesla and Elon Musk: workers are complaining about racist coworkers, and agitating for a union.

Jose Moran—who claimed to be an employee at the Fremont factory—wrote a scathing critique of the facility and his employer, alleging “excessive mandatory overtime” and low wages. He said that he and other employees were considering unionizing and had reached out to UAW for help.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told our sister site Gizmodo that Moran was paid by UAW “to join Tesla and agitate for the union.”

And what is wrong with that? If conditions are unjust, then rallying workers to form a union is exactly the right thing to do (also, even if conditions are relatively just, forming a union to give workers a voice is also exactly the right thing to do. You are never wrong to form a workers’ union.)

But now the story going around is that Musk has fired some of those rabble-rousers for urging unionizing. That makes him a 19th century villain in my book.

But worse…you know those complaints about coworkers freely throwing around racial slurs? Musk has a suggestion for dealing with that, too.

Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of [a] historically less represented group, Musk wrote in the email. Sometimes these things happen unintentionally, in which case you should apologize. In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology.

Jesus.

Different suggestion: if you discover that you’ve got racists working for you who are disrupting the other workers, fire the racists. It’s that simple. If you’re able to fire people for union activities, you must have the power to fire people for naked bigotry. Why aren’t you?

Post-modern neo-Marxist cultural Marxists are coming to get you!

Jordan Peterson is a colossal ass — an ignoramus who has become a professor of psychology and uses his tiny sliver of specific knowledge to grant him the authority to pontificate on every other field, about which he knows nothing. He’s putting together a website that will tell you how wrong, as determined by him, your college classes are.


They can use the website to distinguish between people who are credible and people who aren’t and maybe we can drop the damn enrollment in those horrible courses by 75% over the next three years … it’s in their best interest both, I would say, spiritually and economically to avoid those courses and those disciplines like the plague and then maybe we can get the disciplines that have become entirely corrupt and the ones that started that way to put themselves back together before they run themselves out of existence completely, and I might as well name a few of the disciplines that i think are particularly reprehensible to begin with … So, as I said already, women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies, studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better. It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell. Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.

I’ve got some rather awkward news for him: there are biologists (I’m not one of them) who think psychology is worthless and corrupt. There are physicists who think biology is trivial and useless — “stamp collecting”, I think they called it. A good scholar recognizes that there are domains of knowledge in which we lack expertise, and that our ignorance is not an indictment of the field.

And look at what he wants to get rid of! Women’s, ethnic, and racial studies — does he think that those groups don’t have unique problems and perspectives? Does he believe that White Man is the standard by which all should be measured?

Sociology, anthropology, and English literature have to go? Is he insane? These are rigorous disciplines in important subjects. That they are too difficult for Jordan Peterson to understand does not mean they are invalid.

And my god, he despises education faculty? He’s got a job at the University of Toronto. He is supposed to be an educator. Part of his responsibility is teaching, and teaching well, or he’s got no right to be a member of a distinguished university. His only pedagogical technique seems to involve standing up and stammering out bigotry at an audience — an audience of like-minded assholes who applaud in contempt of genuine academic disciplines, by the way.

I’m just trying to imagine an institution of higher learning where he got his way. At my university, we expect students to acquire some breadth of knowledge. We require students to take courses in literature, history, sociology, the arts, even — I know, it’s hard to believe — psychology, a discipline that must be corrupt if it tolerates this jerkwad. If we demolished all those other disciplines that are so essential to developing our students as well-rounded, comprehensive citizens of the world, they’d be reduced to inane Jordan Peterson clones and the kind of people who write for the Morris North Star (I notice they don’t care much for sociology, either).

Let’s call Peterson what he is: an anti-intellectual. He’s stupid and proud of it, and he’d like everyone else to be as stupid as he is, which is why he wants to destroy so many worthy and important academic disciplines. He’s a neurasthenic Rush Limbaugh, and about as well informed. I wouldn’t even trust him in his own field of psychology.

But he’s part of a rising wave of anti-intellectual barbarism, and he’s profiting well from it. He’s making half a million dollars a year from his gullible alt-right fans!

This is an effective strategy, though: create a boogeyman populated with shadowy figures out of your audience’s paranoid imaginations, and convince them to throw money at you for batting them away. We saw the same thing with the bullshit specter of “cultural Marxism”, a non-existent movement that was conjured from whole cloth by right-wing know-nothings.

Hey, my old high school is in the news!

That’s rarely a good thing anymore, and it isn’t good news. Someone went into the girls’ restroom and scrawled hateful graffiti on the walls: swastikas, death threats against Muslims, and of course, the universal shorthand of American assholes everywhere, “MAGA”.

These people are effectively tarring their own slogans by association. I see “Make America Great Again” on a hat, and it’s as bad as if they have a swastika, a Confederate flag, or racial slur proudly displayed on their clothes.

What is The Jewish Question, anyway?

Speaking of YouTube atheism, they aren’t even hiding it any more. A subset of those goons are now pondering…The Jewish Question. Here’s Sargon of Akkad aka Carl of Benjamin promising to do a video series on The Jewish Question, inspired by another series of videos by a guy named Mouthy Buddha.

I skimmed through a few of those videos by Mouthy Buddha — they are impressively and professionally done! The subject, however, is repugnant. He’s openly questioning the existence of the Holocaust; he shows a few still photos of Jews putting on a cabaret show in a concentration camp, therefore these were all happy places. He goes on and on about how Hitler wasn’t a bad man, he was an honorable gentleman and a distinguished leader. You get the idea. They’re outright Nazi apologetics using bad arguments. And there’s Carl Benjamin declaring that they’re not wrong, that he’s going to make videos along this line himself, and suggesting that Mouthy Buddha was making the pro-Nazi arguments stronger.

In case you’re wondering — the YouTube crowd is apparently shy about stating what it is outright — the Jewish question is about the status and treatment of Jews in a country. The correct answer, clearly, is that they are equal citizens who must be treated with the same respect that all residents of a country, all human beings on Earth, should be treated. In the mouths of Nazis, though, the Jewish question is about how best to deprive them of their lives and property and rights, and to them, the proper answer was called the Final Solution.

But once again, there are people trying to make this a respectable debate, and useful idiots who are complaining about calling people who haven’t personally murdered millions “Nazis”.

Racism enshrined in higher ed

Is this what nurses are being taught?

It’s also revealing how white people aren’t even mentioned. We are the standard by which all are measured; our responses are assumed and we just have to mention the differences, like that blacks are inured to pain and Jews complain a lot and Indians are stoic.

I’m not too surprised to see this kind of garbage in a nursing textbook. It’s no criticism of most nurses, but there’s a heck of a lot of bad woo in nursing programs — my university’s bogus Center for Spirituality and Healing is affiliated with the nursing school, to their eternal shame.