Believe them when they tell you what they want to do

Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, it’s pretty clear what the theocratic Right wants to do: they want to kill you or force you to be as mad as they are.

I remember when everyone thought atheism was radical.

Just a thought: are these far-right loons finally insane enough to repel the majority of Americans? Or are they actually winning converts to their bloody causes?

Oh, wait. I just realized that Twitter is in the process of melting down, and that it’s entirely possible that every time over the last 10 or 15 years that I’ve linked to Twitter, that’s going to become a dead link, and I better make sure to include a link to a more stable, reliable source from now on. That excerpt of one of Nutty Nick’s rants is also enshrined on Right Wing Watch.

The death of Twitter is going to punch holes in blogs everywhere.

It’s called accountability, ever hear of it?

JK Rowling, transphobic hack, is angry with Graham Norton, amusing talk show host.

Rowling wrote: Enjoying the recent spate of bearded men stepping confidently onto their soapboxes to define what a woman is and throw their support behind rape and death threats. You may mock, but takes real bravery to come out as an Old Testament prophet.

Neither Norton nor Bragg referenced rape or death threats in their statements.

He didn’t even mention Rowling! Here’s the horribly offensive thing that Norton said.

“If people want to shine a light on those issues then talk to trans people. Talk to the parents of trans kids, talk to doctors, talk to scientists. Talk to someone who can illuminate it in some way.”

How awful. Doesn’t he know the proper authorities on trans rights are cranky neo-fascists?

Then he went further.

The phrase “cancel culture” has become a ubiquitous catchall that celebrities may cling to after they make a controversial or offensive statement.

But Graham Norton doesn’t think that’s the correct description for what really happens when fans criticize “canceled” people. The right word, he says, is “accountability.”

Norton, the host of a titular BBC talk show, tackled the thorny topic of “cancel culture” at the Cheltenham Literature Festival this week. Speaking to interviewer Mariella Frostrup, Norton decried the concept of “canceling” anyone who still has a sizable platform from which to speak.

“You read a lot of articles in papers by people complaining about ‘cancel culture,’” he told Frostrup. “You think, in what world are you canceled? I’m reading your name in a newspaper, or you’re doing an interview about how terrible it is to be canceled.”

“I think [‘cancel culture’] is the wrong word,” he continued. “I think the word should be accountability.”

Exactly right.

And now Graham Linehan, Rowling sycophant, oblivious toady, and professional hate-monger, has been sucked into the conflict, the poor man.

Speaking to GB News’s Andrew Doyle at the Battle of Ideas festival in London, Linehan said he was “disappointed” by the comments from Norton. He said: “I find Graham Norton personally such a betrayal, because one of the first things he did was his role on Father Ted, there is no way he cannot know about what’s happened to me.

“For him to say there’s no cancel culture, I don’t know what to say about it, but he’s really disappointed me.”

Linehan also addressed being dropped by Hat Trick Productions from involvement in a musical version of Father Ted because of his views. He said: “The way I look at it is, it’s preemptive cultural vandalism. It’s something that’s been cancelled before it even appeared.

“I don’t really know what to say except they’ve never told me what I’ve done wrong. They’ve never told me what I’ve said that they disagree with.

“When I asked once, someone in the room rolled their eyes, as if it was obvious. Well, actually, it’s not obvious.”

Actually, it is obvious. We could start with your willingness to go on GB News, but also…

He had also been a very active and prolific tweeter on popular micro-blogging website Twitter, and in recent years had focussed on attacking trans people and being a general TERF. He opposed the trans charity Mermaids in a rather transphobic post on Mumsnet (a parenting website known for rabid transphobia), and was called out for this by hbomberguy in the latter’s famous marathon charity livestream to raise money for Mermaids, in which he raised over $340,000.

On June 27 2020, Graham Linehan was permanently banned from Twitter, due to violating several of their hateful conduct policies. On March 9, 2021, he announced that his anti-trans activism had caused “such a strain that my wife and I finally agreed to separate”.

You mean his wife never told him what he’d done wrong? I can believe it.

GL’s Wife: Graham, I’m divorcing you.

GL: What? Why?

GL’s Wife: Because you wallow in self-pity, and you’ve become a hateful twit forever ranting about where people should go to the bathroom…

GL: Someone is using the wrong bathroom? Quick! To the Twitter machine! Sorry, dear, this is important, we’ll talk later.

Shorter explanation: you’re being held accountable for your transphobia, Glinner. Obliviousness is not an excuse, and neither is “cancel culture”.

“Dr” Oz, celebrity physician

He really is a Dr Nick.

And then there is this horrible report from Jezebel about his research activities. I’ve mentioned before that part of the way I worked through college was as an assistant in a med school animal surgery, where I’d help out with prep and cleanup and animal care for researchers doing experiments on dogs and cats and a few other kinds of animals, so this is familiar ground to me. I know what this stuff is like, and I also know that the majority of the experimenters were deeply concerned for the care and welfare of the animals (that’s why I was hired — despite not having a degree yet, people like me could work in the lab and advocate for the animals). Would you believe that about half my job was just hanging out in the animal room, playing with cats and dogs? That was nice. The other half was helping to stick recording instruments in their brains and hearts. Not so nice, and a reason why I’d rather work on fish and arthropods.

A warning about the Jezebel article, though: it doesn’t really say anything about the purpose or results of the animal experimentation, which means they’re ignoring a big part of the story. I mean, I assisted in the catheterization of the carotid artery in dogs, which wasn’t for their benefit at all, but was important for monitoring blood flow in the heart — you couldn’t do detailed analysis of circulatory responses without doing that. So I’m wondering what specific goal Oz’s experiments on dogs had, and this isn’t mentioned at all in the article.

Maybe he was actually doing good research? Ha ha ha. This was at the same time he was going on Oprah’s show and his own show to peddle green coffee bean extracts and other such quackery, so I’d be surprised. Another possibility is that this was part of medical training exercises. Some of the animal surgeries I monitored were done by medical students, who were basically practicing basic techniques before being turned loose to cut into humans.

There is no excuse, however, for neglect or abuse of animals under your care. Some of what is reported is simply bad animal care.

Dell’Orto testified that a dog experimented on by Oz’s team experienced lethargy, vomiting, paralysis, and kidney failure, but wasn’t euthanized for a full two days. She alleged other truly horrifying examples of gratuitously cruel treatment of dogs, including at least one dog who was kept alive for a month for continued experimentation despite her unstable, painful condition, despite how data from her continued experimentation was deemed unusable. According to Dell’Orto, one Oz-led study resulted in a litter of puppies being killed by intracardiac injection with syringes of expired drugs inserted in their hearts without any sedation.

That first dog: that’s a massive experimental failure. I want to know what was done for it in those two days; even from a cruelly utilitarian standpoint, that’s a huge expense, because you are obligated to give round-the-clock care to an animal you fucked up. Did they? Or did they just let it suffer for days?

That second dog is a similar failure. Why was it unstable and in pain? What possible information did they think they could get from a botched surgery?

The litter of puppies brought back more unpleasant memories. As the low level lab grunt, euthanizing animals post-experiment was one of my duties. The standard process was to take the animal in a back room, out of the general care area, calming it, and putting in a butterfly needle (I got quite good at that, and could almost stick a vein with the animal hardly noticing), and give it a general anesthetic to gently put it to sleep. Stabbing it in the heart and throwing it in a bag? No way.

Columbia University was fined $2000 for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. That’s a pittance, a mere token. It just tells us that there were definitely some sloppy procedures in that lab.

Oh, also significant is that the accusations are all against researchers and techs working with and for Oz. It’s not as if Oz himself was doing any of the actual dirty work himself, he had a quack business & entertainment empire to run. I tried looking up his research on PubMed, and he has quite a few publications, but most of them are clinical studies, nothing to do with animal experimentation. I did find this ironic gem of a paper, Impact of unauthorized celebrity endorsements on cardiovascular healthcare, which begins with an anecdote about Kim Kardashian recommending pills on her show, and ends by suggesting it is crucial that doctors work with celebrities.

In the future, it is crucial that the cardiologists and other healthcare professionals work with celebrities in order to counter the negative influences of fake celebrity healthcare endorsements. First, cardiologists should speak to their patients about the legitimacy of celebrity advice and the source of the health information. Comments by patients of recent celebrity endorsements should not be received with annoyance, but rather as a crucial opportunity to start educational conversations about cardiovascular health. Second, a certification/registration process or database by the FTC or equivalent regulatory body, should be formed to double-check whether a celebrity actually allowed a company or advertiser to use his or her persona, body or reputation to endorse a product or service related to cardiovascular health. Ultimately, there is an urgent need for large-scale studies to help researchers better understand where people receive false advertisements and what compels them to act on this false information.

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Yeah, the quack celebrity doctor has no interest in telling other doctors that they ought to work more with celebrities.

The Freedom from Atheism Foundation is wrong about everything

If you’re at all interested in how religion wrecks people’s brains, take a look at the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (also on Facebook, where it’s updated more frequently. All the worst shit is on Facebook.) I thought the cartoon on the right was typical, because the little kid’s reply in no way addresses the point Cartoon Dawkins was making, but apparently they think it’s cogent.

It turns out they’ve been claiming that I support them, which is weird. That claim was noted on RationalWiki.

This webshite website is so biased and full of hate that many would consider it to be a “hate group”, as it frequently uses lies, generalizations, and intentional misrepresentations to defame atheists — but then of course, if they do all of that, then they are totally not a hate group, you intolerant, militant atheist. In fact, the FFAF even claims to “love” the very people whom they work so hard to dehumanize. In a brilliant display of deliberate dishonesty, the Freedom From Atheism Foundation also falsely claimed that they were “endorsed” by PZ Myers, despite the fact that he openly stated in his blogpost that he does not at all agree with them, criticizes their claim that “atheism is a religion”, and states that their goal is “all about restricting religious freedom.”

Never be ironic in titling your posts about them, because they won’t get it…or will deliberately misrepresent it.

Conservapædia doesn’t get it, either.

Atheist activist PZ Myers issued a statement on May 9, 2014 called “I support the Freedom From Atheism Foundation”. In this statement, Myers stated “I am happy to agree that atheism should be kept out of the public square, if religion is also excluded. There’s this principle called secularism that I think is a good idea, and the only way to accommodate a religiously diverse community.”

I hope the title of this post clarifies everything for those little minds.

2:52

Émile P. Torres just pointed out the existence of this 5 year old video.

Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, and Jaan Tallinn discuss with Max Tegmark (moderator) what likely outcomes might be if we succeed in building human-level AGI, and also what we would like to happen.

It’s 10 right-leaning white men dressed in black suits who have a history of stirring up fear to their own profit (or, in the case of Tallinn for instance, dismissing credible concerns about climate change for his own profit) clumsily sharing too few microphones to make up some science fiction shit. The panel is titled Superintelligence: Science or Fiction? | Elon Musk & Other Great Minds. I’m done already after seeing the title and lineup, but I’ve always wanted to witness hell, so I watched a little of it. Very little of it.

I made it to the 2:52 mark before I said, “aww, hell no, fuck this” and bailed out. Years of dealing with creationists has given me a high tolerance for bad bullshit, but this was too much for me. How far can you get?

I hope you weren’t eager to get Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book

D’Souza made a stupid, and clearly debunked, “documentary”, 2000 Mules, in which he claimed Democrats smuggled in crates of faked ballots to steal the election. Now he’s trying to turn it into a book. Oops, a snag.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book version of “2000 Mules,” based on the film that makes widely debunked claims that people were paid to dump fraudulent ballots at collection boxes in key 2020 election states, was abruptly recalled by the publisher Monday, the eve of its release.

Recalled? Publication delayed? You might think that’s a small thing to have happen, except…the publisher is Regnery. Regnery don’t care. Regnery publishes the most godawful stupid right-wing garbage without a qualm.

Now I really want to know what kind of garbage is in the first publication of that book that would make even Regnery gag.

Technoidiocy

Jared Kushner lives in a pampered bubble where he thinks he’s going to be sheltered forever.

From the last year, the one thing I’ve tried to put a priority on since I left the White House was, you know, getting some exercise in. I think that there is a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s going to die. So, we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape.

There is no evidence that we can increase human life spans much beyond slightly over a century, and the only people claiming otherwise are scam artists or pseudoscientists (or both, <cough> Aubrey deGrey). The reasonable goal is to make our lives productive and comfortable within the limits of our biology, and that’s a good reason for exercise. Not this ridiculous post-human bullshit.

We’re not even doing that, though. Just browsing through the news, there have been catastrophic floods in Pakistan.

Millions of Pakistanis affected by the worst flooding in a decade are in desperate need of aid as authorities say they have been “overwhelmed” by the scale of the disaster, with the country’s climate minister calling it a “serious climate catastrophe”.

The death toll from monsoon flooding since June has reached 1,136, according to figures released Monday by the country’s National Disaster Management Authority.

Have Republicans been helping much with preventing deaths from climate change? Or take a look at the recent heat waves in Europe.

An extreme heat wave that meteorologists call an “apocalypse” broiled much of Europe and the United Kingdom on Monday, and hundreds of people died because of record high temperatures and ferocious wildfires.

At least 748 heat-related deaths have been reported in the heat wave in Spain and neighboring Portugal, where temperatures reached 117 degrees this month.

Gosh, it looks like science, or rather, our technological capitalist dystopia, has been inventing all kinds of unpleasant ways to die.

Mustn’t forget: at least six and a half million dead from COVID-19.

I would also point out that thanks to advances in science, Jared Kushner has an enhanced probability of dying on a guillotine. That’s far more likely than that he’d live forever.

And there are so many ways he could face mortality! Maybe it’ll be in the chaos of a civil war incited by his father-in-law, or in food riots after the collapse of the economy, or in a backstabbing struggle for power in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or his cozy relationship with the Saudis could end in betrayal and sawed off limbs, or he could just get cancer and die. So many possibilities! Science won’t save you from human nature or the physical limitations thereof.

Fortunately, I don’t listen to overpaid athletes’ opinions on physics

Shaquille O’Neal said some incredibly stupid things five years ago, claiming to believe the Earth is flat. Those stories died down a while ago — I suspect a publicist took him aside and explained “Ouyay oundsay ikelay anyay idiotyay, ixnay ethay atflay earthyay BS” — but it has flared up again with recent remarks on a podcast.

The NBA legend, 50, was asked during an appearance on The Kyle & Jackie O Show if his former comments about the conspiracy theory were a “joke” or if he did, in fact, believe the notion to be true.

“It’s a theory,” O’Neal told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson. “It’s just a theory, they teach us a lot of things. It’s just a theory,” he repeated.

“I flew 20 hours today, not once did I go this way,” O’Neal said, noting he “didn’t tip over” or “go upside down.” He added that he’s also unsure about whether the planet is spinning.

It’s OK. If you don’t mind that I’ll forever after disregard everything you say about anything, just announce that you believe the earth is flat, or only 6000 years old, and I’ll happily file you away in my mental bin labeled “bollocks”. That stuff is so stupid that O’Neal might convince me that basketball must be imaginary.

God-bothering violent fool was temporarily restrained

There’s the question I’d ask.

“Andrew Who?” That’s most of what the over-30 crowd said in response to the news that Andrew Tate had been banned from TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook after a spate of negative coverage and increasing concerns from parents and teachers about the TikTok star’s power over his followers. For adults who don’t have teenage sons, the 35-year-old kickboxer-turned-TikTok star was largely unknown, but as anyone in the high school and college age set could tell you, online he was an overnight sensation.

Admittedly, I’d heard of him second hand as a terrible trollish asshole, but I’d never seen any of his videos, so I’m glad Amanda Marcotte explained it. The big question, though, is how does a loudmouthed ignorant jerk become an overnight sensation? Amanda answers that, too.

His popularity is directly attributable to the profit motives of social media companies. As the Guardian demonstrated, if a TikTok user was identified as a teenage male, the service shoveled Tate videos at him at a rapid pace. Until the grown-ups got involved and shut it all down, Tate was a cash cow for TikTok, garnering over 12 billion views for his videos peddling misogyny so vitriolic that one almost has to wonder if he’s joking.

Oh.

I’m sure the executives behind those kinds of decisions are all cowering behind the smokescreen of the mysterious “algorithm”, but they wrote the code for that crap and fed it the data, and you’re telling me that they never noticed that their software was running amok and spewing bad recommendations all over the place? Nah, I don’t believe it. More likely there was the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley dudebros enthusiastically priming the system with the kind of videos they like to watch — a mob of James Damore wanna-bes — and it took off in a way that the grown-ups had to notice. They noticed the cash flowing into their pockets, anyway.

Parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the wellbeing of young people should be worried. It’s not just that Tate was spreading hateful ideas and encouraging violence against women, though that on its own is terrifying enough. It’s that Tate is just the latest example of the way that far-right figures lure in young men by preying on their insecurities. Once the influencers suck in these young men, they start redirecting audience energies towards fascist organizing. Tate is just a piece of a larger puzzle that explains, for instance, how so many otherwise normal young men get wrapped up in groups like the Proud Boys and actions like storming the Capitol on January 6.

The strategy is simple. Far-right online influencers position themselves as “self-help” gurus, ready to offer advice on making money, working out, or, crucially, attracting female attention. But it’s a bait-and-switch. Rather than getting good advice on money or health, audiences often are hit with pitches for cryptocurrency scams or useless-but-expensive supplements. And, even worse, rather than being offered genuine guidance on how to be more appealing to women, they’re encouraged to blame women — and especially feminism — for their dating woes.

There has to be more to it than just a pied piper leading adolescent boys to their doom, though. I was an adolescent boy, once, and I would have been repelled by my fellow boys “saying shit like women are inferior to men, women belong in the kitchen, and refusing to read an article by a female author because women should only be housewives.” I’m not saying I wasn’t impressionable and stupid at a young age, but that there are some kinds of messages I would have rejected instantly. There’s got to be some other ingredient in the recipe to make a right-wing tool.

By the way, Andrew Tate himself might be banned, but TikTok and YouTube are stuffed to the gills with Andrew Tate videos — his acolytes have been busy duplicating and uploading copies of his videos everywhere…and none of the services profiting off them will do a thing about it. Kent Hovind could be sent to prison for ten years, and still his lies continued to proliferate. Expect Tate to thrive in the same virtual way. He’ll be back. Or some vicious little copy of him will be.