Another professor embarrasses the professoriate

A university professor filed suit against his institution because it chastised him for inappropriate sexual behavior. He wasn’t fired, they just tut-tutted, put a black mark on his record, and told him not to do that anymore. He sued anyway, for his ego.

During a class in 2013, a psychology professor at George Mason University named Todd Kashdan told students he had once performed oral sex at a party, an anecdote he later said was meant to make a point about exhibitionism, according to findings from an internal school investigation and a federal lawsuit the professor filed against the university.

In 2016, Kashdan told graduate students gathered in his hot tub about a sexual experience he had in Europe, and in 2018, he went with graduate students to a strip club where he received a lap dance, the internal investigation found. The professor’s lawsuit said these incidents were misconstrued.

How is bragging about performing oral sex, his sexual experiences, and getting a lap dance in front of his students “misconstrued”? I’m mystified. Just going with students to a strip club seems like it’s crossing a line, and with all the rest, it’s hard to imagine how it could be “misconstrued”.

On top of all that, two former students also filed complaints about him with the university. He is baffled.

The professor, according to the suit, “was surprised to learn that the same women who had given him unsolicited praise for his teaching and research, and sought him out for assistance with academics and their careers, now alleged that he had created a ‘hostile environment.’ ”

Wow. He doesn’t understand that he’s a gatekeeper, that he holds the keys to future advancement in his students’ careers, and is so oblivious to the social workings of human minds that he can’t comprehend that people whose future he controls might flatter him to his face while resenting him?

Psychopaths. Psychopaths everywhere.

IMPORTANT: do not learn anatomy from reddit or twitter

Or from men, apparently.

Men can’t possibly commit sexual assault, because there’s no way they’d be able to find their way about in a woman’s nethers. They’ll just fumble about and end up poking her in a dimple in her knee, or something.

Or they’re just grossed out by the arrangement of parts.

I think we all want that guy to continue to be repulsed by all women. It’s best for everyone.

Even wealthy people can be crackpots

I saw Cody at Some More News talking about the rich people who are dealing with the pandemic in rich people ways. So Gwyneth Paltrow is buying an expensive custom face mask and jetting off to some exotic place to avoid the problems (she thinks). Grifters are setting up luxurious get-aways for the wealthy to get away…in groups. It’s all very Masque of the Red Death, and one can only hope it ends in the same way for them.

And then there’s Eric Weinstein. Sheesh. He’s supposed to be a smart guy? He does this rambling monolog about “Covid, new physics, and our need to get off the planet” and you just have to laugh. What a buffoon…except of course that he has a lot of money and is beloved by the Intellectual Dork Web.

To paraphrase his message, in case you don’t want to sit through that mess: humanity has been very lucky so far, but the lucky streak has ended and COVID-19 has put the world’s economic systems at risk. We should be asking why we’re so ill-prepared, why we have so few ventilators and hospital beds.

This is an insane risk to be taking with the world’s economy. People are accused of being racist if they call it the Wuhan virus and talk about travel bans.

“What should we do if the economy collapses?” he asks. He’s very concerned about The Economy.

This is where it all goes off the rails. To continue to paraphrase: He insists that we’ve got to get off of this planet. He admits that people called him crazy on the Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro shows when he said that. This virus should have been grown in a lab and escaped. We’re not going to be wise enough to rethink. Are we going to have to reboot from tardigrades?

No, really, he said that. I guess he thinks “we”, whatever he means by that, might die off, and “we” will have to restart as tardigrades. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Then he dismisses Elon’s idea of going to Mars, because it’s too marginal. The moon is too bleak for a colony. The only place with abundant opportunity is the far cosmos.

Wait, what? He doesn’t think there’s any place in the solar system to go (I agree), but he thinks we’ve desperately got to get off the planet (I disagree. He’s nuts). So we’re going to have to take off and travel to other star systems. Again, he uses “we” a lot. Who is “we”? Is he going to bring 8 billion people along with him in his space ship?

So, he points out, we’re trapped by Einsteinian physics, so he casually suggests we just have to invent a new physics. Just like that. Oh, Elon Musk going to Mars is crazy, but coming up with a new physics that lets Eric Weinstein do what he wants, that’s sensible.

That gets us about 8 minutes into him talking at his phone, less than halfway through, and you might expect that the rest would be talking about his New Physics, but no. He asks if he has enough of an audience to talk about his new ideas, and the rest of it is him mumbling at people in the chat and rambling on about how scientists and academia are close-minded and wrong, and how he wasn’t even allowed to attend his own thesis defense. Well, if this is how he defends his ideas, I sympathize with his committee.

It’s both infuriating and entertaining — this bozo is one of the leading lights of the IDW? Wikipedia puts his claims of a “new physics” in an enlightening context.

In May 2013, Weinstein gave a colloquium, Geometric Unity, promoted by Marcus du Sautoy as a potential unified theory of physics. His equation-less unpublished theory includes an “observerse,” a 14-dimensional space, and predictions for undiscovered particles which he stated could account for dark matter. Joseph Conlon of the University of Oxford stated that some of these particles, if they existed, would already have been detected in existing accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Few physicists attended and no preprint, paper, or equations were published. Weinstein’s ideas were not widely debated. The few that did engage expressed skepticism. They were unable to debate more intensely due to the fact that there was no published paper.

Yep, total crackpot.

We are now in a race for the dumbest pandemic advice

Florida takes an early lead, with a Republican lawmaker suggesting we aim a hair dryer up our nose to treat COVID-10.

Florida Okeechobee County Commissioner Bryant Culpepper (R) referenced a program he said he saw on One American News Network on how to combat the coronavirus, the Lake Okeechobee News reports.

Said Culpepper: “One of the things that was pointed out in this interview with one of the foremost doctors who has studied the coronavirus said that the nasal passages and the nasal membranes are the coolest part of the body. That’s why the virus tends to go there until it then becomes healthy enough to go into the lungs.”

He added: “This sound really goofy, and it did to me too, but it works. Once the temperature reaches 136 degrees Fahrenheit, the virus falls apart, it disintegrates. I said how would you get the temperature up to 136 degrees? The answer was you use a blow dryer. You hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose.”

Do I need to explain that that wouldn’t work at all, and would probably be deleterious to your sinuses?

By the way, One America News Network is a conspiracy-peddling, far right paranoid network that promotes nothing but pro-Trump bullshit. Don’t trust it.

Seriously, America? Laura Loomer in congress?

She’s running, and fundraising successfully. But this is Laura Loomer.

First, she’s not the least bit bashful about her efforts to stoke hate against Muslims.

In 2017, she bragged on Twitter about being a “#ProudIslamophobe,” as she called Muslims “savages,” calling for a ban on allowing Muslims into America “EVER AGAIN.” She has called Islam a “cancer,” and worse, she wrote that there’s “no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same.” Loomer dangerously wants you to believe that a Muslim American like myself is no different than a person in ISIS.

Loomer, who once worked for the right-wing group Project Veritas, seems to especially despise immigrant Muslims, tweeting in 2017, “Someone needs to create a non-Islamic version of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” That resulted in her being banned from Uber and Lyft for violating its community standards, which prompted Loomer to tweet, “Uber will literally hire an Islamic terrorist, but they will ban a conservative journalist for addressing legitimate safety concerns.”

In 2019, Loomer took to Instagram, where she made a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in vile terms, blaming all Muslims including Omar for 9/11, and adding, “Muslims should not even be allowed to seek positions of political office in this country.”

Beyond social media, in October 2018 Loomer praised and appeared with self-professed Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, who has claimed in the past that homosexuality facilitated the Holocaust and openly recited and defended the “14 word” mantra used by white supremacists. Loomer also trespassed on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s property in January 2019 along with her colleague, Charlottesville Unite the Right marcher Antonio Foreman, to denounce her refusal to support Trump’s wall. While on Pelosi’s property, Loomer reportedly made racist comments about Latinos.

The article doesn’t even mention the time she handcuffed herself to a door at Twitter headquarters and peed herself. Or the time she crashed a Shakespeare play to yell about ISIS controlling CNN. She wants to declare Keith Ellison’s election invalid, because he got 50,000 votes from Muslims and another 50,000 by voter fraud.

The Florida GOP loves Loomer, which is just another sign that the entire goddamned party has been infected with a brain-eating virus, and that we’ve got to do more than topple Trump.

For those who think Trumpism ends with Trump, think again. Loomer, who is 26, and the others we saw march in Charlottesville in defense of white supremacy are part of a younger generation that will be with us long after Trump. The best and only antidote to driving Trumpism to the fringes of society where it belongs is winning big in November. Barring that, Trumpism will spread and infect our nation like a deadly cancer.

How did @Glinner become such an ass?

I tend to have a very hostile reaction to people flinging around lawsuits over the internet. It’s gotten worse lately, I can’t imagine why.

So Graham Linehan (TERF, Gender-Critical Feminist, flaming twit, whatever) saw a video over the weekend and immediately contacted his lawyer. I think he’s a bit touchy about his ugly history.

And here’s the video. Maybe Linehan was just feeding the controversy to help popularize it?

The title is accurate. Linehan does want to eradicate trans children; among the points the video makes, backed with citations from the scientific literature, is that conversion therapy is torture that does harm, increases unhappiness, and makes the victims more likely to commit suicide. Does he plan to go to court to defend his coterie of transphobic fanatics and their distortion of reality?

What’s Jordan Peterson been up to?

Recent photo

We haven’t heard much from him lately. Last year, you couldn’t go on the internet without groaning over yet another fanboi raving about how wonderful Dr Peterson is, he changed my life, don’t you know, and his self-help book is the greatest, and millions of people everywhere have turned their life around with his advice. He was raking in so much money from Patreon and his best-seller book that he was certainly able to live a life of indolence and leisure, and of course, as the master of giving advice to others, he was sure to be living his life as an exemplar of moderation and reason.

Nope. Peterson has been living in ‘absolute hell’. We learn about all this from his daughter Mikhaila, who has been promoted to being “a well known speaker on diet”, eliding over the fact that she has no training or qualifications in nutrition.

  • He acquired “a severe addiction to benzodiazepine tranquilizers”. Really severe.
  • He claims to have started taking them because of his “autoimmune reaction to food”. This is also why he started his bizarre all-beef diet. (By the way, one of the side effects of benzodiazepine is constipation. The man has been corked up for a while.)
  • Getting off of a benzodiazepine addiction is tough; withdrawal seizures are common, and they can kill.
  • North American doctors are aware of this, and wanted to wean him off the dangerous addiction with other drugs. Therefore, they are all puppets of the pharmaceutical companies.
  • So he flew off to Russia to get treatment, where the doctors have the guts to treat him as a man should be treated.
  • The Russian doctors put him in an induced coma, presumably as a consequence of his seizures. And his pneumonia.
  • He nearly died several times.

  • Jordan Peterson has only just come out of an intensive care unit, Mikhaila said. He has neurological damage, and a long way to go to full recovery. He is taking anti-seizure medication and cannot type or walk unaided, but is “on the mend” and his sense of humour has returned.

I’m glad he’s well enough now to laugh, but I would have just told him to stand up straight and clean his room. That would have fixed him right up.

Do people still take advice from this horrific wreck of a man? Not to blame victims of disease or accident, but all of his problems seem to be self-inflicted.

I knew nothing about enneagrams until yesterday

I’d heard of them, of course, but I was in a state of blessed ignorance so the term just sailed right over my head. Now I’ve received a couple of emails from the persistent Richard Colter (never heard of him, either), so I looked ’em up.

Jesus.

It’s some kind of personality profile system, based on numerology and Christian mysticism, with this magical figure used to diagram your personality traits. It has about as much validity as Myers-Briggs personality tests, that is, none at all, but sucks believers in with its pseudo-scientific/pseudo-mathematical posing.

An enneagram is, literally, a drawing with nine lines. Figuratively, however, the enneagram is a New Age mandala, a mystical gateway to personality typing. The drawing is based upon a belief in the mystical properties of the numbers 7 and 3.* It consists of a circle with nine equidistant points on the circumference. The points are connected by two figures: one connects the number 1 to 4 to 2 to 8 to 5 to 7 and back to 1; the other connects 3, 6 and 9. The 142857 sequence is based on the fact that dividing 7 into 1 yields an infinite repetition of the sequence 142857. In fact, dividing 7 into any whole number not a multiple of 7 will yield the infinite repetition of the sequence 142857. Also, 142857 x 7 = 999999. And of course 1 divided by 3 yields an infinite sequence of threes. The triangle joining points 3, 6 and 9 links all the numbers on the circle divisible by 3. To ascribe metaphysical or mystical significance to the properties of numbers is mere superstition and a throwback to an earlier time in human history when ignorance was considered a point of view.

I’d just throw it in the bin with astrology and dianetics and The Bell Curve and every attempt to reduce humanity to a couple of numbers, but Richard Colter has a book he thinks I should read: UNDERSTANDING HUMAN EVOLUTION: AND THE NINE HUMAN ENDEAVORS – REVEALS THE PURPOSE AND MEANING OF LIFE. I am almost tempted to order it.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to read this book is that it reveals the Nine Human Endeavors (NHE), which are the highly sophisticated behaviors that separate modern humans from early human species such as Neanderthals. The constructive use of this knowledge is the key to unleashing the untapped potential of individuals, organizations, and countries. Thus, the knowledge contained in this book will prove to be indispensable to people of all walks of life.
This book will be of interest to Anthropologists because it provides a comprehensive theory of human evolution that answers the unassailable questions of how and why humans evolved. As the story of human evolution unfolds, new concepts fill the gaps existing in the anthropological sciences, along with critical details such as the key psychological and physiological differentiators between modern humans and early humans. And a basic timeline of evolutionary events provides the context necessary for those without a background in anthropology.

It’s 341 pages of this egotistical argle-bargle. I’m sure, given how the Ennealogical Brigade thinks, that it ought to be full of bizarre mystical diagrams that represent the “evidence” that this view of purposeful evolution is true, but a quick glimpse inside reveals that the author has instead substituted page after page of word salad. Maybe the diagrams are in an appendix.

Mr Colter himself is active on Quora, where he writes about two things, and only two things: how to get out of paying speeding tickets, and spreading misinformation about evolution, which always includes a plug for his book. I’d look deeper, but I think I’ve had enough nonsense for the day.