His name is Joe

When he went off to college, Joseph Whedon “traded his basic name for a more interesting one” and started calling himself Joss. That’s not at all unusual, that you reinvent yourself when you get away from old social circles and find yourself in new ones, but I think, given the allegations and confessions in this article about Joss Whedon, I’m going to have to roll that change back. He’s Joe Whedon, and as he admits, he was “dark and miserable, this hideous little homunculus who managed to annoy everyone”. Gollum tried to call himself Smeagol, but no one is fooled anymore.

The author of the article, Lila Shapiro, lets people just speak, and boy is it damning. She interviews people who worked with Whedon on Buffy, for instance, and discover what an entitled little shit he was, who managed to impress everyone with his big words and flowery language.

A high-level member of the Buffy production team recalled Whedon’s habit of “writing really nasty notes,” but that wasn’t what disturbed her most about working with him. Whedon was rumored to be having affairs with two young actresses on the show. One day, he and one of the actresses came into her office while she was working. She heard a noise behind her. They were rolling around on the floor, making out. “They would bang into my chair,” she said. “How can you concentrate? It was gross.” This happened more than once, she said. “These actions proved he had no respect for me and my work.” She quit the show even though she had no other job lined up.

Then there were the alleged incidents two Buffy actresses wrote about on social media last year. Michelle Trachtenberg, who’d played Buffy’s younger sister, claimed there had been a rule forbidding Whedon from being alone in a room with her on set. Whedon told me he had no idea what she was talking about, and Trachtenberg didn’t want to elaborate. One person who worked closely with her on Buffy told me an informal rule did exist, though it was possible Whedon was not aware of it. During the seventh season, when Trachtenberg was 16, Whedon called her into his office for a closed-door meeting. The person does not know what happened, but recalled Trachtenberg was “shaken” afterward. An adult in Trachtenberg’s circle created the rule in response.

But you can tell Joe chose to do this interview because he wanted to correct the record.

Picking up a cup of tea, Whedon said he could no longer remain silent as people tried to pry his legacy from his hands. But there was a problem. Those people had set out to destroy him and would surely seize on his every utterance in an attempt to finish the job. “I’m terrified,” he said, “of every word that comes out of my mouth.”

That was a prophetic statement. You let your ego run away with you, Joe, you should have just shut up. His denials sound like confessions.

Whedon acknowledged he was not as “civilized” back then. “I was young,” he said. “I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell. This was a very young cast, and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party.” He said he would never intentionally humiliate anyone. “If I am upsetting somebody, it will be a problem for me.” The costume designer who said he’d grabbed her arm? “I don’t believe that,” he said, shaking his head. “I know I would get angry, but I was never physical with people.” Had he made out with an actress on the floor of someone’s office? “That seems false. I don’t understand that story even a little bit.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. “I should run to the loo.” When he came back, he said the story didn’t make sense to him because he “lived in terror” of his affairs being discovered.

Wait, wait, wait. The story about making out with actresses couldn’t be true, because sure, yeah, he was having affairs, plural, but he was terrified of anyone finding out? That’s not a very good excuse, you know. It sounds like everyone on the set knew he was screwing around. His wife sure knew, since she divorced him over it.

Then there was that feud with Zack Snyder over the Justice League movie, which Whedon took over mid-filming and revised. I saw the Whedon version, and hated it; I haven’t seen the so-called “Snyder cut”, and won’t, because as bad as the first version was, I don’t think making it longer and putting an Ayn Rand fanboy in charge was going to make it better. It’s a convenient way to blame Joe’s fall from grace on an external force, though.

In our conversations, Whedon was somewhat more circumspect. “I don’t know who started it,” he told me. “I just know in whose name it was done.” Snyder superfans were attacking him online as a bad feminist and a bad husband. “They don’t give a fuck about feminism,” he said. “I was made a target by my ex-wife, and people exploited that cynically.” As he explained this theory, his voice sank into a hoarse whisper. “She put out a letter saying some bad things I’d done and saying some untrue things about me, but I had done the bad things and so people knew I was gettable.”

Snyder superfans tend to be horrible anti-feminist trolls, I agree, but this article makes it clear that Joe is the one who has been exploiting feminism cynically. That Joe Whedon admits to doing “bad things” is not the apology he thinks it is. He was gettable because he’d done those bad things, and that wasn’t Zack Snyder’s, or his ex-wife’s, fault.

Man, that last sentence really needs a “gollum, gollum” at the end of it.

Jordan Peterson is talking out of his ass again

Of course he’s peddling more conspiracy theories. These new COVID variants that require booster shots are apparently the product of convenient whims of Big Pharma.

When is that a variant? How about whenever it’s convenient for the pharmaceutical companies?

The man is firmly in Joe Rogan territory. We recognize variants by their genetics and by their phenotypic effects on their host, things that we can actually measure. The pharmaceutical companies can’t just conjure up new strains of a virus that is already infecting millions of people.

Peterson is a fucking idiot.

By the way, he’s putting on a show in my backyard, at the State Theater in Minneapolis, on my birthday. Tickets are in the $200-$400 (absolutely astonishing), and I want you to know…that would be quite possibly the very worst birthday present I could imagine getting. Fortunately, no one on Earth hates me enough to inflict that on me.

I survived the asteroid! And the first day of classes!

It wasn’t much of a surprise that I emerged from the lab and the Earth was still here. Maybe a little disappointing, but I’ve come to expect that.

My classroom face, sans mask

Class wasn’t that bad, I put on a performance worthy of Sir Lawrence Olivier, or possibly Soupy Sales, and managed to put on a convincing, I think, façade of enthusiasm and optimism that may have fooled the students. It helped that they were an earnest and cheerful bunch, too, but maybe we’re all pretending deep down inside. Now it’s just a matter of repeating the act over and over until I die.

Like tomorrow. And the day after. And endless days stretching into eternity.

Nah, it wasn’t that bad. I’ll probably get through the term without collapsing into a sobbing wreck. I got one day done!

The end is nigh! (not really)

There is a giant space rock hurtling towards Earth! It is predicted to miss, and usually I’d trust the math and physics, but given the Bayesian priors of our experiences the last few years, I would not be surprised if they forgot to carry the 3.

Anyway, the Virtual Telescope Project will be showing it live, in about an hour. You might want to watch it, just in case.

Unfortunately, the stupid asteroid scheduled its closest approach for when I’ll be in class. I guess I’ll have to watch it after the fact, I hope.

MLK saw the problem in 1963

We’re under the rule of a minority, selected for their wealth and willingness to support the wishes of the super-wealthy, and we’re not a democracy any more.

You know this is true. Conservatives have been a drag on progress for as long as I’ve been alive, there are so many policies (decriminalize weed, gay marriage, UBI, abortion rights, etc., etc., etc.) that have wide support in the electorate, yet somehow they always get quashed by our Elected Representatives who aren’t so much elected as bought, and who only represent a narrow slice of the republic. The filibuster is one of those tools of oppression that they use freely.

Unfortunately, other tools are voter suppression and gerrymandering, so the filibuster might be moot after a few more elections.

(via Mike the Mad Biologist)

Feeling rather doomy, but the spider did cheer me up

Sweet dreams.

I didn’t have any such dreams — I could barely sleep last night. Today classes resume, and what I feel is mainly dread, as if this were the day of my execution. We shouldn’t be teaching in-person right now, for one thing. For another, I’m completely revising my approach to the class, because I have to be flexible to changing circumstances, and I have to be prepared to teach students who may have to periodically go into isolation. That means I have to write all new lectures, all semester long. For one more, I have lost all confidence in the university as a place I can trust to support me or my students.

And now I’m tired.

Right now I’m just writing on the walls of my jail cell…and being melodramatic. Everything will be fine, I tell myself, and it probably will be. It’s just going to be hard to get out there and act (teaching is show biz, you know) cheerful and enthusiastic while not feeling that way at all.

The perversion of MLK’s legacy

Today, the Republicans who oppose voting rights for black Americans are all piously praising and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. Follow the thread below to see a long list of hypocrites:

Or you can just read this comic to see it all distilled down.

How are we supposed to quell this feeling of nausea whenever I see, hear, or smell a Republican?

Teachers who won’t heed basic health requirements deserve to be fired

The public school district in Willmar had to put 11 employees on leave when they refused to comply with some simple rules.

The policy gave staff three options:

  1. Provide proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
  2. Wear a mask at work beginning Jan. 10 and submit to weekly COVID-19 testing beginning Feb. 9.
  3. Meet with Human Resources about possible medical or religious exemptions.

They had so many outs! I rather resent the last one — praying does not deter a virus — but they couldn’t even meet those minimal requirements.

The shocking bit, though, is that some of them were teachers.

“There were eleven staff members placed on leave on Tuesday. Some of them were teachers, others were hourly employees,” Superintendent Dr. Jeff Holm wrote in an email to Bring Me The News, noting that the employees placed on leave “opted not to comply with any of the options.”

Holm said that the school board approved the policy to begin Jan. 10 and that employees were give “ample notice” of their three options. Holm added that the district was warned about possible “substantial financial penalties for non-compliant employees.”

It’s been reported elsewhere that one employee refused to leave and was escorted out of the building by a supervisor, but Holm confirmed to BMTN that the employee who was “escorted” out had requested that of their supervisor.

The 11 who have been placed on leave represent a tiny fraction of the district’s estimated 800 employees.

Don’t put these people on leave, fire them. The silver lining here is that this rule has exposed a tiny group of intransigent incompetents who don’t deserve to be employed as educators.

Willmar, by the way, is about an hour’s drive from where I live, and while it’s still rural, it’s not filled with yokels — Ridgewater Community College has a campus there.

Katherine Kersten is still alive?

Happy Martin Luther King Day! Or, more accurately, Racism-Is-Over-Because-We-Named-It-After-A-Black-Man Day! Here in the Great White North, our big state newspaper honored the man by publishing a column by Katherine Kersten, claiming that ethnic studies programs at a university are an extremist boot camp.

You probably don’t know who Katherine Kersten is. When I first moved to Minnesota and started reading the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which is generally a good paper, two aching sores regularly leapt out at me. One was James Lileks, the whitest white man in America, who also seemed to be sending most of his columns from his cozy middle-class cottage in 1950 via a time machine (I could think of so many better uses of a time machine…), and the other was notorious racist conservative Katherine Kersten. Everyone knew she was a pretentious conservative of the William Buckley stamp, the Star-Tribune knew about her biases, the Star-Tribune regularly got protest letters about her, but the Star-Tribune regularly published her hateful opinions. I don’t know what was up with that, her presence seemed very Midwestern, like the paper’s dreadful great-aunt that they had to invite to every Thanksgiving, even though we knew she was going to bring her stale, tasteless hot dish that no one would eat because, as she would constantly tell us, she’d added a bit of mail-order cough syrup and chopped almonds because they were full of laetrile to keep the cancer away.

I used to write about her every once in a while. She complained about atheists, because obviously we have no sense of right or wrong. She was always complaining about the university, because we had all these diversity programs (I imagine that right now she’s fuming over Critical Race Theory, but I don’t know, because I stopped reading her). Oh boy, did she complain about the Muslims in Minnesota. Yet, despite constantly presenting herself as the voice of the oppressed white people of the country, she also complained about the universities cultivating a culture of victimhood.

Oh well. I guess it’s good to have a reminder that racism is not over, because the Star-Tribune couldn’t even be bothered to ask their in-house Archie Bunker to shut her bigoted yap for a few days, and because the Star-Tribune doesn’t seem to have a problem with keeping a racist turd like Kersten on their payroll.