When you’ve lost the crypto bros, you’re being rejected by the bottom of the barrel

How would you react to this announcement?

I can’t imagine ever wanting to attend a crypto conference in the first place, so telling me that Jordan Peterson is going to be speaking would be like ordering a shit sandwich and the vendor offering me a free shit milkshake. No thank you, twice.

What’s interesting though, is that this announcement was made on a subreddit full of crypto bros, the expected audience for such a conference, and their reaction was entertaining.

To paraphrase, “What? Jordan Peterson supports crypto? Maybe this bitcoin stuff is all a grift after all, maybe I better get out while I can.” They’re wondering if Alex Jones is going to get on the bandwagon, and that if Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson support it already that might mean they’re the baddies after all.

The right people are becoming toxic, I guess.

They really hate rainbows, don’t they?

All things must fall into a rigid binary. Everything. The right-wing rainbow is just a block of red next to a block of violet. When they do black and white photography they take it literally — max contrast, only solid blacks and solid whites. It’s all hex #000000 and hex #ffffff. It’s ridiculous.

Here’s the latest imaginary binary, wordcels vs shape rotators. There are only two kinds of brains!

Quick, how many cubes can you rotate in your brain? If you’re struggling to even form the image of a cube in your mind, let alone rotate it, then I’m sorry to say that you’re not a shape rotator. You are, in fact, probably a wordcel. If you have no idea what wordcel and shape rotators are, I will explain it to you, and I’m sorry your curiosity has brought you to this article.

At its base, the dichotomy is simple. Wordcels are people who are good with words. Shape rotators are people who are good with math and abstract thought. Use of the terms has skyrocketed online in the past few months, and especially in the last few days.

I’m sorry, this is insanely stupid. Here’s Marc Andreessen trying to be quantitative and instead coming out as a guy who makes up imaginary statistics to characterize people he doesn’t like.

Classic wordcel gibberish.

But look, these are bogus categories — there is a spectrum of mental ability, with different people having a different range of abilities, it’s not all one or the other. Further, individuals vary over time: when I’m writing something other people will have to read, I’m thinking about the words, even if the subject is something scientific. I can also get locked into problem solving mode, where I’m wrestling with abstractions. When I used to write code — and I’m sure some of you are familiar with this — I’d get into the zone where your brain is 100% machine, focused on tracing multiple lines of logic to track down a bug or implement some novel and non-intuitive function. It was great until you snapped out of it at 3am and forgot where you were or how to speak. I’ve literally had moments of verbal paralysis where my brain had to stop carrying out spatial deconvolutions to remember what English was.

These loons are taking the variety of entirely human modes of thinking and trying to cluster them into two terribly unuseful discrete and rigid “types”. People don’t work that way!

But there is a purpose to their madness. Once again, it’s a verbal — dare I say “wordcel”? — tool for conservatives to attack the left for being inferior thinkers while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for thinking like “scientists”. Let’s label those loser Woke folk with a shiny new derogatory term, never noticing how unscientific their whole approach is.

Much of America’s culture war can be cynically flattened and viewed through the lens of these two words; “woke” wordcels live in the land of philosophy and books and liberal colleges, clinging to ideals espoused in their precious books, tweeting about Wordle, while shape rotators are out here coding, building businesses, doing engineering, etc. etc.

And oh, boy, here comes the validation they need:

Hah. I doubt a Jungian psychologist can spin even one three-dimensional cube in his mind!

Sheesh, now I’m doing it. This is stupid. Still, it might catch on with all these right-wing aliens from Remulak.

Sweet!

I told you all I was having internet troubles the other day, and you all made lots of suggestions. Big steps today: my internet provider brought a brand new router over, all big and clunky, and then I strung a cat8 cable from the router to my office. Wifi no more! Gigabit ethernet! Ten times faster!

Now I just have to find an excuse to really test it out, except today’s task is to get next week’s lab organized. No playing on the internet. I might get tempted to try a livestream at some point, though.

It’s a big excuse to talk about the weather

Minnesotans can relate, since that’s mostly what we talk about, it seems. Anyway, Storm Eunice is battering the UK, and some guy has parked himself outside Heathrow airport and is live-streaming video of the planes struggling to land in high winds. There are a few hundred thousand people watching it right now! Here you go, now you can join the party.

Here in Western Minnesota, it’s -8°C with 18km/hr winds. No planes landing on my street. Nothing exciting to report, so I’ll return you to the frenetic British announcer and the wiggle-waggling wings of jumbo jets trying to slide sideways onto a runway.

Freedom to piss on your neighbors’ lawns

She looks nice. Too bad that’s the smile of a bonkers, blissed out religious fanatic. “Coercion is not consent” is a nice sentiment, but that’s not what Ephesians 6:12 says. It says,

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

That’s a problem. She’s not supporting the truck convoy in Canada, she thinks she’s in a battle with vast supernatural powers. She’s not. The truckers use “FREEEEDOM!” as a slogan, but the protest is really about a bunch of well-off working class people trying to protect their privileges and pretend their bogus beliefs about viruses and vaccinations are valid. These are people who are cranky-ass babies who don’t want to get vaccinated against a disease that has killed about a million people in the US because their preachers or right-wing radio and television have told them not to. Under it all is…religion.

Christian sermons of varying lengths emanate regularly from the main flatbed stage on Wellington Street and from curbside preachers using microphones attached to portable speakers. Their words waft in the air and mix with the rumble of diesel engines and fumes, thumping dance music, the tinge of marijuana.

Starting Friday, “Jericho marches” began circling the parliamentary precinct every morning. The name refers to the Old Testament story of the Israelites walking around the walls of Jericho for seven days. On the seventh day, the Israelites marched seven times, blew rams horns and shouted. The walls came tumbling down.

This past Saturday, a woman draped in a Canadian flag led the march with a megaphone in hand.

“When we sing, enemies flee,” she said as she entered the grounds of Parliament Hill. “Hallelujah, hallelujah.”

The march then joined a mass of people gathered in formation to spell the word “freedom.”

It’s madness. Nothing but madness.

It’s not about freedom, or vaccines, or even just religion. This is a loony fringe of a fringe who are exploiting the fact that the powers-that-be, the police, the media — you know, the actual rulers of the darkness of this world and spiritual wickedness in high places — will give them loving attention and pander to their every whimper and whine. They really are spoiled babies who have discovered that tantrums will get them praise on their favored media.

It’s easy to shorthand these shambolic yet menacing gatherings as “anti-vaccine-mandate”—and they are, glancingly, the way the movie Robocop is about a robot cop, or Animal Farm is a study in zoology. The weeks-long occupation underway in Ottawa—its big rigs symbolizing the distilled essence of “white working class” mythology that cloaks these protests, nominally against vaccine mandates and coronavirus safety protocols, but in actuality accruing a vast baggage train of right-wing grievances and conspiracies—has become a memetic form, to be eagerly adopted and copied, as far as possible, all over the world. It’s worth noting that as vocal as they are, this is an extreme political minority: Canada’s population has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, at 80% fully vaccinated, and among truckers, the rate is even higher, at nearly 90%. As with any large-scale right-wing protest, the police have reacted with a profound lassitude that is tantamount to complicity, and it takes the most wide-eyed cop-boostering stance of centrist faux-ignorance to pretend that this is not solidarity but incompetence. Police have allowed certain menaces—from open fires to public urination to noise complaints to road blockades—to continue unabated, in the name of the protesters’ free speech. “In Ottawa Protests, a Pressing Question: Where Were the Police?” read a comical New York Times headline, manufacturing consent with a frenetic both-hands jerkoff motion.

The question of “why the police seemingly abandoned the country’s seat of power,” as the Times put it, is a question that answers itself: law enforcement apparatuses are a law unto themselves, fed strength by a neoliberal state that needs them to enforce its deadly inequalities. No one is watching the watchmen as they cheer from the sidelines, and that’s true on both sides of the border. Though the police have cleared a smaller bridge blockade that stopped trade between the U.S. and Canada for days in Windsor, Ontario, and seized a cache of guns on the border in Alberta, the Ottawa protests continue apace. Given the laxity that thus far has allowed the protest to grow in Ottawa, gain notoriety, proffer real menace (and so many racist and antisemitic hate crimes a hotline was set up to report them), and issue unhinged proclamations unfettered, imitator protests have already arisen in Canberra, Italy, London, Wellington, Paris, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

It’s a perversion of the concept of freedom. Freedom from responsibility? Freedom from criticism? Freedom to spread disease? Freedom to foul your diapers and let nanny change them? Freedom to believe and act on conspiracy theories?

You don’t have the freedom to afflict your neighbors, but that’s the only freedom conservatives actually want.

God cares about pronouns

Tragic news: a priest was carrying out baptisms wrongly. These were botched baptisms!

The diocese, which is trying to identify people baptized by Arango, set up a FAQ section on its website to confront issues related to the botched baptisms and also created a form for people who were initiated into the church by the priest to complete.

Arango’s error was in saying, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” when he should have begun the sentence by saying, “I baptize you.”

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Christ alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Bishop Thomas Olmsted wrote in a mid-January message on the diocese’s site.

I think the priest had hiccups that day.

Think of all the Catholics baptized by a priest who erred in the precise formula: all the priests who stuttered, or sneezed, or paused too long at some random point in the incantation, or worst of all, spoke the rite in the wrong language. I don’t know what the right language is, but it’s probably not English or modern Italian. God is very finicky about these things, I guess.

It’s probably not German, either, which explains Hitler. Do they say “du” or “Sie” in the correct version? Maybe they’ve been getting it wrong all this time.

I wonder if the Catholic Church is more angry at the priest who screwed up the baptisms than they are at the priests who diddled choir boys?

She’s made of iron

I played hooky this morning to escort my wife to and from the hospital, where she had a colonoscopy done. Apparently she’s perfect inside as well as outside, and got a clean bill of health. So clean that the doctor said she doesn’t have to come back for ten years.

I guess I’m as ugly on the inside as I am outside, because last time I had this done I was told I should come back every three years. Mary is going to outlast me, that’s for sure.

Careless selfishness and the harm done to the most vulnerable

Read Ed Yong. He’s explaining how 3% of the country — 7 million people — are immunocompromised for various causes, and vaccine and mask resistance (and outright denial) are putting them at risk. We seem to have just written them all off.

Finding and keeping jobs can be very hard for people with chronic illnesses such as lupus, which can leave them feeling powerless to advocate for themselves. With “close to no say about your working conditions, you can only do so much to protect yourself,” Levantovskaya, the literature professor, said. Several immunocompromised people have been told that they’re holding the rest of society back. In fact, it is the opposite: They’re being forced to reintegrate with no regard for their residual risk.

And perhaps worst of all, immunocompromised people began to be outright dismissed by their friends, relatives, and colleagues because of the misleading narrative that Omicron is mild. The variant bypassed some of the defenses that even immunocompetent people had built up, rendered several antibody treatments ineffective, and swamped the health-care system that immunocompromised people rely on. And yet one of Wallace’s patients was told by their sister that no one is dying anymore. In fact, people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

The pandemic is not over, despite people insisting they’re done with COVID. COVID’s not done with us.

Meanwhile, over on the Washington Post, they dedicate a long article to Chris Crouch. “Who?” you might ask. I did. Reading the article didn’t help explain why he gets all the attention. He and his wife Diana were deniers.

When the vaccines came along, Chris became outspoken against them, espousing views that were common in his workplace and much of Texas but that put him at odds with his mother, sister and the close friends he had grown up with in the Heights, a liberal bastion in Houston. Despite his family’s pleading, Chris and Diana were adamant they did not need to be vaccinated. They did wear masks, but only when required.

Chris felt that vaccine mandates infringed on personal liberties, a perspective promoted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other prominent Republicans. And Chris and Diana also worried that the shots had been developed too quickly. As he liked to say, “God gave us our immune system and we can fight the viruses with our own immune system.” Diana, meanwhile, was leery of anything that might hurt the developing baby she carried. She knew that early stories linking the vaccines to miscarriage and infertility were false, but thought avoiding them was the prudent thing to do, like skipping wine, raw fish and unpasteurized cheese — especially given some of the medical community’s early hesitation. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend that all pregnant people get vaccinated.

So…stupid asshole with the usual array of bogus arguments.

But then, it turns out that pregnancy is one of those complicating factors for COVID-19. Diana came down with a savage case, spends months on a ventilator and in a coma, has a series of small strokes, her lung collapses, the doctors expect that her chances of survival are very, very low, and that the pregnancy was a seriously debilitating factor.

Chris Crouch decides “he had to try to save them both.” That was a jarring statement. HE is going to save his wife and the fetus? I don’t know that there is much he could do, and further, his wife was unconscious and on a ventilator, the doctors and nurses were doing all the work. I guess he alone decided that he would maintain the elevated risk for his wife. If I were in a similar situation, I’d have instantly made a different choice, but ultimately would have wanted my wife’s opinion. It’s her body, her life, the husband is not the one suffering and close to dying.

“I didn’t know if one or the other was going to live, or both were going to die,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was going to go back home without anybody.”

Oh no! Pity poor Chris Crouch! Then he has a revelation.

During those long hours alone, he struggled with how strongly he had held to beliefs about the vaccines without really examining them. Increasingly, he felt a responsibility to warn others about his mistakes, so he began writing to friends, family and even strangers on Facebook, urging them to get the shots. Somewhere along the way, he got vaccinated himself.

“When you sit there and you see your wife on life support because of covid, you throw out politics,” he said later. “None of that matters anymore.”

Jesus christ. Almost a million dead in the US alone, with doctors and scientists telling you all along that this was a serious disease and that precautions are necessary, and now, at the last minute, when one person close to you is dying of the disease you belittle, NOW you decide maybe you could have been wrong, and that you shouldn’t have let your politics wreck public health policy. You dumbass. You goddamn selfish, self-centered, poisonous little asshole.

Then, the icing on the cake: Chris Crouch gets a whole long story in the Washington Post, entirely centered on him, on his struggle, his encounter with COVID, his difficult months watching his wife wasting away in a hospital bed, his wrestling with his conscience. It’s all him, him, him, him.

His wife survived. Her baby survived, delivered by C-section in the midst of her suffering. Why wasn’t she the heart of this story? Fuck Chris Crouch. He’s one of the reasons COVID has been as crippling and deadly as it has been, and I am totally out of patience and sympathy with his kind.