Panic city

I must be tired. I was sitting in my office reviewing my lecture notes, when I glanced at the clock. It’s 20 to! My class is at a quarter to! Panic followed, because I was still tinkering with a few slides, and I had yet to get to my classroom. Chaos! Rushing about! Slamming down the last few touches! Off to the room I go!

No one was there. What’s going on? My class starts at a quarter to noon — it was a quarter to 11. Sheesh.

At least I got to go back to my office and have a cup of tea. I’m getting too old for this stuff. It doesn’t help that I’m just generally losing my mind lately.

Deplatforming works!

Remember Charles C. Johnson? No? There was a time a few years ago when he was the bad boy du jour, the awful far-right provocateur who was creeping all over social media, getting all kinds of attention, taunting and doxxing people, saying anything he felt like on social media to stir up responses. He even started a “news” site or two to peddle his brand of assholery.

Then he was banned on Twitter in 2015.

It’s like he fell off the planet after that. Sure, he tried a few more stunts, got a little attention now and then, but he wasn’t the raging viral infection he was in the early years of the 2010s. Milo Yiannopoulos should have been paying close attention, because he few years later he would be getting the same oxygen-deprivation treatment, and look where he is now, peddling gee-gaws on a militant Catholic YouTube show. I had completely forgotten Johnson myself — oh, the fickleness of internet fame — until I saw this clip on Twitter.

Blacks have a proclivity towards violence, and it’s driven by one gene, this MAOA variant that the Blacks have, Google it and do your own research. It’s all wrong, it’s fundamentally wrong, based on a few anecdotal level science papers that don’t even claim that the MAOA allele is causal, or that it’s unique to Black people. Johnson is not a scientist or science communicator. He’s barely qualified to tie his own shoes. And yet, there’s Joe Rogan, handing him a megaphone and letting him ramble on, only feebly asking, But could it really be true, though?. (In case were wondering, here’s a John Horgan article shredding the whole idea.)

That’s always been Joe Rogan’s job. He’s a popular, independent platform with a complete lack of responsibility, eager to promote the most odious trash without vetting anything. Johnson was at his peak, an attention-grabbing racist asshole, and that’s actually what made him attractive to Rogan. The time to ask But could it really be true, though? was before he brought on a liar like Johnson.

That clip, by the way, is one of hundreds that Spotify is now frantically deleting, including a multitude of cases where Rogan is happily using the N-word. People are now excavating all these clips of Rogan’s racism, like the one where he calls a Black neighborhood Planet of the Apes, which Spotify can’t touch — the internet doesn’t forget that sort of thing. And don’t forget the misogyny!

That guy on the left, who is telling his anecdotes about sexually harassing women at his comedy club, really ought to be in jail, rather than making Rogan guffaw and clap at the story of a woman being ruined.

Rogan ought to contemplate the fate of Charles C. Johnson, and Milo Yiannopoulos, all of their popularity demolished in a relative moment as more and more people used their own vileness, the tool they used to claw themselves to the top of the social media heap, to dash them down into the refuse heap of history. It happens fast on the internet, you know.

The bit about Mivart

I did that hour-long livestream yesterday, so as I’ll try to continue to do, I yanked out a much shorter segment for those who don’t have any patience for chit-chat. Also, the whole thing got instantly demonetized, I think because I talked about mammary gland development and evolution (YouTube is capricious and stupid — there was nothing prurient or explicit in what I said). Let’s see what they think of just the historical bit, where I talk about that unfortunate 19th century weirdo, St George Jackson Mivart, who got blocked by Charles Darwin and canceled by both the scientific community and the Catholic Church. See? There’s nothing new about cancel culture.

Summertime dreams

I like to haunt r/abandonedporn, where people post photos and videos of derelict buildings that they explore. I want to do that! It’s a bad time of year for it though, since it’s about -20°C out there, and if the spiders are all frozen, what’s the point? Once the world thaws again, I need to get out and do some exploring. These places are full of spiders, and I don’t have to interact with people to investigate them — spiders minus people? Perfection.

This summer you all have to help out by nagging me to get out and find abandoned houses, farms, and shacks, every weekend. I’ll reward you with pictures — lots of close-up pictures of creepy crawlies. It’ll be awesome.

For now, here’s an example: this guy explores an abandoned house and finds an abandoned 1973 Corvette in the garage. It’s February, though, so no spiders, which makes it a lot less interesting.

There’s got to be an interesting story behind it. This is an isolated, tiny house — am I the only one thinking it’s a drug house? — with an expensive car rotting and neglected. Where’s the owner? What happened that no one would claim that car? And most importantly, what kind of spiders will be flourishing there once the weather warms up?

Go unwoke, go broke

What? You never heard of Gettr? Here’s Wikipedia’s summary:

Gettr (stylized GETTR) is a social media platform and microblogging site targeted to American conservatives. It was founded by Jason Miller, a former Donald Trump aide, and was officially launched on July 4, 2021. Its user interface and feature set have been described as very similar to those of Twitter.

So, basically, Twitter for assholes, which is kind of redundant (Twitter is already for assholes!). But this one is a worse version of Twitter, if you can imagine that.

The platform experienced issues shortly after launch, including internet trolls posting content that violated the terms of service, users flooding it with pornography, and the brief hacking of some high-profile accounts. Journalists have observed the prevalence of extreme content on the platform, including racism, antisemitism, and terrorist propaganda.

I had to look it up, because while I’d heard of it, vaguely, I’d never bothered to visit it or look deeper into it.

You’ll find this hard to believe, but Gettr is in trouble.

Social media upstart GETTR fired over a dozen staff members late last year, including two key executives and its entire IT and cybersecurity teams, amid rapid growth and what former employees said were funding problems.

The layoffs came even as interest in the company, founded by Jason Miller, a spokesman for former President Donald Trump, exploded.

But three people who were canned say that behind the scenes, GETTR is struggling with more than just growing pains, warning that the recent round of layoffs may have jeopardized the platform’s security.

Curiously for a far right-wing site, it’s so open-minded that it is a recruiting ground for both the Proud Boys and ISIL. I guess if you want to watch beheading videos or see Canadians getting beaten up by roving gangs of thugs, you’d better sign up fast before it’s gone. Hey, Joe Rogan has an account there!

So that Second Amendment thing is kinda…flexible, huh?

Once again, the Minneapolis police flaunt their fascist behavior once again. Using a no-knock warrant, they burst into a person’s apartment in the early hours of the morning, and 9 seconds later, when a man stirs under his blanket and reveals that he has a gun, bang-bang-bang they shoot him dead. His name was Amir Locke. He was not named in the warrant. He was not associated with any criminal investigation. Maybe it was stupid to be sleeping with a gun, but the body-cam video shows a sleeping man abruptly awakened and disoriented, and killed within seconds. I guess that’s what a no-knock warrant is, permission to barge into someone’s home and murder the occupants.

The police statement is amazing.

An officer fired his duty weapon and the adult male suspect was struck. Officers immediately provided emergency aid and carried the suspect down to the lobby to meet paramedics, the report states. The suspect was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died.

Huffman tried to explain the police tactics used during the raid, stating that the footage shows the barrel of the gun from under the blanket forced the officers to make a split-second decision.

The chief also admitted that Locke was not named on the warrant the officers were executing—and said it was not immediately clear whether he had any connection to the original St. Paul homicide investigation that prompted the raid.

Boy, the passive voice is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. “An officer shot a man, killing him” would be a lot shorter and cleaner. They call him a suspect to make it sound like he was suspiciously bad, when he wasn’t a suspect in anything at all, just a guy sleeping. It wasn’t the officer’s fault, he saw a gun and was forced to kill him. Those good Samaritan officers then provided emergency aid — how kind of them — to deal with the two bullet holes they had just blown in Locke’s chest.

There is, of course, no expression of remorse, no recognition that maybe they’d been a teeny-tiny bit overzealous and trigger-happy, and that, just maybe, they’d fucked up big time, again.

You can actually buy this flag for $11.66 at Amazon. America!

Well, now they’re in trouble. They have just criminalized owning a gun in your own home, a crime that earns an instant death penalty. I’m sure all the white Republican gun nuts are going to march on Minneapolis en masse to protest this abrogation of their constitutional rights. At the very least they’ll be tearing down their thin blue line flags, and politely discussing reforming police policy. Right?

Oh, wait. Amir Locke was black.

Never mind, they’re frantically searching police records right now to find out if he had a parking ticket in 2015, in order to justify the murder.