Sorry, Australia

The first thing I learned this morning is that Candace Owens wants us to invade Australia. You might be curious about what prompted this bellicose idea: it’s because they are managing the pandemic better than we are.

“When do we deploy troops to Australia?” she said before the Victoria lockdown was eased. “When do we invade Australia and free an oppressed people who are suffering under a totalitarian regime?

“When do we spend trillions of dollars to spread democracy in Australia?” she added. “Australia currently, make no mistake, is a tyrannical police state. Its citizens are quite literally being imprisoned against their will. So when do we deploy?”

It seems she’s just following the lead of Ted Cruz.

Owens’ comments follow a similar swipe against Australian authorities made last week by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) who tweeted: “The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful and sad,” before adding: “Individual liberty matters.”

It’s embarrassing. Don’t worry, Australia, these are just the stupid Republicans that are currently afflicting our country, they don’t speak for us. With any luck, they’ll be dying off thanks to their own mismanagement of our health policy.

If you felt like turning around and invading us to liberate our country from a totalitarian, insane political party, I wouldn’t object. I’d be grateful.

Don’t you dare jinx Neil Gaiman!

After I posted about how so many comedians are disappointing people, I found that Abbey had written about Neil Gaiman and how you shouldn’t have heroes except Gaiman seems to be living up to expectations.

“Don’t have heroes” is a huge important philosophical axiom for me, born out of long sad experience that it isn’t safe to have them. Once upon a time, I liked Harry Potter; I liked Father Ted and The IT Crowd. I thought the latter was particularly interesting as a learnable style of humor. We know how those turned out. But those are extreme author behaviors and minor influences. Back in the day, I was a huge fan of Firefly and it still holds a place in my heart (and thereby writing); I used to consider Joss Whedon the pinnacle influence for screenwriting, and sought to be like him… before we found out that the “him” I would have wanted to be like was mostly PR vapor and he was the usual kind of abusive douche that all men with a grain of power in Hollywood seem to be. But I can’t shake it with Gaiman, because he keeps living up to it, the bastard.

Jinx, jinx, JINX! I’m not usually this superstitious, but the pattern of people we thought good collapsing as their clay feet slump into goo is so consistent that I think we need to keep the pressure on. Don’t praise him. Give him nothing but squinky-eyed looks. Make sure he knows you have a big knife hanging on your belt, and when (not if, WHEN) he slips up, you’ll be there ready to go all sewing machine on his kidneys. It is the way. It is the only way. Fear will keep him on the straight and narrow.

That shouldn’t be a problem, it shouldn’t be at all discouraging to Neil. It’s not as if anyone should be behaving well for praise, you know.

Comedian suicide-bombers

Louis CK remains the king — wow, but that guy destroyed his reputation spectacularly — but it looks like Dave Chappelle is working hard to catch up. Where once I could respect him for the ol’ “speaking truth to power” routine and his sometimes exceedingly edgy comedy, I guess he found that work too taxing and has decided it’s easier to punch down and start mocking the trans community, while getting highly paid by Netflix.

Netflix, unfortunately, has so much money that quality doesn’t matter anymore — they’ll greenlight anything. I’ve learned that any science-fiction movie promoted by Netflix is going to be mostly garbage, so I’ve been skipping the service more and more. Comedy specials are even worse. They’re ridiculously cheap to make, so it seems that any bigot who wants to make other bigots laugh will get handed a platform. There are exceptions, of course. Netflix put on Hannah Gadsby, who was marvelous and thought-provoking, but that was a rare occasion in a sea of same ol’, same ol’ boring white men with grievances.

Now a Netflix executive, Ted Sarandos, is trying to rationalize hosting an ugly anti-trans comedian by claiming it’s all about “diversity”. I got news for you, Ted: diversity does not mean you should encourage hatred and ignorance. We don’t need stupid to counterbalance intelligence, and we don’t need to slather shit on a tasty sandwich to make it better. I don’t need to “teach the controversy” in the classroom and educate students about evolution by promoting creationist propaganda.

And then he cites Hannah Gadsby as an example of their rainbow of lovely entertainment choices. Gadsby has a few words for that.

Hey Ted Sarandos! Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chapelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view. You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of the hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted. Fuck you and your amoral algorithm cult…I do shits with more back bone than you. That’s just a joke! I definitely didn’t cross a line because you just told the world there isn’t one.

Gadsby just shot the cash cow, very good.

Sadly, Chappelle (and Louis CK) will only experience fleeting interruptions in their careers. They’ll bounce right back — in Chappelle’s case, there doesn’t seem to have been any significant pushback at all — and will see their fans rushing into the warm embrace of comfortable bigotry again.

He really, really, really misses Twitter

Donald Trump tried this before, with his pathetic little “blog” that closed up shop in short order. Now he’s trying again, with what he calls his new social media company.

Donald Trump has announced plans to launch a social media platform called TRUTH Social that will rolled be out early next year.

The former president, who was banned from Facebook and Twitter earlier this year, says his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise.

Like his previous effort, though, he’s just half-assing it, taking existing frameworks and making the minimal effort to slap a few cosmetic changes on it. This TRUTH social thing seems to be nothing but a Mastodon instance with his name on it, and there is zero thought put into security and checking accounts on the back end. People have already cracked it and found the registration page, despite the fact it isn’t opened yet, and created joke accounts on it. I saw that someone managed to put a photo of a pig pooping on its testicles prominently displayed (I’ll spare you all), as well as registering under various obvious pseudonyms.

This thing is going to flop and fail hard. Once word gets out to the gullible millions that it’s really just an unintentional honey trap — sign up to praise Lord Trump, and someone is going to slurp up your registration info to laugh at you, or worse — I don’t think it can thrive. Hey, did you hear that hackers stole the Oath Keepers registration list and have exposed 35,000 members identities, including a swarm of Republican politicians? TRUTH Social is going to be so fragile and porous, with tissue-paper thin defenses, the hackers are just going to drool in its general direction and rip on through.

But that doesn’t matter. This is an ego-trip for the ex-president. Or is it something more? Like maybe another grift?

Former president Donald Trump’s media venture, Truth Social, could give his new company access to $300 million.

However, some of the investors who funded the venture weren’t aware that Trump would be involved, according to a report from the New York Times.

“The details of Mr. Trump’s latest partnership were vague,” the Times reports. “The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified.”

He knows who his real marks are: stupid rich investment bankers who don’t even bother to look to see who they’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to. And who needs that much money to set up a Mastodon instance?

After this one goes belly up, look for the Donald to beg for half a billion dollars to set up a Discord server. And for his clientele to pay for it.

I know that pain

Lawsuits, as I know from personal experience, cause great personal stress and financial difficulty. They are effective when appropriately applied against the bad guys.

A federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders, goes to trial this month.

The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America’s most well-known white supremacist groups, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called “alt-right,” the white supremacist and nationalist movement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.

“It’s very stressful, and very costly,” said Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit and the former de facto leader of the “alt-right,” in an interview. “This level of pressure is definitely scary.”

Good. He should be scared. When we were sued, we could at least console ourselves with the awareness that we had done nothing wrong (not always an adequate defense when dealing with the law), but these fascist neo-nazis have to know that they’re doing evil.

It does remind me of two things, though.

  • Damn Richard Carrier for making me feel a tiny glimmer of sympathy for the murderous Charlottesville rally organizers.
  • I have to periodically express my gratitude for our readers and donors who dug us out of that unpleasant hole. Thank you all very much!

I’d rather not think about the fact that a national mob of anti-Semitic criminal rioters probably has more supporters than a blog network that promotes something as benevolent as freethought.

There’s a tumor growing in Texas

A very red state

Behold, the official Republican Party Platform for Texas in 2020. THIS…IS…MADNESS!

opposing any effort to classify carbon emissions as a pollutant
abolishing the EPA
repealing the Endangered Species Act
prohibiting teaching “sex education, sexual health or sexual choice or identity in any public school”
recognizing pornography as a “public health crisis”
abolishing Child Protective Services
abolishing the Department of Education
teaching American history courses “heavily weighted toward the study of original founding documents”
opposing the use of any national or international education standards
requiring mandatory daily pledges of allegiance to both the United States and Texas
banning critical race theory from schools
banning any lockdowns, contact tracing, or mask mandates as public health measures
newly limiting the time disabled people can receive SSDI benefits
eliminating the minimum wage
banning cities from passing paid sick leave ordinances, rent control, or plastic bag bans
abolishing school-based mental health care providers
“oppos[ing] all efforts to validate transgender identity”
repealing all limits on campaign contributions to politicians
repealing all estate taxes
eliminating same-sex marriage
eliminating no-fault divorce and supporting covenant marriage
entirely eliminating abortion
introducing a right to use cryptocurrency to the Texas Bill of Rights
requiring employers to verify citizenship status through E-Verify
abolishing all federal welfare programs
drug testing state welfare recipients
adding “the right to refuse vaccination” to the Texas Bill of Rights
stopping fluoridation of the water supply
disallowing prescription drugs manufactured outside the U.S.
limiting Medicaid
banning Drag Queen Story Hour from libraries
allowing people to bring guns into schools
a prohibition on using gas or vehicle taxes for public transit or bike lanes
opposing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and using mass deportation instead
abolishing the refugee resettlement program
eliminating birthright citizenship
new criminal penalties for desecrating the American or Texas flag
revoking the tax-exempt status of any organization that “knowingly aid[s] and abet[s] illegal immigrants”
ending the H1B foreign worker visa program
ending daylight saving time
“support[ing] an aggressive war on terrorism”
requiring cities that cut police budgets to cut property taxes by the same percentage
eliminating all public funding for public broadcasting
repealing the “motor voter” law that allows voter registration at state DMVs
withdrawing from the United Nations
“unequivocally oppos[ing]” the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

This is just the same old poisonous crap I heard from the John Birch Society in the 1970s…except I don’t recall that they hated bike lanes quite so much. I might believe some people are so deluded that they think some those options are a good idea, but the majority of Texans, if confronted with this list, would reel back in horror. Wouldn’t they?

Ooh, such a dangerous job

The police are constantly begging for more, more, more: more money, more guns, more surplus military equipment, because, after all, killing unarmed black people in their cars is hard, dangerous work. But now they are opposing vaccine mandates because, I don’t know, it’s not macho to protect your health in the same way as wearing a bullet proof vest and carrying a big gun is? They’re kind of failing a basic risk assessment test here.

There were 245 law enforcement deaths from Covid-19 in 2020, according to ODMP.
The coronavirus has become the leading cause of death for officers despite law enforcement being among the first groups eligible to receive the vaccine at the end of 2020. The total stands at 476 Covid-19 related deaths since the start of the pandemic, compared to 94 from gunfire in the same period.

Don’t give guns to people who are too stupid to get vaccinated, please.

The cult of masculinity is just another religion

Rev. Carlson & Father Rogan

I should be used to this by now. I spent decades punching back at the weaponized stupidity of creationism: I saw it as a pathological extreme generated by narrow domains of primitive religious thought, but I also recognized it as an expression of a peculiar human property of our minds. We seek out patterns to make the world comprehensible and predictable, and we are susceptible to latching on to whatever idea gives us security, and instead of testing and challenging it, we can instead fall into the trap of selectively reinforcing whatever makes us feel better about ourselves.

My error, though, was to think too small. Get rid of religion, we get rid of a major pitfall. I still think that’s true (but very, very difficult), but I did not anticipate that humanity would simply find another dangerously deep hole to fall into right away, and that encouraging people to find another path with that “reason and logic” stuff would lead them there so fast.

I also did not expect that our doom would be maleness, the new cult same as the old cult. Yikes. I’m a member of that club. So let’s get the perspective of someone outside the club, a woman, in this case Amanda Marcotte, who I think is spot on in her analysis. The noisy mouthpieces of the far right are dominated by a group of regressive jerks who are riding to personal prosperity on the backs of the fears and inadequacy of the worst men. Tucker Carlson, for instance, is an appallingly stupid person who has found a wild niche of pandering to angry men.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in her newsletter, in the past, Carlson has done segments of his show denouncing “fatherless” homes and claiming children brought up in them are “poor, uneducated and have disciplinary problems.” But now he, a father of four, is making fun of men who actually want to be present in their children’s lives. “Are fathers necessary for stable families and children, or is spending time with your kid a sign of weakness and something to be laughed at?” Valenti asks.

What this dissonance reveals, of course, is all the hand-wringing about “fatherlessness” is just a feint. After all, many divorced or separated fathers are deeply involved with their children’s lives. No, as the Proud Boys rally this weekend showed, what’s really at stake is anger at women for rejecting subservience. Single mothers, same-sex marriages, and egalitarian marriages all show that there’s nothing inevitable about male-dominated marriage. That threatens men who are attracted to the dominance fantasy of traditional marriage to silence their own nagging sense of inadequacy.

It’s not just Carlson and the Proud Boys who have figured out how to monetize male mediocrity and fragility.

Just to clarify, though, “male mediocrity and fragility” is not saying that being a man means you are intrinsically mediocre and fragile. Any group will have a subset of individuals who are mediocre and fragile, the weak links that a con artist can scoop up, organize, and turn into a force for evil. It means there is a troubling group of humans who have been recruited into a cadre with a stereotypically male flavor, who then send money to and increase the power of people like Carlson. You can find this in any group. For instance, right now we can see TERFs harvesting female mediocrity and fragility, and atheists profiting off atheist mediocrity and fragility. OK? Not all men. Not all women. Not all atheists. But there are still characteristics of those groups that can be manipulated and abused.

It’s also not just Carlson. She doesn’t mention him, but Jordan Peterson is another classic example of someone harnessing mediocrity for personal gain, and she does talk about Joe Rogan.

Podcaster Joe Rogan has made a mint off of appealing to the sea of men who want an easy boost to their self-esteem through chauvinistic chest-thumping, rather than developing real skills and a personality. Rogan can be a little more subtle than Carlson about it, but ultimately, they’re playing on the same set of anxieties and insecurities in American men, and prescribing the same toxic masculinity as a supposed cure.

In Rogan, it’s easy to see, for instance, how refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine got encoded for the fragile masculinity set as a way to “prove” their manly bona fides. He falsely claimed that “healthy” men who are “exercising all the time” don’t need the vaccine. He repeatedly suggested that vaccine mandates were somehow an assault on freedom, rather than what they are: a common sense health measure that helps free everyone from far more miserable pandemic restrictions. Taken together, it paints a picture of vaccination as the behavior of supposedly weak men. Unsurprisingly, then, Rogan ended up with COVID-19 and had to admit that he had kept finding excuses to put off getting a vaccine he had routinely insinuated was emasculating.

Right. Turning anti-vaccination sentiments into a chest-thumping display of masculinity is the new trap. We can turn any stupidity into a virtue if we couple it to some aspect of stereotypical manliness. See also America’s gun obsession.

Once you’ve got your in-group of weak, gullible men (in this case) you have to find a target to push around. What use is your power, otherwise? So here we go. Let’s go after the transes! And the gays! And the libs!

Carlson went after a gay man with a breastfeeding joke. Rogan’s preferred target for exercising his gender anxieties is all too often trans people.

Rogan has repeatedly used his show to make fun of trans people, paint being trans as a perversity, and elevate anti-trans bigots as somehow experts on the subject. Now that comedian Dave Chappelle has joined in making being transphobic a point of pride, unsurprisingly, he and Rogan are going on tour together. The obsession with trans people isn’t just gross, it’s a little confusing. Why do these cis men care so much about the lives of trans people who have nothing to do with them?

The ugly truth is that trans people, because they’re a small and misunderstood minority, just feel like an easy punching bag for these insecure men to take their gender anxieties out on. The very existence of trans people is a reminder that gender — and therefore gender hierarchy — is a social construct, and therefore can be analyzed, criticized, and even changed. Or, as in that famous 2019 rant from a One America News Network host, transgender penguins are a threat to the “family unit” and everything conservatives hold dear.

What’s also interesting here is how easy it is to spot these self-appointed leaders dragging us down into a sewer. It used to be we could just lock in on televangelists and such, who would happily label themselves with an easy and contemptible myth, and overlook all those people who seized on other myths that we didn’t think were so contemptible (like being a man), and churned them into red meat to feed their followers. We have to get better at spotting these charlatans, and they aren’t all going to be conveniently wearing clerical collars. Some of them just sport testicles.

Hey, here’s another insecure fraud who’s making bank off male mediocrity and fragility: Steven Crowder.

Warning: that video contains what I think is the most tasteless, cruel, pointless “comedy” routine I’ve ever seen, in which Crowder and his cronies pretend to act out the George Floyd murder to show that kneeling on someone’s neck is totally harmless. That didn’t get him instantly demonetized and evicted from social media channels everywhere? That’s another part of the problem, that these fools and liars are enabled by toxic social media rules.

Why are private schools?

You know, the word “school” (and “college” and “university”) ought to have some kind of protected status, where you can’t call your institution one of them without meeting certain rigorous standards and qualifications. Get some other word for your propaganda outlet, and if you abuse the terms and mislead the people you are trying to lure into your scheme, there ought to be some kind of legal penalty. It’s not that you can’t rent a room and offer instruction to the gullible in whatever hogwash you’re peddling, but you can’t legally claim it’s a “school”.

Case in point: religious institutions that claim to be, for instance, a university, like Patriot “University”. Or private schools in general, which seem to be set ups for charging excessive tuitions and fees for information that’s better served by a true public school (goodbye, Harvard!) (OK, some private institutions have adopted good standards for education — this is a complex problem in taxonomy, I won’t pretend it’s easily solved.)

But then, there are other situations where the boundaries have clearly been crossed. Like the Centner Academy, “the brain school”. Maybe we can get them on false advertising, since there don’t seem to be any functional brains inside.

In April, a Miami private school made national headlines for barring teachers who got a coronavirus vaccine from interacting with students. Last week, the school made another startling declaration, but this time to the parents: If you vaccinate your child, they’ll have to stay home for 30 days after each shot.

The email from Centner Academy leadership, first reported by WSVN, repeated misleading and false claims that vaccinated people could pass on so-called harmful effects of the shot and have a “potential impact” on unvaccinated students and staff.

Yeah, that’s patently false. There are no viruses in the vaccine. There might be dead fragments, but nothing that can proliferate and infect.

David Centner, one of the school’s co-founders, repeated the debunked claims in a statement to The Washington Post, saying the policy is a “precautionary measure” based on “numerous anecdotal cases that have been in circulation.”

Listen to yourself, David. Do you know what “anecdote” means? You are making a policy decision based on stories and rumor — and you’re getting it all backwards! You’re blocking the people least likely to carry the disease from your “school”, and encouraging the unprotected students to attend!

The people who do attend this “school” are selected for wealth + gullibility, I guess.

Centner Academy is in Miami’s ritzy Design District, and tuition ranges from about $15,000 to nearly $30,000 per year. The school has become a haven for anti-vaccine parents because it does not require any immunizations for enrollment, citing a parent’s “freedom of choice” and falsely claiming there are “unknown risks associated with vaccinations” that could harm children.

Apparently, you go to this “school” to get a degree in ignorance and dishonesty.

A similar sentiment was shared in an email to parents last week regarding the coronavirus vaccine. School leadership referred to the shots as “experimental,” WSVN reported, and encouraged parents considering vaccinations for their child to wait several more months until the school year ends.

“We ask that you hold off until the summer when there will be time for the potential transmission or shedding onto others to decrease,” Centner Academy leaders wrote.

The school has a history of spreading inaccurate information about the vaccine and penalizing those who choose to get the shots. In April, Centner Academy employees were told they had to notify Leila and David Centner, the married co-founders of the school, if they received a vaccine. Vaccinated school employees were told they would not be allowed any contact with students “until more information is known” about the vaccines. School leaders also told those wanting the vaccine to wait until the summer to get the shots.

About a week later, a math and science teacher told students they should not hug their vaccinated parents for more than five seconds, the New York Times reported, referencing the same falsehoods the school communicated in its email about vaccine components “shedding” onto others. Some parents threatened to pull their children out of the school over the comments.

The Centners are a pair of rich kooks with egomania. Centner is a rich entrepreneur who sold code for monitoring toll booths — he has no background in education at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to pretend to be educators.

We can’t?

Rosie DiManno is wondering why we can’t say ‘woman’ anymore, which is a rather self-contradictory thing to declare in a big bold headline that got published in a major metropolitan newspaper. It’s also counter to common sense and every day experience, since I don’t seem to know anyone who is actually opposed to calling women women, except maybe TERFs, who are generally extraordinarily confused about just about everything to do with sex and gender. It’s a really simple concept, though!

Here’s the rule: you should address people by the identities they prefer and declare themselves. Rosie DiManno bills herself as a woman, and I am perfectly comfortable with addressing her as a woman. If I were to call her a man, I would either be hopelessly addled about who she is, or I’d be trying to insult her with a gendered insult, which is bad. So, hi Rosie, Woman, Human, Bipedal Vetebrate, etc. Strive to be respectful and accurate, is all.

Most/all of my interactions with Ms DiManno, if I were to have them, would be genderless, and there are only a few circumstances when I would have to call her a woman. “The boat is sinking, Ms DiManno — women and children to the lifeboats, you first,” perhaps, or “The ladies room is to the left, ma’am”. There are occasions when sex and gender are relevant, and you do not want to mix them up, lest you seem addled, insulting, etc.

Then there are the situations where some nuance is required, because the world isn’t the simple binary she thinks it is. She seems a bit incensed about a scientific article.

“The Lancet,” the prestigious and highly influential British medical journal, put “Bodies with Vaginas” on the cover of its latest issue, referring to an article inside, entitled “Periods on Display,” a review of an exhibit about the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London.
Maybe the editors, who tweeted the piece, were just looking for clickbait, with a pullquote on the cover teasing that “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of such bodies have been neglected” — this although the author had used the phrase “bodies with vaginas,” only once and “women” four times.

But…but…there are trans men who menstruate and have vaginas. There are trans women who do not have them, and do not belong in an article about menstruation. There are cis women who do not have vaginas, and large numbers of both cis and trans women who do not menstruate. Acknowledging their existence and medical relevance is not erasing cis women at all. But Ms DiManno seems determined to erase trans men (who we call “men”, to keep it simple) and trans women (called “women”, that forbidden word in the minds of TERFs), all by inventing a totally non-existent imaginary problem.

It seems to be a common disease among right-leaning people who need imagined persecution to help them keep up their own sense of identity, so they have to create grievances. Without them, their concerns do seem to be rather petty and indefensible.