I got some correspondence from a person at Portland State University, who tells me a bit about Peter Boghossian’s teaching. He teaches an introductory philosophy course on ethics, a subject with a deep history. Guess what his textbook is?
The one and only textbook?
The one that’s supposed to introduce students to philosophy and ethics?
It’s…
All the philanthropy in the world won’t erase his character — especially when all that money is coming from the accumulation of excess wealth. Bill Gates is getting scrutinized rather intensely, and it turns out he was the subject of internal investigation at Microsoft over his philandering. And there’s more! A while history of coming on to women in his employ!
And while it’s unclear whether the revelation about or investigation of the affair in question was a contributing factor to Gates’ recently-announced divorce from his wife of 27 years, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, it is an example of a longstanding pattern of questionable behavior by Gates. According to the New York Times report published on Sunday, Gates pursued multiple women who worked for him at Microsoft and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. As soon as she wrapped, he reportedly emailed her and asked her to dinner. “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” Gates wrote in the email, which was shared with the Times. The employee said she did feel uncomfortable and ignored the request.
What could make this worse? Let’s throw in his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein!
Her concerns over Gates’ priorities were only compounded when the New York Times published the 2019 article “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” which detailed the men’s meetings together. While Epstein was connected with many wealthy and powerful people, “unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes,” the Times said. At the time, Bill told the publication, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” But The Daily Beast reported on Sunday that “the billionaire met Epstein dozens of times starting in 2011 and continuing through to 2014 mostly at the financier’s Manhattan home” to discuss Gates’ “toxic” marriage.
A Gates representative denied the allegation: “Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein— on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein.”
His only salvation: give away all of his money and retreat into obscurity, where he’ll never again be able to meddle in affairs beyond his competence.
This cartoon does sort of accurately illustrate how Muller’s Ratchet works, but like any metaphor, it drags in a lot of baggage.
Here’s what I don’t like: every step involves intent. In the metaphor, every change has a purpose and brings in a functional element in addition to the random noise and degradation, and the recombination step is portrayed as combining specific, useful parts. Intelligent design creationists will love this cartoon, which is too bad.
I guess my primary objection is that last panel that says “…if you have an image editor that lets you spice together parts of two images, you can make a new version with the best parts of both“. Recombination doesn’t discriminate what parts are best. It’s random.
Adults are rubbish! Don’t trust us or listen to us except for this one thing which is: immediately form yourself into a huge ferocious army of wild youths and destroy everything! Storm the offices of every fossil fuel organization in the world and geosequestrate them all!
Don’t ask us to do that. We’re old and tired and comfortable and we’re leaving it all up to you.
Whew. Peter Boghossian has gone full on crackpot. He’s nuttering along like a Baby Mussolini, claiming he is the true and rightful defender of Western Civilization (whatever that is), and declaring war on everyone who disagrees with him…because it’s really important that we allow freedom of expression…? Yeah, he’s that incoherent.
Did I hear that right? “Full-scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western Civilization”? Coming from the guy who wrote the foreword to Stefan Molyneux’s book, I wonder what this could possibly mean 🤔 pic.twitter.com/KWmf2A3rdc
— ⚒ Sam Hoadley-Brill ⚒ (@deonteleologist) May 14, 2021
People want you to think a certain way, but let’s be clear about something. I’m done playing, I think Douglas is done playing, I’m waging full scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western Civilization. I am taking no prisoners. I have very large scale projects coming for the enemies of reason and science and rationality. These people are divisive neo-racist hatemongers, and there’s simply no…we must broker zero tolerance with this ideology, and the only way forward at this point is full-scale ideological war and I will take no prisoners and that is what I’m devoting my life to. I will…I seek the complete eradication and extirpation of the ideology from every facet of life.
His rant reminds me of this classic exchange.
Bluto: Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Otter: Germans?
Boon: Forget it, he’s rolling.
He’s just reciting martial cliches. He’s not going to eradicate or extirpate anything. He’s not going to take any prisoners because he’s not going to have an opportunity to capture anyone. It’s all noise and posturing.
Boghossian was never much of a presence in the now-defunct New Atheist movement. I remember when he started appearing on the scene, and it was almost entirely by attaching himself leech-like to the most horrible, controversial phonies around, like Molyneux, which was amazing — Boghossian is supposedly a philosopher, but he was endorsing a ridiculous cult-leader whose “philosophy” is an incoherent mish-mash of racism and misogyny? I dismissed him then, but now he seems to think he’s been promoted to be the General Patton of conservative atheism.
There’s more, and recently. Here’s an hour-long video in which he gets together with Bruce Gilley and Dennis Linthicum to complain about diversity and tolerance in academia.
In case you have no idea who those other people are, Bruce Gilley is head of the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Scholars, a fringe political organization funded by right-wing millionaires which deplores “political correctness” and wants “a return to mid-20th-century curricular and scholarship norms, and an increase in conservative representation in faculty.” Yeah. One of those. Gilly himself became notorious with his “scholarship” that decreed that colonialism was a good thing. Fascist organizations everywhere clamored to have him defend their views.
The German parliament, the Bundestag, is rarely an exciting place, and even less often the site of debate and protest. But in December, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) managed to scandalize the German public by hosting an academic lecture on German colonialism.
The speaker the AfD invited has made a name for himself as a colonial revisionist in the most literal sense: Bruce Gilley, professor of political science at Portland State University, became the subject of global debate in 2017 when the (small but renowned) journal Third World Quarterly published his essay “The Case for Colonialism.” In it, Gilley argued not only that colonialism was “objectively beneficial,” but also that it should be reconsidered as a model of governance for countries in the Global South today. Critics, while scandalized by the proposal itself, mainly focused on the question of how a paper that was “blind . . . to vast sections of colonial history,” contained major “empirical shortfalls,” and was essentially “the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes” made it through peer review. As it turned out, the paper had been rejected by three peer reviewers, and the decision of editors to publish it without consulting the editorial board of Third World Quarterly led to the resignation of most members of the board and the retraction of the article.
He takes the interesting position that sure, there were excesses in colonialism, it wasn’t perfect, but all the hand-chopping and murder and rapes were reactions to the resistance offered by the colonized people, and wouldn’t have occurred if they’d just accepted the gifts of Western Civilization. Meanwhile, the collapse of post-colonial nations wasn’t really caused by the colonial institutions and the history of depradation, but was just the true nature of those people emerging, justifying further the loving hand of colonial imperialism.
Dennis Linthicum is a politial non-entity — a Tea Party member of the Oregon senate, one of the chickenshit Republicans who went into hiding in 2019 to undermine Oregon’s efforts to combat climate change. His contribution here seems to be to recite lists. He’s an incredible bore.
And finally, Peter Boghossian seems to have been invited because he is a notorious asshole who is comfortable with the likes of Gilley and Linthicum.
They got together to whine about the university imposing a race studies requirement in the curriculum, and about the university prioritizing diversity, which they claim is racist (that’s what he means by “neo-racist”) and against academic freedom. How dare they address contemporary issues, rather than pretending it’s still 1950!
At about the 16 minute mark, Boghossian gets on another roll.
Let’s be blunt about what we face. We face a group of small-minded, petty ideologues who have hijacked a public institution, who are hell-bent on ripping down Western Civilization. This is explicit in the doctrines of Critical Race Theory. They have created a system and a structure in which any form of dissent is punished as the new heretic, you are a heretic and you have committed blasphemy against the ideology. This is an ideology that proselytizes the consciousness of what is ordinarily…people who are ordinarily reasonable. What this is not is a partisan issue.
Not a partisan issue, which is why he got together with his far-right pals to rant. Sorry, if it’s not a partisan issue, where are the people who are not right-wing ideologues in this discussion?
I have news for Boghossian: there aren’t any universities that are trying to tear down Western Civilization. The destruction of America isn’t explicit or implicit in Critical Race Theory — if anything, the idea that we should come to grips with the failings of Western European and American history is the only way to save this culture.
You know, sometimes people are just plain wrong, an idea I’m sure Boghossian would agree with, and pointing out that people like Boghossian and Gilley are wrong in their interpretation of history and culture isn’t labeling them as heretics, any more than telling someone they don’t understand vaccines or the shape of the Earth is branding them as heretics. Boghossian is wrong about just about everything. He’s also an ass.
I expect he won’t have his platform as a member of academia for long. He’s an untenured assistant professor with a history of uncollegial behavior who is happy to condemn his institution, so I would be very surprised if he were retained — he has already been denied promotion to associate professor. He’s going to be reduced to fantasizing about running over “Wokists” with a tank without an academic title.
That’s a great title: Heckle Christ’s bride at your eternal peril! I knew I had to read it to find out how to heckle Christ’s bride, so it was successful clickbait (Christ’s bride, by the way, is the whole dang Christian church, so now you know…lots of target out there.) And then the article starts with such good news!
For the first time since the Gallup organization started to track the data, fewer than 50 percent of Americans now belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. Behind these numbers are, among other factors, the trendiness of not only leaving church, but announcing it on social media with a bit of shaming and blaming thrown in for good measure.
Many are not only leaving a particular house of worship but joining a growing demographic known as the “nones,” rejecting all religious affiliation. The Christian version of those who grew up in the Church but have become “nones” often go by another label: “exvangelicals.”
As you might guess, the article is all about agonizing over why people are abandoning the faith. It sets up a dichotomy: are they leaving the church because it fails to live up to their moral standards, or are they leaving because they’re already depraved sinners who don’t like a church that has high moral standards?
Go ahead, guess. Which answer do they think is the true one?
I guess there has been a wave of panic-buying of gasoline after a major pipeline was shut down; I haven’t noticed because I’ve been walking everywhere. People were concerned that they wouldn’t have fuel for their daily commute, so they were stockpiling gas in anything that would hold gas, including plastic bags. There are supposed to be safety laws that limit what you can use to store a flammable liquid, but apparently gas station owners were looking the other way. Sometimes, that led to disaster.
A Hummer in Florida burst into flames right after a driver filled four containers with gas.
Citrus County Fire Rescue said they responded to a call at a Texaco Food Mart in Homosassa, Fla. for a vehicle on fire on Wednesday.
Four 5-gallon containers filled with gasoline were in the back of the vehicle when it caught fire, officials said.
Hummers are practically a symbol of self-indulgent excess, so I would have applauded the sight. But what’s really ironic here is that a guy who was concerned about running out of gas is driving around in a Hummer, a vehicle that optimistically gets 10-14mpg. If we really want to save fuel, one way would be to torch every Hummer on the road. Go buy an electric or hybrid or at least a small economy car that gets 30-40 mpg.
I trust them on the science. When they say being vaccinated means you’re pretty safe and don’t need a mask in most circumstances, I believe them. When they say we can loosen social distancing requirements outdoors, I’ll believe them, and the studies do support that. But you have to know by now that this pandemic has a psychological, sociological, and political dimension that you also have to recognize, and they have to know that their advice has ramifications. Our idiot conservative democrat governor has to know that too, but do they care? No. Our state mask mandate has been dismissed, thanks to the short-sighted recommendations of the CDC. This is only going to encourage the worst elements in the state.
Case in point: our local grocery store, Willie’s Super-Valu of Morris, Minnesota.
When the seriousness of the pandemic began to hit us all, they dragged their heels on implementing even the most basic preventive policies. For months, they were carefree, few of the workers wore masks, and almost none of the customers did. It was so disgracefully bad that we gave up and started shopping 40 minutes away. They finally did put up signs requiring masks in the store, but it was too late — we have lost all trust in the store. I go there only reluctantly, and when absolutely necessary, like today. I’ve been car-less for almost a month while my wife was off spending all her time with our granddaughter, and the pantry was bare. She’s going back this week so I’ve just this weekend to stock up again, and I made the mistake of going to Willie’s.
The instant the governor ended the mandate, the signs all went away. None of the workers are masked anymore, and very few of the customers. The kaffeeklatsches have resumed, with people stopping in the middle of aisles to gossip with other residents. We are back to “normal”, I guess, but the pandemic isn’t over, and the CDC recommendations are about people who have been vaccinated…that is, about half the population. This is a politically conservative area, so I have no confidence that any of the people in that store have been following prior recommendations, or have been vaccinated, or at all responsible in protecting the health of the community. I sure as hell don’t trust the owners of the store.
So here we are again, with the local Trump-loving citizens of this town showing their asses and being irresponsible.
I’m going to have to continue occasionally visiting Willie’s — it’s basically the only major grocery store in walking distance — when my wife takes the car again, but as soon as she gets back home again for good, they have lost my business. It’s a shame, too, that a place that has the silly slogan “Home of the People-Lovers” should so reliably betray their community.
Would you buy a cancer cure from this man?
Social media are a cesspool — it’s not so much “social” as it is “manipulative commercial/capitalist propaganda media”. It’s a net of a thousand lies, and Facebook and Google are its eager, willing enablers. It wouldn’t take much to improve it, but they won’t, because they make too much money off frauds and lyin’ politicians.
For example, would you believe that 65% of all the vaccine lies are driven by just 12 people? You can read all the details, but I believe it — there are people who are really good at wielding the megaphone of the internet, and have no other skills or learning at all, and they have an outsized influence. Here are the Disinformation Dozen:
These are the people responsible for most of the memes and assorted garbage that’s poisoning minds all over the world. Mercola, for instance, has a huge and profitable quack empire, selling supplements and snake oil, and giving away lies for free. In the complete analysis, it goes through each of the twelve and states whether they have active accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram…would you believe that Mercola, who has been a notorious quack for decades, is active on all three? He doesn’t get any pushback at all, despite peddling cancer cures that don’t work, as well as claiming that COVID-19 doesn’t exist, but if it does, you can treat it with hydrogen peroxide. He’s been getting filthy rich off this nonsense, which explains why his accounts weren’t instantly yanked.
Kennedy is also active on Facebook and Twitter, but at least he was banned on Instagram.
The Bollingers: active on all three. They’re anti-vaxxers who claim the vaccine kills children.
Tenpenny claims masks don’t help and suffocate wearers. She was banned on Facebook, but still trumpets her noise on Twitter and Instagram.
Islam claims to have beat COVID-19 with chicken soup. Banned from Facebook, still lying on the other media.
Buttar claims that the vaccine will sterilize you. Still active on all three.
Elizabeth claims vaccines are part of a conspiracy theory to make everyone sick. Still active on all three.
Ji claims that the vaccines killed more people than the disease. He’s been kicked off Twitter and Instagram, but is still on Facebook — he runs a snake oil store.
Brogan partners with Ji, and has been booted from Facebook but still babbles on Twitter and Instagram. Nice synergy — between the two of them, they’ve got the big three covered.
Northrup is one of those hydroxychloroquine promoters. Still active on all three.
Tapper is a chiropractor, anti-vaxxer and anti-masker who says stupid things like “There is a total lack of evidence that viruses can live outside the body” — which makes no sense and is not even wrong. Still active on all three.
Jenkins seems to be riding Kennedy’s coattails. Still active on all three.
These twelve people are all using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to spread misinformation, and are doing it with very little complaint from the social media companies. Ban them. Ban them now. I know another dozen will just rise up to take their place, but if they just had real policies against medical quackery that they actually enforced, they could quickly ban those, too.
It’s kind of obvious that the idea of policies that inhibit active fraud on social media are considered a joke by Google and Facebook.
