Bloody-minded stupid people bother me

I thought I was pissed off when Trump took a joyride after being hospitalized with COVID-19. That was disgracefully irresponsible and exposed who knows how many people to his disease — at least his driver, that’s for sure — to accomplish nothing, other than to advertise his insensitivity. I mean, I had a few symptoms two weeks ago, and went in for a coronavirus test that turned out to be negative, and I was still told to quarantine myself for 10 days in case it was a false negative, and I did. That was ten days in which I didn’t even leave my house, and my spiders were hungry and I was desperate for escape, and I was scrupulous in following the recommendations of my doctor.

Trump was diagnosed with a positive case, the disease is spreading rapidly through the White House staff, and he decided to do a ridiculous publicity stunt? Fuck him, and all his little sycophants.

But my annoyance is nothing compared to this woman’s.

I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine. My family has been spared so far, but I fear every day that the slapdash stupid way we implement basic hygiene procedures is going to catch up to me and mine personally, and I’ll probably snap and turn into the avenging angel who wanders through the local grocery store punching every ignorant asshole who wears a mask below their nose in the face.

Hey, Americans — do you even realize how idiotic you look when you wear a mask below your nose, or worse, below your chin?

Does it even cross their little, selfish minds that their irresponsibility might cause suffering?

Old drama, and TERFs revisiting

I seem to have recently stirred up the TERFs, who have been making the usual TERFy accusations, including this one.

Apparently, the only reason I support trans rights is that if I don’t, the all-powerful Trans Lobby will rise up and cancel me and cast me into the outer darkness for all eternity. There are just a few little problems with that imaginary scenario. For one, my accuser says she was one of my “gaggle of blog subscribers”, and I wasn’t so protective of her views at all, since I drove her away.

She canceled me! Oh, nooooo! Appeasing my readers is all I live for, as everyone knows.

Her complaints caught the eye of the one of our “best bloggers” to whom I gave “the witch treatment”. Ophelia Benson had a few things to say about that.

He didn’t defend me. He refrained from joining the other bloggers in trashing me, for a time, but he sure as hell didn’t defend me. He privately begged me to stay, while doing nothing to defend me in public.

Then, in the end, he broke down and did a post saying I needed to “own” my mistakes.

Also, I wasn’t dismissed. I left. That “her dismissal” is a lie. He may have forgotten by now, but the fact is I left.

I will most definitely accept that final correction: before Ophelia could be dismissed, she stomped off in a huff, in the same way that Richard Carrier was not kicked out, but eagerly left the network before we could investigate the accusations against him. They both knew the inevitable conclusion would disclose that he was a harasser, and she was a TERF, and neither are acceptable around these here parts.

But I disagree with the claim that I didn’t defend her, or that it wasn’t public. How else did it happen that I antagonized so many good people in the lead-up to her departure? I struggled with that. She was one of our best bloggers, writing frequently and well, and I was in total denial that such a good progressive feminist could also be hateful towards trans people — I defended her, but did not defend her repulsive views, and kept hoping that reason would bring her around. It did not. She turned out to be far more rigid in her beliefs than I expected, and thus her departure was just a matter of time, and a question of whether she’d leave willingly or we’d kick her out.

Finally, though, it seems to be an article of faith among internet TERFs that I’m held hostage by immense numbers of trans people who give me clicks, and that is the only reason I argue for trans rights. That’s nonsense. If I wanted blog hits, it would be far more profitable to cater to the mobs of cis bigots, who far outnumber the tiny minority of trans individuals. The reason I support trans people is more nefarious than that: I’m a biologist, steeped in the dogmas of biology, which state that sex determination and expression are far more complicated than most people can imagine, and that there are more possible outcomes of the process than just two, and that humans are much more socially and functionally diverse than can be encompassed in a mere two categories, as if we were primitive ants with two castes. I held those views since long before I became aware that TERFs actually exist and think that they understand biology.

That’s particularly galling. All weekend long I was getting indignant messages from TERFs telling me that I don’t understand biology and that real biologists agree that sex is a discrete binary. It’s a bit like being harassed by flat-earthers trying to tell me that a globe violates all the principles of physics, or by creationists confident that more and more True Biologists are abandoning the theory of evolution every day. These are claims that are contradicted by reality and by the experts in the fields, yet they persist in their delusion, and no amount of arguing will convince them otherwise.

I should know that by now, but I have my own delusions.

I voted last week, and I already regret it

Collin Peterson does not belong in the Democratic party.

I made a mistake in my ballot, and I can’t correct it. I mailed it in last week. I voted Democratic party across the board, and I came to Collin Peterson’s name (our conservative DFL representative, who is anti-choice and anti-conservation), and I hesitated — I generally don’t vote at all for that guy because he’s a regressive dinosaur. But then I thought, maybe this one time, because we have to crush the Republican party. And then I thought of all the laughable attack ads the Republicans made against him, painting him as hippy-dippy liberal who votes with Nancy Pelosi 4 out of 5 times, and … I moved my pen and blacked out the spot next to his name. I felt bad about it. But I felt worse about his Republican challenger.

Then I read this account of an encounter with Collin Peterson.

“Do you have any comment as to why you defended Ilhan Omar?” an employee with the National Republican Congressional Committee asked Peterson on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“I don’t defend her. She doesn’t belong in our party,” the 16-term lawmaker responded.

When asked to clarify himself, a COVID-19-masked Peterson repeated, “She doesn’t belong in our party,” as he walked away.

I will have Collin Peterson know that an archaic toad who panders to the right-wing jerks that populate rural Minnesota and has spent his entire long career walking the line to avoid offending conservatives doesn’t belong in my Democratic party, while a Muslim woman who promotes progressive ideas and aligns herself with forward-thinking colleagues does. I won’t ever make the mistake of voting for him again. I feel like I voted for a Republican last week, and it leaves me feeling tainted.

I possess a little spirit of vengeance

Donald Trump has been admitted to Walter Reed hospital “as a precaution”. More likely, the big ol’ bullying coward has been taken by a fear of death — he’s suddenly realizing that the Secret Service cannot protect him, nor can Mitch McConnell, and that he could become one of the statistics that he treats with so little regard.

Awww, poor little preznit. Cheer up! Here is a happy song for him.

Personally, I’m torn, because my humanist values tell me every life is valuable and we should do all we can to alleviate human suffering and even a creature as contemptible as Trump should have a right to basic human dignity…but at the same time, I want him to suffer long and terribly, I want him intubated, I want him to emerge from his ordeal a month from now drained and broken and weeping and helpless to discover that he’d lost the election by a landslide and that his creditors have snatched away all his assets and that the law is serving him a stack of subpoenas and that he has lost everything his greedy, amoral heart thinks is precious. I want him to discover that his trusted inner circle of friends have all been laid low by his own stupid, unconscionable policies. I want karma. I want retributive justice. I want what Damon Young wants.

Normally, I detest those stupid, lazy political cartoons that emerge after the death of a well-known figure, showing them arriving in an afterlife, but I’d make an exception for one that showed a screaming, feculent corpse of an orange man rocketing downwards, jet-propelled by a column of fire shooting out of his ass, with a splashdown in a flaming pit of feces. No pearly gates for that guy. Get to work on that, cartoonists. Just in case.

I feel bad for feeling this way, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and I have to acknowledge my feelings.

It’s going to be a good day, I hope

I am no longer quarantined, so I have big plans for today.

  • I fed all the adult spiders yesterday. They missed me, I could tell, and were pleased to see dinner.
  • I’m going into the lab this morning to feed all the hundreds of babies. I’m more worried about them; the gap in their feeding schedule is more likely to have consequences on their rate of growth.
  • More egg sacs hatched while I was away! I have to sort out more spiderlings.
  • More egg sacs were made! It seems to be a common response at a certain age to start desperately producing a new generation.
  • I’m going to get a flu shot. Vaccines are good.
  • Late this afternoon, Mary and I are driving to Eau Claire, Wisconsin where my daughter and her family have moved. A 4-hour drive is manageable, and probably worth it to see our granddaughter (our grandson is 21 hours away, not a casual drive). I’ll be coming back on Sunday, but once again, my wife is leaving me for a few weeks because I guess she prefers Iliana’s company.

That’s it! That’s my day! Spiders and grandchildren, always a good plan.

Pray for the Preznit

O Lord, the President says he has COVID-19.

We thank you, Jesus, for this once compelling Donald to tell the truth. You did tell him not to lie this time, right? It’s a bit out of character for him, so if he actually has the disease for realz, it would be a kind of divine revelation, I think, a true sign from God. I am praying that his infection is real and true and a sign that he has been touched by the aerosolized Holy Spirit. Hallelujah!

Please, God, make sure he is touched hard.

Forgive him, Lord, for his lapse in listening to the sweet seductive whispers of Satan and getting tested in the first place. We know he’d be fine if he hadn’t tasted of the PCR Test of Knowledge of Positive and Negative Results, and the disease would have just disappeared if he hadn’t peeked. Please forgive him for testing your wisdom, too, and I’m praying real hard that you don’t cast him out of the Rose Garden for his weakness. The temptation was great, he was so desperate for a positive result, any result, of his presidency, and he reached for the one that was in his range.

Sweet Jesus, I beg you to not let him sicken and die, or to spread the plague among the Republican leadership, especially not to Mike Pence, who is surely so holy that he probably does not need chastisement. Oh, wait, Pence is getting tested, too? Never mind. Whip him with your sacred disease, for he surely knows that his suffering would be just.

O Lord, praise You for finally reaching the mind of this worthless <snerk> atheist, getting me down on my knees and beseeching the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to deliver <choke> Donald Trump of this totally imaginary disease that disappeared over the summer and is just like a little flu <hork> and was created by the Democrats conspiring with the Chinese if it were real, which it isn’t <HAAaaa!>.

No, Lord, I’m not sniggering. I’m…I’m…speaking in tongues, that’s the ticket. Now if you don’t mind, I have to get back to praying like a motherfucker for that wretched soul. It’s the least I can do.

Voter fraud! By Republicans Wohl and Burkman

We all know who really commits massive voter fraud — Republicans. Intimidation, gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, those are all in their bag of tricks. So it’s not at all surprising that Jacob Wohl and his pal Jack Burkman were robocalling to minority voters in Michigan to tell them that they’d be in trouble with the authorities if they exposed themselves by voting.

The voice on the call attributed to Wohl and Burkman attempts to trick listeners into not sending in mail-in ballots, falsely warning that the information would be used to track fugitives, collect on credit card debts, and enforce “mandatory vaccines.” The calls also told residents to “beware of vote by mail.”

What is surprising is that warrants have been issued for their arrest.

Conservative operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged on Thursday for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote in the November presidential election, Michigan authorities said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a slew of charges against Burkman, 54, and Wohl, 22, including conspiracy to commit an election law violation and using a computer to commit the crime of election law. Prosecutors allege the two political operatives were using a robocall system aimed at scaring Detroit voters away from using mail-in voting ballots. The calls, which were made in August, went out to nearly 12,000 Detroit residents.

Both Wohl and Burkman face four felony counts and a maximum sentence of 24 years in prison.

Oh I wish. This is the fate dim duo have been reaching for all these years, and they’ve consistently acted so stupidly that that they’re not likely to put up a reasonable defense. Please let them choose to be their own lawyers, please!

There’s nothing new about QAnon

It’s an old evil that keeps reappearing over and over again: blood libel, anti-semitism, witch hunts (the real ones, not the fevered persecution fantasies of terrible people), the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, government sponsored genocide, the McMartin preschool moral panic, satanic ritual abuse, and now…QAnon. They’re all the same. Talia Levin chronicles them all, and adds another organization to the ranks: The Republican party.

For now, QAnon remains in a curious position with regard to the formal party apparatus of the GOP. While QAnon adherents have been warmly lauded by the president—“I’ve heard that these are people who love our country,” he said—other elected Republicans have proceeded with more caution. The past few years have proved that there is an enormous amount the Republican Party is willing to absorb; cryptic clocks, coded messages, and the sating of Democratic appetites on child-flesh seem as yet just out of the bounds of propriety.

Nonetheless, the increasing popularity of the theory among the Republican base—which has exploded following the mixed and often conspiratorial messages proffered by the party during the Covid-19 pandemic—has meant that QAnon is no longer relegated to the fringes. The researcher Alex Kaplan, at Media Matters for America, has kept track of no less than 81 candidates for Congress in the 2020 cycle who have “endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content.” Twenty-four of those candidates have made it to the November ballot, by winning their primaries or fulfilling other requirements. (Kaplan has identified an additional 21 current or former candidates for state legislatures affiliated with QAnon.) A number seem poised to win their contests, ensuring a QAnon-believer presence amid the ranks of the political elite next year. One wonders how closely they will monitor their colleagues’ veins for signs that they are pulsing with adrenochrome, extracted from the pituitary glands of tortured children, and how such discoveries will affect bonhomie in the cloakroom.

The McMartin story is illustrative and familiar. I remember the insanity that gripped so many people over that one: there were secret tunnels under the preschool! Children were dragged down there and forced to participate in satanic and sexual rites! Babies were being horribly murdered as part of evil rituals! Of course, there were no tunnels — authorities actually dug up the grounds to search for them — and there was no evidence of tortured, abused children, or of any of the outlandish acts anyone was accused of. Yet lives were ruined and people were jailed and spent years in court, all over this unbelievable nonsense.

Now QAnon is up to the same tricks with claims of tunnels under pizza parlors and Democrats indulging in child trafficking so they can steal the blood of innocents. When will we learn that none of this is happening and these are lies peddled by fearmongers?