Tony Robbins, super-creep

There’s been a new development in the Tony Robbins case. It ought to be enough that he’s a charlatan with no skills other than a glib line of patter who gets millions of dollars every year for telling people what they want to hear, but he also has a history of harassing young girls. There is, as seems to be common in these cases, a long line of accusers.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News published a series of investigations revealing how multiple former staffers and fans have accused Robbins of sexual misconduct over three decades. Ten women have said Robbins groped them, exposed himself, or sexually harassed them while they were at his seminars or working for him, and nine of them said they were upset by his actions. Other records showed that he had berated victims of rape and domestic violence. He has denied every allegation and accused BuzzFeed News of “flat-out lying.”

Afterward, former SuperCampers reached out to BuzzFeed News about the 1985 incident. Reporters then contacted other former campers and staffers — dozens of whom independently recalled hearing about it. Many also remembered a heavily sexualized seminar delivered by Robbins to campers as young as 13. Several said they had been waiting years for a reporter to contact them. This is the first time Robbins has been accused of assaulting a minor — and it is also the first allegation of sexual misconduct by the guru that could be corroborated by eyewitnesses.

Robbins is following the usual play book of these predators — hit-and-run sexual encounters, denial, accusing his victims of trying to get his money, denial, shaming women, denial — but there was one more box he had to fill in on my bingo card. He had to file a lawsuit against anyone who reported his behavior.

Bingo!

Bonus points for filing in Ireland, of all places. It turns out that Ireland has extraordinarily slack defamation laws — the entire burden of proof rests on the defendant, with everything skewed to benefit wealthy people who are offended that someone dislikes them. It’s an interesting twist on the usual strategy of filing a SLAPP suit in states that lack strong anti-SLAPP laws. He has instead gone international in his venue-shopping. He’s rich, he can afford to kick the peons where ever he wants.

Mayor Pete gets a bad burn

Ow. Michael Harriot responds to Buttigieg’s claim that black folk just need more inspiration to succeed.

It proves men like him are more willing to perpetuate the fantastic narrative of negro neighborhoods needing more role models and briefcase-carriers than make the people in power stare into the sun and see the blinding light of racism. Get-along moderates would rather make shit up out of whole cloth than wade into the waters of reality. Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.

Read the whole thing. Especially you, Mr Buttigieg, and after you finish you can just go off and quietly retire from the race.

A remarkable instance of sneaky corruption

Stephen Ruth is a man with a mission: he’s busy painting over the lenses, or cutting the wires, of traffic cameras at intersections. At first, I thought it was petty vandalism, throw the book at him, or some deep obsession with privacy…but no. There’s an ethical reason for it.

Wherever the cameras were installed, the county intentionally shortened the duration of the yellow lights from 5 seconds to 3 seconds, knowing that it would increase the frequency of traffic violations (and traffic accidents).

The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries.

Such a little thing, and it brings in $32,000,000. I would call that an elegant scam, except that it’s killing and injuring people. And surprise — the police are supporting Ruth.

And after he cut the wires, he called the news to cover his act of civil disobedience, which resulted in his arrest after police received pressure from politicians. Ruth said police and sheriff deputies support him, because they’re aware of the shortened yellow lights.

Some may even testify on his behalf if his case goes to trial. When he was in jail for his most recent arrest, a sheriff’s deputy even offered to bail him out.

You want another surprise? The county is in bed with Xerox.

Ruth pointed out some cameras that were put up have been taken down after they fell short of daily contract-quota with Xerox to produce 25 citations, per camera, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which costs Suffolk County $2,132 per day, according to the Xerox contract with the county.

Xerox collects $13 from Suffolk County for each ticket, which increases to $33 per ticket when a camera generates more than 90 tickets in a month.

Shouldn’t the goal of law enforcement be to reduce the number of violations? These guys have incentives to increase the number!

I wouldn’t want to be a man this fragile

Look at him. He’s afraid of Mr Rogers.

Somebody needs to inform this guy that Marion Morrison, aka John Wayne, was a posturing draft-dodger, a cheerleader for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he said this in 1971:

With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

… I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

But then, that probably makes him even more attractive to the creatures at the Daily Wire.

I’m not as nice as Mr Rogers, but I’m not as dull and reactionary as John Wayne. I don’t believe in settling conflicts with guns, but I also think we have to resist fascism vigorously. Can I just be who I am, without someone telling me I have to conform to one of two different molds? Men are not all the same. Neither are women.

We win!

Good news, everybody! The Richard Carrier lawsuit is kaput. He finally, after 3 years of this nonsense, approached our lawyer and begged for mercy: he agreed to walk away from the lawsuit with prejudice if we agreed to do likewise and promise not to hurt him anymore. This is a comprehensive surrender, agreeing to quit harassing me, Amy Frank, Lauren Lane, Stephanie Zvan, Skepticon, The Orbit, and Freethoughtblogs with his legal bullshit. Here’s the SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT if you want to savor our victory a little more.

We still have to finish paying off our legal debt, so we’ll still be begging for donations for a while. If you’re one of those terrible people who supported Carrier in his attempt to silence people, I hope you appreciate what a bad investment you made, and excuse me while I dance on your failure, losers. Your champion is crawling away, defeated.

Darn, now I’ve got to watch TV

I have plans for today. I don’t have labs to teach this week because of the looming holiday, and I don’t have to prep for class this morning since I’m giving an exam, so I’m delightfully free, mostly. I am sitting down with students all afternoon to coach them through writing a good lab report, so I do have some obligations.

But this morning is all spider time. I’ve got feeding to do and a swarm of spiderlings to sort out. I don’t know why they don’t pay me to do this 8 hours a day, I’ve got a lot to learn.

Then, this evening, I’m setting aside some time to watch We Believe in Dinosaurs, about the construction of Ken Ham’s Ark Park.

We Believe in Dinosaurs follows the design and construction of a massive $120 million Noah’s Ark replica in rural Kentucky, telling the story of the unsettling and uniquely American conflict between science and religion.

Maybe I’ll do some live-blogging as I watch it. I should probably set aside a few hours afterwards for seething time, too.

Religion is a blight on the world

Aren’t you reassured that Rick Perry is writing up one-page rationalizations comparing Trump to Old Testament kings? That he, and many others, are willing to proclaim Trump to be the Chosen One of God, and that the fools of Fox News will sit around agreeing with him?

Apparently, you can be a corrupt, incompetent, narcissistic lecher, and all you have to do is spread the word that an invisible, inaudible god says he likes you, and people will fall in line.

Or look at this woman who declared that Matt Bevin had won the election for Kentucky governor just because she’d prayed on it and wanted it to be true.

It was becoming clearer as the night wore on, that Bevin would be unable to make up the margin of defeat in those areas.

“I ran into other people involved in the campaign process and they had similar things they were saying, trying to talk you into that he lost,” McDowell said.

Amid all these messages that she did not want to hear, McDowell turned to her frequent tool: prayer.

“I’m a praying woman. I just go into prayer. That’s what I do,” she said. “I took it to a spiritual level.”

She also took it to Facebook Live, a feature on the social media platform’s mobile app that allows users to broadcast in real time to their followers. She saw comments from followers supportive of a Bevin comeback.

“I just felt like it was a spiritual thing. It just seemed so strange. Everyone was acting really weird,” she said. “And so that’s why I prayed.”

Her thoughts drifted to “voter fraud”. “I felt it in my spirit. There was some kind of thing undermining the Bevin win,” McDowell said. “I just felt like that the entire time. It was such a dark feeling.”

Substitute “self-delusion” for “prayer”. It’s more accurate.

She basically worked herself up into a frenzy of belief that Jesus wouldn’t let Matt Bevin fail, and ran up on stage and lied to the crowd. She still thinks that was OK, because her faith justifies it.

As seen in a viral video distributed by Lexington TV station WLEX, which now has nearly 400,000 views, McDowell is seen coming on an empty stage with a mobile phone at her ear, trotting towards the open podium.

“Hey, we just got word,” she shouted into the mic. “Matt Bevin has won!”

The crowd, which had much to celebrate as the Republicans easily swept all the other statewide offices but were down at the prospect of Bevin’s pending loss, went from somber to jubilant in an instant.

The scary part is at the end of the article.

And she is OK, she said, and even plans to run for office again. “I will probably do it perpetually,” she said.

“I always pray about it. And Lord, if you want me to do something, I’ll get an idea to do it,” she said. “I’m wide open to politics. I’m pretty much always going to be involved at some level.”

And as she reflected on her viral moment from the GOP event in Louisville, she turned upward again.

“I did it for you, Lord.”

Goddamn. Ignorance is such a good motivator for political involvement.

There are ways to rid oneself of troublesome professors

It’s a given that Eric Rasmusen of Indiana University is a racist, a sexist, and an all-around horrible person. I agree that, as a tenured professor, he can’t be fired for that. However, I am bothered by this statement from the executive vice president of the university.

The First Amendment is strong medicine, and works both ways. All of us are free to condemn views that we find reprehensible, and to do so as vehemently and publicly as Professor Rasmusen expresses his views. We are free to avoid his classes, and demand that the university ensure that he does not, or has not, acted on those views in ways that violate either the federal and state civil rights laws or IU’s nondiscrimination policies. I condemn, in the strongest terms, Professor Rasmusen’s views on race, gender, and sexuality, and I think others should condemn them. But my strong disagreement with his views—indeed, the fact that I find them loathsome—is not a reason for Indiana University to violate the Constitution of the United States.

This is a lesson, unfortunately, that all of us need to take seriously, even as we support our colleagues and classmates in their perfectly reasonable anger and disgust that someone who is a professor at an elite institution would hold, and publicly proclaim, views that our country, and our university, have long rejected as wrong and immoral.

I don’t think that’s true! Is she suggesting that IU would be unable to fire a custodian who showed up for work in a swastika armband, because of the Constitution? That if a non-tenured administrator started suggesting exclusionary racist admission policies, they wouldn’t be dismissed because of the First Amendment? Does she think the principle of academic freedom only holds true in universities blessed to exist under the Constitution of the United States of America?

Rasmusen can’t be fired because he is employed under an explicit, lifetime contract that defines what actions violate the terms of the contract, and being a racist asshole isn’t one of them. Universities recognize the value of being able to express ideas outside the cultural norm so that they can be discussed and argued over by people who aren’t suppressed by the fear that they could be fired for uttering them. This is generally a good thing. Occasionally someone speaks out in a way that makes everyone regret it, but that’s the price you pay for academic freedom.

There are workarounds. The University of Illinois is using public shaming against a professor found guilty of sexual harassment — his offenses are publicly posted where students can read them. Christian Ott was suspended for a year, and denied the privilege of having grad students until he was adequately mentored, and eventually resigned from Caltech. Geoff Marcy resigned after being found guilty of Berkeley’s sexual harassment policy, and under pressure from his colleagues. This was after years of cover-up by the administration; are we to believe that they’d been slow to expel him because of the First Amendment, or that Berkeley violated the Constitution when they eventually dumped him?

I haven’t read my contract in ages, but I’m pretty sure that if I committed a criminal act, like knocking over a bank, my tenure would be revoked, not because of the Constitution, but because there are various specific clauses declaring grounds for revocation, and committing a felony is one of them. Rasmusen is not being fired because there is no “racist asshole” clause in his contract. IU does not and has not considered that a requirement in their rules for admission to the tenured professor club. Although, you know, I think violating Title IX regulations might be grounds for dismissal.

That’s the thing. Tenured professors have been and will continue to be dismissed for violating regulations at their place of employment. Sometimes it’s about peers using social pressure to get them out; I’m sure Rasmusen’s colleagues are unhappy about the added restrictions on his engagement with students, and would much prefer to replace him with a fresh young face who isn’t a racist asshole and can participate in the teaching responsibilities of the department fully. Sometimes it’s about getting the jerk to leave with voluntary inducements, like a better retirement package.

There are remedies. IU should stop hiding behind the Constitution.