They’ve established a beachhead in Wales, where swarms of cephalopods have begun their march inland.
Hey, lady! Yeah, you with the white nail polish! Do not tickle and mock Squad Captain Oi’sh’sh’schlick! We see you, we’re marking you down as a target!
When the marine squadrons link up with the spider cavalry, they’re going to be unstoppable.
Facebook and Instagram have finally had enough bad PR from those wackaloons and has outright banned a host of bad actors. It’s a start. However, it doesn’t affect the structural problems in social media algorithms — they’re built around simple-minded mechanisms that don’t consider the quality of the content, but rely on who is linking to who, and counting the number of references as an indication of popularity. It’s an extravagant version of a sneaky online poll. So you still get fed bad information, even if they retroactively cut out the original source of the lies.
Simply by following Instagram’s suggestions, Russell was recommended 240 Instagram pages posting misinformation. Looking at one QAnon page resulted in suggestions for 12 more. Liking and engaging with even borderline-extremist content on the platform results in recommendations for more extreme content. Just last week, Instagram recommended that I follow Yiannopoulos and Jones after I liked and followed many right-wing meme pages. Russell also noted that more than 30 white-nationalist pages flagged to Facebook and Instagram last month are still up. “One would think that Instagram would bother to halfway try to clean this stuff up,” he tweeted, “but it’s all still there.”
Banning these extremist figures is a step toward stricter moderation of extremist views, but time and again, we’ve seen that the internet’s worst actors always find new ways to exploit platforms. For instance, after Instagram promised to ban anti-vaccine hashtags such as #vaccinescauseautism, anti-vaxxers simply developed new hashtags by changing a letter or adding a word.
The one good thing about cutting off these phonies at the knees is that it makes it far more difficult for them to directly profit from their lies — the lies still get out there, but InfoWars, for instance, has just lost a big chunk of advertising revenue, which we can hope will reduce their effectiveness at poisoning the discourse. It might also discourage the next guy with a get-rich-quick scheme based on selling conspiracy theories.
Rangers in the Northern Territory found this lovely beast, a three-eyed snake, which is particularly interesting because the eye is so well formed, and it’s unlikely to be the result of a secondary fusion of two embryos. Something just triggered the formation of another eye near the midline of the cranium.
Unfortunately, it didn’t live long. That extra eye was an obstacle to feeding.
Also unfortunate is the speculation in the comments. This is not likely to be the result of a mutation — mutations don’t work like that. It’s also not likely to be a direct effect of a teratogen. Most likely is that there was an environmental insult of some sort to the early developing head that caused ectopic production of a morphogen signal. I doubt there will be a wave of similar defects appearing all over the snake population (although I confess it would be kind of cool if there were).
Least likely is the idea that this is a sign of the apocalypse, or that white walkers are going to march out of Timor or New Guinea to descend on Australia.
They actually do a simple experiment in this video to show the effectiveness of washing your hands after handling meat (but where was the control of sampling the bacterial load before handling?), but still, this is one of the reasons we’ve been going vegetarian at my house.
Of course, another control that should have been done: what kind of bacterial smear is on your hands after handling lettuce? I demand a new video with more rigorous quantitative comparisons.
That’s especially since my new dietary regime I’ve imposed on myself and my wife is salads, and nothing else, for dinner every other night. We get our protein dose every other day. Tonight it’s fake pulled pork (seitan) sandwiches, we’ll see how this stuff tastes.
Life Magazine indulged in a little propaganda in 1916 to persuade the citizenry that we ought to be involved in World War I. If we weren’t, why, the Germans would invade from the east and the Japanese from the west, and we good Americans would be confined to a …reservation in the desert, a prospect offered without irony.
Curiously, Canada is labeled as a land of barbarians. Canada joined the war effort in 1914, though, before the US did. I’m not sure what they’re implying.
Meineapolis/St Karl are nice touches, as is Nagaseattle.
Aaron Rabinowitz summarizes his cult:
Someone asked what are the views of our cult. Thoughts on this:
- The truth is complex and painful but intrinsically valuable, so help others learn it and help others suffer through it.
- Luck drives everything, so have as much empathy as you can for those who suffer and do wrong.
- Morality and value are still real, because experience is real and instills in us a variety of obligations that, when enacted, promote flourishing.
This is what atheism could have been. I think many atheists accepted #1 — loudly proclaiming that we have the truth has been a big deal all along — but balked at #2. So many atheists are proud adherents of the cult of capitalism, which insists that all personal progress is a result of merit, and were willing to accept the science of evolution only because of the concept of natural selection, which they considered to be the natural representation of capitalism. They don’t like to hear that modern evolutionary theory puts much more emphasis on chance, or even that selection is a stochastic process rather than an inevitability.
They choke before they even get to #3, because they are so busy cheering for Ben Shapiro’s facts don’t care about your feelings
that they don’t notice that feelings are also part of reality. I’ve noticed that a lot of atheists run away angrily at the very notion of moral obligations, because, as they tell me all the time, “atheism means nothing more than a disbelief in gods”. The virtue of Rabinowitz’s formulation is that it moves beyond a statement of fact to a recognition of the implications of that fact.
I think they may have misinterpreted #1, come to think of it, as “The truth is complex and painful but intrinsically valuable, so be sure to feel superior about your possession of it”.
Environment America has noticed that my campus has made a big accomplishment in renewable energy.
The University of Minnesota (UMN), Morris leads in producing renewable electricity on its own campus. The university produces about 60 percent of its electricity needs with two commercial-scale wind turbines, and also powers one of its residence halls with a 20-kW solar PV installation.
Switching to renewable energy sources is a very big deal at this campus. I know one of our goals is 100% energy independence, and the turbines are just the beginning — we also have a biomass gasifier on campus, which has been off to a slow start, but it’s part of a grand plan to lead the way in sustainable energy production.
You can read more at our page on Renewable Energy Initiatives.
I remember Katie McHugh mainly as a flash-in-the-pan obnoxious anti-semitic Islamaphobe — someone who got a job in the racist hothouses of Breitbart and the Daily Caller, made a little noise with some extremely hateful tweets, like a kind of mini-Katie Hopkins, and then got fired as the alt-right strained to appear a little less thuggish (they failed). Now Rosie Gray has a thorough article on her history, and it’s a sad, dismal story all around. McHugh regrets her role in the alt-right, although I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a genuine repentance — it’s more like she regrets how she has fucked up her own life by embracing a series of bad actors.
Her journey to remorseful failure begins in college. She attended a small liberal arts college where she stood out alone as a far-right firebrand, which was sufficient to win the attention of the far-right media. I’ve seen that happen at my university. Yes, you can stand out by acting the colossal regressive on a campus full of progressive, optimistic, intelligent students, but while it may appeal to the ego in the short run, it’s going to lead to catastrophe eventually. We had a student here who made a reputation for himself writing ugly crap for the alternative newspaper (not as ugly as McHugh’s stuff, though), which led to him making connections with James O’Keefe, which led to him getting arrested in a break-in in Louisiana. It’s not a great career trajectory.
McHugh’s story is similar. She leapt from writing for the college newspaper to working with Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the usual upstart conservative rags, and making connections with major racist white nationalist figures. The pipeline from young conservative to Trumpian conservative is apparent in her history, and she also exposes the real nastiness in their beliefs that these organizations try to hide.
The alt-right was at the time all about smoothing over its public image, becoming approachable, more mainstream. “They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,” as McHugh put it. The very term “alt-right” represented this effort to rebrand white nationalism. Everything in public was euphemism. The names of the main organizations were bland: National Policy Institute, American Renaissance. People could blend in, and they did. They were “polished, sophisticated,” she said. “There’s a very high culture aspect to it.” The class markers were important to someone like McHugh, who had come from the sticks. And the emphasis on genetics and IQ was appealing as well. “They see it almost as a moral value,” she said. “They think that people with high IQ confers them with some kind of super-ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders.”
The emphasis on intelligence confers the whole enterprise with a pseudo-intellectual veneer, and it also provides white supremacists with a way to elide accusations of white supremacy. According to their argument, they can’t be white supremacists because they say that Jews and people of East Asian descent have a higher average IQ. This both whitewashes their bigotry and feeds into the alt-right’s victim mentality, especially as it relates to Jews. The work of the anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald is a cornerstone of the alt-right movement. His Culture of Critique series argues that Jews, using their higher intelligence, employed Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” to perpetuate themselves and win out over other groups. MacDonald blames Jews for the very existence of anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Semitism is a justified response to Jews’ plot to run the world.
If they’re so smart, though, how is it that looking at the details of their groups exposes great pulsing veins of absurdity? This is almost funny.
Their differences went deeper — and stranger — than that, and allowed McHugh to see inside a truly bizarre subculture. McHugh was a Catholic, while DeAnna was a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a group based near Lynchburg that was focused around a neopagan theology based on self-improvement and feats of strength, as well as coded white nationalism. The idea was to cast off the bounds of modern Judeo-Christian society and find a way back to pre-Christian northern European culture. McHugh sometimes accompanied DeAnna on weekend trips down to the Wolves’ headquarters for what they called a “moot” — a ceremony in which the assembled Wolves would smear ash on their bodies around a fire and give what McHugh described as “dramatic speeches” about self-sufficiency and relying on the other group members. They would then sit around the fire and drink beers.
One part of McHugh’s disaffection with the movement was over such silliness. She couldn’t accept it, so she reverted to…Catholicism. More absurdity, different flavor.
McHugh recognizes now how hard she screwed herself over. She’s working as a waitress in a small town somewhere unnamed, and struggling to keep up with her medical bills (she’s diabetic). She has regrets and advice, and not much else.
At age 28, she has made herself unemployable in the career field she chose — even on its fringes. She perpetually struggles to support herself financially. It’s easy to see how someone in McHugh’s position might regret the path she took that got her here. Would she regret it if she still had friends, still had a writing job?
McHugh has a message for the people on a similar path, though, one that can be considered regardless of whether you believe she’s actually changed.
“People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system, they have no chance, and they’re just harmful,” McHugh said. “There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people, and tell your story, and say, ‘Get out while you can.’”
Well, we can hope some college students somewhere read about her and recognize that hate is loud and gets you noticed, but it doesn’t make you a better person.
Here’s Stephen Moore, a rather prominent conservative chosen by Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve board, a fellow who has strong opinions on the importance of traditional marriage, husband as the breadwinner, wife as the mother and homemaker.
Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”.
Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.
Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.
He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.
You would think a guy like that would be a dedicated husband and father, wouldn’t you? Setting an example and all that.
Nope.
The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010.
Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said.
Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.
There’s more. He has remarkable history of bad ideas.
“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work. They want equal pay for inferior work,” Moore wrote. He went on to claim that the real “injustice” was that female pros were paid, while men playing college tennis who could “beat them handily” were not.
“I’m a radical on this; I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people starting to work at 11, 12,” he said during the debate.
“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males, as well. They’ve been declining, and that is, I think, a big problem,” he said in a CNBC interview.
“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course, but you know, people are talking about women’s earnings — they’ve risen,” Moore continued. “The problem, actually, has been the steady decline in male earnings, and I think we should pay attention to that, because I think that has very negative consequences for the economy and for society.”
“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.),” Moore wrote. “It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”
“The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”
Moore’s solution? “No more women refs, no more women announcers, no more women beer venders, no women anything.” He did offer one caveat: “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like (sportscaster) Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant.”
I think it’s kind of obvious that he has a deep contempt for women, and that his ideal of traditional roles for women is simply chattel slavery.
Although, if you think about it, having two characters already meant it wasn’t a binary, but that you had 4 possible states. It looks like there are other characters people were avoiding talking about, which means there are already a heck of a lot more possible states.
This is all about the complicated story of Caster Semenya, an Olympics-class track star who has XX chromosomes and female genitalia (I’m sorry, she’s been poked and invasively examined to a degree no person should be subjected to), which, according to all the TERFs who yell at me now and then, ought to be sufficient to define her as ALL-WOMAN, but a committee has determined that her testosterone levels are too high, and that she shouldn’t be allowed to compete with the “aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics”. So apparently the vagina/XX chromosome requirement is insufficient, and you also have to have lower testosterone levels than a certain amount?
The physiology of top athletes is already weird and abnormal, or they wouldn’t be top athletes. There are subtle differences in proportions in some cases, and blood cell and bone density may be greater, and don’t get me started on the freakish psychology of people who spend long years in intense physical training. Maybe we should also insist that no one can compete in women’s events with a hematocrit above 40, or set an upper limit on the proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers they can have. Uh-oh…body fat. Women on average have more body fat than men. If they train so hard that they get lean, maybe they should be declared non-women. But it’s the nature of athletics to have to exercise hard. A conundrum!
The good news for us men is that all the policing of the boundaries of acceptable human morphology and biochemistry seems to be executed on women, not us. No one seems to be looking at athletes and suggesting that maybe that much muscle mass means you aren’t human anymore, and you should go home — that it would be unfair for you to compete with normal human beings, to preserve the integrity of the athletics of Homo sapiens. It isn’t a Harrison Bergeron situation if only women get handicapped.
It’s almost as human sexual properties are multifactorial and on a continuum. But that can’t be, right?
CORRECTION: Semenya is 46 XY DSD.
I still don’t know which bathroom she’s supposed to use.
