Skepchicks, assemble!

This is good news. After a long hiatus, Rebecca Watson is gathering her team of superheroes to relaunch Skepchick. I find her reason personally inspiring.

I’ve long had it in the back of my head that I should relaunch, but depression, anxiety, and life found a way to stop me (or allow me to stop myself). Then, a few months back, a lawyer emailed me threatening to sue me over something one of my writers wrote ages ago. I realized I needed to do something, as I was spending thousands of dollars on server space and now I was preparing to spend many more thousands of dollars on a legal case, all for a website I’d been ignoring for years. I decided I would shut everything down.

Then I talked to some very kind lawyers, who told me the person threatening me was a troll who makes his living scaring bloggers into paying him off in the hopes they won’t go to court. They gave me information on how to go about fighting him, and I thought, “Oh yeah, this is what I love doing.” I love fighting bullies. I love exposing scam artists. And I love providing a platform for other writers and activists to do the same.

So instead of shutting Skepchick down, I decided to relaunch. I contacted our writers and many of them were excited to come back on. You can see the full list of them (thus far) here. You’ll once again see our daily Quickies, and you’ll be able to read voices other than mine.

A troll is threatening to sue her, and instead of caving in, she gets angry and reinvigorated? That’s excellent. That’s what I need to hear, because…well, there’ll be some ugly news I share later.

Still not a fan of debate

But this discussion between Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers is half-entertaining. Sommers is stuttering and stammering and throwing around her usual garbage — there is no pay gap, #metoo has gone too far, constant exaggeration of “hysteria” on college campuses — and Gay is calm and strong and focused. It was worth it for her commentary alone, so the whole thing could have been half as long and ten times better by cutting out the jittery blonde hack.

Wow, Jacob Wohl is really working hard to be the poster boy for Dunning-Krueger

Wohl is just full of ambitious plans, most of them revolving around presenting himself as a Machiavellian genius, despite being the dumbest man on the internet. One of his recent schemes was a company, the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence (ACPI), which would make money by manipulating political betting pools.

Bumbling conservative provocateur Jacob Wohl pitched investors this spring on a scheme to use fraudulent news stories to manipulate political betting markets, according to a fundraising document obtained by The Daily Beast.

The document indicates that Wohl attempted to raise $1 million to fund the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence, which he claimed would “make shit up” to profit from bets on political races and would suppress Democratic turnout in 2020.

“Make shit up” is a direct quote from his plea. It’s also the centerpiece of his cunning plan — all he had to do was lie, lie, lie, and nobody would ever notice his reputation as a liar.

“With a superior handle on American cultural nuances ACPI will be able to have a devastating impact on Democrat candidates,” the document reads.

The group also planned to create “high-impact political publicity stunts” to affect political races. The pitch praises two recent headline-grabbing conservative efforts—the GoFundMe campaign to fund the border wall and anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York office—as activities to emulate.

“ACPI plans to execute similar sophisticated and impactful stunts as frequently as possible in order to influence political outcomes in the favor of our backers during the 2020 election cycle,” the pitch reads.

Wohl really needs to crack open a dictionary. Words he needs to learn the definition of are: intelligence, nuance, sophisticated. Everything he does is the opposite of those.

Also in his catalog of stupid schemes, he decided that Pete Buttigieg was a major danger for Trump, so his goal was to kneecap him.

That scenario jibes with how the Buttigieg smear circulated on Monday. After the sexual assault allegation appeared in a vague Medium post under Kelly’s name, the unverified claim was quickly trumpeted by a number of right-wing blogs, including Big League Politics, The Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars. From there, it circulated widely on conservative Twitter accounts and other blogs for hours until the accuser denied the allegations and The Daily Beast revealed that Wohl and Burkman were accused of soliciting men to make up stories about the candidate.

A source told The Daily Beast that Wohl and Burkman said the goal of that scheme was to take down the Democrat who poses a threat to President Donald Trump’s re-election. The apparent aim of ACPI’s plan was profit.

Fool. His pointless ploy was to no avail, because as we all know, you only have to wait for a Democrat to open their mouth before they’ll kneecap themselves. As Mayor Pete promptly did, saying something idiotic about vaccinations.

These exemptions include medical exemptions in all cases (as in cases where it is unsafe for the individual to get vaccinated), and personal/religious exemptions if states can maintain local herd immunity and there is no public health crisis.

Vaccinations are to prevent that public health crisis — complacency and obliging faith-based rejection of good medicine, as Buttigieg is advocating, is what leads to them. His statement is simply political pandering to both sides.

I married a Russian bot

I tend to be loud and angry in my political views, I freely admit. My wife, on the other hand, is more subtle and open to exploring other political perspectives, but she is also deeply concerned about the direction the country is taking. She’s been more active in local political organizing than I am (no one wants me in their campaigns, for some reason), and she’s also been quietly working in online communities. She’s far more interested in, and better at, healing the rifts and dispelling the nastiness, so, for instance, she’s been posting in some of the online fora in a positive way. She’s an advocate for Bernie Sanders, but she only says good things about other candidates and does not engage in trying to tear down Warren or even Biden.

I brought her her breakfast this morning, and she was shocked. She could not believe it. She had just been banned from Democratic Underground. She just ignored my lovely breakfast. I think her feelings were hurt.

I couldn’t believe it either. My breakfast was healthy and delicious, and Mary is a gentle vision of sweetness and light online, kind of the opposite of me. I guess DU is committed to fractiousness, though. Either that or they were unable to believe someone who wasn’t cutthroat and vicious was human.

I should have noticed that she said something strange like “doobryuh ootruh” when I brought her plate in, though. She also seems to be drinking a lot of machine oil lately. Should I worry?

Not subtle at all

Here’s a fascinating 18th century political cartoon:

There’s a short essay to go with it.

One could provoke debate about the sexualized imagery throughout the cartoon, the purpose of a racialized America, the ways in which imagery of class, race, and gender intersect, and the place of the “civilized” European versus the “natural” American in the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Does the artist believe Britain holds the moral right; does the cartoon display America’s winning ideology? Which should win, or who shall?

One could. I’m just overwhelmed with the freight of associations here.

Jacob Wohl does it again

Fresh from his expedition to the savage wilderness of Minneapolis, rested from the harrowing experience of faking death threats from gay Hispanic diversity coordinators, Jacob Wohl launched himself fearlessly into his new mission, to defeat the candidacy of Democratic hopeful Pete Buttigieg by hook or crook.

Far-right activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman helped coordinate a fake campaign against Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg through a Medium post on Monday that accused the mayor of sexual assault.

The two men used fake social media accounts for a 19-year-old Ferris State University student named Hunter Kelly on Monday without his knowledge or consent to publish a vague post accusing the presidential hopeful of assault this past February.

It’s too bad that Don Knotts died, because he’d be the natural choice to play Wohl as a bumbling villain in the Disneyfied live-action movie of this caper. Their patsy, Kelly Hunter, has since released a statement disavowing the whole mess.

I WAS NOT SEXUALLY ASSAULTED

It’s important for everyone to know that I was not sexually assaulted and would never falsely accuse anyone.

To keep it brief for now- I was approached by a political figure to come to DC to discuss political situations from the standpoint of a gay Republican. When I arrived they discussed Peter Buttigieg and started talking about how they would be working a campaign against him.

I went to bed and woke up to a fake Twitter @RealHunterKelly and an article that I in no way endorsed or wrote.

I have since left and am working on a formal statement to give to everyone including the Buttigieg family.

Thank you for standing behind me and knowing that I would never accept or allow any of this.

You can’t be too bright to be a gay Republican, but even worse is to be the kind of liar who manufactures transparently phony hit pieces like Wohl and Burkman.

Burkman would be played by Tim Conway.

Swept away in a storm of buzzwords!

It’s obvious that the one thing that is keeping Answers in Genesis afloat is that they’ve tapped into the same vein of fear and lunacy that Donald Trump draws strength from — so today Ken Ham posted cartoons to show all the things the rabid right fears most.

It’s a little weird that he’s got “male and female restrooms” whirling around in his imaginary tornado, and it’s a rather incoherent soup of words (is “creation” contributing to the chaos as much as “racism”?), but it’s also revealing. None of those words leave me feeling confused. Apparently, though, poor Ken and his cult-like followers want all the ideas to stop challenging them so he can cuddle up to his biblical anchor.

Health care and colleges — does Canada have to do everything better than us?

I’m thinking it would be to our benefit to secede and join the more liberal country to our north. They really seem to have it together. They also demonstrate that elitism and exclusivity do not make for a better university.

The University of Toronto, rated one of the 25 best institutions of higher education in the world, has around 71,000 undergraduate students and an acceptance rate of 69 per cent.

Higher education is also cheaper in Canada. The average annual undergraduate tuition is $6,838, compared to $9,700 for state public colleges in the U.S. and around $35,000 for private colleges.

Sign me up. I also hear we get poutine and Tim Horton’s when we enlist. I’m willing to learn a little French.

Got any white walkers you need to deal with?

I’m pretty sure these are equivalent to Valerian steel and would be exceptionally effective. Marcus is auctioning off a pair of beautifully wicked handmade knives to benefit our legal fund. I would bid on both if said legal fund hadn’t drained my bank account rather severely already. I’ve always wanted a tactical chef’s knife, just in case.

Get ’em while you can. Marcus has set up a fair system to manage the auction, and you can both help us out and get a totally appropriate weapon out of it.