Fortunately for the peace of the nation, no dairy products were hurled

Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about. Move along, move along.

Really, no problem at all. It’s just a few armed neo-Nazis crashing into a Pride parade.

In Detroit, an armed white supremacist group called the National Socialist Movement (NSM) descended on the annual Motor City Pride Festival, where they held placards, gave Nazi salutes and displayed armbands with swastikas.

Photos from the event, which was attended by thousands of LGBT+ supporters, showed a group of around 10 neo-Nazis marching surrounded by police officers.

Dressed in black with a number carrying firearms and shields, the NSM marchers tore apart pride flags and pushed over at least one counter-demonstrator. One even appeared to urinate on an Israeli flag.

See? They were supported by the local police, so you know it was an entirely trouble-free and socially acceptable intervention. They didn’t mean any harm, as a few quotes from the NSM show.

[The National Socialist Movement] NSM will be armed and counter-protesting the freaks, wrote Burt Colucci, the self-identified “commander” of the neo-Nazi NSM, on Russian social network VK.

NSM, lets put some boots on the ground!! I don’t really give a damn about op-sec or Antifa in this situation. We go in with Swastikas blazing and if people don’t like it, tough shit…

I might have been concerned and distressed, but no milkshakes were thrown. I repeat, there were no milkshakes. Thus was civility and order preserved.

A gathering of the broflakes

The Boston Straight Parade has faced a couple of major setbacks.

  • Tomi Lahren has endorsed it. That’s the kiss of death right there.
  • Their chosen “mascot”, Brad Pitt, has ordered them to stop using his name and image.
  • To fill the gaping void left by Pitt’s rejection, organizers asked Milo Yiannopoulos to fill in. Tomi Lahren pouts at the rejection.
  • Tragically and confusingly, desperate-for-attention Milo accepts.

    The organization later named Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay, as its grand marshal for the event.

    “I might technically be a sequined and perfectly coiffed friend of Dorothy’s, but I’ve spent my entire career advocating for the rights of America’s most brutally repressed identity — straight people — so I know a thing or two about discrimination,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement released by the group.

    “This parade is a gift to anyone, male or female, black or white—gay and transgender allies, too!—who will stand with us and celebrate the wonder and the majesty of God’s own heterosexuality. Men, bring your most toxic selves. Women, prepare to burn your briefcases! Because it’s great to be straight, and we’re not apologizing for it any more. We’re Here, Not Queer.”

  • The parade organizer, Mark Sahady, has been revealed to be a far right thug who has organized violent and anti-semitic events.

    David Neiwert, author of Alt America and a longtime observer of the US far right, believes the march is primarily opportunistic. For the Daily Kos, he described Sahady as a “street brawler” with “a history … of organizing violent events”.

    Neiwert told the Guardian: “What we know about these street-fighting gangs is that they latch on to whatever they can in order to go out and fight with the left.”

    He added: “In this case it’s so utterly juvenile that it’s like a sixth-grade taunt.”

There’s a word for these people.

Another day, more spiders

This is my life right now: running around town, barging into people’s garages, peering into musty corners with my headgear, scooping up the occasional spider. Sorry. I’m going to be even more boring than usual for a while.

Today we surveyed a few more houses, including one that had no visible spiders at all — we found a few cobwebs, so we knew they were hiding somewhere in there, but no one was coming out to play. We were disappointed. The homeowners seemed pleased.

We also found one garage with multiple orb weavers, all very tiny and very young. This isn’t the usual place we expect to find orb webs.

Also found: Steatoda triangularis, with their pretty black & white diamond pattern.

scale=1mm

Tomorrow I’m doing lab work, then a few more days of field work before we stop for the month, and then next weekend I’m off to the American Arachnological Society meeting to hang out with some real arachnologists. Am I immersed in spiderology nowadays? I think so.

Stop eating now!

Mexie spells out the complexities and contradictions of food. This is very distressing information! We’re mostly vegetarian here at Chez Myers — we’re not strict sticklers, it’s more a matter of avoiding meat in our daily diet — but even buying locally grown produce has its problems. One of the ways we’re undermining capitalism, at least, is that we avoid prepared foods even more. I’ve been getting hunks of raw vegetables and doing all the cooking myself.

If you watched the whole thing, you got the general message: you can stop exploiting animals right now as a step in the direction of the ultimate overthrow of capitalism, but we have a long way to go yet. Don’t give up just because we haven’t achieved perfection.

What is this “pride month” of which you speak?

Would it be OK if I called this an example of toxic masculinity, or will it hurt young men’s feelings?

Arrests have been made, at least.

A 16-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of robbery and aggravated burglary on Saturday morning, Scotland Yard said.

Four other men between the ages of 15 and 18 have already been arrested on suspicion of robbery and aggravated grievous bodily harm and are being questioned separately.

We also get an example of why it’s called pride.

“I was and still am angry. It was scary, but this is not a novel situation,” said Chris. “I’m not scared about being visibly queer. If anything, you should do it more.

“A lot of people’s rights and basic safety are at risk. I want people to feel emboldened to stand up to the same people who feel emboldened by the rightwing populism that is, I feel, responsible for the escalation in hate crimes. I want people to take away from this that they should stand up for themselves and each other.”

Geymonat added: “The violence is not only because we are women which are dating each other. It’s also because we are women.”

Maybe somebody should explain this to Peter Boghossian.

Does the missionary position even need defending?

Quillette is a strange site. It tries to hide its unpleasant reactionary perspective beneath a pretense of academic objectivity, but it’s like trying to pour perfume on a garbage dump — it just makes the whole thing even ickier. Usually the reek oozes through most pungently in their numerous articles promoting pseudo-scientific racism, but the latest stinker that has bubbled to the surface is an article on sex.

Titled A Modest Defence of the Missionary Position, it immediately trumpets its pointlessness. Why? Is there some political faction or avant-garde wing of the culture wars that has denounced certain sexual positions? Does anyone care, outside of religious fanaticism (one thing I don’t think Quillette favors), what postures you assume in your intimate heterosexual moments?

No.

So the author has to manufacture an anti-missionary position position held by those annoying third-wave feminists.

In the post-#MeToo, third wave feminist climate, it often feels as though, in order to be an ethical progressive women, I need to search out and identify aspects of our society that are sexist, oppressive, unfair. Much of this takes the form of critiquing tradition, which we view as largely inhibitive and repressive. Pointing out oppression, raising consciousness, is women’s strategy for getting out from under the patriarchy. “The Future is Female” signals that it’s our turn to be on top.

So of course the author gets very literal with Simone de Beauvoir: “All sex is rape”, “It is he who has the aggressive role”, etc. None of this is about the missionary position, but about control and dominance and how sex can be used as a tool of oppression. We’re going a bit far afield here, you know, from the specifics of who is concerned about what position you favor.

Then it gets ever more airy and soft-focused. Sex is wonderful and beautiful and part of our nature and an essential aspect of the relationships between human beings. OK, even if I grant that kind of greeting card optimism, what does that have to do with the missionary position?

Our erotic nature is the very foundation of human civilization, which is grounded in the bonds of affection and mutual care that result from the promptings of our sexual instincts combined with deeper emotions of love, self-giving, esteem, and friendship. If we view sex as the fulfillment of our natural instincts, then we really have no grounds to take offence at sexual harassment, or even sexual violence, since it would simply and unashamedly be the expression of male animal sexual aggression. It is rightly unthinkable to define our sexual nature as wholly instinctive. To do so would puts us at the mercy of appetite and invites brutality.

I don’t even know what point she is trying to make here, that simultaneously sexual harassment is perfectly normal as a consequence of instinctive male aggression, and that maybe we should throttle it back just a little? Throughout there’s this implicit idea of what male and female (and only those two!) natures ought to be, and a weird vibe about the beauty of heterosexuality, as long as it fits her preconceived mold. “Normal” is best, and she has a very traditional view of normal. She’s willing to nod condescendingly at people who do things differently, but ultimately the best way to “encounter our deepest selves” is to conform to social expectations, even in your most private moments.

“The ancients,” writes Camus in The Rebel, “even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated in wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It is butting one’s head against a wall.” There is a kind of tragic heroism in rebellion. And a kind of deeply human beauty in it—rebellion, too, seems to be our nature. But there is also a uniquely human courage in participating in nature wholeheartedly, with abandon. The irony is that what we often consider the most boring, the most quotidian, the most comically old-fashioned, and unremarkably ordinary way to have sex with another is also the way we encounter our deepest selves because we transcend ourselves to find union with another.

Sheesh. Fine, lady, you have a preferred sexual position. Talk to your partner about it. You don’t have to convince everyone else that your favorite way of boning best reflects the transcendent nature of humanity or that it’s encoded instinctively in our psyches. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t fit your pattern, gay/lesbian/asexual people, or people with specific kinks, and they’re all part of glorious human diversity, too.

Another day of spider-hunting!

We spent another day rummaging about in strangers’ garages, working up a dirty sweat and getting spider webs in our faces. It was great fun! We doubled the size of our data set, so that’s the big news.

The other fun thing is that while mostly the data is repetitive — most garages around here are full of Pholcidae or familiar ol’ Parasteatoda tepidariorum — it’s neat when find a different population. We’re seeing the same species of Theridiidae everywhere, but we walked into one shed today and it was different. Theridiidae, sure, this shed contained only Steatoda borealis. These guys, with many teeny tiny recent hatchlings:

We’re going back here in July to see if that population retains its grip.

Uh-oh. Ticks.

It’s going to be another day delving deep into more spidery domains, and then I see this news about another threat, a new species of tick invading the US.

Testing in New York identified the tick as an Asian longhorned tick nymph, with genetic sequencing adding more evidence affirming the finding. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, further confirmed the finding.

Tick sampling using corduroy drag cloths found Asian longhorned ticks on the patient’s manicured lawn, some of them in direct sun. More were found in the park across the street from the patient’s house, both in open, cut grass exposed to direct sun and in taller, shaded grass next to the woods. Testing also found ticks on a nearby public trail, in mowed short and midlength grass near the trail edge, both in full sun and partial shade. The discovery of the ticks near the man’s house were the first known collections in New York state.

The authors wrote that finding the ticks on manicured lawns and in open sun may be significant, because public education efforts often stress that Ixodes scapularis ticks—the most common biting tick in New York state—are found in wooded areas or shaded grass.

At least my area of interest right now is dark, shadowy, dusty, cobwebby, and hot, so I’m not going to panic. My long-term plans include expanding into lawns and gardens, though, so I’ll keep this in mind for next year.

The story that atheism will never live down

In 2011, a trivial incident got blown up into a major cause célèbre by the regressive clique in the growing atheist movement, which unfortunately included people as prominent as Richard Dawkins. It was, of course, that moment when a woman casually suggested that “guys, don’t do that” when recounting a brief encounter with a guy who didn’t understand simple boundaries. Rebecca Watson recently revisited the incident.

This issue is obviously near and dear to me, because I went through hell on earth for mentioning that I was often sexually harassed by skeptics and atheists and because I gave one example I thought was very obvious of a strange dude asking me to his hotel room at 4am after I’d spent an entire day talking about the problem of sexual harassment. What’s nuts is that the harassment campaign I withstood wasn’t just a flash in the pan. It’s been EIGHT YEARS, and yet I still have an army of men who follow my every move and spread misinformation about me wherever they can. As an example, last week I noticed traffic from Reddit going to one of my videos, so I checked out the thread. Sure enough, there are a few dudes in there just posting nonstop lies: one says I had spoken to the guy in the elevator previously (I hadn’t), that I claimed it was predatory rather than an awkward incident of him not knowing what the right time to ask was (in fact I made it clear in the video that the whole reason I was talking about that incident was because I think a lot of guys are just not thinking when they do these stupid things), and another guy actually hilariously claims that he knows I made the entire story up (why would I do that) because I was “presented with pictures of the people in the skeptic clique in the bar before the imagined elevator incident” and I “couldn’t point the guy out.” Was there a fucking police interrogation? Did someone show up to a line-up claiming to be me? Like, that never happened. Someone literally just made that up, probably said it in a YouTube video and now EIGHT YEARS LATER dudes are shouting about it on Reddit because someone else posted a video of me explaining the origins of the phrase “Judeo-Christian” values.

Eight years have passed and I still don’t get to have a normal career online. I don’t get to just talk about science and critical thinking, because there will always be men lying about me in the comments. Always. I will never be able to get a mainstream job like I used to have, writing copy or whatever for a company, because everywhere they look there will be men lying about me. Why? Because I tried to stop men from sexually harassing women in the skeptic and atheist communities, and because I tried to help men get better at interacting with women they’d like to fuck.

There exists a successful mob of skeptic/atheist yahoos who are currently very popular on YouTube who have thrived on invented mythologies about women and feminists and SJWs. They rely on making up lies when the facts are not juicy enough: I’ve seen people claim with pathological certainty that I was the guy in the elevator, in order to get a double-whammy against two people they detest at once.

It’s so ironic that a community of atheists has decided that the truth is irrelevant.

Rebecca has my sympathies. A woman in this shitstorm of an atheist faction is far more vulnerable and far more targeted by the anti-feminist goblins than any man, and this is a case where it has clearly had a deleterious effect on her daily life. Then people like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer wonder why there are many more men than women in atheism, and make up more bullshit about intrinsic biological differences, rather than pinning the blame where it belongs: the stunted socialization of man-children.

Jacob Wohl gets neatly eviscerated, probably doesn’t even know it

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are getting a lot of attention — I guess spectacular public pratfalls are a great way to get yourself a long profile in the Washington Post. Unfortunately for them, the profile is titled Meet the GOP operatives who aim to smear the 2020 Democrats — but keep bungling it. “Bungling” is the important word there.

There are many not so subtle digs, like the lead photo.

The expressions, the poses — this was not intended to flatter. Look at the length of Wohl’s tie, too. It’s not an important detail, but this is becoming a hallmark of the Trumpkin style.

Then there’s this description:

On Instagram, Wohl is prone to posting images of himself shirtless, staring into the camera with a come-hither look. He says he wants “what any other young man wants — fame and fortune.”

In his public appearances, he favors tightfitting suits and cultivates a serious demeanor. He swears by Garnier Fructis styling gel to shape his dark brown hair into a follicular architectural form with a gravity-defying ledge in the front.

I wonder if he even knows that he’s been dissed? Most of the article consists of our intrepid heroes claiming strong ties to various more infamous Republican operatives, followed by a paragraph in which a fact-checker called said Republicans to get frantic “I never knew these guys!” quotes. There are also summaries of their various failed exercises in rat-fucking.

Now the dilemma. If all publicity is good publicity, does this actually benefit the dopey duo?