They’re not all fools down in Kentucky

Some sure are, like Ken Ham and his crew, or that bozo Bevins, but it’s also home to well-respected universities where they teach good science and groan about the clowns besmirching their reputation. The University of Kentucky recently put up a plaque honoring past faculty who fought against anti-scientific nonsense.

Note also in the comments that Joe Felsenstein points out that TH Morgan was a Kentuckian. Would that more citizens of Kentucky would take pride in their distinguished son than in the Australian weirdo who exploited cheap land and biddable public servants to erect a monument to folly — and his pocketbook — in their state.

I get YouTube comments

Comments on YouTube are often superfluous noise — many of them are by people who didn’t bother to watch the video, but are simply insisting on their right to add a noxious ingredient to the toxic soup simmering in that section. This one is no exception. It has nothing to do with my video, but…there it is.

did this joker put the sun in the sky – did this joker separate night from day – light from darkness did this joker put the planets in rotation- did bacteria create the sun that gives you life- the people that run this planet believe in Satan. if Satan exists does god also not exist. If the bible or god is not about morals why do the commandments tell us not to kill not to steal not to lie not to commit adultery if these are not principles of morality what is. Whether or not Jesus existed is not the point it is the message that counts not the messenger .Do you not believe in forgiving those that have harmed you. Do you not believe in being charitable – then why do so many humans help each other out in times of need, such as in natural disasters. What has any scientist ever done for humanity. They cannot even cure a common cold. Their is only. one good scientist that was Nicholai Tesla

I’ve seen this obsession with Nikola Tesla before. He was a great engineer and an interesting scientist, with a lot of weird ideas late in life that didn’t really pan out, but fueled his popularity as an iconoclast, and also led a lot of people to ascribe mystical ideas to him. Unfortunately for them, Tesla also said, “what we call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the ‘soul’ or the ‘spirit’ ceases likewise.” I guess he was a servant of Satan, too.

Sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads, and they still managed to screw it up

Aquaman. My favorite comic book as a kid, about a guy who can breathe underwater and talk to fish. I was looking forward to this movie, and the trailer had some promising hints…like when, as a boy, Aquaboy is being bullied in an aquarium and all the fish come to the glass and intimidate the bad kids by staring at them. That’s the Aquaman I wanted to see, where the power was all about communication and cooperation with marine creatures.

That’s not what we got. It’s another fantasy movie about a muscle-bound lunk getting his way. I had so many problems sitting through this crap.

  1. Jason Momoa can’t act. He’s big and hairy and flippant, but that’s it. There’s zero chemistry with the love interest that’s shoe-horned in — we’re never given any reason why Mera would find him interesting or attractive, other than that maybe she’s shallow and only interested in his hunky body.
  2. What is his superpower?. He seems to be a wet superman. Early on, he’s shot by what looks like a hand-held cannon with exploding shells — they knock him down, but all he says is “ow” as he gets back up. Yet later he’s pierced by a trident through the upper chest and shoulder (it’s only a flesh wound of course, he’s all better a few minutes later). His vulnerability fluctuates as the plot requires.
  3. Everyone is superpowerful. It gets to be a bit much. There’s a scene in the trailer where Mera and Aquaman casually jump out of an airplane flying over the Sahara Desert — they fall thousands of feet, hit the sand with a bit of a whoomf, and then walk on to their destination. Later, there are a couple of literal cliffhangers, with Mera rescued from falling into a chasm by Aquaman, and I’m just thinking — let her fall. She’ll bounce. There are no stakes here.
  4. The plot is a pathetic scavenger hunt. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a grand macguffin that will allow him to defeat the bad guy, and the hero has to follow a trail of clues around the world to find it. It’s the laziest plot device ever.
  5. The writers are too lazy to maintain even that thin thread of a plot. Step 1: Go to ancient cave in Sahara Desert, use widget to find map to Sicily and another widget. Step 2: Go to Sicily, use Widget #2 to spy two islands in the Mediterranean, then, aww, fuckit, this is boring. Skip islands. Steal fishing boat, putt-putt straight to the end boss to fight over macguffin.
  6. The world is tiny and weightless. How do they get from the middle of the Sahara Desert to Sicily? They just do. Walk, maybe? They take that stolen fishing boat to the Trench Kingdom, which is presumably somewhere deep in the Western Pacific. So…Sicily, through the Straits of Gibraltar, south to the southern hemisphere, round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, north along the coast of South Asia…takes maybe most of the afternoon, and next thing you know their boat is being overrun by toothy Lovecraftian horrors. There’s no sense of place. It’s just The Ocean, you know, that single address.
  7. The villain is boring. It’s a white man who thinks he deserves to be King of the Ocean, so he can kill all the land-dwellers, for some reason. He has all the super-powers Atlanteans do, but his special talent is being able to open his mouth really wide and yell into the ocean. By the way, everyone is white in this movie, except the black human bad guy pirate, whose superpower is being very angry and wanting to kill Aquaman. OK, diversity is served by the merpeople, and the crab people, and the Lovecraftian horrors. If you identify as a slimy giant-eyed fanged monster, this is the movie that will finally give you some representation.
  8. Once again, medievalism. Atlantis is an advanced, super-technological society, ruled by kings, where only those with royal blood can grasp the macguffin, and kingship is established by trial by combat to the death. Fuck you, Wakanda. Black Panther had some virtues that allowed me to overlook the comically silly political system, but Aquaman doesn’t. Also, in Atlantis, miscegenation carries a death sentence. No wonder it’s so white!
  9. The bad guy is on a pointless quest. He’s trying to unite the multiple undersea kingdoms so he can get the title “Ocean’s Master” and then destroy the puny terrestrial humans. But early on, before he unites them all, he does a magic something that inundates coastlines with a huge tidal wave that throws all military ships up on the beach, and also flings all of the human’s garbage back up onto the land. Besides making Boyan Slat look even more ridiculous than he already is, that demonstrates immense power that we land lubbers can’t match. I surrender already. I, for one, welcome our new aquatic overlords.
  10. There are really only two women in the movie. There’s Aquaman’s mother, who is snatched away early in the story and fed to the Trench Horrors for breeding with a hoo-man. There’s Mera, another super-Atlantean princess, whose main role is to have flaming red hair and be Aquaman’s sidekick. She fights people, provides occasional bits of exposition, and is used by her father as a tool for dynastic marriage, but otherwise makes no contribution to the story at all. Strangely, neither Mera nor Aquaman’s mother have the kind of royal genes that would allow them to grab the magic macguffin — I guess it also senses Y chromosomes, or penises, or something. Maybe if it were an engulfing macguffin rather than a pointy stabby macguffin they could have been more useful.
  11. The physics is unbelievable. Water isn’t treated as a medium that might affect movement in anyway — poorly streamlined things just barrel through it with no effect. Also, they use whales as transport animals in Atlantis, and to fight deep in the ocean. Wouldn’t they be frequently rising to the surface to, you know, breathe?

On the plus side, if there is one, it’s a pretty movie, in a garishly over-cluttered CGI way. And, uh, that’s all I can think of.

No, really, I’m racking my brain, and there’s nothing to commend this incoherent mess with a star whose charisma rests entirely in his pecs.

Deep disappointment

I’ve been told that an old friend has become profoundly illogical. This bothers me.

It’s a reply to a fairly mundane tweet.

Here’s the response:

Bad beginning, taking “cis” as 1) a meaningful and useful descriptive and 2) an obviously privileged and dominant group that needs to check itself. I don’t recognize “not thinking I’m the sex I’m not” as a form of privilege, any more than I recognize “not thinking I’m a bird” as a form of privilege. The word “cis” is pretty much designed to make people feel guilty and defensive simply for not having a bizarre delusion. Granted, it’s convenient not to have a bizarre delusion, but convenience isn’t exactly the same thing as privilege.

1) Cis does have a sensible meaning. It refers to someone whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Even if you don’t like it, you have to acknowledge that there are people whose gender identity does not match their assigned sex, making this a meaningful and useful descriptor. Or do you think trans people are actually comfortable and identify with their assigned sex? Are they just making it all up? Why?

2) Our society favors people who conform to cisgender expectations, so of course if you don’t conform, you’re disadvantaged. Right here in this post the author is expressing scorn for people who don’t fit her expectations. I rather despise the “oh so you identify as an attack helicopter” criticism, since birdness or helicopterness aren’t in the range of human behavior, but the “bird” argument doesn’t hold up either. There are people who find social gratification in identifying as an animal — look up furries sometime — and yeah, they face mockery for it, and lacking those desires is a privilege.

Also, if you regard trans people as mentally ill as this person does (I don’t), that doesn’t get you out of the claim that you aren’t privileged for not being mentally ill.

I’m cis. The person who wrote that tweet is saying they’re cis. I don’t feel guilty or defensive, and neither do they. Cis is a non-judmental description of a state that fits most people, used to distinguish them from the minority who are trans. It certainly was not “designed” to provoke guilt, just as heterosexual is not a term calculated to instill shame in us straight guys, and just as white is not a dirty word calculated to make European-Americans feel miserable and embarrassed about their ancestry.

There’s some projection going on here. If someone uses “trans” as an expression of contempt, then maybe they’re only able to see the complementary, neutral, descriptive term “cis” as carrying similar intent. These are the same people who see the accurate and neutral term Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) as some horrible defamatory slur, for the same reason.

This is coming from a person I tried to defend as not a TERF, once upon a time. Boy, was I wrong.

The kindest critic of them all

My favorite book reviewer, Dana from Glenville, sent me a present. That was very kind of her.

I appreciate that she even included instructions on its use, but, generous as she is, I’m not going to dab mysterious liquids received in the mail on myself. Instead, I’m going to save it close at hand in case there is an outbreak of vampires.

I did consider putting it in an atomizer to see what effect it might have on my spiders, but right now I don’t have any to spare for experimentation.

The Democrats are talking about actually doing things?

Be still my heart. There are a couple of promises that have gotten me excited.

One is Pelosi swearing that she’s going to subpoena Trump’s tax returns. Please do that. Could you time it for something like March or April, when us normal human beings are paying our taxes? I don’t expect that they’ll contain anything blatantly illegal — but if they do, I’d be happy to see our president in prison for tax fraud — but I do expect that they’ll reveal he’s been worth much less than he claims (make his ego bleed!), that he used all kinds of loopholes to avoid paying taxes, and that he paid nothing to little to the treasury. That’ll piss people off, and motivate support for the second thing.

AOC suggested raising the top tax rate to 70%. That’s still too low, but it’s a step in the right direction, and if the Democrats were smart, they’d realize that’s the kind of positive policy change that will get the masses to start supporting them with a little enthusiasm. It’ll also make the pissant conservative pundits pee their pants — Ben Shapiro is already whining that that’s scary. The centrists will want to hedge on everything, but fuck the centrists, create change.

The rich should appreciate it, but they won’t. The nice thing about taxing the rich is that the rest of us can stop building guillotines in our back yards, and it’s a nice compromise with eating the rich. They’re high in cholesterol and I’ve cut way back on meat anyway.

Wow

This Women of Color Beyond Belief conference looks excellent. I’ve been so disappointed in the atheism movement of late, and and it’s reassuring to see people working to revitalize it with more enlightened perspectives.

Black Nonbelievers, Inc., the Black Skeptics Group and the Women’s Leadership Project are partnering to launch the Women of Color Beyond Belief Conference, scheduled for October 4th-6th, 2019 at the Marriott Midway Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. The event will be the first national secular forum exclusively focused on the perspectives of women of color atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and skeptics. The conference will highlight the social justice work of women of color within the secular community and provide an intersectional, feminist vision of leadership and activism in secularism. According to conference organizers Mandisa Thomas, Sikivu Hutchinson and Bria Crutchfield, “The conference aims to create more inclusive opportunities in secular organizing, policy and practice. Although the majority of women of color in the U.S. identify as religious, a growing number are examining and rejecting the fallacies of organized religion. Over the past decade, women of color secularists have challenged mainstream secular leadership, pushing for social, racial, and gender justice against the evangelical, conservative right wing tide. We hope this conference empowers more secular women of color to speak up, understand that there are more of us out here, and become motivated to get involved.”

If they actually were logical, it would be easy to crush them

You know that familiar Star Trekkie trope where a human makes a computer explode by leading it into a logical contradiction? It doesn’t work. It never works. Otherwise the final panel of this comic would be the freezepeacher alien melting down into a puddle of goo.

Any sentient brain will be at least subconsciously aware that it can’t encompass the entire universe of phenomena and so will be accustomed to shunting contradictions to the side. If it doesn’t fit the model of the world in their head, it’s ignored (or, in unfortunately rare cases, is used to modify the model).

That’s not the point of this comic, I know, but it just made me pine for a universe where the people who claim to be masters of objective truth actually would explode or disintegrate or whatever it is beings of pure logic do when logic fails.