The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (The graphic version)

This is very cool.  (H/t TYWKIWDBI)

New Chapter up on my Patreon

I've posted a new chapter of Triple Junction on my Patreon!

Here's a bit:

The evening before Parliament opened its Spring Session, Lord Oxford held a party at his guesthouse, which was just across Liberty Park from Harper’s house. Harper took both Jossa and Martin along with him.

Martin was one thing – he had a chip, so even if they ran into trouble, the most that would happen to him was he might get tanked. But Jossa was delinquent on her contract. Jossa, they would shoot.

“No one’s going to arrest me,” Jossa soothed, when Martin pointed this out to her. “It’s Oxford’s House. I’m as safe there as I am at the Academy when Efram is in residence.”

“Except the Academy ain’t hip-deep in Port City. Or filled with holders from Kadir’s side of the aisle.”

“Lord Holders from Kadir’s side of the aisle don’t even see contract labor, not unless they want something. We’ll be fine.”

Martin spread his hands at Dallas, lying on the bunk he and Jossa shared with Luc asleep beside him, but Dallas just shrugged. “I’m not the leader of the network,” he said. “Don’t ask me what she should do.”

Martin bared his teeth. “Maybe this is Harper’s way of dealing with the leader of the network.”

Jossa laughed. “Harper doesn’t want me dead.”

“I’d like to see him run the network without Jossa,” Dallas said, patting Luc’s back gently. “Tell Sen what to do?”

“Or Will, for that matter,” Jossa agreed. “Are you going to comb your hair before we leave?”

“I already did,” Martin said, and both of them laughed at him then.

For only $3.00 a month, you can have access to this chapter and 25 others, and read my critical essays on SF books and media.  What a deal!

Go here for more.

Happy 4th of July

Prisoner in Texas dies while being used as "prey" for dog hunt

More concentration camps for children

Jews and others being arrested for protesting, on the 4th of July

The planet is boiling

Conservatives whine because 'mermaids can't be black!'

Meanwhile, these same conservatives foment about the REAL problem in the USA

Trump celebrates himself with a military parade

ICE shows their true colors 

Happy 4th of July, all y'all! This can still be a good country -- vote the GOP out in 2020!

Books, Books, Books

Is there any feeling more satisfying than having a fat stack of books waiting to be read?

It is bliss.

Vox Writes about Ngo, Antifa, and the Milkshakes

This article is pretty good if you want to know the details about what happened with Andy Ngo, in Portland and elsewhere.

About Those Milkshakes...

So "Conservatives" have been playing this milkshake lie for all it's worth.

The conspiracy theory is evolving. Someone is absolutely going to be killed for holding a milkshake pic.twitter.com/OaNtSWSk0E

— Theynessee Pete (@Tennessee_Pete) July 2, 2019

(See more here:

https://twitter.com/Tennessee_Pete/status/1146028991121375232)

In case you aren't in the loop, what happened was Andy Ngo. that font of propaganda, pretended he'd been hit with a milkshake -- which as we know is the worst thing that can happen to a fascist these days -- and then someone else, probably another MAGA American, claimed Antifa members (you can't actually be a "member" of antifa, but never mind) were mixing cement into the milkshakes.

Then it became "quick-drying" cement.

Now it's quick-drying cement and battery acid.

None of this is true (see this article, but you have to go waaay down to find the paragraph where they admit it never happened), but as we are learning, if you're a "conservative" these days, you don't care what's true. You don't care if what you're telling people is not just a lie, but a silly lie.

You only care whether or not what you're saying justifies your bigotry, your hatred, and your ignorance.

See this thread for more: Thread starts here

(Scare quotes around conservative throughout because -- of course -- these aren't actually conservatives. They're reactionary fascists. Not to mention vile heaps of trash.)

Why Rod Posts about Scary Trans People

Apparently Ezra Klein interviewed Rod Dreher, which first off, why? Do we really need to give a bigger platform to heaps of ignorant, bigoted nonsense?

But Ezra asked Rod why his blog was so obsessed with LGBT people, especially T people, and Rod wrote yet another lengthy screed "explaining" why.

Because LGBT people (and especially T people) have destroyed America.

I'm providing a link, but I don't encourage clicking on it. Rod's blog-site, The American Conservative, is 90% ads now, many of them pop-up, all of them annoying. So, you know, click at your own risk.

Rod's main point is that by divorcing sexuality away from its "real" purpose, which as his religion tells us is Making Babies, those Evil Liberals opened the door to Transform* America into a place where people can be whatever they want and do whatever they want with their own bodies.

I mean, the horror. As we all know, God meant only rich white cismen to have that sort of privilege.

So now we have kids growing up with two daddies, or with a trans daddy. What will become of us all, et cetera.

I'd spend some time rebutting this, but it is nonsense on its face (if sex was just for making babies, for instance, we'd only have sex, or want to have sex, when we wanted a baby -- which, come on) and I have better ways to spend my time.

The real question is why Rod spends 80% of his time screeching about trans people when there are 900 more important issues he could be spending his time on -- the wealth gap, children in concentration camps, white nationalists in our government, the increasing inability of too many Americans to tell a decent source from utter propaganda, student debt -- but of course we know the answer to that one.


*Pun not intended, but I like it

Dog Pictures Please

Heywood thought he ought to be on the blog too.

More Cat Pictures

Here's where Jasper likes to sleep while I'm writing. Sometimes she shifts around, puts her chin on the ENTER key. and created havoc in my manuscripts.

Cat Pictures

We brought the kid home for the summer today -- or, well, for the month of July. (He's taking an interim course in August, so he goes back then.)

Here's the cat, coming warily to greet him:

What Can You Possibly Do

...about the abuse of immigrants at the border and elsewhere?

Here's a list.

And here's one part of why you should care


See also this thread

What Can We Do?

Nicole and Maggie have some advice for those of us who don't want children in concentration camps on American soil.

Go here for more.

Reading Ben Shapiro's Brainwashed

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm going to read all of this one. After three pages, I have already had my bait of Ben's strident screeching. But let's look at as much as we can stand.

For those of you who are blissfully ignorant of his existence, Ben Shapiro is the darling of the MAGA-American crowd. He is a former editor at Brietbart, and appears frequently on Fox News and posts his "discourse" on YouTube, explaining why trans people are mentally ill and Muslims are "radicalized" terrorists. In 2004, he published Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, which I'm wondering if anyone read past the title.

It was published by that stellar press, World Net Daily.

Let's have a look.

Brainwashed has not one, but two forwards, one written by the editor of World Net Daily, and the other by David Limbaugh, Rush's little brother. Both are empty stuffing. Ben is a brilliant young genius, what a clever toddler he is, what an important book this is. We'll skip over these.


Chapter One

Ben lays out the case for "brainwashing" by liberal universities.

First he attempts to prove that universities are liberal. He declares,

The vast majority of the professoriate is leftist. This is an uncontested fact.

What's his evidence for this? Ben at least includes his sources (1/4 of the book is sources) so I turn to the back of the book and discover that his "uncontested fact" is based on a single survey, done by the think tank National Center for Policy Analysis.  This think tank (now defunct) was funded by the Koch brothers and among other things worked to deny global warming.

The survey the NCPA ran had 151 respondents, from (as they put it)

professors and administrators in social science and liberal arts faculties at Ivy League universities 

and found that of this small sample, almost none of them selected George Bush as the best president in the past 40 years. (I know, I can't believe it either!)

Also, 57 percent admitted to being Democrats, while only 3 percent said they were Republicans. 20 percent said they were independents.

This is Ben's sole evidence for his "uncontested fact." Frankly, anyone with sense would stop reading right now.

Let's take it apart, shall we? The sample size is too small, and furthermore it's a biased sample. They surveyed only professors and administrators in the social sciences and the liberal arts -- social sciences are in the liberals arts, by the way, so I assume they're selected out for their ability to scare Conservatives.

No survey was done of business schools, and probably none of economics professors (some people think of economics as a liberal art, but since NCPA doesn't define what they mean by "liberal arts," it's hard to know if economics counts). No survey of science professors or math professors.

Also, we have no sample questions, and no link to the actual survey. As those who design surveys know, how a question is worded often influences its answer.

Also, the "survey" ends with this:

Critics point out that academics are all for diversity in the student population, but are against diversity of opinion on campuses.

Who are these critics? On what are they basing this conclusion? Where's their actual statement?

This is very shoddy work, especially since Ben is going to build an entire book on this dubious claim.

I'm sorry: This "uncontested fact."

Ben moves on from here to spout several more unsupported or badly supported claims: that Leftist professors don't give a balanced point of view in the classroom, but simply spout propaganda; that the "brainwashing" of students is extremely effective.

His evidence for this last? Students who came into a single universities in 2001 were 29.9% liberal and 20.7% conservative. This is based on a national survey of all university students in the USA. When they graduated, Ben says, they were 71% liberal and only 20 percent conservative. This, on the other hand, is based on the voting patterns of students at one university (UCLA) for one election (Bush v. Gore), evidence collected in 2000 -- an entire year before the results collected in the survey he is comparing the voting records to.

I can't believe Ben honestly believes this is an appropriate way to use evidence. I guess he's hoping his audience is too gullible to care?

But Ben doesn't need this evidence, he says! All the surveys support him! (He doesn't cite any.) Talk radio supports him!

Also, he has personal experience. When he went to UCLA, everyone was mean to him and the newspaper fired him -- for exposing Muslims, he claims, but again he cites no evidence. I suspect they fire him because of his crap research skills and his fundamental dishonesty.

His final evidence in this first chapter? An anonymous email from a professor who supports his brave truth-telling.

That's right. His readers support him in emails.


Chapter Two

Ben starts this chapter with a scandalous claim from a geography professor -- his geography professor, I assume -- who pointed out that truth is subjective, since we are all subjective beings. This is bunk, Ben declares. Of course universal truth exists! Of course evil exists!

Only a tiny bit from the professor seems to be a direct quotation. And, of course, this is being reported by Ben years after the lecture took place. Given that this is a geography class, I suspect what was actually said had more to do with how maps were drawn than with whether babies are murdered (Ben's go-to example, always -- he's a fetus-fetishizer).

Ben goes on to claim that this moral relativism permeates universities. Again, he bases this claim on dubious evidence -- comments by a few professors, and a single poll which found that 73% of students think their professors are moral relativists. This poll is no longer available, so I can't check how many students it surveyed or what they were actually asked.

He goes on to cite another shocking example -- his source an editorial that cites the same survey Ben cited above (in the very same language; I wonder if plagiarism is a moral wrong?) -- that "10 to 20% of his students refused to say that the Holocaust was wrong."

I went to the source. Here's what the editorial actually says, in its 4th paragraph, one in which he is arguing that students are moral relativists, just like their teachers:

Several years ago, a college professor in upstate New York reported that 10 percent to 20 percent of his students could not bring themselves to criticize the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews. Some students expressed personal distaste for what the Nazis did.

"A college professor" "several years ago" "reported."

Again, this is appallingly scholarship.

More nonsense follows. Ben cites Peter Singer, another favorite boogeyman for the Right, a philosopher famous for saying newborns have no more moral right to exist than piglets do. Evil! Ben shrieks. This is evil!

He cites Paul Erlich, for the horrible crime of comparing the bombing of Hiroshima with the Holocaust. Evil! Ben shrieks. The Jews were innocent, those civilians in Japan...had to be killed, to save American lives.

What?

This is pretty much how Ben always argues, from what I know of his later work. He says something shocking, and usually ridiculous, and then supports it with "evidence" that has little or nothing to do with his claim.

I mean, let's look at that argument. The victims of the Holocaust were innocent. Okay, so far so good.

His claim that the civilians who died at Hiroshima are not equal to the victims of the Holocaust should, reason shows us, rest on the fact that those civilians were complicit some great crime: not innocent.

Instead, he says that they had to die, to protect the lives of American soldiers. Now this may or may not be true, but it doesn't work to refute his outrage over the comparison. In fact, the idea that the civilians "had to die" is exactly the argument that (pardon my Godwinning) Hitler used to murder six million Jews and another six million Poles, socialists, disabled people, Romani, and LGBT people (including trans people). Those 12 million had to be killed, to protect the Aryan nation.

Ben supplies several more, equally badly supported examples as "evidence" that professors are Leftist. For instance, in one of his classes, a professor played a rap song, and then tried to discuss whether censoring that song was a violation of the First Amendment.

(See, there's right and there's wrong, and if you disagree with MAGA Americans, obviously you're wrong. It's right to violate free speech, unless it's Ben's free speech you're violating, then it's wrong)


The Left, Ben concludes this chapter by stating, clearly exists in order to "debase morality."

That's all I can take for now. (This is another way Ben "wins" arguments. After you spend several hours refuting his first three sentences, you're really too exhausted to go on.)

Banksy

I forgot to tell you, but the kid and his roommate rescued a kitten off the street

They've had him for a couple months now. His name is Banksy, AKA Stinky Wumpus.

Political Art

Source