Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Interesting recap on Comicsgate, the Gamergaters’ newest movement against anyone not cis, het, white and male.

https://www.inverse.com/amp/article/41132-comicsgate-explained-bigots-milkshake-marvel-dc-gamergate

You may remember that thing where the Internet troll said he could beat any female MMA fighter?

Oh, for pity’s sake, what is this, the MMA equivalent of “me Tarzan, you Jane”?? Oh, well, the bright side is, Zylinski can now claim to be a genuine “1 percenter”!!

re: racism in science…
Nothing new here…. And yes, it is dangerous, and yes, it needs to be stopped. The eugenics fans aren’t interested in genetic differences which confer advantages, they’re interested in genetic differences which separate white-presenting people from those who aren’t white-presenting, using “Northwestern European, Xian, Heterosexual” as a definition.

Using IQ tests as a measure is more than a bit ironic, as whites haven’t shown themselves to be very smart recently. The vast majority of people who believe conspiracy fantasies are white… the vast majority of people who reject evidence-based argumentation are white… the vast majority of people who claim our society is “under attack by the learned class” are white….

Interestingly, the eugenicists seem to accept as a truism the idea that if they prove white people are “smarter”, then we’ll make social policy that will benefit smart white people…. We will, and always have, made social policy to benefit white people… rich white people, not smart white people.

I just came upon a wonderful quote:

“If we ever get a time machine a great game would be to see who could build up a religious cult the quickest in the Mediterranean with a box of matches and a box of dodgy Chinese fireworks.”

http://www.strangehistory.net/2018/02/11/ancient-count-st-germain/

Now my mind is writing a story about how all the major world religions began at a drunken frat party of physics majors.

The quote is from a great post about a strange set of “reports” in ancient Greece, of a man who seemed to appear and disappear through time and space. The priestess of Delphi when asked about him, to put up a statue of him, just to be safe.

Hey David Futrelle i thought maybe you can write about these:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/details-teen-sent-photos-dying-045804306.html

https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/962149514785312774

https://www.reddit.com/r/againstmensrights/comments/7of59l/where_rmensrights_believes_that_women_are/

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/California-MeToo-Leader-Accused-of-Sexual-Misconduct-473478133.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-terrorizes-another-teen-this-time-over-the-bitcoin-app-she-created

https://www.inlander.com/spokane/native-american-women-go-missing-at-disproportionate-rates-these-women-are-working-to-change-that/Content?oid=7997576

My husband found a good recipe for the soup.

I shared the Tara LaRosa story on Facebook.

PZ Myers has a blog post about the Comixgaters and their frenetic bloviation and flailing about.

Youtube videos about how “SJWs have ruined [geek thing].”

I believe a major part of what has them stewed is the resistance to trumpification. They saw the rise of the igno-right and the election of the dumpster-fire as a vindication of their feels about being sidelined by people who, well, who aren’t them. Not that there’s really been any major decline in white, male, cis-het, xian, etc. privilege, but they see BLM, MeToo, NFL player kneeling, etc. as a direct repudiation of their “grievances”, such as they are.

Maybe it’s confirmation bias on my part, or “wishful interpreting”, but I believe there has been an uptick in diversity in advertisements since the ’17 SuperBowl…. My workplace is shopping for a software package to help manage an inordinately large project, and I looked at a product called “SmartSheet”. Watching their advideo, I was struck by the diversity reflected in the “sample workplace”… the narrator is a woman of color, there’s a lot of women, several people of color, a fly-by showing a group which included a woman in hijab… it was refreshing.

YooToob link

Oh, and the igno-righties grumping about “SJWs”… FUCK THEM. Social Justice is only a negative to those who already enjoy it and don’t want to share their power.

@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Posting on Discord mostly 😀

Re: Comics. Always favoured Dennis the Menace (the British one) and Minnie the Minx myself.

@Kat,

This place you live — Australia, I believe you call it — has some interesting things going on. Not all of them involve the koala or the duckbill platypus, it seems.

?????????

Apropos of nothing: last night the son and myself were watching our nightly Gintama. A character was opining pompously that it’d always been terribly hard for him, being so much smarter than everyone else. Jude said “oh my god he’s a fucking neckbeard!” just as I exclaimed “he’s a YouTube skeptic!” and then we had to pause as we laughed like drains. Good times.

Slightly more serious note:

Since reading the article that Rahu posted, I’m of course seeing references to comicsgate all over Twitter (along with countless mentions of Jordan P., WHY OH WHY is he everywhere right now?)
It’d be great if Varalys was around – I’d love to hear her thoughts on this. The comics stuff, not that silly JP person.

And on the racism in science… I had a poke around. The main journal these people publish in is peer-reviewed (and yes, I know peer review isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we have right now) which is interesting. The contributors are very diverse, in terms of ethnicity and culture (gender, not so much). A lot of articles about gender difference and racial difference, especially re intelligence, obv.

This did make me laugh:

The ratio of women falls from dominant to rare as we go from social science to medicine and biology, to chemistry, to math and physics. There are two ways of viewing this progression: either women value math less insofar as it has no immediate human application; or women are deterred by the fact that math gets more difficult as you go from psychology to mathematics. Since either of these traits could be genetic in origin, I can see no easy way of obtaining conclusive evidence one way or the other.

There you go, folks – less women in maths is because of women! No other possible explanation. Not one.

I might be a puny psychology degree holder, but even I and my pathetic lady brains have heard of stereotype threat.

The Googles even find 545,000 results when I typed in “stereotype threat in math students.’

I know as a woman, I can’t use a computer because it’s not a human and women only know human stuff. Don’t worry, I batted my lashes at some men and they kindly looked it up for me. Computers are hard! So is math. But the men assure me that number 545,000 is pretty big. Maybe if I giggle becomingly and heave my bosoms, they’ll tell the researchers about this for me!

@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation

Yes. There are also Loki’s horns (poor guy gets no respect), Magneto’s helmet, a Sentinel’s head, the Red Skull’s skull…

Picture is from the “Gwenpool Absorbs the Marvel Universe” 4 pager that was in Marvel’s 2017 “after* event joke comic”.

* This tradition was only broken by Secret Wars (2015) in recent memory because that got so damn late that the joke issue came out before the event’s end, and was about poor writer not knowing how to end the damn thing.

What I can identify from the costume:

Daredevil’s horns
Cyclops’ visor
Thor’s helmet wings
Ms Marvel’s scarf (Originally I thought it’s Elektra’s but hers is solid red)
Dr. Strange’s cape
Captain America’s shield
One arm of Iron Man’s armor
Iron Fist’s chest insignia
Captain Marvel’s belt thingy
Ghost Rider’s chain belt
Squirrel Girl’s tail
One of Colossus’ upper legs… somehow
The Venom symbiote on one of her lower legs
Parts of Groot on the other lower leg.

I can’t quite place the green on her other upper leg and the purple boot (maybe it’s Hawkeye’s(?))