Friday, June 29, 2018

Speaking of bots...


There's a worrisome phenomenon going on in my web analytics. Usually the vast majority of visitors to this web site are from locations in the US. Over the past few weeks I've gradually noticed there's been a huge influx of visits from Russia.


I don't think they are targeting me - I think this is more likely evidence that the Russians are focused on the US generally, probably planning to try to help Republicans in the midterm elections.

Although it's also possible they are bots constantly trawling for ways to hack and steal from computer systems. Operating in Russia of course.

Or both stealing money and stealing elections.

I see Trump is planning to meet his boss, Putin, in Finland.

I guess Putin is giving Trump his annual employee review.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Spreading hate can be profitable, at least for a while

Pamela Geller is a right-winger and vicious anti-Muslim bigot. The New Yorker has  story about her and other free-speech grifters (as GQ dubbed them) whose project is apparently to cost liberal colleges lots of money by causing ruckuses, disguised as concern for free speech - they then ride the controversy to money and notoriety and in the case of people like Christina Hoff Sommers, approval by her bosses, the Koch brothers.

Geller is quoted:
Geller and Cernovich changed the subject to Internet censorship. “They kicked me off Google AdSense,” Geller said. “I was making six figures a year from that. You can’t even share my links on Pinterest now! I’m ‘inappropriate content.’ ”
Wow six figures from a blog. That's pretty amazing. I'm surprised she was kicked off Google AdSense long before making that much money, I have found GoogleAdSense to be extremely touchy about content, even just reporting the news, if it's violent, can make them freak out. Which is why I don't have Google ads on this, my personal blog.

In case you're not familiar with Geller, she's about as far right as you can get, and the thought of poor people getting healthcare drives her into paroxysms of lies as Media Matters documented (along with so many other of her frothing, often exaggerated or false claims) back in 2010:
Geller: Senate Democrats supporting health care reform voted "to rape the American people." In a December 21, 2009, blog post, Geller wrote of the cloture vote for health care reform: "The moochers and the looters, the crooks and degenerates voted at 1 am this morning to rip the constitution to shreds, to rape the American people and to nationalize medicine." She added that passing the bill on Christmas Eve would be "an act of treason and blasphemy."
I'm sure even without Google Ads though Geller is doing fine - between all the right-wing freaks in the US and the generous wingnut welfare from plutocrats she'll never go broke selling hatred.


Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Hours later, Putinbot comes up with an excuse for why he won't condemn murderous dictator Putin

Well what a big surprise. Turns out the Putinbot I flushed out wants us to all get along with Putin.


We went back and forth a few times and eventually he pointed out that Finland was a small country and I said I guessed they were nervous they could be annexed like Crimea. Which got him mad and he explained of course they weren't worried about that.

Then he blocked me. Off looking for Trump-followers who are much more inclined to be comfortable with Putin-loving and treason.

Zak Morgan and his Putinbot friend

Facebook is of course still infested with Putinbots and I outed one today while arguing with one and its fellow Trump-lover Zak Morgan.

I asked this one several times to repudiate Putin - and although he continued to read the thread - I know because he clicked "like" on Zak Morgan's comments - he refused to do so. No doubt because then he wouldn't get paid. And possibly poisoned.

What must it be like to know you're in agreement with an agent of Vladimir Putin?

That's what it means to be an extremist - I think Zak Morgan is a far-right extremist who agrees that Trump has the right to snatch children away from their parents and hold them hostage.

I think the people who allow Morgan to associate with their children should know what he really thinks about the parent-child bond.

Morgan wanted me to link to the conversation, claiming I was misrepresenting him. Wish granted

Here's when I first demanded that the Putinbot repudiate Putin. At the bottom of the screen cap we see Zak Morgan, once again, equating immigrants with criminals.



Zak Morgan: tomorrow belongs to him




I am a Facebook friend of John Gorka, author of the immortal "I'm from New Jersey" and Gorka posted a message in opposition to Trump's policy of kidnapping children and then holding them hostage so he can achieve his anti-immigration policies.

Turns out Gorka has more MAGAt fans than you would expect for a singer-songwriter.

And one of them is a folk musician, by the name of Zak Morgan, who seeks to demonize immigrants as drug runners, human traffickers, gang members and terrorists.

This is a man who has regular contact with children. He has gigs coming up all over Ohio and Kentucky.

He has an obligation to inform the parents that he supports the policy of kidnapping children. Especially if any of them are Latino, because if Trump is able to suspend due process as he wants to, the children of citizens who "look" illegal might very well be snatched as Krugman pointed out.



I told Morgan he has the obligation to inform parents of his position on child-snatching but he declined to say he would. I believe it's because he's a sniveling chicken-shit Trump supporter.

 I wonder if Morgan will ever perform at a Trump rally. He could sing this volk ditty:


Tuesday, June 26, 2018

OKCupid - getting desperate


I took this photo on the 1 train in Manhattan today - the subway car I was riding in was plastered all over with the OKCupid "DTF" campaign.

The schtick is that the letters don't mean "down to fuck" as per usual.

Instead the letter F stands for things like "Farmers Market" and "Fall in Love."

I think it means women must be leaving OKCupid in droves thanks to men being such assholes. 

There are lots of web sites devoted to the awfulness of men on dating sites. Although it does lead to some funny comebacks from the women.

These idiots have inspired the term "fuckboys" and the phrase "dick is abundant and low value."

OKCupid seems to be admitting the problem here:
The ads are aimed at anyone who wants to bring their full selves to dating. But Hobley says they may resonate especially with women, who are “aware that the phrase DTF was used historically in a negative way. There’s power in taking that back and making it yours.” 
I don't see how any dating site is going to survive on the long run. There are just too many stupid men in the world. Men who think, because it's a dating app, somehow the rules have changed about how you should treat people and in the words of Alana Massey:
...men stormed into our messages with all the social grace of Steve fucking Urkel but none of his endearing sincerity with appeals like, “Sexy dress. Hook up?” They used the precious real estate of their bio to complain about women rather than entice them. They wore jerseys for teams that suck. They attempted to order women to their homes as if they were chicken fingers on Seamless...
They can't change men from being assholes who start conversations with crude inappropriate comments, and there are just so many men who do that. The sheer quantity of awful men saying awful things to women has a cumulative effect.

Even if it's only 10% of the men who are horrible, men send messages often, so most women on dating sites will have to deal with an avalanche of stupid gross comments aimed at them.

And that can wear you down and make you hate men until you decide they are absolutely not worth it and to hell with them all.

Ladies and gentlemen, the men of online dating.







Monday, June 25, 2018

Shameless alt-right Claire Lehmann's shameless Quillette censors me again

Once again those snowflakes at Quillette have shown that they lie about their devotion to free speech and they can't tolerate criticism.


This was an article entitled "Why Women Don't Code" because Quillette supports Steven Pinker's claims that women are inferior to men at STEM thanks to evolution.


I had forgotten I had posted the comment, but apparently WordPress, which is still new to me, has a messaging channel that shares your comments from other WordPress sites, so  when I was tinkering around on a WordPress site I saw the responses to my comment there. 

But when I went to the original article I found my comment had been removed - and all the Quillette misogynist dude-bros' comments in response to mine were removed too. 






The only evidence in the original article's comment thread that I had ever written anything was some jerk mentioning me by my display name, presumably because his comment was posted separately from the thread under my original comment.

Some of the creeps claimed PHP isn't actual coding. Of course it is coding as the Wiki says:
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (or simply PHP) is a server-side scripting language designed for Web development, but also used as a general-purpose programming language. 

And the Wiki entry for "coding" classifies script languages as programming languages. By any standard PHP - and PHP in tandem with a MySQL backend is coding.

But one of the main goals of Quillette, in keeping with Claire Lehmann's toxic misogyny, is to constantly attack and deride women as losers and morons. This attitude of Quillette & Claire Lehmann comes through in its editorial decisions and so Quillette attracts hard-core misogynists who are happy to participate in Claire Lehmann's campaign of contempt for women.

I don't claim to be a professional compiled languages programmer - I am a technical writer, new media producer and playwright who happens to do some coding on the side for my various projects. So even women who aren't professional coders can do it, when they need to do it.

I feel sorry for any women who have such low self-esteem that they read or contribute to Quillette. They must really hate themselves. And have a high tolerance for bullshit and hypocrisy.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

McCartney's still got it baby

The man is a consummate entertainer.


Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Marriage is not so magic after all

As I blogged about before, Steven Pinker in his book "Better Angels" firmly believes that marriage has the power to stop men from committing violent crimes.

Another member of the "intellectual dark web" Jordan Peterson also believes that marriage prevents male violence.

Will someone please ask them how they can maintain this position when the data show that as violence levels have dropped, so have marriage rates? 



You can't expect their gullible fans to question their claims, but why don't journalists ever call them to account for their easily-debunked statements? 

This is how they get away with being such charlatans while claiming to stand for Reason. It's thoroughly disgusting.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Happy Juneteenth 2018

NYTimes columnist Charles Blow is celebrating Juneteenth
It's odd that we have a national holiday for Christopher Columbus, a mass-murdering slaver, but not one celebrating the end of slavery.

It's absurd that Juneteenth is seen by anyone as a black-only holiday. Anybody who opposes slavery should be happy to celebrate Juneteenth.

And today it's also a good time to remember that one of the horrors of the US slave system was that children could be ripped away from their parents and taken somewhere far away, never to be seen again.

Ripping children away from their parents is nothing new in the US - but we should oppose it whenever it happens. Like with Trump's evil policy of grabbing children away from their parents, with no system of tracking the kids and parents and no system aimed at reuniting them.

This is when we find out how evil Trump supporters really are.



Monday, June 18, 2018

Nancy qui est chic

I feel like this Fancy Nancy brat is single white female-ing me with all the francais. 

The closest the French have to "fancy" is "chic" - which isn't quite the same.

Saturday, June 16, 2018

Bizarre video of 21st century man

Speaking of 21st century men (like Justin Trudeau) here is a very odd video - it's a documentary about people who participated in demonstrations in May 1968 in France.

This is what it says at francetvinfo - Google Translate didn't do a great job with it though...
It's a surreal scene from La Traversée *. In this excerpt of the documentary made in 2017, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Romain Goupil, two figures of May-68, argue about the interest of going to interview Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee. But the director is against, believing that the film will lose its irreverence. 
"It's full of gilding the Elysée, it's not neutral, protests Goupil.You will become Mireille Dumas or Karine Lemarchand who wants to have a confidence!" And Cohn-Bendit, seated at a café in Frankfurt (Germany), replies: "But why are you so frozen?"
While they bicker, the frame makes appear Emmanuel Macron, sitting between the two men, waiting wisely, looking amused. The president then addresses Daniel Cohn-Bendit: "What you could do is meet him in a cafe, it would be a nice nod for someone who messed up at the university. , 50 years ago in France. "

So what this all means is that the film-maker is arguing with this guy about Macron, and then suddenly we see that Macron has been sitting right there the whole time. You can watch it for yourself:




I can sort of understand some of what they are saying - it's my goal to eventually get the whole thing.


Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Justin Trudeau plays rope-a-dope and Trump is the dope

The Canadian Kid
It was so obvious Trump was going to come out of the G7 looking like a fool.

Like so many others, Trump completely underestimated Justin Trudeau - who long ago assembled a team to prepare for Trump to throw the inevitable trade tantrum. As the NYTimes said:
The Canadians could see the trouble looming in the summer of 2016. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister at the time, found herself, along with millions of Canadians, fixated on the unfolding United States presidential election, and it was becoming impossible to overlook the gathering clouds of protectionism. 

Trudeau and team studied and learned well that you can't get down into the mud with Trump - he is a creature of mud and he has the home advantage. They are remaining calm and polite which is driving Trump crazy - he doesn't understand calm and polite.

And Trudeau set the stage long ago by being so cordial to Trump and the feckless Ivanka - Trump assumed Trudeau was another toady like the Republicans he so routinely rolls over. He thought he was going to roll over Trudeau.

If you watch the documentary "God Save Justin Trudeau" you can see Trudeau doing the same with the conservatives in his own country in 2012 who thought Patrick Brazeau was going to crush him in the boxing ring. They just couldn't imagine this polite friendly guy could be strong.

Film-makers Eric Ruel and Guylaine Maroist depict Trudeau’s spectacular victory in October as a fight, showing it was exquisitely planned from the start.
Trump of course doesn't understand planning & preparation as he famously kept saying he was going to go into talks with Kim Jong Un and just wing it.

It turns out Trump still doesn't get what happened with Trudeau, and still can't understand how Trudeau, whom Trump thought was a little wimp, just like the right-wing Canadians did before Trudeau crushed Patrick Brazeau in the boxing ring, could stand up to him. According to this piece in Vanity Fair, TRUMP SPENDS NORTH KOREA DEBRIEF OBSESSING OVER JUSTIN TRUDEAU
Yes, speaking to reporters in Singapore following his summit with gulag enthusiast Kim, Trump continued to lash out at our mild-mannered neighbor to the north and promised to mete out more financial punishments for allies that dare match his provocations. 
“When I got out to the plane,” Trump said. “I think that Justin probably didn’t know that Air Force One has about 20 televisions. And I see the television and he’s giving a news conference about how he will not be pushed around by the United States and I say push him around? We just shook hands. It was very friendly . . . No, I have a good relationship with Justin Trudeau. I really did, other than he had a news conference, that he had because he assumed I was in an airplane and I wasn’t watching. He learned. That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada. He learned. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. We have a big trade deficit with Canada . . . It’s either $17 [billion] but could actually be $100 billion. You know they put out a document, I don’t know if you saw it. They didn’t want me to see it, but we found it. Perhaps they were trying to show the power they have. It’s close to [a] $100 billion-a-year loss with Canada. They don’t take our farm products—many of them.”

In the movie "God Save Justin Trudeau" you can see Trudeau talking about how he is often underestimated. And nobody underestimated him more than narcissist ignoramus bully Donald J. Trump, the perfect target for Trudeau and his exquisite planning.

Monday, June 11, 2018

Blocked by Steven Pinker

I don't know what I posted to Pinker's Twitter that made him block me - I had been posting critical things for years, and it had been days since I had checked Pinker's Twitter when I found I was blocked.

Pinker is a big booster of the alt-right Quillette which likes to pretend it favors vigorous debate about all kinds of ideas but what Quillette and Pinker really want is a safe space, a space safer than anything dreamed up by the most fragile social justice warrior snowflake, a space where the claims about race and gender promoted by Pinker and Quillette are never, ever critically examined.




Sunday, June 10, 2018

Siri a acquis plus de blagues


Si on est ennuyé on peut demander à Siri pour des blagues. Avant elle a un collection de les memes blagues, mais tout à coup elle me dit des nouveaux blagues. Comme ca:

C'est un paresseux qui se fait cambrioler par trois tortue
Lorsque la police arrive sur les lieux, ell lui damande a quoi ces derniers ressemblaient
Le parraseux repond: je n'en sais rien. Tout s'est passe si vite...
Translation:
A lazy person was robbed by three turtles. When the police came they asked what did they look like? The lazy person said: "I don't know, everything happened so fast.
They don't say "lazy person" they say "paresseux" which means lazy person, or perhaps bum. Not in the British sense of bum of course.

Although the joke is pretty weird because it's one thing to be indolent, it's another to experience time itself as speeded up. I think maybe the bum was on morphine.

Monday, June 04, 2018

Merde! Le petite enfant parle français tellement plus bien que moi!




C'est ne pas possible! Ce petit bouche peut faire les sons memes je trouve trop difficile!

Elle peut prononcer "grenouille" correctement! Comment, à son âge?

Mais il faut noter que la vidéo a été mise en ligne en 2011 et l'enfant a maintenant dix ans ou plus. Donc, elle peut parler 100x mieux que moi maintenant! 

Ne deviens pas trop découragé, Nanette. Vous pouvez apprendre le français et parler mieux que les petits enfants francaise. Un jour, si vous essaie tres dure!

Peut-etre elle parle de version français du "Winnie the Pooh" la? Je ne connais pas la version dont elle parle. Je ne me souviens pas de tous ces décès dans la version Disney.

Friday, June 01, 2018

John Goodman's ASMR commercial

I thought I saw John Goodman doing a commercial for McDonald's that was a parody of ASMR videos but I didn't stop long enough to really examine it - and now it seems it has been taken down. 

But it was definitely an ASMR take - as this McDonald's tweet confirmed.


This Reddit page shows the video.

The New Yorker posted a video and article about ASMR yesterday. I gather from the video that the science of ASMR hasn't advanced since I first discovered the term ASMR three and a half years ago. It's still a bunch of speculation, it seems.

I did my part - a few years before I started this blog I contacted Oliver Sachs to tell him about my unnamed head-spine sensation but he had no interest in exploring the phenomenon and just said "enjoy it." Which, well duh, that's the only thing you can do. I was really surprised that Sachs had such little interest in it, but maybe he had spent all those years with people who had odd experiences they were trying to fix, so he was focused on fixing things, and nobody was asking Sachs to fix ASMR.

I haven't experienced a full-blown ASMR event since probably around the time I discovered the term ASMR, but if I could trigger it, like the lucky people who are triggered by the ASMR videos, I would do it all the time. And if science could figure out how to trigger it, ASMR would be a possible non-drug alternative to anti-anxiety or pain medication.

Anyways, I thought it was amusing that someone in the New Yorker ASMR video says, around minute 5:30 "I don't think ASMR is mainstream at this point, I think it's going there..."

If McDonald's is making commercials that mimic ASMR videos I think it's time to say it's gone mainstream.