I’ve been reading Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare, which is a novel of absolute haters. Every character is basically a version of awful liberals, mostly college professors which of course is an easy target but also a pretty good one. Everyone is full of themselves, is in terrible and hypocritical relationships, thinks they are god’s gift to the world, are doing nothing interesting at all, and talk a bunch of bullshit about the latest language inside universities that makes absolutely no sense to anyone outside the university but which makes the professors feel righteous about themselves. Personal confession–I loathe talking about the university and its politics with other professors. Who gives a shit about any of it? You want to talk about ideas or bands or food or your favorite color or the fate of the Earth or whether the Blazers will ever have a winning record again? Sure. You want to talk about the dean’s office? Jesus christ, shut up.
The protagonist, Moddie, is also awful, but in a different way. She’s getting over a breakup and also has absolutely no social filter and also likes to cut through the bullshit of what she’s hearing, even though she ends up hating herself everytime since no one wants to hear these uncomfortable truths and then no one wants to hang out with her.
You can see why this novel would appeal to me.
Anyway, this set up is at a dinner party where an old friend who maybe isn’t a friend anymore is talking about the Kavanaugh hearings and how horrible it all was and Moddie responds with this long paragraph and…..yep, this pretty much sums up the whole fucking thing.
The Ditmar Awards were announced in Canberra on October 5 at Conflux 19, the Australian National SF Convention. Best Novel Best Novella or Novelette Best Short Story Best Collected Work Best Artwork Best Fan Writer Best Fan Artist Best Fan … Continue reading →
The Australasian Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the Australasian Shadows Awards on October 5. The juried award is given in eight categories for the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year. Eligible genres/sub-genres … Continue reading →
I just watched the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which effectively intertwines jazz music and musicians (Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and many others) with the tragic history of the Congo in 1960, culminating in the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, one of my early memories as an assiduous reader of international news (it’s filed with the Plain of Jars and Quemoy and Matsu in a dusty cupboard way at the back of my brain). There is also plenty of Congolese music, including a song “Satchmo Okuka Lokole” performed by Joseph Kakasele, “le Grand Kallé”, and his band African Jazz. Naturally, I wanted to know what “Okuka Lokole” meant; I first came across a Louis Armstrong House page making the absurd claim that it means “jungle wizard, the man who charm beasts,” but happily I then found José Nzolani’s detailed PAM article with the following convincing account:
The song is sung in Lingala. But “Okuka lokole” is from Tetela, a Bantu language spoken by the Batetela. This ethnic race of the Anamongo group is located east of Kasai, on land irrigated by the Lomami and Sankuru rivers. The singer Papa Wemba and Patrice Emery Lumuma, the separatist leader, are famous figures of this ethnic group.
The lokole is a long section of hollowed-out tree trunk and carved with a narrow slot. This type of drum is used as a musical instrument or for sending messages. The idiophone instrument produces sounds by being struck on both sides of the slot with wooden sticks. Widespread among the Bantu peoples, the lokole is often compared to morse code. For the Batetela, this large drum plays a special role. “Okuka” in their language is a resistant tree ideal for fabricating lokole drums. It is also one of their surnames.
You can see a lokole at the Wikipedia article, and there are more photos here. As for the Batetela, check out the tangled tale at Wikipedia, beginning:
“Batetela” as a clan or tribe did not exist. Only between 1885 and 1887 are the first public geographical journals, notes and books reporting a people named “Batetela”. Missionaries were reporting all people speaking languages akin to today’s “Kitetela” or culturally similar people as “Batetela” despite the name “Batetela” evolving from the term “Watetera” in reference to bilingual communities from the 1870s Barua lands(Baluba lands in Maniema).
This term “Batetela” was either a corruption or mistranslation off the mid- to late 19th-century term known as “Watetera” which was used to describe the people from this region which Arab slave traders termed “Utotera”.
It goes on in that vein for many paragraphs.
I have to mention also that during the performance of the song the subtitle read “[man singing in Zulu]” (!), and at one point a subtitle reads “from Kobongo towards Kabala” when the towns involved are actually named Kabongo and Kabalo. Africa in general, and the Congo in particular, are treated with remarkable casualness (and I don’t mean just in this movie).
For previous Congo-related onomastic inquiry, see this 2012 post (quickly derailed onto a discussion of TV shows, but I did get a good answer from, of course, MMcM).
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin lied to Fox Business by claiming ICE agents in Chicago weren't racially profiling when they arrested hundreds of people in Illinois and only detained "gang members, murderers, rapists and pedophiles."
McLaughlin's Stephen Miller talking points were undone by Marcos Charles, the acting head of ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, who said 40-50% of arrests were "collateral arrests.” meaning people that ICE comes across during their operations who aren’t the person they’re looking for but may have been here illegally.
Lest we forget, in late September, the Supreme Court used the emergency docket to lift a lower court injunction barring the use of racial profiling by federal immigration officials. The Court’s order allows ICE officers in Los Angeles to continue aggressive “roving patrols” and detention practices based on a person’s appearance."
VARNEY: And is it totally divisive to suggest that just going up black and brown people introduces a ridiculous racial element into this?
MCLAUGHLIN: That is outrageous, what this governor's saying. It's blood boiling.
Tomorrow, an activist legal group will ask SCOTUS to overturn a ban on anti-LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” in a case that could destroy protections for transgender and queer youth in America. Via The Guardian:
Lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in high-profile litigation, are representing a woman challenging a 2019 Colorado law that prohibited conversion practices for youth under age 18. The ban applies to licensed clinicians who seek to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity, tactics medical groups have discredited as harmful and ineffective.
ADF’s petition in the case, Chiles v Salazar, cited several scholars to support its argument that conversion practices should once again be permitted. Two of those experts, however, told the Guardian that ADF had “profoundly” misrepresented their research, which discussed the “psychological damage” of conversion therapy.
The family of a deceased researcher, also quoted by ADF, said they were “deeply disturbed” by the “distortion” of his work.
CNBC host Joe Kernen raked Republicans, Trump and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett over the coals for never having an actual health care plan for America as the Trump administration is gathering steam to let the ACA subsides go away.
Kernen went back to before 2008 to bring Hassett up to speed.
KERNEN: I just want to go over, and maybe you can come up with what the Republican plan is.
So back before Obamacare, Republicans didn't want to talk about healthcare.
That left a huge opening for Obama, 2010, came up with this, what is really a mandate subsidy mess, I'm quoting Kimberly Strassel, which almost got repealed by a couple of physicians who led the way, Tom Price and Tom Coburn, but it didn't.
She says that spurred a return to the dark ages, ever since 2017, where Republicans haven't done anything to try and fix the problem. So these bump-ups that we're going to see have nothing to do with the expiration of these COVID super subsidies.
It totally has to do because Obamacare is a flawed system that isn't working. And yet, I guarantee you, watch your colleagues in some of the red states wimp out and decide that we're going to pretend that we care, and we're going to renew these subsidies.
HASSETT: Right.
Well, the bottom line is that we made some progress with the previous bill, and a lot of people share your opinion about Obamacare.
MOORE COUNTY, Tenn. (WTVF) — For decades, the Jack Daniel's distillery and farmers in Moore County, Tennessee, maintained a mutually beneficial relationship that helped both parties thrive.
The distillery provided its corn slop byproduct to local farmers at zero or low cost through what's known as the Cow Feeder Program, giving livestock operators an affordable feed source while helping the company dispose of its waste.
That partnership is coming to an end on March 31, leaving farmers devastated and scrambling for alternatives.
Terry Holt has made the daily drive to the Jack Daniel's distillery since he was 20 years old, hauling back tens of thousands of gallons of slop to feed his hundreds of head of cattle. For 45 years, he's made this trip every single day.
But Jack Daniel's is scrapping the Cow Feeder Program. Instead of providing the slop to local farmers, the company has contracted with Three Rivers Energy, an energy plant that converts the byproduct into renewable gas and fertilizer.
"All I know is that's gonna destroy us," Holt said.
Andrew Gelman puzzles over this in the context of the Bill Ackman tennis farce we discussed a few weeks ago (Short version: Ackman, 59-year-old financier who apparently was a mediocre high school tennis player 40+ years ago played an actual ATP match with two actual ATP pros and a recently retired pro, who was top ten in the world just a few years ago. He then made a bunch of cringey excuses as to why he lost badly. In fact the pros were playing in first gear and Ackman wouldn’t have returned a single shot if they had been trying. The pros’ failure to give an honest effort in an official match is a huge violation of the sport’s rules because of gambling scandals etc). Imagine competing at something you’re just OK at against somebody who is one of the best 200 people in the world at that thing. Ludicrous mismatch doesn’t begin to describe it in other words.
Gelman throws out some possibilities in regard to why people end up acting like this.
(1) Genuine delusional ideation — always a distinct possibility among hereditary monarchs, billionaires, Harvard professors, and other megalomaniacs.
(2) The person knows he’s lying to himself and others about his abilities, but can’t stop lying, either out of sheer embarrassment, or because of some deeper rationalization that he would be that good if he just put his mind to it, because he’s just that talented of a person, but he’s too busy with other things. Like Gelman, I suspect the latter frame of mind is Elon Musk’s attitude toward his imaginary gaming skills, not that I know anything about gaming.
Why did Elon Musk cheat on video games? I don’t know. My guess is that he was going around telling people what an awesome player he was, people were (correctly) skeptical of his claim, so he decided to make up evidence. In his mind, perhaps he really is awesome, and he’s just too busy to actually play the games, so his fake is just a way to demonstrate a higher truth. Similar to how that tough-guy psychology professor from Harvard misrepresented his data: he knew his theory was true, and if his actually monkey videos didn’t show it, then, well, he’d have to dissolve his dataset and elect another.
Why did that speedrunner cheat at Minecraft? I don’t know. My guess is that he was going around telling people he was the best Minecraft player in the world [I don’t actually know what that would entail. — ed.], people were (correctly) skeptical of his claim, so he decided to make up evidence. In his mind, perhaps he really is awesome, etc. Maybe he thinks that everyone else is cheating too, I dunno. Or maybe there’s a financial incentive here, that if he’s the world’s best player he can make some money from endorsements?
What about that cheating triathlete? I don’t know. My guess is that she was going around telling people she was an awesome athlete–or maybe she just had the ambition to rule at the triathlon but couldn’t quite hack it. In any case, if she’d already told her friends how amazing she was, or even if she’d just told herself this, then by cheating she doesn’t have to give up the story. Sure, she knows she didn’t complete that race as claimed, but she can still get the respect of others.
Gelman realizes that the reaction of a lot of people will be “who cares?” and indeed a couple of his commenters respond that way immediately, even though his post has a good answer to that question:
The other thing is that not everyone thinks about these things in the way that Paul Campos, Andy Roddick (“This was the biggest joke I’ve ever watched in professional tennis”), and I do. From my perspective, the tennis match was an embarrassment which was only exceeded by Ackman’s later statements on the topic. But I guess that a lot of people don’t really care about the truth; rather, they see life as some sort of grand struggle of will, and they admire a rich guy who will get out there and never back down. As a social scientist, it’s important for me to try to understand this attitude, even though it repulses me. Hence this post.
I do think that this kind of unapologetic total dishonesty is one of the things many people perversely admire about Donald Trump, and it’s both disturbing and disgusting.
This topic also gives me a chance to link to quite possibly my own personal favorite all-time LGM post, which is also about fleeting and fraudulent fame.
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lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed) wrote2025-10-06 09:30 pm
