I can’t believe I’m writing this again. But The Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders Giving Game continues and it is again time to donate to Sanders!

About as soon as he possibly could, Paul Krugman wrote, Post-Iowa Notes. And in it, he made the point that really doesn’t need to be made — that Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio are all horrifying. But that wasn’t really what the article was about. It was another swipe at the “Bernie bros” and to say, “To be blunt, I think Sanders is selling an illusion, but it’s an illusion many people want to believe in, and there’s no easy way to counter that.”

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Attention Paul Krugman: you aren’t being anymore blunt than you have been for the last two weeks. We get it! Bernie is an idealist who is selling a lie and Clinton is a realist who will produce. Thus far, he has not provided a shred of evidence that Clinton actually would be more successful on a practical level than Sanders would be. This is just an unstated assumption — something Krugman “knows” just as sure as Ted Cruz “knows” that Jesus walks with him and tax cuts pay for themselves.

Look: I don’t care. I think Krugman means to say something else. I think he means to say that Sanders won’t win in the general election. He could make the quite reasonable claim that a Republican president would be so disastrous at this point that we can’t take the chance. He could write a reasonable article like Erik Loomis’s Bernie Skepticism. But he doesn’t. Krugman is just embarrassing himself at this point.

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You may not know this but there is this thing called The Two Rules of Paul Krugman: “Rule number one: Paul Krugman is right; rule number two: if you think Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule number one.” And there is a reason for that. Krugman has always been a very careful thinker. He is not inclined toward saying outrageous things. Just the same, he doesn’t back away from saying things that are clearly true but “just aren’t said.” But I’m beginning to think that rule number two needs to be changed to: “If you think Paul Krugman is wrong, and it doesn’t involve Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, refer to rule number one.”

This isn’t just a matter of politics. Check out what Krugman has to say about financial reform, “Substantively, her financial reform ideas are as tough as his, just different in focus.” Oh, is that right?! Well, to start with, they’ve gotten tougher because Sanders is in this race. (Thanks Bernie!) But there just so happens to be an economist I find far more credible on economic matters than Krugman: Dean Baker. Baker has not only been right about just about every important economic issue over the last 15 years, he’s also a very creative thinker.

About a week ago, Baker wrote, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Wall Street. He points out how much wiggle room there is in all the proposed regulations. He ended by asking the serious question of which of the candidates would actually be willing to break up the too-big-to-fail banks. I think we know the answer to that.

But more important, there is one thing that we absolutely should do: enact a financial transaction tax. Sanders has been very strong on this. Clinton has only proposed such a tax on high frequency trading. Why?! I think if you look at the last question, you can see that there is one candidate that is more beholden to Wall Street.

Does any of this matter if Republicans still have control of the House in 2017? No, I don’t think it does. I’ve said many times before: I don’t think there would be much a difference between a Clinton administration and a Sanders administration. But to glibly claim that Clinton’s financial reforms “are as tough as his, just different in focus,” is just wrong.

Krugman wants to have it both ways. He wants to claim that Clinton is the practical choice. And then, he wants to claim that Clinton is just as ideologically keen as Sanders is. Which is it Krugman? Because The Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders Giving Game is getting really expensive.

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If you would like to donate to Sanders: This is YOUR movement.

Paul Krugman wrote a very upbeat column on Monday, Wind, Sun, and Fire. And he’s right to be rosy. The truth is that the cost of clean energy has been plummeting for years. He quotes one standard estimate that solar power generation has decreased 82% since Obama took office (with almost as steep a decline in wind energy). I want to add a few random thoughts.

I’m so tired of hearing conservatives say that doing anything about global warming will hurt our economy. To start with, this is a typical trick of only looking at one side of the ledger. I see this all the time with the deficit. They claim to care about the deficit, yet apparently, it is only possible to balance a budget by reducing costs; there’s just no way you could increase revenue. (Well, except by cutting taxes, which they wrongly claim will increase revenue.)

And with global warming, the costs of mitigating are allegedly included, but never the costs of not mitigating. This position is always proffered by the “reasonable” conservative who will at least admit that global warming is a real thing. But if you admit that it is a real thing but refuse to look at the damage that it is doing, you don’t really believe in it. You just don’t like the moniker “global warming denier.” But you are one nonetheless.

But ever since 2008, I’ve heard people — even liberals — claim that we should not invest in infrastructure and clean energy in a depressed economy. This is exactly wrong. The more the economy improves, the most costly it gets to fix our power plants. We’ve gone through periods of the last seven years when investors were paying the federal government to hold onto their money. And what were we doing? Fighting over the deficit! That was the time to spend, spend, spend! And if we had, we’d have a better cleaner infrastructure, and a better economy today.

I keep think back to Scott Turow’s first novel, Presumed Innocent. In it, the DA wants the prosecuting attorney to also be able to testify, because the defendant, Rusty, allegedly admitted to his guilt. (In fact, he said it sarcastically.) The judge says that if the DA wants to use that prosecutor as a witness, he must have a different prosecutor try the case. The DA doesn’t want to do that, so the situation is dropped. Until…

The case completely falls apart. Then the DA rushes to the judge, pleading to let them put the prosecuting attorney on the stand. The judge doesn’t buy it, but then, the judge is a very liberal man and doesn’t think the prosecution should get special dispensation, just because its case fell apart — especially given that it by then looks like a setup.

This is what I imagine happening in a few years. When solar and wind energy and battery technology make coal and gas very uncompetitive, I imagine the fossil fuel industry running to Congress pleading for special subsidies. (They already get plenty.) They’ll have all kinds of reasons that they deserve this — reasons I’m sure they already have well worked out. They will shed crocodile tears for all the people that will be put out of work. Remember: these are the same people who have been dead set against subsidies for emerging clean technologies. And these are the same people who have been firing workers with glee for decades.

But if things stay the same in Congress — if we have the same kind of people in Congress — they will get those subsidies. Every argument that conservatives make today will be turned on its head to protect their rich benefactors.

Afterword: Clean Energy Reversal

Note that it doesn’t work the same way for liberals. It makes sense to invest in new technologies that are better. It makes no sense to invest in old technologies that are worse. So it is perfectly reasonable to be for subsidizing clean energy today and against subsidizing dirty energy tomorrow. It is perverse to be against subsidizing clean energy today and for subsidizing dirty energy tomorrow.

Last night, I found myself quite interested in the Iowa Caucus. This came as a surprise to me.

I am deeply divided on the idea of a caucus. On the one hand, I like how interactive it is. On the other, people have busy lives. A lot of working people are tired at night and don’t have the energy to go and mess with the whole process. But then you add on top of that the fact that it is done in the dead of winter in a state that is quite cold. And you finish it off with the fact that Iowa is a ridiculously homogeneous state, with a population of about 3% African American and no Latinos to speak of.

So put it all together and you have a prescription for a “democratic” process that leads to oligarchy. Thus, I’ve never thought that much of the Iowa Caucus.

Republican Iowa Caucus

Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucus, but really, it was a three way tie with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. Obviously, this makes the Republican establishment very happy. And maybe Rubio will get a big bump out of this. But the fact remains that the Iowa Caucus format helped him. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, Rubio is barely out of the single digits. We will see. (For the record: Ted Cruz is doing almost exactly as well as Rubio in these next two states.)

There is something else, though. Even though I think presidential elections are primarily about economics, I do know that candidates matter. And despite what the common wisdom is on Rubio, I think he’s a terrible candidate. I know some people say that Hillary Clinton seems fake, but that is nothing compared to Rubio. This is a guy who will turn on a dime based upon the political winds. And the entire focus of his campaign is that he’s young. Well, he does come off as young — as in not prepared, not serious, not anything. And as I’ve discussed, his ideas are old.

Rubio being the great hope of the Republican establishment is based on their boneheaded notion of identity politics. By their theory, it doesn’t matter what a politician thinks, so long as they are the right demographic. After years and years of running African American candidates who do not appeal to African Americans, you would think the Republicans would learn. But no.

We’ll see what the next week brings. The only real concern I ever had of the Republican field was that it might nominate Kasich. If Cruz, Trump, and Rubio are what the Republicans have to offer, then Clinton or Sanders will be running against the economy and only the economy.

Democratic Iowa Caucus

This one surprised me. Or it did until I read this headline in The Washington Post, Early Democratic Entrance Polls Show Big Liberal Turnout in Iowa Caucus. I wrote in my Recycled Genius post (which is turning into a kind of announcement space) that my two greatest fears were that Hillary Clinton would win and that Hillary Clinton would lose. And I more or less got my wish, because this election was amazingly close: 701 SDEs (State Delegate Equivalents) for Hillary and 697 SDEs for Bernie. (Martin O’Malley got 8.) That gave Sanders 21 delegates and Clinton 22 delegates, but I guess Clinton gets one more for winning the state.

You need to remember, however, that this is all much more complicated than it looks. If Clinton and Sanders were evenly divided by the DNC, Clinton would win. Right now, Sanders has 13 super delegates and Clinton has 347. Of course, right now in New Hampshire, Sanders is dominating with a lead of upwards of 20 percentage points in the polls. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Clinton is crushing it with a polling lead of over 30 percentage points.

This is crazy. But exciting. And as a Democrat, I hope this goes on. Martin O’Malley has suspended this campaign. That leaves just Clinton and Sanders, who I think have been very good and very respectful. It’s not like in Life of Brian, “The only people we hate more than the Romans are the f@#king Judean People’s Front!” I’m not so sure that’s true on the Republican side.

Summing Up

I think it is important to remember that just as we are right about the Republicans, they are right about us: there isn’t much difference between the candidates. The three Republican at the top in Iowa all think that we need to lower taxes on the rich, cut spending on the poor, get rid of regulation, and “drill, baby, drill!” On the Democratic side, both our candidates want to tax the rich more to provide a more equal distribution of wealth and to invest in the future of this country. They both want to do something about global warming. Neither are planning to take us to war with Iran.

There is a clear decision between the parties — not so much inside the parties. What continues to boggle my mind is that roughly half the nation will vote for the Republicans. I don’t say that as a partisan. I can well see a conservative party that is worthy of people voting for. But not this one.

Like The 39 Steps or The Loyal 47 Ronin, The 22 “Top Secret” Email Messages has a mythic quality to it. As you may have heard if you are a normal person, and definitely heard if you are a Fox News or hate radio devotee, the government declared 22 Clinton email messages “top secret.” And so withheld them from release. Almost immediately, the Clinton campaign demanded that the email messages be released. Why would they do that? Most people are like Max Fisher at Vox who thinks that it is because the Clinton campaign wants the world to see that there is nothing top secret about them.

I disagree.

This is definitely the reason. Good God! I would be shocked if even 0.01% of classified documents deserve to be. When very old documents are finally declassified, they are almost always the most banal things. When they are sexy, it is because they embarrassed someone, not because they would have led to the fall of our empire. Creating “top secret” documents is a way for bureaucrats to feel like they are special. The fact that their jobs are usually pretty boring probably doesn’t help matters. Everyone likes to feel like they are an insider, and what better way than to mark banal nonsense as “top secret”?

One thing I remember very fondly from the 1990s was all of the work that the Clinton administration did declassifying documents. It was amazing and refreshing. I’ve always hated the over-classification of stuff. It’s anti-democratic. But the icing on the cake of what Clinton had done was that after George W Bush was appointed president, Dick Cheney began his own program of re-classifying what Clinton had declassified. It showed that there really are two kinds of people in the world: normal and authoritarian jerks. I mean, that’s such a Stalinist move! Sure, the information has been made public, but now I’m going to stop anyone from talking about it!

Paul Krugman wrote a really good blog post about his own experience with classified documents. Here is the heart of the matter which not only goes along with everything I know about classified documents but is also pretty funny:

I’m not a good prognosticator, but I’ll tell you how I think this is going to go: no one who doesn’t already care will care. The truth is that the Clinton campaign is playing this exactly right. By immediately demanding the documents’ release, they are signaling that there is nothing to see. And the vast majority of people already know that our classification system, very much including “top secret,” is a joke.

There’s another aspect to it too. People might have their questions about Hillary Clinton. Is she too secretive? Is she a political opportunist? (As if all politicians aren’t both.) But no one thinks that she is incompetent or a traitor. What’s more, it is all so boring. But if it starts a discussion about how over-classified government documents have become, it will be a great thing.

I know one thing: Bernie Sanders won’t be using the “damn emails” as an issue.

Erik Loomis brought my attention to an article in The New York Times, Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace US Workers With Immigrants. This is all about the H-1B visa. This is supposed to be a way for companies to get highly skilled workers that they just can’t find in the United States. It is most definitely not meant to be used to bring workers from other countries to replace existing workers. And so there are two class action lawsuits against Disney for doing just that.

I’ve written about H-1B visa a lot, because in my life, I’ve worked with a lot of people on H-1B visas. I have nothing against them — some I even counted as friends while I knew them and one I gave a guitar and instruction to. But they were neither super smart nor super knowledgeable about arcane subjects. They were just good, professional coders. There was nothing to distinguish them from the many good, professional coders here in the US except that they would work for a lot less money.

What’s so annoying about the constant drum beat for more H-1B visas is that it is the same old scam. Business owners always say they can’t find qualified workers. What they actually mean is that they can’t find qualified workers for the crummy pay they offer. I remember back a few years, my father was aghast that an employer was complaining that he couldn’t find skilled workers would could do trigonometry and other things. How much was he offering? Fifteen dollars an hour with no benefits. That’s a $30,000 a year job. (As I recall, the guy was also upset that many of the workers he did get were fired because they insisted on their legal rights — things like breaks.)

What we are seeing with Disney is not at all surprising. And the truth is, it is no different than the way the H-1B visa is normally used. Other companies just aren’t as obvious about it. But does it really matter that a company has a 50-something coder who is now considered too expensive so it brings in a cheap Indian coder? How is that different from a company that pretends it can’t find qualified people in the first place? There really is no difference, and everyone in government and industry knows it. This is all “nod and wink” nonsense.

Last year I wrote, H-1B Visas Are a Scam to Keep Wages Low. In it, I talked about an actual criminal conspiracy: Steve Job’s deal with other Silicon Valley giants not to hire each other’s workers. Instead of making sure that workers were happy, the CEOs just made it impossible for a high tech professional to go from, say, Apple to Google. Employers already have the great advantage of a monopsony. They wanted to make it so that even the little wiggle room that employees had was removed. Effectively, they wanted to turn workers into serfs.

Sadly, Erik Loomis doesn’t really get what’s going on. He’s an academic and they get screwed over in a totally different way. But this isn’t about people having to train their replacements or even putting people out of work. This is about a systemic problem designed to keep wages down. The H-1B visa is just a tool in that regard.

Exactly who are these workers who have skills that the US lacks? We aren’t talking about letting Albert Einstein into the country here. In the days of old, IBM didn’t expect to hire people with the “right skills.” They expected to hire smart young people, invest in them, and employ them for their entire careers. But now we have a whole new way of thinking where having any job at all is considered some kind of privilege. So people go way into debt so that they can get those lauded “right skills.” And even if they happen to succeed in that, by their 50s, they will find that they are costing the company too much money and be replaced.

It’s disturbing. People like David Brooks and Charles Murray have spent decades talking about the decline of values in America. But they never touch the single most important area where values are lacking: the business world. If you want people to marry, have kids, and raise them properly, they first need a job they can depend upon. Well that is out of the question now because all that matters is next quarter’s profits and the bonuses of top management.

Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) has an editorial asking one of the stupidest questions you are likely to hear this year, Why Is There No Uber For Health Care? It is based on a paper by pretend wonk Avik Roy, Health Care 2.0: Ushering in Medicine’s Digital Revolution (pdf). Before I get to the specifics of the stupid question, let’s go over a few issues that the editorial raises.

First, IBD thinks healthcare costs are all about technology. This isn’t even close to being true. For one thing, in Japan, they have a lot more healthcare technology than we do, yet their healthcare spending is much lower. People who make these kinds of arguments are all free marketeers who are just looking for some reason to claim that the free market will save us if we just let it.

Well, a free market in healthcare might be just fine. But the people at IBD aren’t interested in that. And Avik Roy certainly isn’t interested in that. They aren’t calling for an end to licensing of doctors. In fact, they aren’t even calling for an end to restrictions in doctors immigrating to the US. Because that’s the reason healthcare costs so much: doctors get paid two to three times as much in the United States as they do in other advanced countries. Do we have better doctors than they do in Canada and Japan and Germany? I don’t think so.

Then IBD asks a question about all this technology, not understanding its wider ramifications, “Why would any consumer demand a more expensive product if they had no idea whether it would work?” Well, the truth is that most people do not demand a more expensive product. But generally speaking, healthcare customers are not knowledgeable enough to make good healthcare buying decisions. This is why the neoliberal approach (Not to mention the free market approach!) is not a good way to provide healthcare.

But the editors — based upon Avik Roy — go in the opposite direction. The real solution is to get rid of insurance! It’s the conservatives’ great solution to everything: health savings accounts so that people can count every penny and not go in for expensive procedures! Of course, they started with the understanding that people don’t know what they are doing when it comes to healthcare.

But there’s another issue here. Ultimately, conservatives all think we should save money on healthcare by getting less of it. They don’t want to deal with the issue that the healthcare itself is too expensive. And let’s face it: it’s a false saving. Because if you get people to count their pennies, many of them will decide they can save a buck by not getting preventative care or taking drugs that will lead to much more expensive care later on.

Big on Avik Roy’s radar is that the insurance that people get, they don’t pay for directly. Thus the “direct consumer is largely indifferent to the price.” But surely the businesses and government agencies that are paying for the insurance care about price and are in a much better position to negotiate it. Again we are back to the idea that the more the individual has to pay for care, the better. But the truth is that increasing co-pays and similar devices have not been shown to cut down on unnecessary care.

The great Avik Roy trick in all this is that technology will save us. This is the answer that conservatives have for every problem. And there is no doubt that technology can help. But the kind of technology that Roy and Carly Fiorina and the editors at IBD want is market innovation. They want a way to make it easier for customers to compare prices. They want a little app that will allow people to get the best price on a colonoscopy. Okay. I’m not saying that might not save a few pennies.

But it wouldn’t be like Uber. Uber saves money because it is a low-skill service. It has thrived because there are a bunch of out of work, desperate people. And it effectively placed all the burden on these powerless people. In as much as it has changed the market, it has taken a pretty bad job and made it worse. Yet in the entire IBD editorial, the word “doctor” is used only once — and then in a quote that they attack. Do they really think that doctors are going to allow themselves to be Uberred?

No. What it all comes down to is that the people at IBD and Avik Roy (who I’ve been following for years), don’t give a damn about providing healthcare. They just want to keep taxes down and salaries high for the already rich. So they will nibble around the edges. Medical technology! Skin the game! Malpractice insurance! In fact, the article even talks about the high price of drug entrepreneurship, without discussing all the billions of dollars that the government does in drug research that makes the drug companies rich.

A couple years ago, Avik Roy went through a cycle. He kept writing articles about this or that country that had a supposed free market healthcare system that worked. And then, an actual healthcare wonk would point out why he was wrong. So Roy would move onto another country. Because there just isn’t a country that provides reasonably priced high quality healthcare without having the government very much involved.

The problem is as it always is with conservatives on any issue. They are constrained by conclusions. Yes, they would like everyone to have good paying jobs, but only if the solution is that we lower taxes on the rich and get rid of regulation. And they would like everyone to have good affordable healthcare — but only if it involves the government only helping the rich stakeholders in the process. If it involves subsidizing individuals, forget it.

For more on this, see my article from three years ago: Avik Roy: Healthcare Apologist.

I devised The Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders Giving Game just three days ago. If I were actually playing it, I would now be broke. Three days! Krugman doesn’t seem to be interested in much of anything but how wrong it would be to vote for Bernie Sanders and how Hillary Clinton is the only sane choice.

He also has taken to complaining about Sanders’ supporters not being nice to his friends and him. In fact, last week, he wrote, Health Wonks and Bernie Bros. Now I don’t know the etymology of the term “Bernie Bros”; it probably started with Sanders supporters, but among the liberal punditocracy, it has become a pejorative. The implication has long been that Sanders appeals to young men and that being a Sanders supporter is somehow sexist (despite the fact that the people supporting Sanders first wanted Elizabeth Warren). And note: young women now support Sanders far more than Clinton.

But Krugman’s column yesterday was truly over the top, Plutocrats and Prejudice. It’s a straw man, as so many arguments against Sanders are: Sanders is an idealist who can’t get his big ideas accomplished and Clinton is a pragmatist who will make incremental improvements. The implication is always and forever that Sanders is some ossified old sixties socialist who can’t adjust to political reality. Listening to Krugman, you would think that when the public option was off the table, Sanders had voted against Obamacare. What actually happened was that he got the Senate to roughly double funding for community clinics in exchange for his support. Sounds like a guy who is capable of making incremental change.

So Krugman argues that since Sanders talks insistently about economics, he must think that is the only (or almost the only) issue. It’s funny. Just a few days before, Jonathan Chait wrote pretty much the same thing, What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics. I’m not suggesting that these guys are on the Clinton payroll, but they both have the same ax to grind, and they grind it the same way.

But it is worse than that. Because Krugman starts off by going over territory that I’ve gone over before: the plutocrats were able to get their lower taxes and decreased regulation by supporting politicians who got votes by demagoguing against minorities. But that isn’t entirely true. We got the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 — long before the Silent Majority, Welfare Queens, and Willy Horton. But does Krugman really believe that Sanders doesn’t understand the role that bigotry has played in helping the plutocrats since the 1960s? I don’t think so.

If you look at the other things that Krugman has been writing, you’ll see a certain level of hysteria. He’s been looking for anything he can hammer away at Sanders on. There’s never a kind word. And there is never a negative word for Clinton. No, in Krugman’s world, Clinton is right and perfect and Sanders is wrong about everything that matters. As one commenter (PN) put it, “Prof Krugman seems to dream of ways to disagree with Sanders and to support Hillary.” It’s true.

So we have a Republican Party that is bigoted. One of their great bigotries is against powerful women. And one of their greatest bigotries is Hillary Clinton herself. And she’s the one who is going to be able to make incremental progress? Krugman ended the article with a question, “Isn’t there something noble, even inspiring, about fighting the good fight, year after year, and gradually making things better?” Yes! Yes! Again, I say, yes! But isn’t there also something incredibly suspicious about a candidate who campaigns in that way?

Everyone (and certainly Krugman) knows the Mario Cuomo quote, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” And Bernie Sanders’ entire career has demonstrated that. The only place that isn’t true is in the fever dreams of people like Krugman. It could be that Krugman either doesn’t really like Sanders’ positions, but this seems unlikely given that they really aren’t that different from Clinton’s. I think it is that Krugman doesn’t think Sanders can win the general election. That’s a fair argument. Make it! Don’t give us this garbage about how Sanders is too high minded and naive to be president.

You all know that I like rats — a lot. And I’ve certainly told you the story about the study that showed rats exhibiting altruism. In particular, if given a bunch of chocolate chips (which rats love), they will generally save some of them for another rat that is in another cage. But then I found out something unfortunate. All the females rats did this. But only 30% of the male rats did it. The other 70% of the male rats ate all the chocolate chips. I mean, rats don’t have to be altruistic. Having a selfish rat as a pet is perfectly fine because rats are awesome regardless.

But ever since learning that, I think about it every time a man does a horrible thing. It’s really not hard to conclude that 70% of men are selfish jerks. This does go along with my general sampling of male behavior. The one place that it breaks down is in that I also think about 30% of women are jerks. But I should be clear, because I’m implying that there are certain people who are just jerks. Well, sure: some are. But mostly, I think it is that 70% of the time, any given man is a jerk. Certainly I am not perfect. But the point is that because of the mix of chemicals swimming around in our bodies, women really are better then men.

Well, I was over on We Hunted the Mammoth. Why do I do that? It just upsets me. When I say that men tend to be jerks, I’m talking on the small scale. I’m talking about them doing things that I can see myself doing — in many case have done. But it’s nothing too bad. A trip to We Hunted the Mammoth is the gender politics equivalent of putting on NAZI Death concentration camps Germany August 28 1945. It’s really upsetting. But given that Nazis are mostly gone and MRAs are still around, very vocal, and I think, dangerous, it is necessary.

So yesterday, David Futrelle offerred up, Richard Dawkins, Lindy West, and the Cartoon Video of Great Hatefulness. It is about Richard Dawkins, because Dawkins was recently in a fight that is just like so many others that he’s been in. And that means in many ways it hardly is worth writing about. It’s more the backstory that bothers me. But before I get to that, allow me one sort parenthetical paragraph.

(What’s with the MRAs? Do they think people mistake them for “real men” or something? My direct experience with them is that they are a bunch of man-boys who are mostly just upset because they can’t get dates. It really is all about scapegoating women. I suppose for the older ones, it is about all the other things in their lives that suck. But the younger ones clearly need girlfriends — which they won’t get because they are such misogynists. I would be willing to provide training for the young ones, though. I’m no Don Juan, but it really isn’t that hard to get women to like you. Hint: don’t be an MRA.)

There is a woman named Chanty Binx who made the mistake of yelling at some MRAs on video. This went viral, at least through the Mammoth community. Which led to the usual rape and other violence threats. And then came a video that equated fundamentalist Islamists with feminists. The feminist in the video was a caricature of Binx. Richard Dawkins then tweeted out a link to the video saying that he didn’t think all feminists were like this but some where.

Ultimately, Dawkins backed down. But his back-down position I find truly repugnant. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. What Richard Dawkins is pushing as a good thing in fact destroys lives. So apparently, as a society, we should allow absolutely anything so long as it doesn’t threaten violence. This is beyond absurd. Has Dawkins never heard of bullying? It very often has nothing to do with violence or threats thereof.

But what’s sad is Richard Dawkins is — relative to the MRAs — reasonable. He even calls himself a “feminist,” even though he seems to think that as long as women somewhere are having forced clitorectomies, women elsewhere can’t complain about anything. And this is, remember, one of our greatest scientists. I guess we can just place him next to William Shockley. But it does remind me of all the New Atheist nonsense of, “I only believe things I have evidence for!” I’m sure that Dawkins and Shockley would claim the same thing.

Regardless: rats. Love ’em or hate ’em, they are not very different from us. I’m not against men. My rat was a male and he was wonderful. But we men tend to be worse than women. And at our very worst, we are terrible.