Eruditorum Press

If you want an image of the future as we desire it, imagine a boot stamping on Jonathan Jones’ face… forever

IDSG Ep92 The Better Skeptics Project, with Jeff Eaton and Kristin Rawls

0

Our friends Jeff Eaton and Kristin Rawls from the Christian Rightcast return to help us wrap up our Bret & Heather coverage, at least for now.  Daniel takes us through the horrors of the ‘Better Skeptics Project’, Bret and Heather’s escalating (yet crumbling) project of puffing Ivermectin as a Covid treatment, their spat with Yuri Deigin and Quillette, etc. 

Content Warnings

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Show Notes:

Christian Rightcast https://rightcast.substack.com/

CHristian Rightcast on Twitter https://twitter.com/crightcast?lang=en

Kristin’s Twitter https://twitter.com/kristinrawls

Jeff’s Twitter https://twitter.com/eaton

Thread by Ben Collins on the origins of the Ivermectin craze: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1431040456364810242

Decoding the Gurus, Special Episode: Welcome to Weinstein World with special guest David Pizarro

Yuri Deigin, Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research

  • Furin Cleavage Site
  • Similarities to RaTG13

Dark Horse Episode 93: School of Rocks

“No such thing as a biologist” — 40:50ish

Claire Berlinksi and Yuri Deigin, Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines

Sam Harris with Eric Topol, Making Sense Podcast #256, A Contagion of Bad Ideas

Rebel Wisdom YouTube

Rebel Wisdom, Better Skeptics for the Dark Horse

Rebel Wisdom, Ivermectin, For and Against, with Tess Lawrie, Graham Walker, and Gideo Meyerson-Katz

Rebel Wisdom, Eric Weinstein: Vaccines, Ivermectin, & Dark Horse

Rebel Wisdom, Yuri Deigin Responds to Bret Weinstein on Vaccines, Ivermectin, and Quillette

Rebel Wisdom, Vaccines and Dark Horse, an Investigation

Rebel Wisdom, Ivermectin, the Backstory of the FLCCC. Eric Osgood

David Fuller, Ivermectin — For and Against, Briefing Document

David Fuller, On Bret Weinstein, Alternative Media, Ivermectin and Vaccine-Related Controversies

Megyn Kelly, Bret Weinstein on Tech Censorship, The Value of Conversation, and COVID Treatments

  • Kirsch and Malone and the Other Side Starts around 17:20

The Better Skeptics Project

Alexandros Marinos Twitter

Alexandros Marinos [thread about Fuller and Better Skeptics]https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1422301544737738762?s=19

Alexandros Marinos thread about the Sam Harris/Eric Topol Making Sense

Better Skeptics, [Launching the 10K Ground Truth Challenge]https://www.betterskeptics.com/launching-the-10k-ground-truth-challenge/

  • We think it is worthwhile to take full accounting of the quality of the statements uttered in these podcasts. This is almost 11 hours worth of live speech, so it would be unbelievable if the number of false statements is zero. Should some false statements be identified, it will be for the world to see how the interested parties react. We want to compose high-quality fact-checking from average-quality ingredients: normal people, with our own biases and internal contradictions.
  • A detailed description of the challenge process and rules is available here. In a nutshell: Anyone who identifies what they believe is a false statement will be required to submit their claim to us via public Twitter message with a specified hashtag. Three referees will evaluate each submission across two rounds, and all submissions scoring 9 or above will be awarded the $100 prize.

Ground Truth Challenge: The Rules

We’ve chosen and transcribed four recent podcasts featuring Bret Weinstein which discussed COVID-19 vaccines and/or Ivermectin. These are:

  • Covid, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century. June 1, 2021. Video – Transcript
  • How to Save the World in Three Easy Steps.
…

Continue Reading

IDSG 91 The Theological Dark Web, with Kristin Rawls and Jeff Eaton

0

With – once again – apologies for the gap between episodes, here is a very special edition in which Daniel plays host to Kristin Rawls and Jeff Eaton of the excellent Christian Rightcast podcast, to chat about the areas where their work – on the Christian Right, if the name of their show didn’t tip you off – intersects with ours.  Lots of laughs in this chat about depressingly awful people.

Content warnings.

Direct Download / Permalink / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Show Notes:

Christian Rightcast https://rightcast.substack.com/

CHristian Rightcast on Twitter https://twitter.com/crightcast?lang=en

Kristin’s Twitter https://twitter.com/kristinrawls

Jeff’s Twitter https://twitter.com/eaton

Hbomberguy on Davis Aurini https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hbomberguy+davis+aurini

ADDENDUM by Kristin:

“…[S]omething I was trying to get out yesterday didn’t come through about the Reconstructionists, which is that… Yes, they think of themselves as the intellectuals of the Christian Right, but we aren’t really agreeing with their assessment. And it’s partly that they think charismatic/pentacostalism is “fairly tale nonsense,” which is a direct quote from Rushdoony. Yes, that’s racialized. But it’s partly also that he thought he was better and more intellectual than institutions like Liberty because, like, he actually read books and was steeped in classics (this is where the pseudo-intellectual sheen of it comes from, which is a big thing that Wilson has carried on in starting the classical Christian school movement and a Great Books college). Those colleges are of course dead white man studies and nothing more than that, but it’s kind of unusual in the Christian Right to actually read books. Which is to say, if there is any way in which their self-assessment is accurate, it’s because the entire Christian Right is fundamentally anti-intellectual. This makes them unique for reading Plato.

“So, it’s partly that they’re anti-charismatic in racialized ways (although the huge charismatic megachurches like Hillsong that get a lot of their scorn are VERY white). They also think Liberty and similar institutions are embarrassing, and they’re embarrassed by “red state America” even though Wilson said “it’s all we’ve got right now.” This is about their pseudo-intellectual veneer and also has to do with classism and stereotypes about red state rednecks. It’s all of a piece. They think they’re better than the rest of the Christian Right and are heirs to some great Christian culture that they’re going to rebuild by reconstructing all of life under “God’s law.” All of this is why they dovetail so easily with IDW people and racist defenders of “Western civilization.””…

Continue Reading

New(ish) Human Bondage episodes

, 0

Last month we uploaded our On Her Majesty’s Secret Service show. As always, Kit, James, and I had a lot of fun, and you should check it out. Alas for Eruditorum Press-only readers, someone neglected to update the site that we’d put up a new episode (it may have been your favorite trans Christian hippie Tolkien scholar. We’ll never know). We actually seemed to like the movie on the whole, for probably the first time since Kit and I talked From Russia With Love. About 80% of that is down to Diana Rigg, aka the best goddamn part of a Bond movie ever, so there’s plenty of Tracy Bond adulation. Trigger warnings apply, as always.

And this week we’re releasing our Diamonds Are Forever show! In it we talk Connery’s second and last swansong as Bond (yes, it is, go fuck yourself). Las Vegas, stupid plotting, cute rats, and Peter Griffin make appearances. It’s also James’ favorite podcast in recent memory, so bear that in mind. You lucky people have two Human Bondage shows to listen to if you haven’t heard one! We hope listening to it brings you as much delight as we experienced recording it.

Human Bondage will return next month with Live and Let Die, where the Bondage crew are joined by my delightful friend Miranda, who you might remember from the last Eruditorum Presscast. We run a good show. Have fun with it.…

Continue Reading

IDSG 90 – Bret & Heather’s Crunchy Covid

, , 0

Bret and Heather and Ivermectin.  Oh my.

IDSG returns from it’s 17 year absence with a banger of an episode in which Daniel dishes out THE FUCKING TEA on Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying (again) and their irresponsible spreading (in hushed, reasonable voices) of potentially lethal conspiracy theories and bad science re Covid, Wuhan, vaccines, and Ivermectin. 

Content Warnings.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Show Notes:

Bret Weinstein Odysee

Bret interviews Yuri Deigin.

Yuri Deigin, Lab Made? SARS-CoV-2 Geneaology Through the Lens of Gain of Function Research

Indeed, virologists, including the leader of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, have done many similar things in the past — both replacing the RBM in one type of virus by an RBM from another, or adding a new furin site that can provide a species-specific coronavirus with an ability to start using the same receptor (e.g. ACE2) in other species. In fact, Shi Zhengli’s group was creating chimeric constructs as far back as 2007 and as recently as 2017, when they created a whole of 8 new chimeric coronaviruses with various RBMs. In 2019 such work was in full swing, as WIV was part of a $3.7 million NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Under its auspices, Shi Zhengli co-authored a 2019 paper that called for continued research into synthetic viruses and testing them in vitro and in vivo:

Bret and Heather on Real Time with Bill Mahr on the Lab-Leak Hypothesis

CLIP (Bret and Heather on BIll Maher Lab Leak) – starts at beginning of clip.

Andersen, et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

Garry, Robert. [Early appearance of two distinct genomic lineages of SARS-CoV-2 in different Wuhan wildlife markets suggests SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin](https://virological.org/t/early-appearance-of-two-distinct-genomic-lineages-of-sars-cov-2-in-different-wuhan-wildlife-markets-suggests-sars-cov-2-has-a-natural-origin/691

This Week in Virology 762: SARS-Cov-2 origins with Robert Garry

CLIP (Two Covid Lineages in Wuhan Market) – Starts about 39:00 in TWIV762

potholer54, Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a Chinese Lab?

potholer54, More “man-made” SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak malarky

Scott Gavura, Science Based Medicine, “Ivermectin is the New Hydroxychloroquine”

There has been interest in ivermectin since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, because it was observed that at high concentrations it had antiviral properties against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.…

Continue Reading

Britain a Prophecy Update

0

Thank you to everyone who has supported our new project Britain a Prophecy. We’re a little less than 50% of the way to our $800 a month goal, and I’m optimistic that we can make it. If you haven’t had a chance to check out what we’re doing, I hope you will. I’m very, very excited about this.

A quick roundup of some of the things I and others have been writing about it. First, Sean Dillon, who many of you know from the blog comments, did a big interview with Penn and me for the Comic Book Herald. It’s a big deep dive on the comic and our process, and a lot of fun. Here’s a highlight:

El: One of the appealing things about comics to me—and I think the reason they ended up being the medium that finally broke through my strange resistance to the idea of writing fiction—is that they’re a medium that rewards a kind of analytical approach. I certainly don’t want to say that this is the only way to approach them, although I think if you look at the writers I’m drawn to you’ll find a certain tendency towards formalism, but one way that writing a comics page can work is to think of it as an amount of space that you have to divvy up appropriately. An issue has a finite number of pages, a page can hold only so much stuff, and you have to successfully figure out how to use that space. There can be a puzzle-solving aspect to it, and that’s been helpful in getting past some of my unfamiliarity with this kind of writing.

Obviously there’s more to it than just the puzzle-solving. But I think comics allow for a degree of forensic, analytical thinking that, in prose fiction, would risk becoming unpleasantly cold and clinical. I don’t want to say it can’t work, because, like, I think it’s pretty obvious that Alan Moore approached Jerusalem pretty analytically, but you’re probably setting yourself up for failure if you come out of the gate trying to write Jerusalem. That’d require some hubris. Whereas we, being paragons of humility, are coming out of the gate trying to write V for Vendetta.

We also got a frankly ridiculously kind writeup in Kieron Gillen’s newsletter where he said, “I am intrigued and, having read the script of the first issue, know much more awaits you. It’s confident big swing stuff.” We blush appropriately.

I’ve also done a couple Twitter threads about it, with more to come in the next few days.

If you haven’t checked out the preview pages yet, they’re up on the Patreon too. I think you’ll really like them.…

Continue Reading

Britain a Prophecy Launch

0

BaP-3ColourLogo

I am thrilled and deliciously terrified to announce the launch of the Patreon for Britain a Prophecy, an ongoing comic series that I’m creating with my husband Penn Wiggins. This is easily the biggest and most exciting thing I’ve launched since Neoreaction a Basilisk. It might well be the maddest and most ambitious thing I’ve ever done as a writer, tying together themes and ideas I’ve been working with from the start into something fundamentally new. If you’ve enjoyed anything I’ve done, whether it be my comics criticism, TARDIS Eruditorum, or Neoreaction a Basilisk, this project has something for you.

I’ll start with the pitch, just to get it above the fold. Britain a Prophecy is our take on late 80s/early 90s Vertigo books. Think Sandman meets V for Vendetta. Think two queers who grew up on Moore, Morrison, Gaiman, and their successors deciding it’s our turn. Think dark urban fantasy full of big ideas and sharp teeth. Here’s our opening text crawl:

Long ago, a King of Britain made a bargain with the fae: one in ten thousand of his subjects would be switched at birth with faeries, who would enter the mortal realm and guide the Story of Britain to greatness.

It is the 11th of June, 1987. Margaret Thatcher is about to sweep to a third term as Prime Minister.

The deal stands to this day.

The story begins when Terrence Fitzwilliams, a fae social worker in Manchester, is tasked with tracking down a wayward teenager named Taz, and the two of them find themselves confronting a staggering plot that will change the story of Britain forever. 

It’s a comic about the story of Britain, who tells it, and what it’s for. It’s a comic about magic, trauma, queerness, goths, and insurrection. It’s about dragons, kings, and bears of multiple sorts. It’s a distillation and amalgamation of almost everything I’ve ever written about on this site. It’s the best and scariest thing I’ve ever written, and I am desperate to have it come into the world.

Here’s a preview of the first five pages. 

You can see why I’m excited about it, I trust. Here’s the Patreon link again in case you have a sudden need to run off and help ensure more of this exists. I’d understand. The next bit where I natter a bit about how this came about and why I’m fundraising for it can wait.

It’s not a shock to point out, I imagine, that my writing career has not involved a lot of fiction. My usual answer for this is that I prefer writing criticism. Which is true enough, at least in terms of prose. But that’s never meant that I don’t have a head full of ideas for things I’d love to do if I could. But then I married an artist. An artist, specifically, who loved comics, and kept talking about how he’d love to do them, but how he’s not a writer. And so we tried it.…

Continue Reading

IDSG Ep89: Sounds like Hate, with Geraldine Moriba and Jamila Paksima

0

For Episode 89, Jack takes a break and Daniel chats with Geraldine Moriba and Jamila Paksima of the excellent Sounds Like Hate podcast.

Content warnings, as ever.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Show Notes:

Sounds Like Hate official website https://soundslikehate.org/

Geraldine Moriba [Twitter] https://twitter.com/GeraldineMoriba

Jamila Paksima [Twitter] https://twitter.com/JamilaPaksima

Justen Watkins and Alfred Gorman [arrested] https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7mme4/a-leader-of-neo-nazi-terror-group-the-base-was-just-arrested-in-michigan…

Continue Reading

Olive Peaseblossom in Have Them Fight God

0

Penn and I are delighted to present the last of our Olive Peaseblossom shorts, in which we take our little trickster up into space and, well, have them fight a god. Thanks as always to my patrons for being willing to fund this silliness as we figure out how this whole making comics thing works. We’re hard at work on our first ongoing series, which I’ll do a proper announcement of soon when we have some preview pages. It’s the biggest and coolest thing I’ve worked on since Neoreaction a Basilisk, and I can’t wait to share it with you all. (If you’re curious, we’ve got an early access version of the Patreon up with the full script for issue #1 available as a “backing before the big launch” bonus—otherwise, more in a couple weeks when we’re properly ready to rock people’s socks.)

For now, though, our fond farewell to Olive Peaseblossom, long may she get into trouble.

And as always, a slightly improved readers experience, artist’s notes, and indeed six Olive Peaseblossom shorts we did between In Suburbia and this are all up at Penn’s site.

…

Continue Reading

IDSG Ep88 The Long Shadow of New Atheism, with Eiynah Mohammed-Smith

0

And so, episode 88 is finally here.  And we found the best way to deal with it. 

In this episode, we welcome back the brilliant Eiynah Mohammed-Smith – of the Polite Conversations podcast – to talk about the long shadow of New Atheism.  In the process we also talk about some of the crop of IDW-criticism proliferating these days, and our issues with it.  We also talk about other things.  Rude things.  *Jack blushes*

Content Warnings.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Show Notes:

Polite Conversations Soundcloud

Eiynah on Twitter

Eiynah’s Patreon

Friendly IDWsphere photo tweet

Video connected to those photos.

4chan hate campaign against kink at pride

Richard Dawkins wants to lovebomb Iran — with erotica

James Lindsay “Woke Jews” tweet

James Damore at Portland State (2/17/18)

  • Event hosted by Andy Ngo, introduced by Bret Weinstein. Heather Heying, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian were the panelists. Event disrupted by protestors, which made international news.

Anti-Trans Bills and the Bigoted History of “What About The Children” – SOME MORE NEWS

Eve Fairbanks, The Reasonable Rebels

Donna Minkowitz, Why Racists (And Liberals!) Keep Writing for Quellette

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

Wikipedia, Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries

  • The US incarceration rate peaked in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars. That’s 760 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of all ages.[27][25] This incarceration rate was similar to the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the infamous Gulag system, when the Soviet Union’s population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag prison camps and colonies (i.e. about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents, according to numbers from Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde).[37][38] Some of the latter Soviet Union’s yearly incarceration rates from 1934 to 1953, however, likely were the world’s historically highest for a modern age country.[39] In The New Yorker article The Caging of America (2012), Adam Gopnik writes: “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag under Stalin at its height.”[40]

Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”…

Continue Reading

Human Bondage: You Only Live Twice, or Critical Support for Blofeld

, 2

After a (Jesus) 7-month hiatus, Of Human Bondage, or Human Bondage as we’re rebranding it, is back. Kit and I have functionally rebooted the project, with a co-host lineup change, new theme music, and losing the preposition. Otherwise it’s the same show, and Kit and I are still cracking jokes and being insightful about James Bond movies. We’re pleased to announce that our friend James Slater-Murphy of Pex Lives celebrity has joined us for our grilling of You Only Live Twice, an execrable piece of anti-Japanese schlock that we nonetheless have a lovely conversation about. As always we include a content warning, particularly for the troubling 10-minute segment at the head of the show, but afterwards things go quite smoothly. We hope you enjoy the show at least once; or even twice, to match your number of lives. …

Continue Reading

«‹ 20 21 22 23 ›»