Oh, yeah, Black Panther

It wasn’t bad — not quite a great movie, the premises were too silly for that, but very entertaining and lovely to watch. OK, spectacular to watch. The whole esthetic was gorgeous and stimulating.

It was also good because it was one of Marvel’s more constrained, focused efforts, with nothing about a build-up to their upcoming blockbuster, Infinity War. I very much liked the fact that it’s about the people of this one African country struggling with decisions about their place in the world. It was a big but still manageable set of conflicts.

That it wasn’t just a set-piece to lead to a bigger movie also allowed the ensemble cast to shine. This isn’t just a movie about one super guy in a fancy costume. I left the theater wanting to see a heck of a lot more about Okoye and M’Baku (let’s see a movie wrapped around the Dora Milaje!), and all of the characters were interesting. Even the villain had realistic conflicts.

One thing that annoyed me: why is an enlightened, progressive country like Wakanda ruled by a hereditary monarchy? Why is kingship settled by a trial by combat? One minute I’m thinking this looks like an awesome, wonderful place, and the next I’m wondering what other ugly flaws are lurking to wreck this utopia.

Other than that you don’t want to cross the Dora Milaje. Or is that a good thing?

Why do I never recognize the universities hated by conservatives?

I’m a creature of academia. I attended college starting in 1975, and essentially never left — I went on to do graduate school, post-docs, and taught at a couple. I’ve been at both the small liberal arts college (DePauw, UMM) and the great big state school (Universities of Washington, Oregon, and Utah, and Temple University). I talk to students and faculty and staff every day for decades now, and at worst you could say maybe I’m a little too close to this environment, but you certainly can’t argue that I know nothing about what goes on on college campuses.

But then I read these stories from outsiders about what it’s like to be on an American campus, mostly by people who haven’t been here in ages and probably had just a transient experience before leaving, and they’re all about as accurate as if I were trying to describe life on Mars. They are distinguished by their total lack of awareness of reality and the vehemence with which they condemn students.

Case in point: Andrew Sullivan. It’s pure madness.

Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet; the campus Title IX sex tribunals where, under the Obama administration, the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the absence of a “reasonable doubt” could ruin a young man’s life and future are just a product of a hothouse environment. And I can sometimes get carried away.

I’ll give him a different rebuttal: you’re clueless, Mr Sullivan. Your “intermittent coverage of campus culture” is so detached from reality, so thickly slathered with conservative bullshit, that it is an unrecognizable caricature.

What “neo-Marxist safe spaces”? “Neo-Marxism”, by the way, is an empty buzzword generally used by terrified “neo-conservatives” who are upset that students explore new ideas outside the conventional, capitalism-worshipping straitjackets conservatives would rather we brainwashed students into worshipping. We actually encourage students to think, rather than accept the received wisdom of hidebound old farts. We ask them to look at systems of thought with new eyes and a wider perspective, and we tell them it’s OK to question that system. That’s it. That does not imply that we’re sitting around inculcating them with the sacred words of Lenin and Mao.

Most of our students are solidly middle-class, not interested in rocking the boat too much. It’s kind of ironic that our universities are accused of promoting communism when the most common rationale students and administrators use to get students to attend is that it’s the path to a good, well-paying job. You’d think that if we were busy indoctrinating them into neo-Marxism that they’d wake up somewhere around their junior year, look around, and realize that they’re imbedded deeply into an institution with a vested interest in moving them into the bourgeoisie, and they’d riot. Or leave. We’re not seeing much of a revolution right now because the rising costs of a university education have already filtered out most of the citizens with an interest in overthrowing the system.

At best we can stir up a modicum of social consciousness. Yeah, you’re here at a university, we’re going to try and make sure you acquire at least middle-class status (here’s your alumni newsletter, please donate!), but hey, if we can make you aware of your privilege and advantages, and the fact that not everyone in our country shares them, we can dream that you’ll help promote some incremental change for the better.

That’s the extent of campus radicalism. Relax, hidebound old farts. David Brooks still has his sinecure at the NY Times, and Andrew Sullivan will still get TV appearances where he can pretend to be an enlightened conservative. I wish it were otherwise.

As for “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” — those are real things. I know that when you get snugged down tightly in your socio-economic slot, it gets harder to see them, because you are no longer exposed to as many contrasts, and you’re now rewarded for conformity rather than enquiry. It’s not that campuses are narrow and constraining and forcing people into radicalism, it’s that your life as a cossetted, privileged, boring white man means it’s easy for you to move right into a secure bubble and never think again. You’re the one being warped by your milieu, not the students. They tend to be liberated to think in new ways, a freedom they may never have to the same degree again. There’s no hothouse here. That’s reserved for defenders of the status quo in the non-campus universe, who will forever strain to suppress novelties that might emerge from a free-thinking environment.

But Sullivan wants to claim that he’s not totally against new ideas. He just hates the boogeyman du jour of conservative thought, “identity politics”. It’s ironic that people like Sullivan who are so committed to preserving the privileges of a narrow group, white men, are also committed to demeaning efforts to extend those privileges to all citizens in the name of denial of opportunity to all others.

The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

Oh, look at the projection! Identity politics is what people other than white males do to create oppressive power structures around race or sex; when white men erect power structures around their positions to block those others from achieving equality, well, that’s just fair and generous, not identity politics at all! The thoughtful people on college campuses aren’t at all interested in building silos of power for themselves and no others — they look at the identity politics of white men for white men and want to tear down those walls. That’s the ideal, anyway. I fear that most of them will graduate and find themselves forced to conform in order to keep themselves housed and fed within that hierarchy that Sullivan loves so much.

And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.

Oh, christ. So much nonsense.

Groups form in response to pressure from dominant, oppressive forces. They aren’t about suppressing individuality — to the contrary, they’re all about finding power in unity to resist the opposition of an overwhelming pressure to succumb to your myth that American culture is about “merit”. It ain’t.

For example, I often hear people mock the idea of different pronouns, or that the LGBT acronym keeps expanding to include more letters. How ridiculous, they say — I can’t be bothered to learn how to reference someone with all those weird new pronouns, and I will resist the neo-Marxist Left’s effort to pollute my language; or they laugh at the alphabet soup of LGBTTQQIAAP2S or QUILTBAG or whatever unique set of terms a particular group chooses to use. But there’s a reason for that: it’s not about conformity to a group, but the opposite of that, where people are trying to build structures under which everyone is free to express their personal, unique identity, where differences are encompassed with respect and no one is trying to dictate that individuals must fit into two and only two narrow types, the masculine and the feminine. How can Sullivan honestly defend the concept of individual agency while complaining about people who demand their own?

Speaking of conformity, though, I’ve noticed that status quo warriors like Sullivan are all speaking the same set of codes. Hierarchies are good. Everyone fits into the hierarchy on the basis of pure merit. Privilege doesn’t exist, except that dominance is good and natural, so somehow some people are privileged (but they must have earned it!). Cultural factors are negligible before the power of biology, and if it’s biological, it is necessarily good and true. History and environment don’t matter when Nature is the sole determinant of your status. Anyone who is not a conservative capitalist is a neo-Marxist.

It all makes me wish college campuses were seething hotbeds of chaos and rage, rising up to shatter these lies.

But I’m here. I know. They’re actually all fairly complacent places where students learn and maybe think a bit more than they do in Andrew Sullivan’s world, and just that is enough to make conservatives quake in their jackboots. That world is an upside-down place where demanding tolerance of diversity is bigotry, and where calling out men on harassment is a witch hunt. Let’s all hope his world continues its decay and dies off eventually.

Friday Cephalopod: So that’s what octopus porn is like

The photograph is, I think, tastefully provocative.

A male and female giant Pacific octopus mating in captivity at the Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco, California, USA). The male is on top. The arrow points to the insertion of the male’s hectocotylized arm into the mantle cavity of the female. (Photo by Kevin O. Lewand.)

It’s the accompanying text, describing multiple observations of mating, that gets hot and heavy.

A female was placed in a 12,000 l display tank and the male was added 10 min later. The female weighed 18 kg and the male weighed 20 kg. The female was sitting motionless in a lower corner of the tank when the male was added. She was oriented horizontally, facing outward from the corner. As he swam to the bottom, the male inked. He jetted directly to the female and enveloped her with his web and arms. There was then an active intertwining of arms for 2 min. At the end of this period, the female was facing into the corner and the male was on top of her facing the same direction, with his dorsal arms wrapped around her head and mantle. The hectocotylized arm of the male was inserted into the right mantle opening of the female. He was a mottled gray/pink color with frontal and mantle white spots apparent. The mantle was papillose. The female was dull red and smooth. The male’s respiration rate was 5.9 sec/breath, and the volume was judged “deep breathing.”

At 78 min after first contact, there was an increase in the intensity of the mottling and the brightness of the white spots on the mantle of the male as he raised his body up off the female slightly and then settled onto her again, whereupon the intensity of the mottling and white spots dulled. This was likely an arch and pump. At 3 hr 43 min, the male removed the hectocotylized arm. He moved away from the female at 4 hr 1 min. At this point, he was smooth and bright red; she was smooth light pink.

After 17 min apart at the opposite corner of the tank, the male again approached the female. She was in the same corner facing outward. He mounted and grasped her as before and turned mottled and papillose with mantle and frontal white spots apparent. After 3 min, she turned toward the corner as before, so they were facing the same direction. He again held her with his dorsal arms. His hectocotylized arm was inserted into the mantle of the female. They maintained this position for another 4 hr 12 min. He then moved off to an opposite corner of the tank and turned smooth dark red. She maintained a smooth pale pink for several minutes and then turned mottled and papillose. No spermatophores were observed protruding from the female’s mantle cavity as reported by Mann, Martin and Thiebsch, (1970).

Whew. Get back, EL James, there’s a new bestseller in the making. I’m also impressed with the male’s endurance — 3-4 hours? We hoo-mans are not worthy.

Is a cat’s time really that valuable?

A cat cafe is opening in Minneapolis — the grand opening of Cafe Meow is tomorrow. It sounds like a fine idea, especially that they’ll be housing cats from a local shelter and will be encouraging adoptions. So, sure, if you like cats, you can get a bit of cuddling while drinking your morning coffee.

Except…

It’s $10/hour to hang out with a cat. I’m sorry, I go home at night and try to get some work done, and our cat will flop down in my lap and demand that I pet her, and that I don’t move because she wants to take a nap, and if I do try to type while accommodating her, she will pop up and decide to stroll about the keyboard. She should be paying me.

If this cat ever sends me a bill, it’s gonna get ugly.

Who all is going to see Black Panther this weekend?

I’m tempted to stay up way past my bedtime to catch it — we’re having a midnight showing at the Morris theater. I’m encouraged by the trailer and a few reviews. I only have two reservations, which are actually common complaints about the recent crop of superhero movies.

  • Please don’t let it be about yet another cosmic villain with godlike powers threatening the fate of the entire planet. Smaller stories are better. You’ve already got unbelievable heroes, don’t overwhelm the audience with even more amplified conflicts.

  • Please let there be some sense of humor about the whole affair. The protagonists are bouncing around in colorful tights. They shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.

Good examples of why you don’t need to blast us with gigantic world-shaking, universe-spanning battles are Logan and Ant Man. Perspective, please! Also, look at Thor: Ragnarok — despite the daunting title, it turned out to have quite a bit of humor about the whole romp.

I’ll be able to handle it if it violates either suggestion, but not both: deadly sober comic book movies about vast cosmic consequences will just put me to sleep. Especially if I do go for the late night showing.

Evergreen tweet


The NRA argument boils down to a belief that massacres are part of the price of constitutional liberty.
This implies that the Founders were all psychopaths.

They might have been. But I’m confident that the whole dang NRA organization is run by psychopaths, who are trying to encourage psychopathy in the American populace.

Didn’t see it coming

The Florida mass-murderer had a lot of problems: he was a “loner” (uh-oh, so was I!), and other kids thought he was “weird” (damn, that’s me again), and he’d also been treated in the past for mental health concerns (I was not, but there should be no stigma with getting help). Those all seem like irrelevant points to me, not associated with going on a shooting rampage, but there were other signs, which his foster family didn’t even notice.

Jim Lewis said the family is devastated and didn’t see this coming.

Maybe it’s because people don’t pay attention to the right signs. Like this one:

Victoria Olvera, a 17-year-old student, said Cruz was expelled last school year after a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. She said Cruz had been abusive to his girlfriend.

“Abusive to women” — that one warrants a great big check mark in a large box at the top of the checklist. If you can’t respect one class of people, you’re probably already well-practiced at dehumanization and lack empathy.

He was in a fight so severe that he was expelled from school? There’s another sign, a propensity for violence. Unfortunately, once you’re kicked out of school, there isn’t a fallback institution where this kid’s problems could be corrected.

What else might have been a concern?

According to the family’s lawyer, who did not identify them, they knew that Cruz owned an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet. He did have the key, however.

Teenagers do not need an AR-15. I can sympathize with someone enjoys target shooting or hunting, although I don’t do either, but that’s a weapon that’s not particular good for either hobby. It’s good for stroking while you have bloody power fantasies.

Mutchler recalled Cruz posting on Instagram about killing animals and said he had talked about doing target practice in his backyard with a pellet gun.

Target practice with a pellet gun? Fine. Killing animals? Bright red flashing lights and a siren going off.

“He started going after one of my friends, threatening her, and I cut him off from there,” Mutchler said.

“Threatening people” is one of those things that has been treated as perfectly fine on the internet — it’s just free speech, man, you know you can’t say anything against free speech. Unless you threaten to kill the president, of course. Then for some reason they’ll think you might be a real danger to an Important Person, so they investigate further and open a file on you. Threaten an ordinary citizen…well, suck it up, ignore it, even if he does have an AR-15 and instagrams photos of dead animals and has a history of physical abuse.

“There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus,” Gard said.

They knew.

The parents, the school administrators, his peers, they all saw it coming. They knew this kid was a powder keg ready to go off. But you don’t get to condemn guns or abuse of women as a serious warning sign — those things are OK in this culture — so they did nothing.

Well, they did nothing except abandon the kid to his own devices, where he festered and got worse. Let’s see a stronger, more active response to dangerous people than neglect.

And let’s take their damn guns away.

Playing games…for Science!

For the past few days (and wrapping up today) I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota as one of a team of advisors helping them on a future interactive exhibit on evolution, which I’m not going to tell you about, except to say that they have an ambitious schedule and maybe you’ll get to see it as early as this summer. One of the things we had to do yesterday is introduce ourselves with a 5 minute talk about what we can contribute to the project, and so I threw together a little something about my background and my experience as a teacher, yadda yadda, and because I could, I put up an illustration on YouTube to play on the screen behind me — so I used this one, which is just a general time-lapse of zebrafish development.

You have to picture me standing at the lectern, saying something like, “…and this is the experimental animal I work on”, clicking on the play button, and turning to wave gracefully at the screen…and discovering that YouTube had inserted an ad at the beginning, and that what I was pointing at was a shirtless, hunky, muscular man flexing and saying something about an exercise or diet program, I don’t know, because I was busy clicking on the “skip ad” button.

Now everyone has a much more exciting impression of my research.

Aside from that little misstep — do not trust YouTube to serve up your sober, serious videos — it’s been an enlightening experience. My colleagues here have an eclectic mix of skills, with theater people, professional game designers, and museum directors all contributing to the construction and critique of this coming exhibit. Our evenings have been spent playing games, looking for ideas that could be used to involve and inform the general public.

I have been introduced to escape rooms. I did not have the slightest inkling these even existed until this weekend. I guess I’ve been totally out of it, and you’re probably going to tell me you’ve been doing these for ages, and make me feel old.

Anyway, for my fellow old codgers, escape rooms are a big booming business right now. The idea is that someone designs an elaborate series of puzzles in a locked room — you have to figure out a hidden code with clues in the room to find a secret switch that opens a concealed door that leads to a room with more puzzles that then fit with clues to reveal more puzzles, for instance, and if you solve them all within a certain time limit you are allowed to escape, or discover the murderer, or save the world, or something. They seem to be hugely popular — a search for Minneapolis escape rooms reveals they’re dotted all over the map.

And now, I’ve gone from a state of total ignorance to having played 3 escape rooms at the Science Museum’s expense.

I’ve learned many things this week — if you want to teach people about science, it’s helpful to listen to theater people and game designers, and it’s good to get away from the model of telling people what the answer is to instead have them figure it out for themselves. Also, escape rooms are kind of fun.

Engaging Jordan Peterson is enlightening and frustrating

I’ve made two videos about Jordan Peterson now: in the first, I addressed the basic errors in biology he made in a television interview, and in the second I drilled down into the bad biology in the first chapter of his book, where he would have presumably been more rigorous in his treatment (he wasn’t). The results have been interesting. Note that what I was doing was cutting through the fog of obfuscation he throws up around one simple point, and was actively avoiding any temptation to deal with extraneous issues, like social justice, or mere feminism, or his confusion about whether behaviors are culturally or biologically determined.

It sort of didn’t work.

The comments have been weird. A fair number of his fans are willing to admit that I popped Peterson’s balloon on that one point — he really is making illogical arguments, and you can’t simply announce what ideal human behavior is from the behavior of lobsters, and Peterson is just wallowing in the naturalistic fallacy — but they don’t care. They just move on to something I didn’t address here and announce that he’s still right.

Peterson can be confusing to listen to. I think he makes some excellent points…. but we gotta give PZ the nod with respect to evolutionary biology.
This video has confirmed that we need to be careful when listening to Jordan Peterson. Some of what he says…particularly with respect to religion….seems purposefully obscurantist and unnecessarily confusing.

I’m right there with him on the “pronouns” issue though. There is only XY and XX. Anything else is pretense. (notwithstanding the 1% of people born intersex)

I wonder if this person has even seen his karyotype? Probably not. Very few people have. But the thing is that I did not address Peterson’s gender misconceptions in either of these videos, so why fall back on something that I’d have to make another video to address?

And then there is this sentiment:

Even if ALL of Peterson’s scientific references are incorrect, his greater messages are more important, and that’s why his book is waking the globe.

These are young men who mostly identify as skeptics and atheists and hard-bitten realists (although I don’t know about this specific individual), and look what they’ve sunk to. That’s pure faith-based acceptance of a conclusion while seeing the evidence for it debunked. It’s sad to see. This is where organized skepticism has led us — to a tool you can use as a blunt instrument, without comprehension, to shout down science while waving science as a banner.

Some don’t even bother with argument.

And the thing is … Peterson makes a strong and persuasive case against the SWJ woo that you appear to promote.

PZ, you are a clown. The only reason anybody takes you seriously is that because those who do are brainwashed social justice warriors who will support anybody, no matter what they say, who loudly spouts their rhetoric. Take the SJWs away, and you would just be the laughing stock of everybody.

Nothing in those videos was “SWJ woo” — it was straightforward, basic biology and science. I focused on the narrow point at hand. It doesn’t matter. Any criticism of Peterson will be dealt with by huddling with the ideological tribe and cursing those damned sssjooooos.

If I were to do it again — I do not plan to do it again — I wouldn’t be so restrained. I’d point out that his book is terribly written, relying on a fog of flowery prose and long digressions into irrelevant issues to conceal his central conceits. If he embeds his message in a cloud of noise, you can still see it as a negative space, his readers can imbed it in their brains, but he never has to expose himself to the risk of a direct statement…and when you do catch him saying something specific, he can trust his fans to defend him by saying, “Hist, poltroon, look over there in the mist, a vague outline of something that refutes what Jordan said, therefore he didn’t really say what you caught him saying!” But wink, wink, nudge, nudge, they know exactly what he’s saying, his “greater messages” that are “waking the globe”.

I’ve written about his inanity on gender issues, but you can read far more from Siobhan. His fans sound even worse, but that’s only because they don’t have the political sense to conceal their views behind a cloud of evasion and verbiage.

I recommend this video by Peter Coffin. He takes the opposite approach from what I did — instead of taking a microscope to one narrow point and stabbing it with a micropipette, he steps way back to look at the big picture and expose Peterson’s general strategies. It’s good.

Obviously, the comments are predictable, claiming that he’s strawmanning and taking Peterson out of context. That’s what happens when you try to argue rationally with people who have abandoned all reliance on reason.