Caucusing while brown

This is the time of year when states that use a caucus system, like Minnesota, will have caucus training. Flawed as it is, it’s part of the package, and if you want to be politically effective, it’s perfectly normal to learn how to do it. We’ve never had a complaint about training people, and it’s bizarre to think that someone would complain about learning basic civic duties.

But then, this is a rather white part of the state. Caucusing while brown would be a whole different story…at least as far as Republicans are concerned.

Warnings from GOP legislators that Muslim voters plan to “infiltrate” Republican caucuses appear to have galvanized Muslim efforts to get out and caucus. But Muslim leaders say the rhetoric has extended well beyond the content that the two Republican representatives have shared.

It started with a Facebook post that said a “Macalester professor from Bangladesh” led a recent caucus training at a mosque. Dave Sina, chairman of the 4th Congressional District GOP, wrote that the training “encourages them to infiltrate them all, Republican, Democratic as well as Green and independent.” The post went on to say that “the easiest is the Republican, because they don’t show up.”

As the article points out, this is training to participate in elections, which has rather different implications than infiltrate. They are proposing entirely legal activities which are in fact encouraged by society. I watched the introduction to this training video on facebook, and while I’m not at all a fan of ISAIAH, a group that tries to encourage non-partisan political partisan by faith groups, everything the speakers say is exactly correct, fair, and just. (I’m not a fan because of sour grapes — I’d like to see more secular training).

But read the comments. People are freaking out. She talks about how to “build political POWER”! The Muslims are going to take over! They’re TAKING OVER! We’re DOOOOOOOOOMED! You can almost hear the shrieks of horror at the idea that minority citizens of the state might actually get out and vote.

By the way, it’s true that Republican caucuses are small. At the last one, the Republicans just held it at someone’s house; the Democrats took over a big meeting room at the big bar in town, and had volunteers at stations to help guide the mobs of people who showed up to their positions and to explain the procedures. It was standing room only.

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere

This is where fighting gets you.

Amazing find!! This was shared today on one of the snake pages, nothing about the location but it would’ve been in south east Asia somewhere.
A King Cobra (the worlds longest venomous snake) has attempted to catch, kill and eat this Reticulated Python (grows to be the longest snake in the world) and has been coiled and strangled by the python and died in the process. Both were dead when found.
The King has met its match…

Eagles & Patriots fans: watch your behavior if you’re in Minneapolis this weekend

The Superbowl is in Minneapolis this weekend, and I’m happy to say I’m staying 150 miles away from that mess. Various outlets are busy trying to inform the influx of visitors about Minnesota culture, and this is one absolutely essential point.

Be ready to experience first-class passive aggression. If someone says your old school Ron Jaworski Eagles jersey is “interesting,” they are not a fan. If someone says, “I’m not mad,” they are, in fact, mad. If you get to a 4-way stop at roughly the same time as another driver(s), your best bet is to just abandon the car, get out, and walk to your destination, as who gets to go first will never be resolved by conventional means.

The 4-way stop thing? Totally true, unless one of the people was born out of state, like me, and exasperatedly cuts the friendly waving short and accelerates right on through. What they don’t say about the passive-aggressive stuff is that everyone is going to be very polite to all these East Coast people, but deep down…they hate them. Especially the Philadelphians. No, wait, especially the Pats fans. We hate them with a white hot passion. They will be boorish and crude and impolite, and all the natives will be seething inside, regretting that they left their Viking axes at home, or there would be some churls waking up in Hel with their brains draping their shoulders, I tell you what.

Interesting term

I wouldn’t have thought this possible, but it’s happening: the rise of the I-Love-Jesus atheist. I’d qualify it a bit, though, because this isn’t the generic benign Jesus, but the immigrant-hating white Jesus of American evangelical Christianity, and it’s also a Jesus divorced from any religious tradition. They’re accepting one religious figure to spite women and people of color. It’s revealing that many atheists weren’t in the movement for freethought or a rejection of dogma, but for the anti-feminism, anti-Muslim side of atheism, and they’re now enthusiastically joining forces with the regressive right, no matter their views on gods, to exercise that hatred further.

Not surprising. None of the chaos within atheism has been about our beliefs (or lack thereof) in gods, but about our beliefs about how other human beings should be treated.

Making an eye

How timely! We just started talking about evolution in my first year intro biology course, and next week we’re getting into eye evolution, and this video comes out.

I assigned it to my students, naturally. That and some reading.

What has Adam Corolla been up to lately?

No good and getting worse, I guess. He’s teamed up with right-wing fruitcake Dennis Prager to promote something called “No Safe Spaces” which is…I don’t know what it is. An opportunity for conservatives to whine about higher education, or something? Anyway, here’s a promo for it.

Warning: the first third of this video is set on “Utopia University”, of which Corolla says, That campus doesn’t really exist, does it? That doesn’t even look like parody to me. You could run that after Don Lemon’s show on CNN, and it would just play like a commercial. I think you’re going to see that Corolla has a bit of a credibility problem.

No university looks anything like that. I don’t understand the logic of proclaiming the importance of free speech while striving to silence all those liberal voices that make narrow-minded bigots uncomfortable.

Also, further statements that question Corolla’s credibility: in explaining their pairing, he says that Prager has more wisdom than anyone he knows (which might well be true), and that…he’s funny. I think we can safely say that statement is false.

Jon Del Arroz tries so hard to promote himself

Jon Del Arroz bubbled up in my news again — you may remember him as the self-aggrandizing fellow who bills himself as the “Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction” and who last rose to my attention as yet another rabid puppy whimpering about SJWs with made-up statistics and bad analyses. He’s making noise again, not for the excellence of his writing, but because he had his membership to WorldCon revoked.Oops. It’s hard to lead from the rubbish bin.

But his complaining provoked Jim Hines to catalog all the reasons he was banned. That’s going to leave a mark. I can’t say that I’m sorry to see an anti-feminist, anti-social justice friend of Vox Day get a public spanking, but it’s kind of sad to see someone who works so dang hard at self-promotion accomplish the reverse of what he intended.

There are more Stephen Millers out there

That a young racist asshole like Miller has risen to become the man in charge of immigration policy in America is scary enough, but there are still more Children of the Corn waiting their turn. Take a look at Cory Carnley. All you need is this one picture to know he’s a terrible human being.

Yeah, he’s proud of reporting a fellow student to ICE, because turning in race traitors is what the Hitler Youth do. He also likes to get on social media and argue that he ought to be allowed to say the “N” word, recite nonsense from The Bell Curve, threaten to murder immigrants, and say “Merry Christmas” as offensively as possible.

He’ll go far, I’m afraid.

Well, being expelled from high school for being a ranting jackhole might put a brief glitch in his plans. Having his name spread far and wide may also slow him down a little, until Trump sees him and makes him a duke or something.

No heroes — unless we’re all heroes

Here’s something really nice: an impromptu choir formed to join David Byrne in singing a David Bowie song. These are the kinds of communal heroes we should encourage.

Byrne comments:

What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?

A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.

The second thing that happens involves the physical act of singing. I suspect the regulated breathing involved in singing, the act of producing sound and opening one’s mouth wide calls many many neural areas into play. The physical act, I suspect, releases endorphins as well. In singing, we get rewarded by both mind and body.

No one has to think about any of the above-we “know” these things instinctively. Anyone who has attended a gospel church service, for example, does not need to be told what this feels like.

So, the reward experience is part of the show.

Lobsters are not people

I’ve been getting a tremendous amount of pushback from Jordan Peterson cultists on this video about his ‘lobster’ claims — it’s my most popular (or should I say, unpopular) one yet. I’m seeing a lot of “context!” and “strawman!” and “he really meant to say…” and “you need to watch these 6 hours of videos to understand” kinds of comments. No one cares that his reasoning is flawed or his evidence is weak or wrong, all that matters is that he comes to the conclusion they like — they sound exactly like creationists, or Sam Harris fans. It’s more than a little ugly, and rarely have I seen a more unpleasant collection of people using poorly understood evolutionary justifications for bad science since the last time I looked at an evolutionary psychology article.

Interestingly, though, a colleague independently came to the same conclusions and made very similar arguments. He remains nameless, unfortunately, because no one wants that troop of Peterson’s baboons flinging feces at them, but he did allow his arguments to be posted.

In case you want to use this, here’s an updated write-up. You don’t need to attribute it to me (“a handsome biologist” will do) as I don’t care to engage with you-know-who’s fanbois.

The lobster (i.e., arthropod) and human (i.e., chordate) lineages did not diverge “350 million years ago”. They already existed as separate phyla by the Cambrian (~550 million years ago). Molecular divergence estimates are on the order of 800 million years ago. This error jumps out immediately to anyone with even a basic knowledge of evolutionary history.

All bilatarian animals, including all the non-social ones, have serotonin. Some plants, fungi, and amoebae produce versions of serotonin. Serotonin has several functions — in humans, most of it is found in the gastrointestinal tract. It’s not particularly surprising that lobsters and humans both use serotonin as a neurotransmitter, nor that this would be involved in the neurobiology of any particular behavioural system. There are only so many neurotransmitters, and it is pretty likely that any innate behavioural system is going to evolve to be regulated by the same basic ones. Social hierarchies are almost surely examples of homoplasy across phyla, as is the co-option of serotonin in affecting various behavioural systems.

That anti-depressants “work on lobsters” is not very surprising given the pharmacology of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which we might expect to work on any neurons that use serotonin as a neurotransmitter. This does not imply that the neural systems of lobsters and humans are especially similar beyond this, however. For one, lobsters don’t even have brains in the same sense as vertebrates. We share some superficial similarities in neural biochemistry (as do pretty much all animals), that’s about all.

Leaving aside the comparison of deeply divergent lineages, there is enormous variability in social structures even among our closest primate relatives. Bonobos have promiscuous sex and matriarchy as part of theirs. The point is that even where hierarchical systems have a presumed genetic basis, this is a rather malleable trait evolutionarily and the specific forms of social hierarchies can be quite different even among species with brains that are extremely similar.

Of course, innate tendencies and genetic hardwiring are at best only part of the story in a complex, cultural primate like humans. Consider language. The physical and neural structures involved in language use are encoded genetically. Which language we learn is cultural. Social behaviour is similar. Yes, there can be genetic underpinnings based on brain chemistry, but how this manifests in a given human society may be greatly dependent on cultural influences. We could also have a culturally-driven system that is enabled because there is a neurological system that can support it. Nature via nurture and nurture via nature.

Moreover, culture can easily override genetic programming in humans — we see examples of this all the time. One of the great things about human brains and human societies is that we can overcome our most base biological impulses through a combination of personal choices and societal norms. In fact, modern society would not function were it not so.

This is an unremarkable example of convergence. Anyone with any competence and basic training in evolutionary biology would come to the same conclusion.