Where’s my magical truth detector? I’m sure it’s somewhere in my lab.

Last week, Mary Beard was getting sneered at because she agreed that the Roman Empire was ethnically diverse, and that — gasp, shock horror — there were brown people living in ancient Britain. She’s still getting sneered at, of course, because one thing racists really hate is being told their prejudices aren’t empirical facts. But at least the silly contretemps stirred up some excellent responses.

Jennifer Raff summarizes the complexities of ancient DNA analysis, and also makes an important point: it takes a village. There isn’t one unambiguous perfect path to the Truth™.

Framing this issue as a debate between hard science and fuzzy humanities is simply nonsense. Reconstructing the past is a multidisciplinary effort, and I can’t think of a single geneticist who wouldn’t candidly admit to many limitations in our approaches. To get around these limitations, and to improve the collection and interpretation of our data, we work closely with collaborators in other disciplines: archaeologists, linguists, osteologists, specialists in stable isotope analysis, and yes, even historians. Perhaps instead of fussing about whether cartoon characters conform to our beliefs about how the ancient world should have been, our energies would be better spent in learning more about how it actually was.

Yes. One of the hallmarks of the current round of Nazi pseudoscience is their claim of far more certainty than we actually have, and insistence that genetics and molecular biology, which they don’t understand, offer perfect clarity on race. The only perfect clarity we have is that it’s a complicated muddle.

Massimo Pigliucci goes after the philosophy behind these biases, and offers a good explanation of scientism.

It’s a good thing Mr. Taleb was being polite, I hate to imagine what he’s like when he’s not. Of course, so far as I know, he is no rocket scientist either, and he also operates under a “structural bias.” We all do, there is plenty of empirical evidence (not to mention good philosophy of science, but of course that’s just part of the humanities, which lack intellectual rigor anyway) that everyone is affected by personal cognitive biases. Moreover, any organized enterprise — not just the academic study of history, but also the practice of statistics, or population genetics, or whatever — is affected by structural constraints and biases. That’s just another way of saying that no human being, or organized group of human beings, has access to a god’s eye view of the world. All we have is a number of perspectives to compare. Which is a major reason, as articulated by philosopher Helen Longino, to work toward increasing diversity in the sciences: many individually biased points of view enter into dialogue with each other, yielding a less (but still) biased outcome.

The mistake of scientism is to elevate scientific knowledge and data crunching to a level of certainty and competence they most definitely do not have, while at the same time dismissing every other approach as obsolete nonsense. But human knowledge and understanding are not zero sum games. On the contrary, they work best when we expand, rather than artificially or ideologically limit, our methods and sources of evidence. The scientistic game is foolish not just because it is incoherent (what statistical, empirical evidence do we have that scientism works? What does that even mean??), but because it is dangerously self-serving. It makes a promise on behalf of science that science cannot possibly maintain. And this in the midst of an already strongly anti-intellectual climate where half of the American public, for instance, rejects the very notion of global warming and does not believe in the theory of evolution.

It really bugs me to see prominent people spreading a cartoon version of what science is — whether it’s Pinker to now, Taleb — and continued progress in science demands that we explore multiple perspectives on the evidence, and try our best to shake ourselves out of our comfortable biases.

Ignorance is a powerful force

Charles Pierce is dismayed and despairing. But at least we know who to blame: the guilty parties have been proudly engaged in driving the country into the gutter for decades.

Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican who ever spoke to, or was honored by, the Council of Conservative Citizens and/or the League of the South owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican administration that ever went out of its way to hire Pat Buchanan, and every TV executive who ever cut him a check, and every Republican who voted for him in 1992, and everyone who ever has pretended his views differed substantially from the ones in the streets this weekend, owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican president—actually, there’s only one—who began a campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to talk about states rights, and who sent his attorney general into court to fight for tax exemptions for segregated academies, owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican politician who followed the late Lee Atwater into the woods in search of poisoned treasure owns this bloodshed.

Every conservative journalist who saw this happening and who encouraged it, or ignored it, or pretended that it wasn’t happening, owns this bloodshed.

The modern conservative movement—born of the Goldwater campaign, nurtured by millions of dollars from corporations and rightwing sugar daddies, sold day after day on millions of radios and on its own TV network—shoved the Republican Party right where it was dying to go anyway. These were institutions whose job it was to isolate this encroaching dementia from afflicting our politics in general.

Last November, we saw the culmination of four decades of the Republican Party trying to have it both ways, profiting from the darkest forces in American culture while maintaining a respectable cosmetic distance. On Saturday, we saw the culmination of the election that produced. At least, I’m praying this is the culmination. But I’m not sure about anything anymore.

All true. But what disturbs me most is this: our enemies are idiots.

We feared the tyrannical despot with vast armies at his disposal; the cunning wormtongue who undermines strong leadership. Who knew it would be a swarm of lice with the brains of 8 year olds, nattering inanely for the “lulz”, going “kek, kek” with a cartoon frog as their symbol?

I read the Daily Stormer article titled Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut*. Worse, I read the comments. My estimation of the intelligence of that crowd plummeted astonishingly, given that I had no high impression of them in the first place. I may have overestimated them in my comparison with 8 year olds — the pettiness, the viciousness, the amazing arrogance of these people patting themselves on the back for their “cleverness” and “wit” in going to great lengths to smear this woman they didn’t know, and who found villainy in the most innocent bits of information they could find (they dug up a photo of her with a black man — rage flared instantly) were appalling.

Stupidity, ignorance, and bigotry are the forces that are tearing apart the Republic.

*Not linking to it, obviously. One: Andrew Anglin doesn’t need the attention. Two: the Daily Stormer is currently featuring a front page splat from Anonymous, claiming they’ve taken it down (strangely, Anonymous says they haven’t). And three: GoDaddy, not the most progressive of hosting services, has finally had enough and announced that they are terminating their contract, and it’s going to be gone in 24 hours.

It isn’t just the South

His name was Henry Towne. He was a second cousin on my father’s side; he was always cheerful and laughing, and was the life of every party. He was also a fanatical John Bircher, and his house always had signs outside: “US OUT OF THE UN!”, and various such slogans. I felt sorry for his kids, because he set up a school for his fellow far right conservatives, yanked them out of the public schools, and I hardly ever saw them again.

I name him now because I didn’t when I was a kid. When I was about ten years old, he took me aside, knowing that I was already a science nerd, and he showed me some flyers he was handing out. It included a cartoon of a gorilla, with a list of characteristics they shared with Negroes: Black. Thick curly hair. Thick lips. Yellow teeth. Emotional. Violent. Criminal. I had black friends at school, but they looked nothing like that. I was a science nerd, and I knew enough about gorillas to know that they were nothing like that. Every thing in that flyer was a damnable lie, and I knew it.

And that asshole looked at me and said, smugly, “Well, what do you think of that?” And I looked at him, my mind racing, tangled up with politeness and the respect I’m supposed to give my elders, and I mumbled something vaguely affirmative, and he let me go.

I’ve been ashamed of myself for about half a century for that. I knew he was a dishonest bigot even as a child, and I said nothing. The last time I saw him was at my father’s funeral, almost 25 years ago, and again I said nothing, not about his racism, not about his ignorant political views, not about his abuse of his children’s educations, nothing. I just avoided him. He told some nice stories about when my father was a boy. I just sat quietly to the side, seething, torn between avoiding a spectacle at the funeral and wanting to grab him by the scruff of the neck and ask him how many poisonous lies he’d told this week, before throwing him out the door.

I didn’t. I’m ashamed of that, too.

This was in Kent, Washington, a fine suburban city in a thoroughly Northern state. My parents, fortunately, never expressed such odious views to me, but I had other relatives and friends who used all kinds of slurs casually; Henry Towne was just the worst of them. And he was so nice and polite about it! He could cheerfully, and in flawless, grammatical English, tell you the most vicious nonsense about any of your neighbors who weren’t sufficiently white, in his estimation.

Now I live in another fine Northern state, one with an excellent progressive reputation, and here is one of my neighbors, living just a few blocks away.

He has both a Confederate and American flag hanging in his garage. His truck has a sticker that says “God Bless America”.

There is a cancer at the heart of our country, and there it is, proudly displayed. My cousin, and this person, knew that they could express their bigotry with confidence, and no one would call them on it.

The scumbag who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville is from Ohio. Richard Spencer was born in Boston. Milo Yiannopoulos is British. Tim Gionet, better known as “BakedAlaska”, is from Alaska. Mike Cernovich is from Illinois. Alex Jones is from Texas, so at least that one hate-filled loon is a Southerner. This bigotry is not a purely Southern phenomenon, it’s everywhere in America. We’re all of us complicit in white racism.

It is time to root it out.

Inmates, asylum, yadda yadda yadda

I do believe I said something about that cultural marxism lunacy that’s been floating about in the far right fever swamp for several years. Now would you believe Charles Pierce has found an astonishingly incoherent policy statement that reads like it came straight out of that swamp?

Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck. However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing. Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.

…

Academia has served as a principle counter-state node for some time and remains a key conduit for creating future adherents to cultural Marxist narratives and their derivative worldview. The Deep State – The successful outcome of cultural Marxism is a bureaucratic state beholden to no one, certainly not the American people. With no rule of law considerations outside those that further deep state power, the deep state truly becomes, as Hegel advocated, god bestriding the earth. Global Corporatists & Bankers – Exploitation of populations, unfettered by national protections and notions of personal morality and piety. Democratic Leadership – The democratic leadership has been a counter-state enabler that executes, sustains, and protects cultural Marxist programs of action and facilitates the relentless expansion of the deep state. Republican Leadership – More afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” the Republican Establishment accepts and enforces cultural Marxist memes within its own sphere of operations. In doing so, knowingly or not, it becomes an agent of that.

Pure madness. Except this doesn’t come from some fringe nutter on Twitter. It’s from a guy named Rich Higgins, who was serving on the National Security Council. The conspiracy theorists have taken over the state.

Goddamn fascist cowards

A car driven by our craven American Nazis was intentionally driven into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville today.

There has been lots of violence by raging Nazis this weekend — Nazis who chant anti-semitic slogans, “Blood and Soil”, and “Heil Trump”.

Let this be a lesson to every city, every where: when white supremacists announce their intention to riot in your town, shut the fuckers down. Don’t send out the police to corral the antifa protesters and shelter the fascist marchers — use them to throw these awful, disgraceful people out and defend your citizenry.

Unless, of course, you suspect the police sympathize more with the racist cowards. Which may be the case.

Never give Nazis an inch

The KKK, the alt-right, white supremacists, and unabashed Nazis have all converged on Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, treacherous defender of slavery, from a local park. They marched with torches through the city last night.

We can at least appreciate this moment of linguistic simplification: KKK, alt-right, white supremacist, and Nazi all refer to exactly the same thing, one united collection of deplorable bigots, and we should likewise unite to oppose them all. No more Nazis. Shun them, scorn them, punch them in the face. Tear down their monuments, trash their flags, fire them from their jobs.

Now that David Brooks has endorsed it, can we declare evolutionary psychology brain-dead and pull the plug?

This is a doozy of a canard that just won’t die. It’s how idiots who don’t understand evolution, but know that the theory is highly esteemed by scientists, attempt to coopt Darwin to be the figurehead for racism and sexism.

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism

Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.

Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.

Charles Darwin: I’m not a creationist: I’ll use the word ‘race’ in title of my Origin of Species

It’s the dumbass dichotomy: you will either believe in their crude, ill-informed, cartoon version of biology that says that black people are different and inferior, or you’re a creationist. It’s false. The argument is rotten all the way through. Not only do I reject the premise as ill-informed and wrong, but I also reject it because it’s a blatant attempt to commandeer science to be their banner.

It’s bad enough that racists play this game, but guess who else does it? Evolutionary psychologists. Evolutionary psychologists are just the worst.

So I got called out by Lilian Carvalho, a professor of marketing at a business school who studies consumer behavior and — what else? — evolutionary psychology. I have to revise my previous statement: evolutionary psychologists who think their crude misunderstandings of how evolution works gives them a handle on consumer behavior and marketing are the worst of the worst.

Anyway, Carvalho twitted this:

Another false dichotomy, common to evolutionary psychologists! You see, if you don’t accept their adaptationist model of how the human brain evolved, with every quirk and kink selected to be optimal for life on the savannah 10-100 thousand years ago, then you think biology only works from the neck down. They like to set themselves up as the sole arbiter of how brains evolved, when they always seem to have such a poor grasp of evolution in general, and usually are just coming at it in defense of the biases of the status quo.

I took a look at her twitter history before blocking her, and oh, yeah — it’s full of familiar names, “scientific” racists and anti-feminists and marketing professors, basically a collection of third rate ignoramuses puffing themselves up by waving Darwin around as their virtue signal. Ugh. I don’t need that crap in my life.

But then I read…David Brooks. Fuck me sideways, but we’ve found the worst of the worst of the worst.

Like all the EP wackaloons, he’s irate over the James Damore affair — he argues that Damore shouldn’t have been fired, because he was correct about the biology (which raises the question…how would a conservative pundit with no qualifications for anything know?), but that the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, ought to be fired for joining the mob. Of course, he cites evolutionary psychologists as saying Damore’s manifesto was scientifically accurate when the truth is that an evolutionary psychologist wouldn’t recognize scientific accuracy if it bit him in his bright pink berries.

I hit this paragraph and was stunned at the magnitude of the dishonesty and inanity.

Damore was tapping into the long and contentious debate about genes and behavior. On one side are those who believe that humans come out as blank slates and are formed by social structures. On the other are the evolutionary psychologists who argue that genes interact with environment and play a large role in shaping who we are. In general the evolutionary psychologists have been winning this debate.

Whoa. Brooks sets up two strawmen, labels them incorrectly, stages a battle in his head, and declares the victor.

Look, guy, the nature/nurture debate is dead. Any time I see someone setting up an argument with this hoary ancient dichotomy, I know I’m dealing with an uninformed nitwit. But to characterize it as Brooks has done is carrying idiocy to an absurd degree.

And then…the blank slate. Good god, I blame Pinker for reviving this bullshit and using it to slander his scientific opponents. No one believes the human mind is a blank slate. No one. I’m probably as liberal as most scientists come, you can call me a SJW and I don’t blink an eye, and you won’t find me claiming that. I believe we carry all kinds of predispositions (like a tendency towards tribalism…) that are consequences of our biological nature. I know there are biological differences between men and women, but I also know that people like to falsely rationalize behavioral differences as somehow innate and genetic. That first straw man is basically a nonexistent cartoon.

His second straw man made my jaw drop. evolutionary psychologists … argue that genes interact with environment…unbelievable. The standard understanding among all knowledgeable biologists is that organisms are products of genes and environment interacting; you can’t tease the two apart. That’s why the nature/nurture debate is archaic nonsense. What Brooks has written there is not the key property of evolutionary psychology. It’s what actual evolutionary biologists think.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that the human brain evolved in a specific environment over 10,000 years ago, and that all of the features of how our minds work can be described as adaptations to that environment. It is profoundly dishonest to appropriate the mainstream understanding of the role of genes and environment and credit it to a pseudoscience, while leaving out the actual premises of that pseudoscience. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize the primacy of genetic explanations; they argue that human behavioral traits — how well we do at math, who is most suitable for working in computer science — are affected by a legacy of genes we inherited from our paleozoic ancestors, and that they have the tools to determine exactly which traits are adaptive products of our past. They don’t. They’re masters of the panadaptationist just-so story, nothing more.

And then Brooks declares that the evolutionary psychologists are winning. But he’s just used a bogus definition of evolutionary psychology, one that is more appropriate to real biologists, and pretended that their opponent is a caricature, the blank slater.

Man, those two straw puppets just whaled the hell out of each other.

Yet people are citing David Brooks as the voice of reason all over the place — even Steven Pinker retweeted it. Wait. Of course Pinker would retweet that pile of crap.

James Damore was speaking bullshit calmly, so I can sort of understand David Brooks approving of it, as a kind of professional courtesy among bullshitters. But if you know anything about the science, you shouldn’t accept these lies.

Science doesn’t say that biology holds women back in the workplace. What Damore and Brooks have written is the same old exhaustingly familiar apologetics for discrimination. It’s not science, it’s prejudice pretending to be science.

And right now, evolutionary psychology is the field of choice for bigots who want to pretend to be scientists.

The 2017 Hugo awards are out

The winners have been announced, and they are NK Jemisin, Seanan McGuire, Ursula Vernon, Amal El-Mohtar, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Marjorie Liu…hey, wait a minute, those are all lady names. Obviously, this must mean that women are genetically predisposed to write the best science fiction and fantasy. The evidence is right there! I’m sure the people who argue that existing sex differences in anything can’t possibly be caused by socio-cultural factors will agree because they hate that kind of stuff. They’re just going to have to acknowledge that women are biologically better writers.

Oh, there was the usual effort by the Sad/Rabid Puppies to get some of their nominees on the ballot, and they did have a few works they pushed — none of them won. Not even the transparent attempt to steal credit from good authors by naming them succeeded. They nominated, for instance, China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, and the movie Deadpool…they lost, too. I suspect there might be some weak negative effect, even, where attaching Vox Day’s recommendation to an otherwise good book causes some negative votes. Not that it matters; all the winners were rewarded fairly on their own merits.

One interesting twist: the Puppies, for some reason, really really hate Rachel Swirsky’s If you were a dinosaur, my love, which was nominated for a Hugo in a previous year. I like that story a lot, so I don’t quite get the hatred, but OK, they’re allowed…but this year they intentionally went looking for an opposing story, something with dinosaurs in it, so they could simultaneously sneer at both Swirsky and Chuck Tingle. They picked Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex, by Stix Hiscock. You can’t hold that against Hiscock, though.

Hiscock also said she didn’t know anything about Beale, and seemed to be unaware (before the interview) that he was responsible for Alien Stripper getting on the ballot. She was a little hurt that he would use her novelette as a way to mock the Hugos, especially since it doesn’t seem like he’s even read it. (It’s possible Beale picked it specifically because of the Rabid Puppies’ hatred of the award-winning novelette If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love.) “I guess I’ll cry a little, laugh a little. But I’ll be ok. Jokes are pretty hilarious sometimes,” Hiscock said.

Still, Hiscock said it’s an honor to be nominated, even though she probably won’t be able to attend the ceremonies in Helsinki because of the expense. And even though Beale might’ve gotten Alien Stripper on the ballot due to sheer pettiness, the bank error is definitely in Hiscock’s favor. Book sales of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex are through the roof.

It didn’t win, even though the author is a woman, and we now know that women naturally have superior writing skills.

But I ordered a Kindle copy of Alien Stripper Boned From Behind by the T-Rex anyway. It was free. The author seems nice. Besides, I’ve already read all the winners.

Escalating

Our boob of a president has now announced that Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, because he’s a blustering incompetent who would love to bomb something to distract from the legal actions creeping up on him.

North Korea is happy to call his bluff. They’re spreading the news about their attack plan, and they’re willing to be specific: they’ll launch missiles at Guam.

North Korea said under its attack plan, four Hwasong-12 rockets would fly over Shimane, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures in Japan, hitting waters 19 to 25 miles from the island, the Associated Press reported. The plan could be sent to leader Kim Jong Un for approval within a week or so.

They’re threatening to fire a warning shot. So we’re at the next step in the nuclear poker game: they’ll launch a few missiles at us, just to let us know they have the ability. What shall we do next? Do you think our madman would possibly back down and negotiate at some point? I don’t think so.

A prediction: If Kim Jong Un lobs a few bombs in our general direction, Trump will use that as an excuse to target and destroy the missile launching sites…and then the shooting war begins.