It’s Christmas Eve morning!

You know what that means? I’m going to go take a long walk in the frigid cold, stop off at the gym, walk back to my lab, spend some time taking care of animals, water the plants in the greenhouse, and come home to an otherwise empty house occupied by an evil cat princess.

Bah, humbug already.

Guess what I’m going to do Christmas morning! The same thing!

Oh, also, I got the official notification that I’m denied a sabbatical next year. Bah! Humbug!

I’m back! Animals watered, plants fed…hope I got all the instructions down correctly. Now I have to buckle down and get a couple of hours of textbook reading done.

A master class in dealing with media douchebros

Watch this video. @LaurenDuca goes up against Tucker Carlson and you get to learn.

It’s amazing. She’s confident. She calls him out on his bullshit. She points out when he’s being patronizing. She clearly explains her points. She dumbfounds him because he can’t understand how she can admire many of Ivanka Trump’s accomplishments while also deploring her actions in “supporting the most aggressively anti-woman candidate of our time” — which seems like a fairly obvious and reasonable concern to me, but Carlson doesn’t get it.

Or, at least, he pretends he doesn’t get it. Most of his rebuttal seems to involve adopting a dull, stupid expression, repeating her words, and acting as if there is some kind of contradiction there, when there isn’t.

And then at the end he tries to fight back by mocking her writing for Teen Vogue — she has an article on thigh-high boots which apparently, to the one-dimensional mind of Tucker Carlson, means she can’t have thoughtful political opinions…and further, there is an implicit belittling of teenaged girls, which Duca confidently rejects.

Here’s hoping a generation of teen-aged girls are growing up aware and angry, preparing to put on their thigh-high boots and do a flying drop-kick to Tucker Carlson’s condescending stupid face. He ought to be worried.

By the way, it also helps that she’s defending a righteous and reasonable position. Confidence is good, responding aggressively is good, but it doesn’t help if your confident aggression is in defense of racist sleaziness, for instance.

Art hates Trump

onemanband

Have you been following the news about Donald Trump’s search for talent to perform at his inauguration? He’s not having much luck. Sad!

He does have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, though, and some performer from a reality TV show. My favorites, though, are two bands I never heard of: The Reagan Years and The MIXX, cover bands that do oldies. The best part: they’re the same band! They use different names for different musical eras. So basically Trump gets to pad his list of performers by counting the same people twice.

But the saddest performers have to be the Radio City Rockettes. The inauguration committee has happily secured them by getting their “owner” to twist their arms. James Dolan, their boss, signed them up and told them that they are under contract and will be fired if they don’t dance for their new overlord. At least one of them has spoken up.

I usually don’t use social media to make a political stand but I feel overwhelmed with emotion. Finding out that it has been decided for us that Rockettes will be performing at the Presidential inauguration makes me feel embarrassed and disappointed. The women I work with are intelligent and are full of love and the decision of performing for a man that stands for everything we’re against is appalling. I am speaking for just myself but please know that after we found out this news, we have been performing with tears in our eyes and heavy hearts. We will not be forced! #notmypresident

They’ve also been informed by their union that they must perform.

We have received an email from a Rockette expressing concern about getting ‘involved in a dangerous political climate’ but I must remind you that you are all employees, and as a company, Mr. Dolan obviously wants the Rockettes to be represented at our country’s Presidential inauguration, as they were in 2001 & 2005. Any talk of boycotting this event is invalid, I’m afraid.

We have been made aware of what is going on Facebook and other social media, however, this does not change anything unless Radio City has a change of heart. The ranting of the public is just that, ranting. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but this does not change your employment status for those who are full time … Everyone is entitled to her own political beliefs, but there is no room for this in the workplace.

I have to agree (but not with the tone). If we can say that bakers don’t get to discriminate in making wedding cakes for their customers, we have to say that professional dancers have an obligation to do their work, no matter who pays for it.

Still, I thought unions were supposed to fight for the rights of the workers, rather than management — and that union representative is clearly not on the side of their constituents.

Also, if I were commissioning an art performance, and I learned that the artists did not find any joy in working for me and were at best going to make a workman-like effort with no heart behind it, I wouldn’t demand that they do it — there’d be no point to a celebration without a celebratory attitude. But from what I see of Trump, he’s probably getting an extra thrill out of subjugating reluctant women to his will.

He’s also getting desperate. If he can’t force people to sing and dance for him, he’s only going to have a bunch of no-talent hacks singing his praises.

Some good news: the union has agreed that all participation in this event is entirely voluntary.

No, not Snopes!

We love Snopes, the fact-checking web site founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson, and it’s useful now more than ever. Now, though, the Daily Mail has published a hit piece on Snopes — Snopes must have debunked a few too many Daily Mail crap stories.

The hit piece is 90% hot steaming garbage, but unfortunately, 10% of it is a matter for serious concern. First, let’s sweep away the garbage.

The piece focuses on the most useless bits of the story: Facebook ‘fact checker’ who will arbitrate on ‘fake news’ is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes – and its staff includes an escort-porn star and ‘Vice Vixen domme’. Oooh. A couple of the people writing for Snopes are also sex workers. I don’t care, but apparently readers of the Daily Mail need a sanctimonious snit to get through the day. Sex work is work. It no more discredits the intellectual abilities of Snopes contributors than does the fact that I worked my way through high school doing agricultural stoop labor. Actually, sex work sounds like a smarter use of one’s time than spending long hours bent over pulling weeds.

The article obsesses over the fact that Kim LaCapria and Elyssa Young have and may still be working as escorts and models. Don’t care. Really, the only thing I care about is that the Daily Mail thinks shaming women is newsworthy. [A clarification: while the Daily Mail thinks this is the case, LaCapria herself has said that she is not and has not been a sex worker.]

They are outraged that a site billing itself as “non-political” has a woman writing for them who ran as a Libertarian for Congress on a ‘Dump Bush’ platform. I have no love for Libertarians, but if the only way a website can be non-political is if every writer for it never expressed a political opinion, then you’ve just created a filter that guarantees that only idiots will work for it. Everyone has political opinions, it’s human nature. What matters is if they take care to avoid using them to color their work. Or if they use the illusion of objectivity to justify defenses of the intolerable, which is the Daily Mail’s specialty. Fuck ’em. Don’t care.

They are also aghast that the Mikkelson’s went through an acrimonious divorce, with disputes about the management of the site ongoing. That two people are finding personal differences great enough to compel them to separate is not a problem — if you’re unhappy in a relationship, end it and move on. I watched my grandparents hate each other for decades, and I would rather have seen them happily apart, if that was possible. The Daily Mail does not get to tell people who should stay married to who.

But then we start getting into some real concerns. They are arguing over compensation, which is an internal concern, but one of the accusations is that David Mikkelson has been rifling through the company’s budget to pay for personal matters. If true, and of course David Mikkelson disputes it, that’s an ethical violation that also says management is not very tight. Healthy companies do not let the founder loot the treasury.

If true. I’d like to see evidence of professional management.

Mikkelson has also made a statement to address the Daily Mail’s objections.

David Mikkelson told the Dailymail.com that Snopes does not have a ‘standardized procedure’ for fact-checking ‘since the nature of this material can vary widely.’ He said the process ‘involves multiple stages of editorial oversight, so no output is the result of a single person’s discretion.’

He also said the company has no set requirements for fact-checkers because the variety of the work ‘would be difficult to encompass in any single blanket set of standards.’

‘Accordingly, our editorial staff is drawn from diverse backgrounds; some of them have degrees and/or professional experience in journalism, and some of them don’t,’ he added.

I think that’s a good response, actually. I agree that they should have a diverse staff, and that they’re dealing with all kinds of claims suggests that flexibility is important. But the key point is this one: “multiple stages of editorial oversight”. Say more. What exactly does Snopes do internally to verify their assessment, and how do they cross-check to prevent bias from creeping in? That’s something they ought to be able to explain.

So Forbes asked them for the details. David Mikkelson flubbed the answer.

Thus, when I reached out to David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, for comment, I fully expected him to respond with a lengthy email in Snopes’ trademark point-by-point format, fully refuting each and every one of the claims in the Daily Mail’s article and writing the entire article off as “fake news.”

It was with incredible surprise therefore that I received David’s one-sentence response which read in its entirety “I’d be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I’m precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing details of my divorce.”

OK, details of your divorce should be off the table. But the details of how your company determines what is fit to post on your website? Nope. That’s the main concern and you should be able to discuss it. That the Daily Mail published a lot of salacious garbage ought to be ignored on principle, but the accusations that weaken trust in your organization ought to be answered promptly.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Forbes article is still tainted with bullshit.

When I presented a set of subsequent clarifying questions to David, he provided responses to some and not to others. Of particular interest, when pressed about claims by the Daily Mail that at least one Snopes employee has actually run for political office and that this presents at the very least the appearance of potential bias in Snopes’ fact checks, David responded “It’s pretty much a given that anyone who has ever run for (or held) a political office did so under some form of party affiliation and said something critical about their opponent(s) and/or other politicians at some point. Does that mean anyone who has ever run for office is manifestly unsuited to be associated with a fact-checking endeavor, in any capacity?”

That is actually a fascinating response to come from a fact checking organization that prides itself on its claimed neutrality. Think about it this way – what if there was a fact checking organization whose fact checkers were all drawn from the ranks of Breitbart and Infowars? Most liberals would likely dismiss such an organization as partisan and biased. Similarly, an organization whose fact checkers were all drawn from Occupy Democrats and Huffington Post might be dismissed by conservatives as partisan and biased. In fact, when I asked several colleagues for their thoughts on this issue this morning, the unanimous response back was that people with strong self-declared political leanings on either side should not be a part of a fact checking organization and all had incorrectly assumed that Snopes would have felt the same way and had a blanket policy against placing partisan individuals as fact checkers.

Mikkelson’s answer to that is actually on point. I agree. The author’s reply is crap.

We aren’t talking about an organization drawing on a sole political viewpoint, like Breitbart or Infowars. The Daily Mail found one person with open Libertarian leanings, and at the same time, found that the operation was loose and diverse. Snopes is not a propaganda organ for one point of view.

And Jesus fuck, what is a “partisan individual”? Where are you going to find all these boring neutered drones to act as the fact-check department for a news organization? That a bunch of suits at Forbes don’t like people who think differently than they do to work as fact-checkers is meaningless. Don’t care, again.

I would say that someone who worked at Breitbart and Infowars is disqualified from working as a fact-checker because those organizations don’t do any fact-checking, and seem to lack all principled motivation to search for the truth. That isn’t necessarily true for a libertarian, a conservative, or a liberal. Judge them on the quality of their work and their ability to separate the personal from the objective, not whether they have brains of purest pablum.

My opinion: most of the accusations against Snopes are irrelevant. But some do raise concerns: this is an organization that ought to strive for transparency, and they aren’t. I also get the impression it’s very much a David Mikkelson operation, and there ought to be management practices that shield the organization from the whims of the founder.

Nazi philosophers? NOW?

Brian Leiter reports on a shiny new neo-Nazi blog site…for academic philosophers. Although who knows? Most of the contributors are using pseudonyms (actually, it looks like all are hiding their identities), so no one knows what kind of unqualified riff-raff are posting there. Although judging by the excerpts Leiter has posted, they are mostly awful neo-Nazi scum. Like this.

Now, if there really are racial differences in intelligence, personality, temperament, and so forth—and there is overwhelming evidence that there are such differences between the races—and these differences contribute to (or give a flavor to, or determine, etc.) the sort of civilization that a race will create, then it is not implausible at all to suggest that Western civilization—by which we mean European civilization—can only be fully and genuinely carried on by people of European biological stock (just as, say, Jewish civilization can only be genuinely or fully carried on by people of Jewish stock). Other races that have some biological similarity to people of European stock may carry European civilization forward to some extent—we could say not genuinely (as do, for example, the Japanese, to some extent, in their appreciation of classical music). But the differences between the race groups will inevitably result in differences in the way that European civilization can be carried out, just as we would expect Europeans (that is, people of European biological stock) to be able to carry on with Japanese civilization in a limited manner but never genuinely.

That could have come straight from Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the actual author would probably consider that a compliment.

But they can’t all be that bad, can they? Yup. I looked for myself. Here’s one arguing against affirmative action, with a lovely header image straight from the racist image collection of the alt-right.

stereotype-jew

…if we have any worries about ‘systemic’ bias and unfairness, it seems hard to deny that the massive over-representation of Jews tends to create a ‘chilly climate’ for people whose interests conflict with theirs, that Jews may tend to be a little nepotistic or even hostile to non-Jewish groups, and that this may tend to operate in the form of ‘systemic’ and often implicit bias against others. At least, if we accept the arguments along these lines meant to support claims of ‘systemic’ bias or oppression in support of generic white hegemony, similar and equally compelling arguments hold with respect to Jewish hegemony.

Thus, in deciding who to hire, the committee should always prefer any other kind of candidate over the Jew. If you’re stuck with a short list of straight white males—a bunch of SMWASPs, for example—and just one Jewish guy you should either cancel the search or, if that’s not feasible, you should throw the Jewish guy’s application in the trash without even looking at it. Maybe there should be a freeze on all hiring of Jews, or Jewish men, at least, for the next 30 years. That would open up a lot of positions for other kinds of people, even if we kept on discriminating against non-Jewish straight white males. In fact, depending on some number-crunching we have yet to do, we might well find that discrimination against the non-Jewish whites was not warranted, or that it should be much less intense than it currently is. Anyway, at the very least we should always strongly prefer the non-Jewish straight white male over the Jewish one in those regrettable cases where those are the only two options available to us.

I think someone is a wee bit obsessed with The Jews.

I wonder if they also think it would be perfectly legit to throw the application of the neo-Nazi with the bad philosophy in the trash without even looking at it? We do want to be consistent, after all.

“Comes to its senses”?

Trump just plopped this one out.

The world will have come to its senses when we get rid of nukes, and when we get rid of sabre-rattling assholes like Donald Fucking Trump. You don’t diminish the threat of nuclear war by strengthening and expanding your nuclear arsenal.

Also, this seems appropriate now.

The future of American science is in question

It sounds incredible that we are even asking that question here in the 21st century, in a country that is one of the world leaders in research in science and technology, but Trump has made it scarily relevant. His pick for the office of management and budget is a guy who thinks the funding of science might belong on the chopping block.

President-elect Donald Trump recently picked Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina to head the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Like many of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees, Mulvaney seems to have a disturbingly low opinion of science.

In a stunning September 9 Facebook post (that’s since been deleted but is still cached), Mulvaney asked, … what might be the best question: do we really need government funded research at all.

That was in the context of a discussion about funding programs to deal with the Zika virus. What Mulvaney argued was nonsensical and self-defeating: there had been studies that found the etiology of Zika-induced birth defects to be complex and variable (there have since been studies that showed a stronger and more consistent association), so he’s arguing that maybe we don’t need more scientific studies at all? This is a close-your-eyes-and-maybe-it-will-all-go-away approach. We don’t run away from complexity. We don’t expect that interactions in biology will be simple and clear and 100% reproducible.

This is also a matter of public health, rather than profit. We also don’t expect that the biomedical industry will, out of the kindness of their hearts, fund research on a low-frequency but tragically serious disease, nor are pharmaceutical companies, for instance, usually much concerned with public health measures to control disease vectors. This is exactly the kind of research that needs government funding — unprofitable, requiring multi-disciplinary approaches, with a need to work out basic mechanisms.

And that’s what compels Mulvaney to question the utility of government-funded research. I wonder what he thinks of Drosophila and zebrafish work?