Dana Rohrabacher says what the Republicans think

Rohrabacher is outraged that Orange County has been building temporary shelters for the poor and homeless.

More than 1,000 people protested at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting last month, where officials were considering a plan to relocate those who had been moved from near the river to temporary shelters in the area. That plan apparently inspired Rohrabacher to speak out, issuing a statement titled “Homeless Shelter Nonsense,” in which he complained about the homeless population insinuating that homelessness was somehow a choice.

“The chickens are coming home to roost after almost a decade of Liberal/Left control of our state and federal government,” Rohrabacher wrote. “Those chickens have ended up in Orange County.”

In the statement, Rohrabacher called “county financed homeless compounds” a “spectacle” and a “travesty.”

“As a parent who owns a modest home in an Orange County neighborhood, I join the outrage that we are assuming responsibility for homeless people, taking care of their basic needs and elongating their agony by removing the necessity to make fundamental decisions about the way they live their lives,” he said. Providing them with “a place to stay and basic sustenance,” he added, “will not change them for the better and will encourage more such people to come to Orange County.”

He actually has quite a nice house. It looks roomy and a bit rambly, and the only problem with it might be the protesters who like to hang around outside it waving signs. The spectacle in his neighborhood might be reduced if they kicked him out.

Meanwhile, here’s what an Orange County homeless shelter looks like.

Rohrabacher wants — no, he thinks the poor deserve — to live in even worse conditions than that. He’s not alone.

Rohrabacher is hardly the first to put his foot in his mouth on the topic: last week, a Republican group in Colorado apologized for a tweet and Facebook post saying that “Republicans hate poor people.”

“Out of self-respect — be a Republican,” the posts from the Alamosa Republicans read. “Democrats love poor people because they think that poor people will vote Democrat. Republicans hate poor people because they think the dignity of man is above being poor.”

You know, there are a lot of loud, indignant Christians in the Republican party. I’ve read the Bible, but I don’t think they have.

Jobs! Biology jobs!

Look, gang, the University of Minnesota Morris is hiring biology professors! Two of them! If you meet the requirements and are looking for a position at a small liberal arts university that greatly values teaching, here’s your opportunity!

We’re looking for someone to teach microbiology/biochemistry, and someone to teach cell biology. You’ll also be expected to teach an interesting elective or two, which we can discuss. Here are the descriptions for the two positions:

Full-Time, Multi-Year Position in Biology

Required/Preferred Qualifications:
Required: Candidates must have a Ph.D. in biochemistry or microbiology, or a closely related field by August 20, 2018. Experience and evidence of excellence in teaching undergraduate biology is required. (Graduate TA experience is acceptable).
Preferred: Preference will be given to applicants with experience teaching courses similar to those attached to this position. Ability to supervise undergraduate students in summer research is also valued.
Duties/Responsibilities: Teaching upper-level undergraduate courses for majors in biochemistry and microbiology, both with labs; our introductory Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution and Development course for majors; contributing to other courses that support the biology curriculum; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program.

Full-Time, One-Year Position in Biology

Required/Preferred Qualifications:
Required: Candidates must have a Ph.D. in cellular biology, or a closely related field by August 20, 2018. Experience and evidence of excellence in teaching undergraduate biology is required. (Graduate TA experience is acceptable).
Preferred: Preference will be given to applicants with experience teaching courses similar to those attached to this position. Ability to supervise undergraduate students in summer research is also valued.
Duties/Responsibilities: Teaching undergraduate courses for majors in cell biology, with labs; our introductory Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution and Development course for majors; contributing to other courses that support the biology curriculum, including an upper level elective; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program.

And this is some general boilerplate and the specific application instructions.

Program/Unit Description:
A distinctive undergraduate campus within the University of Minnesota system, Morris combines the benefits of an intimate, student-centered residential liberal arts education with access to the resources and opportunities of one of the nation’s largest universities. The University of Minnesota, Morris is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) and provides students with a rigorous academic experience, preparing them to be global citizens who value and pursue intellectual growth, civic engagement, intercultural competence, and environmental stewardship. The student body of nearly 1800 is supported by approximately 130 faculty members, a student/faculty ratio of 14:1. The Morris campus is the most ethnically diverse in the University of Minnesota system, with 28 percent US students of color (19 percent of whom are American Indian students) and 11 percent international students.

Morris culture is characterized by an unwavering commitment to the liberal arts and undergraduate education as well as by the particular traditions it has developed in pursuing that mission. The community believes in the values of shared governance (embodied in its official policymaking body, an inclusive Campus Assembly), and it recognizes the heritage of its campus (which was founded as an American Indian boarding school) with a vigorous commitment to diversity. With a vibrant sense of community in and out of the classroom, Morris aims to integrate curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular aspects of the student experience, and it reaches outward to the broader community with collaborative enterprises, partnerships, and service-learning initiatives.

The University of Minnesota shall provide equal access to and opportunity in its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, gender, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Morris values diversity in its students, faculty, and staff. Morris is especially interested in qualified candidates who can contribute to the diversity of our community through their teaching, research, and /or service because we believe that diversity enriches the University experience for everyone.

To request disability accommodation contact: UMM Human Resources, 320-589-6024, Room 201, Behmler Hall, Morris, Minnesota.

Application Instructions:
To apply for this position, go to the University of Minnesota Employment System at https://humanresources.umn.edu/jobs. The job ID# for the multi-year position is 323067. The job ID# for the one-year position is 323104. Please click the Apply button and follow the instructions. Applications must include a letter of application, resume, graduate and undergraduate transcripts, a teaching statement with evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three letters of reference. Supporting documentation may be sent to Ann Kolden, Administrative Assistant, at koldenal@morris.umn.edu, (320) 589-6301, or they may be sent to:

Biology Search Committee Chair
Division of Science and Mathematics
University of Minnesota, Morris
Morris, MN 56267-2128

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins April 16, 2018.

Inquiries can be made to Professor Paul Myers, Search Committee Chair, at (320) 589-6343 (myersp@morris.umn.edu).

Note the dates. We’re moving fast on these positions, and will start reviewing applicants in two weeks.

Note also who gets to organize this whole thing…so much work.

The pay gap is painfully real

How about this for a revealing graphic? It’s a plot of average salaries for biology majors in a range of occupations, from airline pilots on the left (almost entirely male) to dental hygienists on the right (mostly female), and the gray dots and pink dots connected by lines show the relative salaries for men and women in the same job. Yikes — it turns out that being a gray dot means you get paid more money, no matter whether it’s a “female” job, or a “male” job.

I had to look hard to find exceptions to that rule. Women who are dishwashers or bank tellers get paid slightly more than their male counterparts. I wonder how much they use that biology degree in those jobs?

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, says Michelle Ball, a career counselor at the University of Virginia. “Do teachers get paid less because the workforce is largely female, or is it that education is just underfunded and women are willing to go into it anyway?” she asked.

Even in such female-dominated professions as nursing or teaching, men are paid more. And the pay gap is even more severe for women of color: While college-educated white women earn only 55 percent of what college-educated white men do, college-educated non-white women earn even less.

I think we can answer that question from the graph: the proportions of men and women in a workforce doesn’t seem to matter at all, women will get paid less. How much less, and how badly screwed are people of color?

How can we change this? One cause of the difference is that the labor of raising a family falls almost entirely on women’s shoulders. We could fix that by changing the culture and having men share more of that labor (sheeyah, right), or employers could recognize that and adjust their practices to take it into account.

The labor of raising a family, then, is one of the biggest sources of divergent career paths for women and men who attain the same degrees. A recent U.K. study found that universities with generous maternity leave policies employed twice the number of women professors as those without, and a 2009 Center for Work-Life Policy survey found that among college-educated women who had left their careers, 69 percent said that they wouldn’t have done so if their companies had offered more flexible work options.

There are a whole lot of smart, ambitious women graduating from our biology program every year. Maybe employers should think more about what it takes to attract the best and brightest?

Who came up with this stupid idea?

Students in Parkland, Florida are now expected to use transparent plastic backpacks, as a way to prevent future mass murders. This makes no sense.

The “$1.05” tag is meant to suggest how much the NRA pays per student to Florida government officials to kill gun laws.

The article goes on to discuss “better” alternatives, like installing metal detectors at all entrances. I don’t get it. These are all pointless superficial measures to avoid addressing the problem at its root, the easy availability of weapons that have no utility other than mass murder. The kids are going to be so pleased that their worth has probably increased by several dollars more: (NRA donations + cost of backpacks + cost other useless measures) / number of Florida students. Yay!

First step in writing about others is self-awareness

Check out this thread. A man tries to prove that he can write good woman characters, and all of his writing samples are like cheesy porn.

Then it descends into parody as the women on the thread are challenged to “describe yourself like a male author would”.

So I thought about how a male author would describe me, and given my experience with the nastier side of the internet, it was easy: they would just write “cuck”.

Maybe it would help if we fired all the oracles and listened to the criticisms

I have my disagreements with Chris Stedman — he’s kind of representing the ooey-gooey side of atheism, while I’m typically on the harsh, strongly worded side (I know, you’re surprised). So, goddamn it, I hate it when I have to admit that he’s right, and that my side has been too accommodating to the fanatically godless side, which just luuurves ’em some alt-righties.

I’m still an activist, but after nearly a decade of active participation in online atheism (a loose community of forums, blogs, YouTube channels, and fandoms of figures like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and writer Sam Harris), I mostly stepped away from the online side of atheism a few years ago. One of the biggest reasons for this was my growing concern over its failure to adequately address some of its darker currents—such as overt sexism, racism, and anti-Muslim bias.

I’ve been backing away myself, and I was smack in the middle of online atheism for years. It’s for the same reasons.

By neglecting to address its darker currents, online atheism has perhaps unknowingly planted the seeds for the alt-right’s harvest. Three years ago Reddit’s atheism subforum, perhaps the largest community of atheists on the internet, was found to be the website’s third most bigoted—meaning not just tolerant of overt displays of bigotry, but actively supportive of them. Last year, the Daily Beast revealed that the study’s most bigoted Reddit subforum, the Red Pill, was founded by Robert Fisher, a Republican state lawmaker who is also an atheist.

The problem is more widespread than figures like Spencer and Fisher, too. While championing liberal views on some issues, many of atheism’s most prominent advocates—the majority of whom are, like me, cisgender white men—have expressed troubling sentiments that align with views held by the alt-right and faced little to no consequences.

Last year Sam Harris hosted Charles Murray—who has famously argued that black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs than whites—on his immensely popular podcast, calling Murray a victim of “a politically correct moral panic.” Harris has in the past called for profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.” (When I challenged him on this, he suggested I “wear a t-shirt stating ‘There is no God and I am Gay’ in Islamic countries and report back on [my] experiences.”) Outspoken atheist Bill Maher rightly came under fire last summer for using racist language on air. He has also argued that “most Muslim people in the world do condone violence,” told “transgendered” [ sic] people to be quiet, and gave alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos a sympathetic interview on his HBO show. Lawrence Krauss, a popular skeptic who now faces numerous sexual harassment allegations, has criticized the #MeToo movement. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist in the world, has mocked women for speaking out about experiences of sexual harassment, shared a video ridiculing feminists, and railed against “SJWs” (short for “social justice warriors,” a derisive term for social justice activists). Look beyond atheism’s biggest names and you will find vocal Trump supporters like author Robert M. Price and immensely popular atheist YouTubers with more than a million subscribers. Their views are likely shared by more atheists than many would like to admit.

Yeah, what good is atheism as a philosophy if it can’t even find within itself a reason to condemn Nazis, bombing campaigns against Muslim countries, and discrimination and harassment against women? I know that several of the big organizations, like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and American Atheists, are quite clear that they are pro-feminism and anti-Nazi, but it seems like the base have been drifting away to the siren song of the anti-Muslim, racist right (or, as they prefer to call themselves to the point that the word has lost all meaning “centrists”).

Trav Mamone has identified one of the deeper problems in the atheist movement.

One thing I suggest is getting rid of the concept of the atheist celebrity. By declaring just a handful of prominent atheist activists to be the movement’s leaders, it creates a hierarchal system where the same arguments against God get repeated ad nauseam, and newer ideas about how to put humanist values into action are ignored. Everyone should be a leader in the atheist movement, whether that person is fighting for church and state separation in a small town in Pennsylvania or creating a community for liberal atheists living in the Bible Belt. Martin Luther King once said, “You don’t have to know the theory of relativity in order serve.”

There’s always got to be a figurehead, apparently — even MLK has become one. I agree wholeheartedly that we have to get out of that stupid “four horsemen” mindset and recognize that an effective movement has ten thousand leaders, and no one is just a follower, and we’re always ready to criticize, and listen to criticism. Another of our problems is that our “leaders” have been remarkably thin-skinned and unwilling to tolerate disagreement, let alone act on it to change course. We need to be more adaptable.

Until we achieve that kind of breadth and resilience, though, clearly we need to make Trav the King of Atheism. All bow down and worship their wise words.

Sullivanian mendacity

As if we should have ever doubted it, Andrew Sullivan let his racist freak flag fly again in his column in New York magazine, which seems to be his venue of choice for exposing the tendencies he typically denied before.

Last weekend, a rather seismic op-ed appeared in the New York Times, and it was for a while one of the most popular pieces in the newspaper. It’s by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard, who carefully advanced the case that there are genetic variations between subpopulations of humans, that these are caused, as in every other species, by natural selection, and that some of these variations are not entirely superficial and do indeed overlap with our idea of race. This argument should not be so controversial — every species is subject to these variations — and yet it is. For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans. Our large brains and the societies we have constructed with them, many argue, swamp almost all genetic influences.

Humans, in this view, are the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution, the only species where, for example, the natural division of labor between male and female has no salience at all, the only species, in fact, where natural variations are almost entirely social constructions, subject to reinvention. We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates, to be written on solely by culture. All differences between men and women are a function of this social effect; as are all differences between the races. If, in the aggregate, any differences in outcome between groups emerge, it is entirely because of oppression, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. And it is a matter of great urgency that we use whatever power we have to combat these inequalities.

That last paragraph is jaw-dropping — apparently, he thinks he has accurately described the views of the academic left, of people like me. He has not. This is a collection of willful lies and distortions.

the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution: I’ve only ever heard this absurd claim from the kind of racist who accuses opponents of “cultural marxism”. It is stupidly false. No one thinks humans have somehow ‘escaped’ evolution.

the natural division of labor between male and female: He gives himself away with that magic word, “natural”. What is that natural division of labor? I’m going to guess it’s whatever the current status quo says it is.

natural variations are almost entirely social constructions: There’s that word, “natural”, again. We know there are genetic variations. They’ve been mapped and catalogued. No one denies them. How they are translated into behavior and culture are largely unknown.

We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates: Oh, fuck you, Andrew Sullivan. “Blank slate” is another magic phrase from the conservative playbook. Let’s pretend that leftists deny all human nature, when what scientists actually say is that human behavior is complex and plastic and can’t be wedged into the rigid categories that conservatives would like to claim are the only “natural” behaviors.

Whenever someone tells me that anyone who disagrees with their narrow views must be a “blank slater”, all I see is a great big blinking neon sign appearing above their heads that says “WRONG”. If you rely so grossly on mischaracterizing your opponents position, you can be disregarded.

Sullivan provided further evidence for that a little farther down.

I felt a genuine relief reading the op-ed because it was so nuanced and so low-temperature; it reflects precisely my own thoughts on the subject; and it’s hard to smear a Harvard geneticist for being a white supremacist (the usual gambit).

Oh god.

  1. On a matter that is life or death for some people, on a belief that has led to centuries of oppression, that allows the police to get away with murdering people because of their race, Andrew Sullivan thinks that being cool and nuanced is a virtue. There are times when a righteous anger is the only appropriate human response, and this continued casual approval of racism and sexism is one of them.

  2. Yeah, we know, you like the op-ed because it reflects your own fucking racist/sexist views. That is not an endorsement.

  3. Holy shit, seriously? You know that Harvard is an elitist organization that for years was at the forefront of the eugenics movement, right? Just a taste, from a Harvard zoologist:

    In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that “racial crossing” benefited neither. “From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race,” he wrote. “From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.”

    It’s damned easy to rightfully accuse a Harvard geneticist of white supremacy (not that I’m saying that of Reich). Since when did being a Harvard professor give you immunity to holding bad ideas?

Andrew Sullivan’s opinions on this matter are pure garbage, badly supported, and full of dishonest misrepresentations. There are qualified responses to Reich’s op-ed — they are made with respect for his actual scientific contributions while pointing out that he has bungled the interpretations of actual scientists who study the genetics of human populations. This statement, signed by a number of scientists, is a good example.

Reich frames his argument by positing a straw man in the form of a purported orthodoxy that claims that “the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.” That orthodoxy, he says, “denies the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations” and is “anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations.”

This misrepresents the many scientists and scholars who have demonstrated the scientific flaws of considering “race” a biological category. Their robust body of scholarship recognizes the existence of geographically based genetic variation in our species, but shows that such variation is not consistent with biological definitions of race. Nor does that variation map precisely onto ever changing socially defined racial groups.

Reich critically misunderstands and misrepresents concerns that are central to recent critiques of how biomedical researchers — including Reich — use categories of “race” and “population.”

No wonder Sullivan liked it. Like him, it builds an argument around straw men.