Do not play gotcha games with @upulie, even if you are a billionaire

You all know I’m not a fan of Elon Musk — I think he’s something of a looter, a guy who’s good at PR (usually) and knows what bandwagons to leap upon. But lately he’s been working so hard to confirm all of my biases against him.

He announced a plan to fund a media watchdog site that would rank news sources…which is a fine idea, except that his criteria seemed to be self-serving. A news source that was critical of Elon Musk would be “fake news”, obviously. And then what happens? Musk endorses a propaganda site run by a sex cult.

But what really annoyed me was his ignorance and arrogance when he sneered at Upulia Divisekera because she studies nanotechnology.

So Upulie responded with a whole series of tweets outlining the importance of nanotechnology. But guess what? After his initial snipe, he just ignored her altogether. I think that means that she kicked his ass.

At least a nice summary of the Musk mythos emerged out of that mess.

This is what we do

These are rosaries confiscated from illigal immigrants by the Customs and Border Patrol, salvaged by a custodian at the processing station.

Here I am, a guy who despises religion and sees no magical value at all in these items, and I have to say that that is inhumane. This is not right. This is wrong.

…Kiefer sees his project as a counterweight to C.B.P.’s dehumanizing practices, which yank everyday objects from the contexts that imbued them with meaning. He hopes not just to draw people’s attention to those practices but also to evoke the value the objects must have once had to their owners. “I’m doing something different,” he told me. “I’m presenting these deeply personal objects in a way that is reverential and respectful.”

Yes, that something has no value to me does not imply that it has no personal value to others. We can only strip these away if we first decide the others have no value — we’re in the midst of a great effort to dehumanize anyone who opposes a certain narrow set of selfish values.

If we can take away their rosaries, we can also lose their children. We can break up families.

For months, stories have abounded of families separated by immigration authorities at the border: Three children were separated from their mother as they fled a gang in El Salvador; a 7-year-old was taken from her Congolese mother who was seeking asylum; and so on, in reportedly hundreds of cases. In almost every case, the families have described heart-wrenching goodbyes and agonizing uncertainty about whether they would be reunited.

According to the Florence Project, an Arizona nonprofit organization that provides legal and social services to detained immigrants, there have been more than 200 cases of parents being separated from their children since the beginning of the year in the state alone.

But don’t worry! They have a rationale for what they’re doing — they are being intentionally brutal as a deterrent to immigration.

In a May 11 interview with NPR’s John Burnett, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly referred to family separation as something that would be a “tough deterrent” to migrant parents who may be thinking of bringing their children to the border.

It might work. I’m beginning to think the United States of America is a terrible place to live, myself. This is a time-honored strategy on the right…for instance, it’s how Ted Nugent avoided the draft.

I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard, really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’ kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, piss the whole shot. My pants got crusted up.

See, I approached the whole thing like, Ted Nugent, cool hard-workin’ dude, is gonna wreak havoc on these imbeciles in the armed forces. I’m gonna play their own game, and I’m gonna destroy ’em. Now my whole body is crusted in poop and piss. I was ill. And three or four days before, I started stayin’ awake. I was close to death, but I was in control. I was extremely antidrug as I’ve always been, but I snorted some crystal methedrine. Talk about one wounded motherf*cker. A guy put up four lines, and it was for all four of us, but I didn’t know and I’m vacuuming that poop right up. I was a walking, talking hunk of human poop. I was six-foot-three of sin. So the guys took me down to the physical, and my nerves, my emotions were distraught. I was not a good person. I was wounded. But as painful and nauseous as it was — ’cause I was really into bein’ clean and on the ball — I made gutter swine hippies look like football players. I was deviano.

It’s the Ted Nugentification of America!

Heather Mac Donald’s coded racism is not at all subtle

Heather Mac Donald is claiming that identity politics is harming the sciences. It’s an amazing exercise in willful blindness and coded assumptions.

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.

Yes, we’re always changing how science is taught. When I was a college student, you’d go into a huge classroom, sit on your butt, and a professor on a distant podium would lecture at you. That was great for some things, and I learned a lot, but the most formative experiences in my training were all in small lab settings where we did stuff. Good teachers experiment all the time and try new approaches to engage students. I don’t think Mac Donald is a teacher, or has any experience in STEM, so she’s lacking in qualifications to judge how teaching works, and she doesn’t present any evidence that teaching is getting worse as we reach out to diverse students.

But look at that coded assumption at the end of the paragraph: it is going to have a “disastrous” effect on American science if we increase representation of “females, blacks, and Hispanics”! Why? Does Heather know something we don’t? Are we just supposed to assume that those groups are intellectually inferior to white men, so it’s going to downgrade our scientific institutions if we don’t staff them entirely with white guys?

This next paragraph is actually correct.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.

Yes. The funding agencies are awake to the fact that American demographics are changing. We can either ignore the shrinking pool of white male students entering the sciences, or we can try to address and incorporate the growing pool of brown-skinned and female people. There is an understanding in the funding agencies that Heather Mac Donald lacks: there is an immense group of intelligent, talented, ambitious people who don’t look like Dennis Miller. We have an aging, largely white male professoriate (who, moi?) and we need to take active steps to end the natural tendency to favor people who look like us.

We were the recipient of an HHMI grant for 5 years, and it’s true: part of the deal was being sent a constant stream of information about how to address imbalances in our student population — in fact, the whole grant was about looking forward to the next generation of the professoriate and tapping into diverse audiences. It was helpful and informative.

Another of Heather’s assumptions is that reaching out to black kids or the children of immigrants requires dumbing down the curriculum. It doesn’t. The last HHMI meeting I attended was all about increasing rigor and math skills in biology students. Does she really think the best scientists in the country want to downgrade science education? The message was always, “You have to be really smart to succeed in science, how can we help really smart kids of all colors learn?”

Look here, more coded dog-whistles.

Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those “un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue. The NSF is conducting a half-million-dollar study of “intersectionality” in the STEM fields. “Intersectionality” refers to the increased oppression allegedly experienced by individuals who can check off several categories of victimhood—being female, black, and trans, say. The NSF study’s theory is that such intersectionality lies behind the lack of diversity in STEM. Two sociologists are polling more than 10,000 scientists and engineers in nine professional organizations about the “social and cultural variables” that produce “disadvantage and marginalization” in STEM workplaces.

Of course “un-diverse” scientists were successful! None of this is about saying white students are suddenly inferior — there is no policy in play to shut out wealthy white kids. The goal is to tap into a larger pool of intelligent, science-minded kids of all genders and skin tones. We’re on the path to becoming a minority-majority counter in the next few decades — how do we maintain scientific progress if we only cater to a shrinking group of people on the basis of their skin color and sex, which are totally irrelevant to scientific expertise?

I had to stop reading at the next paragraph, though. The raging racist presuppositions were just too much.

Racial preferences in med school programs are sometimes justified on the basis that minorities want doctors who “look like them.” Arguably, however, minority patients with serious illnesses want the same thing as anyone else: subject mastery.

Why, Ms Mac Donald, are you assuming that giving opportunities to minority doctors will lead to a reduction in subject mastery?

She did all this railing against implicit-bias training, but she’s a picture-perfect, flawless example of implicit bias herself. It would be a useful exercise in recognizing implicit bias to give this article to scientists along with a red pen and ask them to highlight all the examples — as one of those cunning scientists myself, I’d have a quick answer. I’d just pop the pen open, dump the ink into a small beaker of alcohol, and pour it over the paper to give it a nice red wash.

Or maybe it would be quicker to just set it on fire. Fire is red, right?

Jordan Peterson gets burned hard

Whoa, you have to read this op-ed from a retired member of Jordan Peterson’s department at the University of Toronto — and not just a member, but his primary supporter in getting him hired and tenured, and who was good friends with him. Now it’s all regrets.

I thought long and hard before writing about Jordan, and I do not do this lightly. He has one of the most agile and creative minds I’ve ever known. He is a powerful orator. He is smart, passionate, engaging and compelling and can be thoughtful and kind.

I was once his strongest supporter.

That all changed with his rise to celebrity. I am alarmed by his now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency, which I had not seen before. His output is voluminous and filled with oversimplifications which obscure or misrepresent complex matters in the service of a message which is difficult to pin down. He can be very persuasive, and toys with facts and with people’s emotions. I believe he is a man with a mission. It is less clear what that mission is.

I am baffled by all the people who say things like that “He is a powerful orator”. I just don’t hear it — I find him meandering and pointless and weirdly distractable, but OK, I’m just going to have to recognize that some people are sympatico with his lecture style. Every teacher knows that there’s no such thing as a universal communication strategy.

But he really was a strong supporter, initially.

We did not share research interests but it was clear that his work was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical — they felt he was too eccentric — but somehow I prevailed. (Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to hire him because they were “tired of hearing me shout over them.”) I pushed for him because he was a divergent thinker, self-educated in the humanities, intellectually flamboyant, bold, energetic and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring a new excitement, along with new ideas, to our department.

Been there, seen that. Contrary to the right-wing stereotypes of academia, we actually do look for different voices — someone with good credentials who is also enthusiastically radical will get some attention. We won’t necessarily hire them, unless there’s a strong advocate on the search committee, but yeah, that rings true. It’s also sometimes a colossal mistake.

He sat in on some of Peterson’s lectures. This also rings true.

He was a preacher more than a teacher.

We walk a tightrope in the classroom. I think it’s a good thing to be transparent about my biases, but I have to be careful to avoid strong rebukes of students’ ideas — my job is to give them the basics, get them thinking, and draw out their ideas in discussion. I am not the repository of all knowledge, I’m the guy who has read a lot and can steer the class in productive engagement with the material, I hope. That’s not Peterson’s style.

And then it gets weird.

Jordan exhibits a great range of emotional states, from anger and abusive speech to evangelical fierceness, ministerial solemnity and avuncular charm. It is misleading to come to quick conclusions about who he is, and potentially dangerous if you have seen only the good and thoughtful Jordan, and not seen the bad.

Shortly after Jordan’s rise to notoriety back in 2016, I emailed him to express my upset with his dishonesty and lack of intellectual and social integrity. He called in a conciliatory voice the next morning. I was reiterating my disappointment and upset when he interrupted me, saying more or less the following:

“You don’t understand. I am willing to lose everything, my home, my job etc., because I believe in this.” And then he said, with the intensity he is now famous for, “Bernie. Tammy had a dream, and sometimes her dreams are prophetic. She dreamed that it was five minutes to midnight.”

That was our last conversation. He was playing out the ideas that appeared in his first book. The social order is coming apart. We are on the edge of chaos. He is the prophet, and he would be the martyr. Jordan would be our saviour. I think he believes that.

He used to support him, but now he’s seeing serious problems with the man — problems that are probably key to his popularity, but also tell us what we ought to fear in this guy who is basically a religious fanatic on a mission from God.

What I am seeing now is a darker, angrier Jordan than the man I knew. In Karen Heller’s recent profile in the Washington Post he is candid about his long history of depression. Depression is an awful illness. It is a cognitive disorder that casts a dark shadow over everything. His view of life, as nasty and brutish, may very well not be an idea, but a description of his experience, which became for him the truth. But this next statement, from Heller’s article, is heartbreaking: “You have an evil heart — like the person next to you,” she quotes him as telling a sold-out crowd. “Kids are not innately good — and neither are you.” This from the loving and attentive father I knew? That makes no sense at all.

It could be his dark view of life, wherever it comes from, that the aggressive group of young men among his followers identify with. They may feel recognized, affirmed, justified and enabled. By validating them he does indeed save them, and little wonder they then fall into line enthusiastically, marching lockstep behind him. That is unnerving. The misogynistic attacks on the British broadcaster Cathy Newman, after she was humiliated and left speechless by Jordan in the infamous “gotcha moment” of their TV interview, were so numerous and vicious that Jordan asked his followers to back off. These devoted followers are notorious for attacking Jordan’s critics, but this was different. It was more persistent and more intense. That was not outrage in defence of their leader who needed none; she was the fallen victim and it was as if they had come in for the final kill. Jordan’s inflammatory understanding of male violence for which “the cure … is enforced monogamy” as reported by Nellie Bowles in the New York Times is shocking. This is upsetting and sad if you are, or were, Jordan’s friend. But it is also frightening.

Peterson is also getting scathing reviews of his skills as a therapist. Again, he’s not there to help people learn and become better — his goal is to bully people into accepting his dogma, or to pander to their beliefs if they’re already aligned.

Ugh. Just ugh. I can’t believe this fellow has such a zealous following, but then I’ve never understood how people can fall for Deepak Chopra, or Joel Osteen, or Donald Trump, either…but they do.

You mean one of these jerks might actually get a proper comeuppance?

You’ve all been waiting for this: Harvey Weinstein’s perp walk.

He’s actually facing criminal charges for forcible oral sex, a Class B felony in New York state, and he could get as much as 25 years in prison, if found guilty.

This was not a lightly made decision by his accuser, Lucia Evans.

Evans told me, of her experience with Weinstein, “I know how this has changed my life for the worse. How he took away my self-esteem and personal power. And knowing I can take it back, and stop him from doing that to another woman, I couldn’t let that go.”

“Harris’ moral landscape is cratered with artillery and pock-marked with bullets.”

I’m glad someone else is paying attention to Sam Harris, because I just can’t. Too many years of wrestling with creationists has given me some nasty allergies to bad reasoning and arrogant codswallop. But at least Marcus Ranum has the spine to tear into Harris’s terrible arguments defending Israel’s atrocities. It’s long, but worth reading.