Evils and lesser evils

Does this sound awfully familiar to you: “Democratic politicians who constantly echo courageous populist themes in speeches, news releases and election ads, and then often uses the party’s governmental power to protect the status quo and serve corporate donors in their interminable class war”? David Sirota tears into the smug complacency of corporate Democrats. It felt good to see someone calling them out.

Amid an upsurge of populist energy that has alarmed the Democratic establishment, a new wave of left-leaning insurgents have been using Democratic primaries to wage a fierce war on the party’s corporate wing. And, as in past presidential primary battles, many Democratic consultants, politicians and pundits have insisted that the party must prioritize unity and resist grassroots pressure to support a more forceful progressive agenda.

Not surprisingly, much of that analysis comes from those with career stakes in the status quo. Their crude attempts to stamp out any dissent or intraparty discord negates a stark truth: liberal America’s pattern of electing corporate Democrats – rather than progressives – has been a big part of the problem that led to Trump and that continues to make America’s economic and political system a neo-feudal dystopia.

I’m not going to blame the Democrats for Trump — that’s all on the Republican party. But I will blame the Democrats for failing to provide a compelling alternative. Under the influence of big money donors, the current Democratic party is acting as if they only have to be slightly less insane than the Republicans to win, so they’ve been swirling down the same drain…just with a bit more lag.

He names names, and gives examples of Democratic failures.

Less than a decade ago, with Democratic majorities controlling both the House and Senate, it was the administration led by Obama and Emanuel that bailed out Wall Street, enshrined a too-big-to-jail doctrine for megabanks and – by its own admission – designed the Affordable Care Act to preclude Medicare for All. Obama’s administration did this while Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. It was Democratic lawmakers’ like Delaware’s Tom Carper and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman who helped insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists make sure the ACA also excluded any public healthcare option that could compete with private insurers.

Today, it is House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, from deeply liberal San Francisco, insisting that Medicare for All will not be any kind of litmus test for her party and promising that budget-cutting austerity will govern Democrats’ legislative agenda should they retake Congress.

It is 16 Senate Democrats voting to help Wall Street lobbyists gut post-financial-crisis banking regulations. Those include blue-staters like Colorado’s Michael Bennet and Delaware’s Chris Coons, the latter of which then went on to make national headlines slamming progressives for supposedly pushing the party too far to the left.

It is 13 Senate Democrats, including 2020 presidential prospect Cory Booker of Democratic New Jersey, beholding skyrocketing drug prices – and then voting to help pharmaceutical lobbyists defeat Bernie Sanders’ initiative to let Americans purchase lower-priced medicine from Canada.

It is most of the Democratic Senate caucus recently voting to confirm 15 of Trump’s judicial appointees, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, from Democratic New York, vowing there will be no punishment for Democratic lawmakers who vote to confirm Trump’s supreme court nominees.

I know the arguments: you need money to get elected in our plutocracy, so they need to pander to the wealthy in order to get the minimal, incremental reforms they’ve made. I think that reality is the other way around. They take tiny progressive steps to convince the people to vote for them, so that they can then get the big money from their corporate friends.

The party is too far to the right, not too far to the left. And it’s going to extremely difficult to change, because the Republicans are so goddamned evil that many of us (including me) vote a straight Democratic slate anymore, so they don’t need to change.

Dunning-Krueger, only for racists

Racists don’t know they’re racist, I guess, which is how they can deny racism when it’s right there in their face. Like this cartoon:

That caricature is racist as fuck. It’s not something you can reasonably argue over — there is no debate. It’s done. You can’t draw a black woman that way, in a way that doesn’t even vaguely resemble Serena Williams, except to make a racist point. It looks like something from the 1930s or earlier.

“It had nothing to do with gender or race,” the artist says. Bullshit, says I. He also claims to be completely unaware of the history of racist caricatures, so how was he to know? He’s a cartoonist, that’s how. He’s so completely uninterested in his craft that he never, ever studied cartoons from the past?

Michael Harriot has a few words to say about that.

And not only does Knight’s drawing portray Serena with undertones of classic racial stereotypes, including the apelike stance and oversized pink lips reminiscent of the coon caricature and Sambo cartoons, but he included a pacifier in the drawing, presumably to indicate Serena’s childish actions. You’d never know, from this cartoon, that Naomi Osaka is actually two inches taller than Williams.

It is also revealing that Knight chose to illustrate Osaka as a blonde, fair-skinned damn-near white woman whose complexion is the same as the umpire’s. Unintentional or not, the juxtaposition is clear: Naomi is the quiet, questioning protagonist who, along with the genteel official, is opposed by the brooding behemoth, Serena Williams.

It’s stunning how many people are trying to argue that the cartoon isn’t racist. Damn. Racist is as racist does. It doesn’t have to have the n-word scrawled in sharpie across the cartoon to be racist.

Harriot has a few things to say about American Republicans, too.

  • 52 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election believed blacks are “less evolved” than whites, according to researchers at the Kellog School of Management.
  • In a 2018 YouGov poll, 59 percent of Republicans agreed: “If blacks would only try harder, they would be as well off as whites.”
  • The same YouGov poll revealed that 59 percent of self-identified Republicans believe blacks are treated fairly by the criminal justice system.
  • 70 percent of Republicans agreed that increased diversity hurts whites.
  • Republican-appointed judges give black defendants longer jail sentences, according to a Harvard study released in May.
  • 55 percent of white Republicans agreed “blacks have worse jobs, income and housing than white people” because “most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty” according to the Washington Post’s review of data from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.
  • Nearly twice as many Republicans than Democrats (42 percent versus 24 percent) believe that blacks are lazier than whites, according to the same NORC poll.

Every single one of those opinions are racist as fuck, too. The white people of America are a mob of racists, and the most racist of us gravitate to the Republican party, where they are welcomed with open arms.

What do Australia and the United States have in common? A history of displacing native peoples and justifying it by the claimed intrinsic superiority of the colonizers. Here’s a good summary from an Australian professor.

As Cheryl Harris wrote in her famous article Whiteness as Property, racial regimes based on the theft of native lands and the enslavement of black people produce an association between the fact of being white and the right of possession. Not only are white people given the legal right to take ownership of stolen land, but whiteness itself becomes property, having intrinsic value as a quality that only white people can possess. At the same time, under slavery, black people become property. The privileges that accrue as a result of being white come to be expected by white people so that any threat to their status or their reputation is perceived as illegitimate, particularly when it comes from the racially subjugated.

Both our countries are still dealing with that ugly history…or more accurately, failing to deal with it.

No, Jordan Peterson, Genesis is not an accurate scientific summary of primate evolution

Just watch the wheel of illogic turn in Jordan Peterson’s head.

First, we get a quick summary of the book of Genesis.

A snake gives them an apple, and that wakes them up.

Then he waddles off into a discursion about science. This is key, because he’s going to conclude by using science to validate his version of the Bible.

The reason that humans have such great vision, way better than most animals, except for raptors, is because our visual systems were designed to detect predatory snakes.

Friggin’ bollocks.

He cites a book by a primatologist whose name he can’t remember on this “fact”. The evidence is a lot weaker than he implies.

Snakes were “the first and most persistent predators” of early mammals, says Lynne Isbell, a behavioral ecologist the University of California, Davis. They were such a critical threat, she has long argued, that they shaped the emergence and evolution of primates. By selecting for traits that helped animals avoid them, snakes ultimately endowed us with forward-facing eyes, for example, and enlarged visual centers deep in our brains that are specialized for picking out specific features in the world around us, such as the general shape of a snake’s body camouflaged among leaves.

Isbell published her “Snake Detection Theory” in 2006. To support it, she showed that the rare primates that have not encountered venomous snakes in the course of their evolution, such as lemurs in Madagascar, have poorer vision than those that evolved alongside snakes.

There is no strong correlation. I read Isbell’s paper, and there is no statistical comparison, which would be difficult given the lack of specificity. Here’s the extent of the “species comparisons” she did.

Malagasy prosimians have never co-existed with venomous snakes, New World monkeys (platyrrhines) have had interrupted co-existence with venomous snakes, and Old World monkeys and apes (catarrhines) have had continuous co-existence with venomous snakes.

To which I have to ask, “Why restrict yourself to venomous snakes?” New World monkeys have as much to fear from constrictors as they would from venomous snakes. I think the answer might lie in her reasoning in response to the argument, “but then why haven’t rodents evolved bigger brains and sharper vision?” — it’s because she argues that rather than visual adaptations, rodents evolved to become more resistant to venoms. It’s an entirely adaptationist hypothesis, of course, which is OK…but when an adaptation is turned into an umbrella hypothesis which explains everything with a single cause, I get a little leery.

At least the paper has the best “What have the Romans ever done for us” line I’ve seen in a scientific work.

What besides visually guided insectivory, feeding on fruits and nectar, moving on fine terminal branches, or leaping could favor better depth perception in near space and a better ability to “break” camouflage, both of which are improved with orbital convergence, particularly in the lower visual field?

Her answer, obviously, is “snakes!”

Trust Peterson to ignore the multiple factors that contributed to our pattern of evolution to focus on just the one that he can twist to stand in defense of the fundamental truth of the Old Testament. If only the story had told about how Eve, a hairy, monkey-like creature, crept along the branch of a pear tree gathering ants for breakfast before leaping to the apple tree, finding both a snake and a ripe apple waiting for her…

Once again, though, Peterson is going to use a mention of snakes in the scientific literature to suggest that the authors of the book of Genesis had a startling and anachronistic understanding of evolutionary theory thousands of years before Darwin.

Our visual system, which is the ability to see, and to be enlightened let’s say because enlightenment, for example, is associated with vision, the snake gave that to us because we had to pay attention to predatory things that were after us for tens of millions of years.

Well then. Basically every animal has had to pay attention to predatory things. Do they all get enlightenment? It’s almost as if there has to be more to the explanation than just, “Yikes! A snake!” As if, maybe, the Genesis tale is more of a poetical metaphor than a scientific description of a phenomenon.

And fruit, that’s interesting, we have color vision because we are fruit eaters. Our color vision is precisely evolved to detect ripe fruit.

No it’s not. That’s part of the story.

We don’t have particularly good vision, or even particularly good color vision (the exceptional qualities we do have arise from more elaborate visual processing in our brains). Other vertebrates, like reptiles, fish, and birds have tetrachromatic vision — they have four opsins, or color filters, in their eyes. Mammals are descended from a common ancestor that lived in the Cretaceous and was nocturnal — it foraged in the dark at night, when the less sensitive color opsins were useless, and they lost all but two color opsins. We primates secondarily evolved a third opsin by gene duplication approximately 30-40 million years ago.

So I guess the book of Genesis is all about the catarrhine radiation sometime in the Eocene?

Also, the “ripe fruit” story isn’t as straightforward as he claims.

Another approach in trying to understand how primate colour vision evolved is to examine directly how behaving animals exploit colour information. For this purpose, the polymorphic platyrrhines have provided an invaluable resource, since we know that (i) opsin gene polymorphisms responsible for the colour vision variations in platyrrhine monkeys have been maintained by natural selection over long periods of time and (ii) individual monkeys in these species are forced to deploy strikingly different colour vision capacities to achieve common life-supporting goals. Studies of such species can ask, for instance, whether animals with alternative colour vision arrangements are better or worse at particular foraging tasks. In tests run under semi-natural conditions, trichromatic monkeys proved to be more efficient at gathering foods predicated on the use of colour cues than were dichromatic conspecifics. Although such outcomes imply that trichromacy could have evolved in the service of efficiency in food harvesting, other research suggests that the story may be more complicated than that. For instance, several sets of observations made on monkeys feeding in natural circumstances found no causal relationships between colour vision status and efficiency in foraging. Supporting this conclusion is a recent examination of the efficiency of fruit gathering in polymorphic spider monkeys (Ateles) that also detected no differences between dichromatic and trichromatic animals. This experiment focused specifically on foraging that is conducted over very short range (within an arms length) and the physical feature of the target fruits that best predicted foraging efficiency was not colour, but rather luminance contrast, a cue that should be equally available to trichromatic and dichromatic viewers. It may be noted that short-range foraging such as this also allows for the exploitation of various non-visual cues.

Researchers have had little difficulty in identifying potential advantages that might explain why colour vision evolved in the way that it has among the primates, but so far have had less success in demonstrating which among these may hold greater importance or, indeed, whether any single set of circumstances may provide a general explanation. Future studies on this topic will no doubt continue to exploit the exceptional opportunities for study offered by the polymorphic platyrrhine monkeys, while having to pay closer attention to the physical details of the viewing environment operative for a range of natural behaviours.

Always question those pat answers that ascribe a complex phenomena to a single cause. Our color vision is a contingent property of a fortuitous event in a successful distant ancestor; we’ve opportunistically used it in our species for many functions, whether it’s gauging the ripeness of fruit or getting more cues in foraging or detecting social cues or creating art or labeling our side with blue vs. red.

We didn’t get it from a snake peddling apples. But here’s where we see Peterson make the fallacious conclusion that yes, we did, and further, a group of priests in Palestine 2500 years ago had secret knowledge of the evolution of primates in the Paleogene, and wrote a metaphorical history of the catarrhines.

So that part of the story is right.

No, it’s not. The bullshit generator in Peterson’s brain has assembled a rationalization that falls apart when examined by anyone with basic knowledge of evolution.

A useless comic

Wouldn’t most specialty shop delivery trucks have a phone number painted on the side? So you could see what the service offers and immediately pick up the phone and say “Yes, please”?

Frustrating.

Spider status (no photos)

I spent a good chunk of my morning fussing over my spider colony, tidying up their vials and making sure they all had food (crickets for the larger ones, wingless fruit flies for the little guys.) I currently have 10 total adults, 8 females and 2 males, and a countless swarm of spiderlings that I’m gradually sorting out into individual dishes.

The current roster:

Females:

  • Gwyneth
  • Cathy
  • Diane
  • Amanda
  • Emma
  • Xena
  • Sara
  • Larry

The ones in blue have had a successful hatching, and are currently sharing their vial with some unknown number of babies. I’m slowly working on separating them.

The ones in red have an egg sac.

This is promising — they seem to be awesomely fecund. I’m going to have to wait on supplies before I can start doing mad science on the embryos, though. For now I’ll be content with just building up the colony and figuring out what I’m doing.

Uh, about Larry…Larry’s on the small side, and I initially only got a rough look at their morphology with a hand lens, and just today I got a good look under the scope. Larry’s a girl. Come on, people, I’m new at this — I’ll keep practicing at recognizing their sexes.

Males:

  • Barney
  • Harry
  • Fred (deceased)

Fewer males. I don’t know whether it’s due to high mortality upon encountering females, or if it’s just sampling bias. They are smaller and harder to spot.

These are all wild caught adults, found in our garage and sun porch. Credit where credit is due: Mary found them all, and lately she’s been catching them herself. True story: I was just reading papers, and had put together a few vials and things to begin the process of spider catching, when she told me there was a lovely spider on the door of the sun room, and asked was it the right species? And of course it was, so I clumsily scooped up Amanda and took her to the lab. And now Mary has the search image for these spiders locked into her brain, and she prowls around and spots them with her eagle eyes, and I haven’t had to do a lick of work.

They’re afraid! And not very bright.

Nazis loooooove Nietzsche. Or at least, their idea of Nietzsche — the problem is that they don’t understand him. It does make for amusing reading to see someone with a basic understanding of his philosophy tear into Richard Spencer’s juvenile comprehension.

Nietzsche was a lot of things — iconoclast, recluse, misanthrope — but he wasn’t a racist or a fascist. He would have shunned the white identity politics of the Nazis and the alt-right. That he’s been hijacked by racists and fascists is partly his fault, though. His writings are riddled with contradictions and puzzles. And his fixation on the future of humankind is easily confused with a kind of social Darwinism.

But in the end, people find in Nietzsche’s work what they went into it already believing. Which is why the alt-right, animated as they are by rage and discontent, find in Nietzsche a mirror of their own resentments. If you’re seeking a reason to reject a world you don’t like, you can find it anywhere, especially in Nietzsche.

It reminds me of that quote from A Fish Called Wanda.

Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it.

But while they’re just dull-witted apes, they’ve got a dangerous agenda and can do great harm to the country. That’s why it’s good news to learn that the Nazis are terrified right now.

In the days since the Charlottesville rally and as white nationalists have been identified in photos on social media, white supremacists have fretted —often self-pityingly—about the risks posed by social media mobs bent on exposing their identities. In one forum thread on the Daily Stormer, which recently went dark after being cut off by both Google and GoDaddy, a user lamented that the peril of doxxing made attending a rally too scary for him. “The thought of getting outed as ‘white supremacists’ to our employers and possibly losing our jobs is a horrifying prospect,” the user Ignatz wrote. If forced to choose between a rally, which could bring him unwanted exposure, or supporting his white family, he says he would choose the latter.

That’s a bit alien to me — I have the kind of job, with tenure, that would allow me to come out as a white supremacist with little risk of losing my income (losing the respect of all of my colleagues is another thing). I don’t, not because I’m afraid of getting fired, but because this white superiority bullshit is wrong. And I can also use those protections to openly decry racism and misogyny, as every tenured professor should.

Those in the movement who would dare to self-doxx are in the minority, though they exist. “Of course you’re going to have some of those guys who are out there publishing under their own names like Richard Spencer, and there’s constant arguments among the right wingers about whether everyone should [go public],” says Hankes. In the forums, one user struck a defiant tone after being doxxed, vowing “never to cuck out” despite public threats against them. “But, by and large, people are scared because of the exact same reasons you’d expect,” says Hankes. “It’s hard to get a job, hard to make a living, hard to have a normal social life when all your friends and family know you believe in ethnic cleansing.”

It seems just to me. You should have a hard time fitting in and finding support from your community if what you do is advocate is the murder and forced emigration of members of that community.

It’s only appropriate to close with another movie quote, and yes, I am aware of the irony of the fact that the humans in this movie are the fascists.

Dysfunctional academics

The Avital Ronell story was ugly enough, but now more critics are emerging. This one is from a former colleague of Ronell’s who was displaced by her as head of the department, so there’s some obvious disgruntlement that might warrant dialing it down a few notches, but even so…the German department at NYU was a dysfunctional mess, largely because of Ronell’s ego.

Before I offered Avital Ronell her job, I’d had many in-depth conversations with her. She engaged my queries with what seemed like understanding. She said she’d throw herself into the building of an integrated study and research program. She promised actively to contribute to department research, conferences and publications. Once she had assumed the position, however, she broke all her promises. She did her best to sabotage the program. She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research. Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism. Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable unless it cited Derrida and Ronell.

Whoa. No one would stand for that kind of nonsense in any department I’ve ever been part of — to dictate content in student work is simply not done. Somehow, I suspect that citing Ronell to criticize her work would not be acceptable.

From her second semester onward Professor Ronell reigned with an authoritarian hand, gloved in her well-proven hypocrisy. Instructors whom I had brought to the department either submitted to her regime or lost their jobs, always according to the letter of the law and in discussion with the dean, never in consultation with members of the German department. Once, she drafted a secret dissenting opinion against the unanimous decision of a commission and submitted it to the dean. The protest we as a department made to the dean against the dismissal of a junior professor fell on deaf ears. He would make no decision that ran counter to the will of the chairperson. The cynicism of Professor Ronell’s reasoning was hard to beat. The dismissal of this junior colleague was in this professor’s best interests, she explained, for she would not have felt comfortable in the department. In fact, Ronell wanted this colleague to leave because she was not prepared to be subservient. Someone else was found to fill in. Sure, the new hire had no experience, but at least she was ready to submit to Professor Ronell.

Now that I have seen — some deans see their role as one of imposing their vision of the discipline in the department. It never works. It only demoralizes the faculty.

The quality of teaching in the department unraveled. The carefully planned program of teaching German literature was ignored. Many students arrived in the department with minimal knowledge of German literature or history. The courses that were meant to correct this no longer existed. Now philosophy, from Hegel to Judith Butler, was taught. But multidisciplinarity quickly deteriorated into dilettantism. Students were encouraged to take philosophy seminars at other universities. Soon, students who had learned about deconstruction and feminism in Paris, but who had no idea who Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth and Alfred Döblin were, were no exception in the department. As one student told me, “We study in a German department where French theory is taught in English.”

I am amazed even today that we succeeded in preventing the inclusion of a clause in the German department’s charter that would have exempted students from mastering the German language. It was Professor Ronell who, in all seriousness, made this suggestion. In fact, however, she admitted students who spoke English and French, but not a word of German — but they had studied in Paris and proven in their term papers that they were Derrida connoisseurs.

She tried to make knowledge of German optional in a German department? OK. That sounds a bit off. That’s like a biology department deciding students can graduate with no knowledge of biology, as long as they know some physics.

And then the article gets brutal.

Now, however, a few commentators will have us know that the case of Ronell is a fresh example of the oppression of a leftist feminist by conservative white men. This political polarization is crude, and its goal transparent: This is war, and ranks are closing around Ronell.

Leftist? Avital Ronell’s father figures are Martin Heidegger and, often quoted and paraphrased, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Who could possibly describe them as left-leaning theorists? If Ronell has a political agenda, it is the liquidation of the legacy of 1968.

In the German newspapers Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ronell has been elevated to the “shining light” of feminist studies. I had to read this description twice before I could believe my eyes. Anyone trying to find a substantial contribution to feminist thought in her work will be searching for a long time. And “shining light”? If pure ignorance did not produce this phrase, then it is simply the reality-denying militancy of ideology. If “light” is supposed to refer to the Enlightenment, this is also a perversion of standards. Few other books in recent years have served the Counter-Enlightenment as well as Avital Ronell’s books. Her hypocrisy serves the commentators’ lack of insight. She likes to cast herself as diabolical and loves the color black — but only in the sanctuary of her inner circle. As soon as her audience grows beyond those confines, she performs a new role, namely, that of the fragile and vulnerable woman.

Everyone has an ideology. That she told everyone what her label was supposed to be doesn’t mean she fit it well, and we should not judge (or avoid judging) people because of the banner they fly. Leftists can be bad people, too.

You, thou, they, who?

I’ve got to thank my students, who helped me out with this pronoun stuff. It’s a habit, but it’s not too hard to break.

Yes, practice—I am trying my best to master this new way of using they despite the fact that, make no mistake, it’s hard. In contrast to the deliberateness of writing, speaking casually is a largely subconscious, not to mention very rapid, act. In addition, pronouns, like conjunctions and suffixes, are a very deeply seated feature of language, generated from way down deep in our minds, linked to something as fundamental to human conception as selfhood in relation to the other and others. I’ve been using they in one way since the late 1960s, and was hardly expecting to have to learn a new way of using it decades later. I thought I had English pretty much under my belt.

We’ve been trained for years to address people one way, and he doesn’t even mention one aspect to it: not acknowledging the gender of the person you’re talking about has been considered offensive.

But as McWhorter explains, “they” is fine as a plural pronoun, has been for centuries, and has only been shunned by those weird grammarians who try to impose the structure of old dead languages on English. I’ve been finding it easier and easier to adapt to reasonable pronoun usage.