I would have guessed Tom Brokaw was one of us…he isn’t

I just heard that interview with Old Tom Brokaw in which he exhibited that common disease in the journalism profession, that attempt to sympathize with bad people to the point you lose sight of the fact that they are, in fact, bad, and you begin to share their views (see also Jonathan Haidt, who is not a journalist, but has acquired a terminal case).

And a lot of this, we don’t want to talk about. But the fact is, on the Republican side, a lot of people see the rise of an extraordinary, important, new constituent in American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats. Also, I hear, when I push people a little harder, “Well, I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.” I mean, that’s also a part of it. It’s the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other.

I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.

If you don’t want “brown grandbabies”, that’s simply racism. No matter what shade their skin is, they’re still grandbabies, and still your grandbabies.

If you don’t like intermarriage, that’s simply racism. Don’t pick who you love by their skin color, and don’t demand your children share your weird racist color preferences.

Demanding assimilation is just another way of rejecting differences. That’s simply racism. I see Hispanic people moving into rural Minnesota, and while they may initially struggle with the language, they’re adapting quickly and their children are fluent in English. How fast do you expect them to “assimilate” anyway? Are you expecting them to abandon pride in their family and their heritage, too?

I’ve looked into my family history, and I see a series of Norwegian farmers who settled in Minnesota, and then kept bringing in Swedish mail order brides every generation, almost as if they were refusing to assimilate and insisted on Scandinavian families, rather than melding with the American mongrels. My great-grandparents’ house was full of yellow and blue and knick-knacks in Swedish and Norwegian, and they spoke with a heavy accent that was the result of a lifetime in exclusively Scandinavian-American communities. Were they bad assimilators? Am I unamerican because I still like the Nordic foods of my childhood and still celebrate Swedish/Norwegian traditions?

I don’t even know what “assimilate” means in the minds of these people. Liquify and blend? Because that doesn’t happen. We are who we are. Hispanic people are adding a new strand to our communities, and the only reason they might tend to vote Democratic is because Republicans think like Tom Brokaw. He can go back to celebrating his “Greatest Generation” while ignoring how awfully racist and sexist that generation was.

Reagan Redux

Donald Trump has been telling this story about souped-up cars driven by bad guys who run the border with women tied up (with blue tape!) in the trunk, and finding prayer rugs in the desert left by terrorists. It’s all a lie. He’s making shit up. Where did it come from?

…there’s a movie called Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which was released last summer, and which included a woman being tied up with tape, smugglers driving vast vehicles, and officials finding prayer rugs in the dirt near the border.

Again, just so we’re all clear, the movie is real, but the story is fictional. The script was written by screenwriters, not documentarians. The plot of the film is made up, as are the characters and developments that unfolded on screen.

As Rachel added, “In a normal administration, it would be insane to suggest” the president of the United States saw stuff in a movie and maybe thought it reflected reality. And who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence.

We’ve been here before with a president who can’t tell reality from fiction.

It was Reagan, you might remember, who told an annual meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society about a World War II B-17 commander who elected to stay with a wounded crewman rather than bail out of his stricken plane. “He took the boy’s hand and said, ‘Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.’ Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded.”

Actually, Congressional Medal of Honor never awarded. There’s some dispute about where Reagan got the story. Some said it was from the 1944 movie “A Wing and a Prayer” while others cited a Reader’s Digest item. Whatever its source, Reagan’s account was not true.

We have a madman at the helm, and he’s forcing us to ride it down together.

Trump has to have been informed that his story is false. Next time he tells it, someone tackle him, put him in an ambulance, and take him to the nearest hospital for a thorough neurological examination.

I keep turning down these honors

Gosh, you’d think I’d welcome the attention. I just got a call from an apologetics group asking if I’d consider debating Frank Turek next fall. My answer:

“Debates are a tool to give bad ideas, like those of Frank Turek, an undeserved platform. No.”

He was a nice guy on the phone, but I’m done with being nice to creationists. Oh, wait, I was done with that 30 years ago.

Advice for new professors

I was there once. I remember working in a research position where almost all of my colleagues were white men, and then getting a job where I had to work with large numbers of diverse students, and it was a major change. Fortunately, I buckled down and paid attention to all those workshops on bias and seminars on effective teaching, and I started out with a relatively large amount of respect for students with different backgrounds. You may think that it’s all administrative make-work, and that you just want to get back to work in the lab, and that it is the job of the students to accommodate you if they want to learn at your feet, but that’s not reality. You are part of a community of learning that includes students, and every part of the machine must be respected and treated well.

Learn that, and you won’t make the career-wrecking mistake this assistant professor did.

Although it may not be just her fault; that two other faculty members came to her to ask for help identifying wicked students who committed the egregious sin of speaking their native language suggests that there is a widespread problem at Duke University. I have two points to make about this remark: They were disappointed that these students were not taking the opportunity to improve their English and were being so impolite as to have a conversation that not everyone on the floor could understand. The first is that foreign students are going to get better practice in mastering English by listening to faculty in their classes, which are all in English, I ‘m sure, and by communicating with the majority native English-speakers in their community. Why are you seeking to hobble the ability of two fluent Chinese speakers to talk to each other? And second…why the hell do you think you have a right to listen in on the private discussions of students?

Also extremely dismaying is the implicit threat: they want to know the names of these students so they can deny them opportunities for internships or for work in their labs, and the department chair is amplifying that threat. This is completely unacceptable.

Megan Neely has resigned from her position as director of graduate studies in that program, which is entirely appropriate. No word on what happened to those nosy professors who wanted to blacklist a couple of students for a private conversation. It seems to me that this ought to provoke a major effort to get all the faculty in Duke Biostatistics into bias training, which will piss off a lot of them, but this is what happens when you neglect basic information on what ought to be university-wide standards for the people you promote to administrative positions. Apparently you all need to have your understanding of civil behavior refreshed.

Even old professors can royally fuck up and set a bad example for their colleagues, like this bozo:

Yes. Anxiety is a disability. I’ve had students force themselves to come into my offices, voices trembling and sweat streaming off their faces, because they’re terrified of authority (it’s not because I’m scary, I’m a teddy bear — they were somehow afraid of big mean old people generally). I’ve had students seize up and break down at the prospect of taking a test, even when they were competent on the material. Every university has policies in place to tell faculty what accommodations they must make for disabilities. They have ways of dealing with these problems. Every semester I’ll have two or three students who come to me with a note that says they’re not going to take tests in class — instead, I drop off exams at the library, where they have quiet rooms where they take the tests in a supervised but consistent and less stressful environment. This is a good thing. My job isn’t to make students suffer, but to make sure they comprehend the science I teach so they can succeed in subsequent courses and in their careers.

Also, don’t belittle students with disabilities.

The key thing to understand is that you are there to help students learn, not to create an obstacle course. When I teach a course in, for instance, ecological development, I’ll often include an assignment that involves public speaking in class — but if a student tells me that they’re totally wrecked at the thought, I’ll come up with an alternative that involves just as much work and allows them to demonstrate mastery of the material, because while public speaking is an important skill, it’s also not the primary subject of the course. Can you show me that you understand development? Good. I’ll recommend that they might want to take a separate course in communication in the appropriate department, or offer other options, like making a video for the class.

Maybe part of the problem is that people think they’re climbing a hierarchy and that they’re being given dominion over everyone with a lower rank, rather than that they’re joining a web of mutual responsibilities. Hierarchical thinking really does mess people up.

The most disturbing news yet

Insect populations are crashing.

“We knew that something was amiss in the first couple days,” said Brad Lister. “We were driving into the forest and at the same time both Andres and I said: ‘Where are all the birds?’ There was nothing.”

His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming.

Look at these numbers.

The Puerto Rico work is one of just a handful of studies assessing this vital issue, but those that do exist are deeply worrying. Flying insect numbers in Germany’s natural reserves have plunged 75% in just 25 years. The virtual disappearance of birds in an Australian eucalyptus forest was blamed on a lack of insects caused by drought and heat. Lister and his colleague Andrés García also found that insect numbers in a dry forest in Mexico had fallen 80% since the 1980s.

Data on other animals that feed on bugs backed up the findings. “The frogs and birds had also declined simultaneously by about 50% to 65%,” Lister said. The population of one dazzling green bird that eats almost nothing but insects, the Puerto Rican tody, dropped by 90%.

Lister calls these impacts a “bottom-up trophic cascade”, in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain.

“I don’t think most people have a systems view of the natural world,” he said. “But it’s all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect.”

Exactly. We are part of a complex web of interdependencies, and it’s also a non-linear dynamical system. There’s a word for when parts of such a system show a pattern of failure: it’s called catastrophe. By the time you notice it, it’s too late to stop it.

I do enjoy a good Pinker-dunking in the morning

Did you know that Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is full of misleading claims and false assertions? It is! And this article takes an interesting approach to documenting it: the author focuses on one chapter, on a topic he knows well, and contacts a bunch of people Pinker references and asks them if he represented their views correctly. A surprising number say no, and explain why.

I am not a fan of neo-liberal techno-optimism, as you might guess. It’s always just some well-off dude trying to persuade people that we can ignore systemic injustice because he’s doing just fine.

Those wacky billionaires!

Michael Dell, the billionaire, was asked what he thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to increase the marginal tax rate to 70%. He didn’t like that at all. His reasoning was mostly skewered by a competent economist on the panel, who pointed out that the US had that rate for quite a long while during a period of strong growth.

But I was amused by another point. He claimed he donated more to his charitable foundation than the increased rate would take from him.

My wife and I set up a foundation about 20 years ago, and we would have contributed quite a bit more than a 70 per cent tax rate on my annual income.

That seemed unlikely. So I had to look it up; my source is Forbes, which is going to be biased in favor of billionaires. I am aware that the 70% would be taken from his earnings for a year, and this number is apparently as a fraction of his lifetime earnings, so there’s a bit of apples/oranges comparison going on here, but as I suspected, he’s not giving away as much money as he implies.

I’m pretty sure 5% is a lot less than 70%.

Not covered in just the bare numbers is the way billionaires use philanthropy as a tax dodge, and to manipulate the target population in a way that benefits them personally. For that, I’m going to recommend this podcast, “The Neoliberal Optimism Industry”, which explains the game these arch-capitalists are playing.

We’re told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times’ Nick Kristof explained “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History.” The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates’ favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by – who else? – Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media… bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it’s actually the opposite.

For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true – just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be “measuring” improvements in society?

On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything’s going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence.

All those names really do have to be among the first lined up against the wall when the Revolution comes.

Alt-right trollery deciphered

If we count USENET (and of course we do), I’ve been active on social media for over 25 years, and now, finally, someone explains the mentality of those asshole trolls. This is required watching for anyone who has gotten exasperated with those annoying ‘online debaters’ who have evolved into Kekistanis and Trumpsters and other odious labels.

It is helpful to realize they’ve got no substance behind them, and they’re really just here to entertain themselves by throwing gravel in the works.