Wow. Tenure expectations are really tight nowadays

You win a Pulitzer prize and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, and you still get denied tenure? Those are standards that are impossible to reach for most of us. There must be extenua…oh. She’s black.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who founded the Pulitzer-winning “1619 Project,” was not offered tenure at her alma matter, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Instead, she was offered a different role with the option for a tenure review in five years.

The reversal from the university, which previously announced the MacArther Fellow would teach in the Knight Chair position that comes with the expectation of tenure, came after conservative pushback to the “1619 Project” but wasn’t supported by the faculty and tenure committee.

Oh, that’s interesting. Tenure comes in stages: first you get a thorough grilling by your peers at the university, and then if you pass that, a recommendation to grant tenure is passed to the regents or trustees or in UNC’s case, a board of governors consisting of people appointed by the state government, who have final say. It’s extremely unusual for a tenure decision by the faculty to be rejected by Those On High — the board usually consists of wealthy donors who have no knowledge of the fields they stand in judgment over, and rejecting a faculty decision is going to make those faculty very unhappy.

Yet they took that step in this case, against an incredibly well-qualified candidate and genuine super-star in journalism. Why? Why would a bunch of political appointees in a politically conservative Southern state decide to break from a policy of hands-off to meddle in an academic appointment?

Failure to tenure Nikole Hannah-Jones in her role as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism is a concerning departure from UNC’s traditional process and breaks precedent with previous tenured full professor appointments of Knight chairs in our school. This failure is especially disheartening because it occurred despite the support for Hannah-Jones’s appointment as a full professor with tenure by the Hussman Dean, Hussman faculty, and university. Hannah-Jones’s distinguished record of more than 20 years in journalism surpasses expectations for a tenured position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.

I think we have a clear case of Konservative Kancel Kulture at work. She’s one of the founders of the 1619 Project, and they reached out and stomped on her.

I’ll be waiting a long time before I hear the usual defenders of Academic Freedom and Free Speech Uber Alles say a single word about the decision, won’t I?

The quacks are calling from inside the house!

Yes, I would like to support my emotional well-being. No, I will not subsidize the Center for Spirituality and Healing to do it. My university has this stupid but well-funded garbage-hole in our midst, the CSH. It’s a disgrace. This is a unit associated with the nursing school that does helpful thinks like bring Deepak Chopra to campus, or teach nursing students Tellington Touch, a technique for waving your hands over a patient to diagnose and heal them. They are very good at leeching off of revenue streams, though.

So I get email to my official university promoting CSH nonsense, and this is a new low, informing me of opportunities to spend money on CSH.

The Center of Spirituality and Healing is offering an online three part workshop, “Mind and Body Tools”. For each session completed, you can earn 25 points. Suggested registration fee is $15 per workshop, sliding scale rates available. See attached flier for additional details and registration information.

Yeah, see attached flier.

Here’s what rubs me the wrong way. The university knows their faculty have been struggling with their workload and with ancillary phenomena like depression and fatigue. This is the first time they offered any kind of assistance for dealing with that sort of thing, and it’s from that nest of quacks they sponsor, and it’s going to be a vague online seminar — you can guess how fed up we are with all that. Then, to add injury to insult, they want to charge us for it.

The points bullshit is part of our “wellness” program. Earn 500 points for various activities, and they’ll cut $500 off our insurance premiums. Yay. We can support an insurance company and a quack center together, just by spending a few hours on a zoom call listening to spiritual pablum. You know what would ruin my emotional health further? Sitting through 3 hours of blithering snake oil salespeople telling me about my chakras.

I’ve got a better idea. Disband the Center for Spirituality and Healing, and take the money saved and invest it in your useful and overworked faculty.

Oh, look. They offer a summer course in aromatherapy! Oh, fuck you, CSH.

I learned long ago that grandfathers shouldn’t drive

Abbey has a whole post about turning my blog topics into a poem…a rather morbid poem, because I guess all I talk about is DEATH and SPIDERS and MORONS. It wouldn’t sting as much as it does if there weren’t a bit of truth to it. All right then, I’ll write about something else then.

How about alcoholism?

I have an ugly family history of alcoholism, which has given me a lifetime resistance to the disease. I’m not about to take up drinking unless, of course, I become suicidally depressed, which could happen, since depression isn’t under anyone’s control. So I’ll never say never, but sure, if my life took a tragic turn, I could imagine trying to drown my grief and end my life in a puddle of vomit while shitting my pants. That’s what I think of alcoholism: it’s an ugly way of destroying yourself if you have such self-loathing that you want to degrade yourself into oblivion. How I came to that opinion was by witnessing such destruction.

When I was a child, I had doting grandparents on my mother’s side. She was an only child, so we were the only grandchildren they’d ever have, and they spoiled us. We often spent weekends at their house, staying up late, watching TV, eating cookies, etc., all the things we do to take advantage of older relatives. My grandfather taught me interesting things: he had a complete woodworking shop, where I learned how to use a lathe and a table saw. He was also an eager adopter of new gadgets, and had an 8mm movie camera, and taught me how to edit film. He was a cool dude, at first.

And then, the drinking.

It was an occasional beer throughout the day, at first. Then a six-pack in the morning. Then he’d have a case by his easy chair, so he wouldn’t have to get up to pop a warm can of Pabudschlitz, or whatever, when he felt like it, which seemed to be continuously. By 10am he’d be soused, slurring his words and veering frequently into racial commentary. When I was a pre-teen, though, I’d sometimes still be left in my grandparent’s care, and sometimes Grandma would be off doing grandmotherly things, and the moment of dread would arrive (no, not what you think):

“Hey boy, let’s go for a drive.”

This where I acquired my grim Nordic fatalism. We’d get in his land yacht, which was always some huge monstrous boat of a vehicle (it was a rule in the 1960s that the older you got, the wider your car had to be), and set off on an Epic Journey. He’d never get above 10-15 miles per hour, wobbling all over the road, terrifying the telephone poles, and stopping at every intersection to peer around blearily to figure where he was going. I could have told him. North on 1st Ave, left on Willis and a quick right, on to Meeker street, then left and right one block up, then pull into the parking spot. Our destination was a bar, of course. I think it was called the Moonlight Inn? Moon something? I don’t know, I’ll just call it the Memory Hole Inn.

We’d stop. He’d say, “Wait there, I’ll be right back.” He wouldn’t be. I’d sit in the car for maybe an hour or so. One time I got fed up with waiting, and walked into the Memory Hole Inn to see what was going on. It was the only time I ever set foot in the damned place.

It was dark. Lights were dimmed, there was a long dark wood bar, there were dark booths, dark tables, dark chairs, some benches upholstered with cracked red vinyl. It was dead quiet, except for the occasional clink of glasses. There was my grandfather, sitting alone at a table, slumped over a half dozen empty shot glasses. He noticed me and without a word we went back to his boat of a car and drove back to his house.

I cannot communicate the terror of driving with my grandfather, because I took it like a good little nihilist. He didn’t drive fast, just erratically. We were doomed, I’d probably end up with a broken neck or a face lacerated with shattered glass, but I would just sit there quietly as the world lurched by in unexpected proximity. Not even a seatbelt — this was the 1960s, after all — and I just contemplated with despair the tree branches that might punch through my eye or what ditch my sad little corpse would adorn.

I loved my grandfather, you see. If he saw fit to take me on a cruise on Naglfar, who was I to object?

Far more revealing, pehaps, was when he drove with my grandmother (she had no license, had never learned, 1960s yadda yadda). She lacked the Norwegian grimness, you know. When Grandma was in the car, she clutched the armrest with one claw, had the other braced against the dashboard, and would frequently shriek “NEHMEN!” Every moment we were one second away from Hel, and she let us all know it. While I was sitting quietly in the back seat, calmly thinking “we’re going to die any moment now” and goggling about owlishly, resigned to my fate, she was howling “WE’RE GOING TO DIE” while preparing to murder Grandpa in revenge. She was obviously the bravest woman I’ve ever known, with the courage to repeatedly mount the doom ride.

Also, she managed to stay with her husband as his drinking worsened, as oral cancer mangled his face, as he descended into foul-mouthed impotent rage, sitting in his chair howling his hatred of women and Asians and black people. At least he was unable to drive at all!

So today I am a grandfather, and my wife is a grandmother, and we’re getting ready to get into a car and drive across the state to see our granddaughter. There won’t be even a whiff of alcohol vapor anywhere in the car or from my person, because I learned my lesson early on. I learned a lot of things I shouldn’t do from Grandpa. Mary will still be terrified of my driving — I think it’s a Scandinavian Grandmother thing. We’ll probably survive, especially if I let her do all the driving.

So. I’m getting ready to go to Wisconsin. We’ll probably make frequent stops to see how the spider population is doing along I-94. Iliana won’t have to wonder what Grandpa is doing, he’ll be hunched over a spider web rather than a collection of shot glasses, which I think is an improvement.

What’s that smell in the air? It’s the reek of Bill Gates

Finally, the touch of Bill Gates is being recognized as the taint that it is. The New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Guardian are all writing about his terrible ideas, I talked about it yesterday, and Rebecca Watson has a video on it.

I’ve despised him since the late 1970s, when he wrote his paean to capitalism, a letter berating the Homebrew Computer Club for pirating his version of BASIC. Don’t you know that because he wrote a BASIC interpreter, he now owned BASIC and you all had to pay him for his two months of work…forever? That’s been his philosophy ever since.

Now he has written a book (I think; did he have a ghostwriter?): How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. The hubris is impressive. Does he have any expertise at all in climate science (or epidemiology, or education, all topics he has pretended to have mastered)? No. He’s a college dropout who spent most of his life marketing a monopoly. Now he’s so obscenely rich he can throw all kinds of money around to get reviewers to publicize his stupid book.

Why would anyone buy a book by an unqualified rich person on a complex topic? Go read Michael Mann’s book instead. He knows what he’s talking about.

I expect Jeff Bezos to come out with a bestseller on labor management now.

Finally, Bill Gates gets called on his BS

All the philanthropy in the world won’t erase his character — especially when all that money is coming from the accumulation of excess wealth. Bill Gates is getting scrutinized rather intensely, and it turns out he was the subject of internal investigation at Microsoft over his philandering. And there’s more! A while history of coming on to women in his employ!

And while it’s unclear whether the revelation about or investigation of the affair in question was a contributing factor to Gates’ recently-announced divorce from his wife of 27 years, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, it is an example of a longstanding pattern of questionable behavior by Gates. According to the New York Times report published on Sunday, Gates pursued multiple women who worked for him at Microsoft and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. As soon as she wrapped, he reportedly emailed her and asked her to dinner. “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” Gates wrote in the email, which was shared with the Times. The employee said she did feel uncomfortable and ignored the request.

What could make this worse? Let’s throw in his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein!

Her concerns over Gates’ priorities were only compounded when the New York Times published the 2019 article “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” which detailed the men’s meetings together. While Epstein was connected with many wealthy and powerful people, “unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes,” the Times said. At the time, Bill told the publication, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” But The Daily Beast reported on Sunday that “the billionaire met Epstein dozens of times starting in 2011 and continuing through to 2014 mostly at the financier’s Manhattan home” to discuss Gates’ “toxic” marriage.

A Gates representative denied the allegation: “Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein— on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein.”

His only salvation: give away all of his money and retreat into obscurity, where he’ll never again be able to meddle in affairs beyond his competence.

Uh-oh — I don’t think the metaphor works

This cartoon does sort of accurately illustrate how Muller’s Ratchet works, but like any metaphor, it drags in a lot of baggage.

Here’s what I don’t like: every step involves intent. In the metaphor, every change has a purpose and brings in a functional element in addition to the random noise and degradation, and the recombination step is portrayed as combining specific, useful parts. Intelligent design creationists will love this cartoon, which is too bad.

I guess my primary objection is that last panel that says “…if you have an image editor that lets you spice together parts of two images, you can make a new version with the best parts of both“. Recombination doesn’t discriminate what parts are best. It’s random.

Good advice for new graduates

Adults are rubbish! Don’t trust us or listen to us except for this one thing which is: immediately form yourself into a huge ferocious army of wild youths and destroy everything! Storm the offices of every fossil fuel organization in the world and geosequestrate them all!

Don’t ask us to do that. We’re old and tired and comfortable and we’re leaving it all up to you.

The rabidly martial rhetoric of that bad philosopher, Peter Boghossian

Whew. Peter Boghossian has gone full on crackpot. He’s nuttering along like a Baby Mussolini, claiming he is the true and rightful defender of Western Civilization (whatever that is), and declaring war on everyone who disagrees with him…because it’s really important that we allow freedom of expression…? Yeah, he’s that incoherent.

People want you to think a certain way, but let’s be clear about something. I’m done playing, I think Douglas is done playing, I’m waging full scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western Civilization. I am taking no prisoners. I have very large scale projects coming for the enemies of reason and science and rationality. These people are divisive neo-racist hatemongers, and there’s simply no…we must broker zero tolerance with this ideology, and the only way forward at this point is full-scale ideological war and I will take no prisoners and that is what I’m devoting my life to. I will…I seek the complete eradication and extirpation of the ideology from every facet of life.

His rant reminds me of this classic exchange.

Bluto: Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

Otter: Germans?

Boon: Forget it, he’s rolling.

He’s just reciting martial cliches. He’s not going to eradicate or extirpate anything. He’s not going to take any prisoners because he’s not going to have an opportunity to capture anyone. It’s all noise and posturing.

Boghossian was never much of a presence in the now-defunct New Atheist movement. I remember when he started appearing on the scene, and it was almost entirely by attaching himself leech-like to the most horrible, controversial phonies around, like Molyneux, which was amazing — Boghossian is supposedly a philosopher, but he was endorsing a ridiculous cult-leader whose “philosophy” is an incoherent mish-mash of racism and misogyny? I dismissed him then, but now he seems to think he’s been promoted to be the General Patton of conservative atheism.

There’s more, and recently. Here’s an hour-long video in which he gets together with Bruce Gilley and Dennis Linthicum to complain about diversity and tolerance in academia.

In case you have no idea who those other people are, Bruce Gilley is head of the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Scholars, a fringe political organization funded by right-wing millionaires which deplores “political correctness” and wants “a return to mid-20th-century curricular and scholarship norms, and an increase in conservative representation in faculty.” Yeah. One of those. Gilly himself became notorious with his “scholarship” that decreed that colonialism was a good thing. Fascist organizations everywhere clamored to have him defend their views.

The German parliament, the Bundestag, is rarely an exciting place, and even less often the site of debate and protest. But in December, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) managed to scandalize the German public by hosting an academic lecture on German colonialism.

The speaker the AfD invited has made a name for himself as a colonial revisionist in the most literal sense: Bruce Gilley, professor of political science at Portland State University, became the subject of global debate in 2017 when the (small but renowned) journal Third World Quarterly published his essay “The Case for Colonialism.” In it, Gilley argued not only that colonialism was “objectively beneficial,” but also that it should be reconsidered as a model of governance for countries in the Global South today. Critics, while scandalized by the proposal itself, mainly focused on the question of how a paper that was “blind . . . to vast sections of colonial history,” contained major “empirical shortfalls,” and was essentially “the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes” made it through peer review. As it turned out, the paper had been rejected by three peer reviewers, and the decision of editors to publish it without consulting the editorial board of Third World Quarterly led to the resignation of most members of the board and the retraction of the article.

He takes the interesting position that sure, there were excesses in colonialism, it wasn’t perfect, but all the hand-chopping and murder and rapes were reactions to the resistance offered by the colonized people, and wouldn’t have occurred if they’d just accepted the gifts of Western Civilization. Meanwhile, the collapse of post-colonial nations wasn’t really caused by the colonial institutions and the history of depradation, but was just the true nature of those people emerging, justifying further the loving hand of colonial imperialism.

Dennis Linthicum is a politial non-entity — a Tea Party member of the Oregon senate, one of the chickenshit Republicans who went into hiding in 2019 to undermine Oregon’s efforts to combat climate change. His contribution here seems to be to recite lists. He’s an incredible bore.

And finally, Peter Boghossian seems to have been invited because he is a notorious asshole who is comfortable with the likes of Gilley and Linthicum.

They got together to whine about the university imposing a race studies requirement in the curriculum, and about the university prioritizing diversity, which they claim is racist (that’s what he means by “neo-racist”) and against academic freedom. How dare they address contemporary issues, rather than pretending it’s still 1950!

At about the 16 minute mark, Boghossian gets on another roll.

Let’s be blunt about what we face. We face a group of small-minded, petty ideologues who have hijacked a public institution, who are hell-bent on ripping down Western Civilization. This is explicit in the doctrines of Critical Race Theory. They have created a system and a structure in which any form of dissent is punished as the new heretic, you are a heretic and you have committed blasphemy against the ideology. This is an ideology that proselytizes the consciousness of what is ordinarily…people who are ordinarily reasonable. What this is not is a partisan issue.

Not a partisan issue, which is why he got together with his far-right pals to rant. Sorry, if it’s not a partisan issue, where are the people who are not right-wing ideologues in this discussion?

I have news for Boghossian: there aren’t any universities that are trying to tear down Western Civilization. The destruction of America isn’t explicit or implicit in Critical Race Theory — if anything, the idea that we should come to grips with the failings of Western European and American history is the only way to save this culture.

You know, sometimes people are just plain wrong, an idea I’m sure Boghossian would agree with, and pointing out that people like Boghossian and Gilley are wrong in their interpretation of history and culture isn’t labeling them as heretics, any more than telling someone they don’t understand vaccines or the shape of the Earth is branding them as heretics. Boghossian is wrong about just about everything. He’s also an ass.

I expect he won’t have his platform as a member of academia for long. He’s an untenured assistant professor with a history of uncollegial behavior who is happy to condemn his institution, so I would be very surprised if he were retained — he has already been denied promotion to associate professor. He’s going to be reduced to fantasizing about running over “Wokists” with a tank without an academic title.