Not as bad as it could have been, not as good as it should have been

This is not normal, and I hate it.

I woke up this morning with a sense of dread, and glanced at the news only briefly. I have been conditioned to expect the worst the day after an election, when I will learn just how stupid and hateful my fellow citizens are, when I will discover that the shrieking losers will march their case to the corrupt Supreme Court to get their election overturned, when the newspapers and fucking 538 will babble excuses about how their efforts to manipulate, that is, “predict” the elections went awry, and we’ll see how much democracy has decayed. There is never any good news but that it is tainted with bad.

So I glanced. Then I closed the news and ran away.

What little I learned: ballots aren’t all counted yet, lots of elections are still up in the air. The “red wave” that esteemed newspapers like the NY Times never materialized — but then, I’ve learned that the media desperately wants a “wave”, and they never happen. We don’t know the final outcome yet, but the newspapers are still yapping about it. I can’t even imagine what the noise on cable news is like, and I’m not going to try to find out.

So my current assessment is short: not as bad as it could have been, not as good as it should have been. Give it a few days.

It’s all part of the brilliant plan to become profitable

The first step in making money with Twitter is to drive away all those scientists. They’re so critical!

Still, with uncertainty about how Twitter will change under Musk, many of the thousands of medical and scientific experts on the platform have started to look for alternatives or are considering giving up on social media altogether. For a while the hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter and #TwitterMigration were trending, and many researchers have been posting their new Mastodon handles, encouraging others to follow them to the site, which has gained more than 100,000 new users within days of Musk completing his purchase.

For the moment, most researchers are waiting to see what happens with Twitter. “I’m hedging my bets with a Mastodon account but not planning to leave in the short term,” says biologist Carl Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom, 163,000 followers) of the University of Washington, Seattle. Many other researchers are doing the same. That means even if little changes for now, the groundwork is being laid for what could quickly become a digital mass migration of scientists.

Once those old crotchety stick-in-the-muds are gone, Twitter will prosper. Just like when chasing away those computer scientists made it possible to sell dancing serfs as robots, and making the neuroscientists roll their eyes at Neuralink opened the door to brain surgery on his fans, and horrifying space science realists makes it possible to sell seats on a rocket to millionaires, Musk has a grand plan. By antagonizing all the rational people, he’s left with a market packed with fools — it’s like those Nigerian prince scams, where the skeptics get turned off by the subject line, but if the mark reads through a whole paragraph, you know you’ve got a potential sucker.

Like Bergstrom, I’m staying on Twitter for now — for the lulz, if nothing else — but I also have a backup plan with an account on mastodon that I set up 5 years ago (I’m on octodon.social/@pzmyers, if you want to track me down). There, I’ve noticed a recent flood of familiar science-related names showing up, which is nice. It’s always been a pleasant crowd over there, but I was sad that I had to go to Twitter to hang out with most of my science-related online pals, and now Twitter is becoming less and less essential.

By the way, if you find Mastodon confusing, DrSkySkull has written a short guide.

It’s best we don’t know

It’s election day, get out and vote if you haven’t already.

Today, I’m going to consciously avoid reading any news, since it’s entirely pointless. The votes will be cast, my staring fixedly at the ballot box will change nothing, the people reading the news have no idea what they’re doing anymore, and there are so many grossly stupid people running for office. It’s best to remain in ignorance until all the chaos has settled, and then I’ll whip off the blindfold to feel the full force of a corrupt system in decay all at once.

Another summary of the “academic freedom conference”

Inside Higher Ed covers that godawful conference.

One attendee of the conference, who asked to speak anonymously as not to run afoul of the event’s supporters or critics, said the room “was not simply full of right-wingers there to hear fringe right-wingers,” as “many from around the country are alarmed at intolerance on both sides of the political spectrum.”

“Both sides do it”. I’ve heard that somewhere before. Maybe they should have included a few people who weren’t fired for sexism or racism or misogyny to show off the Intolerant Left.

At the same time, the attendee said, the meeting “required no scholarly rigor or counterargument, rather it proved mostly a feel-good session for an unfortunate mix of many powerful public voices who deserve criticism, and a few brave people who take unpopular positions and actually deserve to be heard. Clearly, the conference organizers were trying to be provocative in letting the most outrageous be heard, but that undermined the seriousness of harm done to the less outrageous but equally censored speakers.”

The most hilarious comment comes from Jonathan Haidt.

Referencing Cochrane’s additional complaint that liberals had been invited to speak but refused, speaker Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy co-founder and Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, said that there was nevertheless more diversity, more ideological and political diversity, in the room today than in probably any other room anywhere in any of America’s top 100 universities this year.

He is correct that diversity is underrepresented in academia. However, here is a candid photo of the attendees at the con:

I think most universities do better than that room full of old white men. Not better enough, but much better than that.

Also, yeesh, that was a tiny conference.

God’s big money cheaters

Make AiG’s nightmare a reality!

Churches already have so many unwarranted privileges that it’s simply being greedy when they also flout the few laws that constrain them. ProPublica exposes what we already knew was happening everywhere: churches ignoring the law to meddle in politics.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have found 20 apparent violations in the past two years of the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits church leaders from intervening in political campaigns. Two occurred in the last two weeks as candidates crisscross Texas vying for votes. The number of potential violations found by the news outlets is greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns in the past decade, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Under the law, pastors can endorse candidates in their personal capacities outside of church and weigh in on political issues from the pulpit as long as they don’t veer into support or condemnation of a particular candidate. But the law prohibits pastors from endorsing candidates during official church functions such as sermons.

Violations can lead to the revocation of a church’s tax-exempt status.

Oooh, what a terrifying punishment.

Since the IRS has been unable to enforce the law, I suggest cutting through all the hesitations and simply revoke the tax-exempt status of all churches. There’s no legitimate reason that setting up a panhandling shop and calling it a god’s house should make its owners free of property and income taxes. Start rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, you know.