You can’t teach this

It might make someone uncomfortable about racism in America.

It’s a crime to ring a doorbell while black in America.

Ralph Yarl, a 16 year old Black boy, was shot twice by a white man in North Kansas City after accidentally ringing the doorbell of the wrong home while attempting to pick up his sibling. The white man reportedly shot Ralph in the head through the glass door, then when Yarl was already bleeding out on the ground, shot him again. The family has described it as a hate crime, and community members are calling for justice for the young victim.

The perpetrator of this vicious crime is in jail, at least. He is in jail, right? Right?

Reports indicate that the white man was taken to the police headquarters briefly to provide a statement but was released shortly after without charge. Yarl’s family is outraged that the perpetrator has not been held accountable.

Unbelievable. He shot an unarmed boy who only rang his doorbell, and put a second bullet in him while he was lying on the ground, and the police didn’t recognize that he committed an act of attempted murder? Let me guess: Missouri has a ‘stand your ground’ law.

Things you won’t be able to teach in Tennessee

Unacceptable in Tennessee

The Tennessee senate has passed a bill to restrict what may be taught in their universities. The bill is fairly long, including rules for assessment and enforcement, but I’ll just excerpt the list of “divisive concepts” you may not teach.

(1) “Divisive concept” means a concept that:
(A) One (1) race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex;
(B) An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously;
(C) An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race or sex;
(D) An individual’s moral character is determined by the individual’s race or sex;
(E) An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
(F) An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex;
(G) A meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist, or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress another race or sex;
(H) This state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist;
(I) Promotes or advocates the violent overthrow of the United States government;
(J) Promotes division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people;
(K) Ascribes character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex;
(L) The rule of law does not exist, but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups;
(M) All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
(N) Governments should deny to any person within the government’s jurisdiction the equal protection of the law;
(O) Includes race or sex stereotyping; or
(P) Includes race or sex scapegoating;

Great! (J) means we can kick the Young Republicans off campus.

You can see what they’re trying to do, and it’s antithetical to the university’s purpose. I agree that one race or sex is NOT inherently superior to another, but does this bill mean I couldn’t discuss that, at all, in the classroom, even if my goal is to discuss how I came to that conclusion? We’re just supposed to accept it by legislative fiat? Hey, all you students, memorize this statement, don’t question it, your Republican overlords demand it.

Some restrictions I vehemently disagree with. We can’t say that This state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist? But it was and is. We were founded on slavery, women weren’t allowed to vote, etc., and Tennessee Republicans want to prevent people from saying the facts?

Even better: they can fine you up to $5 million for saying what I just wrote.

I can tell where the Republican obsessions lie. This is implicitly a bill against diversity, or any questioning of the wealthy white male American imaginary version of reality. Consider that earlier this year the GOP chastised a new member of the state congress for not conforming to the unwritten laws of what a congressperson looks like.

“If you don’t like rules, perhaps you should explore a different career opportunity that’s main purpose is not creating them,” wrote the Tennessee House GOP on Twitter.

The tweet was a reply to Rep. Justin J. Pearson (D-Shelby County), writing, “We literally just got on the State House floor and already a white supremacist has attacked my wearing of my Dashiki.”

A dashiki is a traditional West African loose-fitted shirt. On Thursday, Pearson wore a black one in the chamber.

(Foreshadowing: later, they’d find an excuse to kick Mr Pearson out.)

A dashiki is respectful, and can be a formal, kind of attire. They have a dress code that both requires a conservative Western style, and has different requirements for men and women. But hell no, they don’t enforce any kind of discrimination. It’s a meritocracy, don’t you know.

Springtime

Just yesterday I was savoring the rapid retreat of the piles of snow heaped up by the roadside, enjoying a nice long walk on sidewalks that were not covered with ice, and anticipating the flourishing of spiders everywhere — I even released about a hundred surplus lab spiderlings in my yard and garage. Today…

Cold. Windy. Light snow. Spring!

Maybe social media shouldn’t be for profit?

Here’s a radical idea: social media and capitalism are not a good match. Everyone is trying to force-fit human social interactions into a pay-to-play capitalist box, and it’s just not working.

Parler — remember Parler? One of those Twitter-substitutes fueled by conservative billionaires, promising no content moderation at all, used to plan the January 6 insurrection? That Parler? — just died. It will not be missed.

Parler, the self-described “uncancelable free speech platform,” has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a “strategic assessment.” The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says.

The Parler website is now a simple page containing only today’s press release announcing the acquisition, which was completed without financial terms being disclosed. “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp.

“While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities—even extending beyond domestic politics,” the press release said. No timing for a return was mentioned.

Yeah. The uncancelable has been canceled by market forces, as a luxury that wasn’t a “viable business.” It wasn’t. It takes a real shock to get conservatives to recognize reality.

Then there’s Facebook. Facebook makes money, although the amount is declining, but it relies on selling people’s personal information to marketers — it’s less a social media company than a colossal siphon for collecting data that it can manipulate and sell to those who want to take advantage of users. What it offers as an inducement to draw in those users is the worst of human nature, giving grifters and attention-seeking fools free reign. Facebook is great if you want to sell trash to the gullible and demolish democracy as you go, but Facebook is what you get when you fully meld social media and capitalism. It’s not a good example.

Ah, Twitter. Poor Twitter. It was fun while it lasted, but now it’s been taken over by egomaniac and incompetent businessman, and is being run into the ground by a bad man whose “focus appears to be on cutting costs and making Twitter profitable.” On the one hand, I feel like we should kill it while the Nazis are lying on the ground, helpless and twitching, but on the other…it turns out that Twitter has been integrated into the world-wide disaster response network.

For years, Twitter was at its best when bad things happened. Before Elon Musk bought it last fall, before it was overrun with scammy ads, before it amplified fake personas, and before its engineers were told to get more eyeballs on the owner’s tweets, Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.

We started taking it for granted, that buried in the noise was a genuine public good that could be used to help people. That wasn’t a side of the service that made money, though. At least, not until some soulless clever dicks decided that maybe they could exploit that capability for their profit, unaware that the utility vanishes when you start demanding cash to save people’s lives.

Unfortunately, the platform is becoming less useful as a way of monitoring chatter about developing events. Twitter announced on February 2 that it would end free access for researchers to its application programming interface—a mechanism that allows people outside the company to gather and analyze large quantities of data from the social-media platform. Relief workers have frequently used API access to determine where supplies and other resources are needed most.

Four days after the company’s API announcement, a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing at least 46,000 people. In an enormous geographic area, API data can help narrow down who is saying what, who is stuck where, and where limited supplies should be delivered first. Amid complaints about what abandoning free API access would mean in that crisis, Twitter postponed the restriction. Still, its long-term intentions are uncertain, and some public-spirited deployments of the API by outside researchers—such as a ProPublica bot tracking politicians’ deleted tweets—appear to be breaking down.

Social media can be a valuable tool for a society, but not when some capitalist or autocrat somewhere is monitoring it to milk every drop of advantage from it so they can actively harm its users. That’s the fatal flaw: the free flow of information is a strong social good, but when people exploit it for profit it’s no longer free.

What beast emerges from the dark depths?

This is exciting. I’ve written about my compost bin before, which has been a rich source of spider lore — a partially closed habitat, the domain of some large dark spiders that build their cobwebs in a place rife with buzzing insects.
The bin has been inaccessible for months, buried under snow. Today the snow had retreated enough that we could hobble over slick, crunchy ice to get to it and throw back the lid. What did I see?
First, fresh silk, new cobwebs laid across the corners. Somebody had been working hard. Then, suddenly, at one side, a massive spider loomed out of the darkness — a fully grown, adult male Steatoda borealis. His presence tells me something: he’s much too large to be a recent hatchling, so he must have overwintered down in the dark, sheltered from the storms, huddled in the fermenting warmth of the compost.
We closed the lid and let him be. I’m sure there are more down there who will creep out in the next few weeks to rebuild a thriving colony.

If you want to see this massive unit of a tough Minnesota spider, you can go to Patreon or Instagram. He’s big and dark in shades of red and black with thick strong limbs and glowing eyes.

The only reason to pay attention to the haters is to shame them

A borough in the UK posted an innocuous tweet, suggesting that people should go in for cervical screening. They had to take it down because a small minority of haters complained that the words “anyone with a cervix” was offensive to women.

The wording was just fine! It was inclusive and was a message to an appropriate audience. In fact, if you look at the thread, there’s a deluge of support for it, with swarms of people, cis and trans, chiming in to see that the message was good and they appreciated it. There were also, of course, a few indignant assholes whining that only women have cervices, and they were the ones they had to listen to, because Calderdale deleted the tweet.

Those few vicious, mocking tweets are the modern equivalent of this, an ugliness that will stain us all for years to come:

Meanwhile, in the science world, the journal Nature is updating their policies. Language matters.

It is regrettable but true that researchers have used and abused science to justify racist beliefs and practices. As previous editorials have acknowledged, Nature has played its part in perpetuating racism — and has now pledged to play its part in tackling it, together with colleagues in the research community.

As part of this pledge, Nature and the Nature Portfolio journals are updating our advice to authors on reporting research that involves race, ethnicity and other socially constructed characteristics. Specifically, we’re asking that authors exercise care and consideration so that the highest standards of rigour are applied where these attributes are found to be an explanation for an outcome or conclusion. This is part of our ongoing updates to guidance asking authors to describe how demographic characteristics, including sex and gender, are considered in the design of studies — and, more broadly, to consider the research’s potential to cause harm.

They aren’t asking a lot. This is what Nature expects now, and I was a little surprised…shouldn’t this have been standing, routine policy all along?

So, what are we asking authors to do, if their research describes people according to race, ethnicity or other socially constructed categories? Essentially, three things. First, specify the categories used and explain why such classification is needed. Second, explain the methods used to describe people in this way — for example, did study participants self-report, or did the information come from a census, social media or administrative data? Third, we would like authors to describe how they controlled for confounding variables, such as socio-economic status. These requests will be added to a paper’s reporting checklist so it is a part of the usual editorial and publishing workflow.

I’m not going to publish in Nature, and the kind of work I do isn’t going to touch on issues of race and sex (although some will try to force it!), but I would have thought that if you were doing work in those areas of sufficient prestige that it would be published in top-tier journals, those rules would have been already incorporated. You can never underestimate the devious efforts of bigots, though!

Naked corruption

It’s all just hanging out there, exposed, flapping rudely in the wind, and we’re supposed to pretend that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t selling out the country. The story is simple and transparent.

Thomas’s mother lived on some property owned by Thomas. Harlan Crow paid Thomas $133,363 for that property, and then allowed his mother to continue to live there rent-free afterwards, and in fact renovated the house, put on a new roof, a nice fence, etc.

Crow was the best landlord of all time!

Of course, what it all was was a pretext to put a whole lot of money in a judge’s pocket and curry favor with him. Thomas knew this; he rather obviously avoided reporting the whole money shuffle to the government, and tried to hide the source of this sudden largesse.

“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”

Oh, really? You think? I’m not wondering at all. Hint to ethics lawyers everywhere: the time for understatement is over. This is time to suspend him from the bench while impeachment proceedings are begun. I’d go so far as to suggest it’s time for handcuffs, except we all know that white collar crime by high-ranking federal officials is going to be treated with kid gloves, instead.

See also Robert Reich’s take on this situation.