Don’t ever play the racist game

A simple question: did Elizabeth Warren have an Indian ancestor? Yes. Definitely. As Carl Zimmer explains, the science is good and robust on this one. Anyone who is arguing that this is fake science ought to be immediately fired from any job that involves setting science policy. Bye, Donald!

More complex question: does Elizabeth Warren have any legitimate claim to any kind of Indian affiliation? Nope, not that she claimed she did. And she played right into Trump’s racist hand.

Warren ended up providing one of the clearest examples yet of how Trumpian rhetoric shifts the political conversation. The woman who is hoping to become the most progressive Democratic nominee in generations is not merely letting herself get jerked around by a Trumpian taunt. She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood. Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X—in this case, race as a biological category. Warren’s video will hardly convince a Trump voter, who will see only a woman who feels that she has to prove something. Trump himself has already walked back his promise of a million-dollar charity donation. Warren, meanwhile, has allowed herself to be dragged into a conversation based on an outdated, harmful concept of racial blood—one that promotes the pernicious idea of biological differences among people—and she has pulled her supporters right along with her.

See? You can understand that it is good science while also recognizing that she’s promoting odious ideological implications that are contrary to her political position.

A Republican, pro-Trump pimp has died

Are we expected to mourn?

I saw a few episodes of that godawful HBO reality show, Cathouse, which featured smug thug Dennis Hof as a brothel owner. It is no surprise that he ran for political office as a Republican, and actually won the primary — Republican voters may be moralizers, but they’re also the biggest hypocrites on the planet. He has now died, ending his political aspirations.

I will say he’s one of the reasons I don’t subscribe to HBO. When I’d travel and stay in a hotel somewhere, I’d flip on HBO in the evenings to see what was on, and would routinely see only a few things. One was those dreadful sports documentaries where some lugubrious narrator would drone on about the Cosmic Significance of a boxing match or some sportsball event; the other thing that was always on was that terrible Cathouse show with the women simpering over that bald pompous bouncer guy. Hated ’em both.

I guess his show has been off the air for a while now, and recently every time I’m in a hotel room in the evening it’s nothing but Bill Maher, who always seems like another Dennis Hof, only with hair.

We can be angry for all the right reasons

An interesting take on the psychology of Trump:

Donald Trump is an anger troll. Rage is the one thing he capably nurtures and grows. He stoked anger in people horrified by Kavanaugh’s confirmation and is now turning it against them. This is an old tactic: drive people crazy, then call them so. As projects of government go, this one is as familiar as it is contemptible. He wants to make his followers feel threatened. To achieve this, he needs his opponents to seem irrational. So he sets about making them angry.

He insults them, railroads them, calls people protesting for justice liars and profit-seekers even as he openly enriches his friends. He gives them offensive nicknames and mocks their pain for fun, and to get them to lose control. He’s doing this in plain sight—it’s pretty obvious why people are angry—but his goal is to make their reaction look inexplicable, beyond the pale. After leading angry crowds to yell abuse at anyone he points to, he turns around and marvels at how irrational and dangerous his targets are.

As tactics go, this one is dumb and transparent, but it’s worth describing it because it works. It works a lot. Trump is not a genius. But he instinctively understands the dynamic of provoking and then delegitimizing someone else’s pain. As Adam Serwer wrote, he’s energized by the suffering he causes others and—secondarily—by the bond that ritualized cruelty forges with his base, which has been connected by fear of others. From Trump’s perspective, it’s kind of fun that people feel compassion for the families he separated. It’s delightful that women are worried about rights he has expressly said he wanted to take from them. And, after insulting and belittling people he’s supposed to be governing, he enjoys acting surprised that they mind.

It’s a silly and ugly game, but it’s the only true rule of Trumpism: be the sorest winner imaginable. Aspire to nothing but power and status. Hold no principle sacred. Withhold justice and insult those who object. Yes, the effects of this are predictable. It doesn’t take a genius of social engineering to be the “why are you hitting yourself?” guy. All it takes is a willingness to be him.

Yeah, that’s the man. But it’s only half the problem: the other half is an electorate that falls for it every time, that fails to recognize that a lack of principle and a narcissistic need for power are bad things, and not a sufficient reason to give the narcissist the power he craves. Slightly more than half the population sees right through him and is really pissed that the orange troll has gotten what he was after — they are righteously angry — and the remainder have completely fallen for the lies and are in a mad race to hurt themselves even more.

We need to own our anger, because that’s the alternative. Our rage is aimed at a deserving target, their rage seems to be self-inflicted.

Arachnophobia is irrational

You are allowed to have irrational fears, and it’s fine if you have a personal aversion. What is not fine is when you use that irrational fear as an excuse to disrupt other people’s lives, as has happened lately with ten schools in England closed for three weeks because headteachers were afraid of a spider infestation.

Hundreds more children have been told to stay at home after the presence of false widow spiders has closed a tenth school.

Thousands of families have now been affected by closures across east and north London since last week after infestations of the venomous were discovered on school sites.

Parents have spoken out against the disruption caused by schools deciding to close their doors for up to three weeks on the discovery of the spiders, calling it “over the top” and “ridiculous”.

John F Kennedy Special School became the latest school in Newham to close due to spiders on Friday. Campuses in nearby Stratford and Beckton have also been closed for the foreseeable future.

These spiders are close relatives of the ones I’m working with — apparently, they’re finding Steatoda grossa in the schools (I’ve got Steatoda triangulosa and Parasteatoda tepidariorum). They can bite, and cause an unpleasant blistering and rash, but you have to really torment the little beasties before they can do any harm. OK, I can imagine schoolkids doing exactly that, but the problem isn’t the spiders, it’s the malicious little thugs in your classroom.

But here’s the thing: you can’t get rid of them. They’re everywhere. They tend to hide in out of the way corners, so you probably don’t see them very often, but really, they are ubiquitous. Lately I’ve been searching for them and have become fine-tuned to spotting them, and they’re everywhere: they’re in your homes, your attics, your garages; they are lurking under your bed and other furniture, they’re quietly making cobwebs in the corners of your window frames, they’ve filled up your crawlspaces and the spaces within your walls. If they’re in the schools, they are in the students’ homes. They love those nice shadowy spaces in all human constructions — we’re in a long-term commensal relationship with these spiders. They’re not picking on schools selectively.

I’m sorry, but if you’re going to shut down schools over this routine and mostly harmless occupation by a few small organisms, you’re just going to have to shut down all of England. And Europe. And Asia. And the Americas. The spiders haven’t figured out how to live in Antarctica yet, so I guess we’re all going to have to hide in that continent, quivering in fear of itsy-bitsy spiders.

Until they move in to whatever shelters we build, that is.

The histrionics are over the top. Check out the photos on this article — they’ve got exterminators in biohazard suits hosing down the schools with pesticides. I’d be more afraid of the goop they’re spraying than of spiders.

There’s a heck of a lot more to identity than what genes you carry

I’ve done the 23andMe test. I’m 50% Scandinavian.

More significantly, I knew my great-grandparents personally; my great-grandmother was a Swedish immigrant, while my great-grandfather was part of a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota that had been around for generations. They spoke some kind of Norwegian/Swedish/English pidgin, they had connections with the Old Country, we ate Scandinavian food at home, we went to a church that had services in Swedish and Norwegian.

I think I can confidently say that I’m a Scandinavian-American.

The other 50% of my genome is mostly English/Irish/Scot. That side of my family emigrated to America in the 17th/18th century. All cultural vestiges of that connection have been scoured clean by a few hundred years of history, poverty, and total immersion in this mongrel American pastiche we live in, and they retained no connections with family on the other side of the Atlantic. I wouldn’t be as comfortable with claiming to be a British-American, despite my genes sending a clear signal of my biological ancestry.

Elizabeth Warren is not Indian. A few genetic scraps from a distant ancestor do not make you an Indian, any more than the 0.6% of my DNA that is Iberian makes me a Spaniard.

Bustamante’s analysis places Warren’s Native American ancestor between six and 10 generations ago, with the report estimating eight generations. “The identity of the sample donor, Elizabeth Warren, was not known to the analyst during the time the work was performed,” the report says.

Eight generations back means she’s about 0.4% Indian, with zero cultural association. No Indian tribe recognizes her as a member. I think it was a terrible mistake for Warren to play the genetic essentialist game and essentially vindicate racist arguments about one drop of blood making you a member of a racial group, and if vague rumors of a distant relative being a Cherokee princess makes you an Indian, then a multitude of people who belong with 99% certainty to the oppressor genetic group that committed genocide get to play Indian. This is just wrong.

That said, I have a bit of sympathy for her in that she’s trying to defend herself against a racist bigot who has been mocking her remote, slight Indian affiliation by using it as a pejorative. Warren did not use her ancestry as a tool to gain an advantage, to her credit, and it’s shameful that anyone would think that association with one of the most strongly oppressed groups in this country is a way exploit the system.

We’re now at the point where we’re grimacing a bit at Warren’s exaggeration of her connection to Indian culture, while at the same time we’re tolerating a president who openly expresses contempt for Indian culture. All the hypocrites who are berating Warren ought to be even more aghast that Trump is frequently using “Pocahantas” as a slur. But they aren’t.

Also, it’s naive to think that Trump would pay up on his $1 million dollar bet. He’s always been a welcher.

Jennifer Raff weighs in. She’s an expert on this stuff.