Sometimes, we do have to respect the humanity of those we despise, no matter how repugnant we find them.
Me, right now
I am all caught up on my grading — until Friday, when it starts all over again — so I could have used some happy, wholesome news. Instead, I got this:
Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.
The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender.
The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out, sometimes killing the baby long-tailed macaque monkeys in the process.
I mentioned this horrible monkey torture ring before. Does it count as good news that several people are going to prison over this activity, or is it bad news that such horrors exist at all? This is a better question than whether the stupid cup is half empty or half full — should we regard the existence of monkey torturers as an indictment of humanity, or the existence of anti-torture laws as an example of humanity’s virtues? I can go either way.
Unfortunately, then I read about 764, the torture ring that’s all about kids torturing kids. We should probably all just get off the internet.
My son, Major Conlann A. Myers, has been published in Army Communicator, with a short history and current status of the 51st Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced (ESB-E) (his unit) on page 35, if you’re interested. I know I am. This is the best we get, though – vague statements about the broad general area of deployment, next to nothing about timing.
The 51st ESB-E is postured to deploy to the United States Central Command area of operations (AoR) in 2024 as the first full ESB-E, taking over a mission that has previously been filled from ESBs and providing new capabilities to the area of responsibility. The mission will provide the Army the opportunity to improve the tactical network supporting U.S. forces in the AoR with the newest equipment and prove out the ability of the ESB-E concept to fully replace existing ESBs.
We know it’s soon and it’s the Middle East, and we’ll be worrying the whole time.
If I lived a good bit further east, I’d be here this afternoon:
There have been several days of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and Barnard College, which is not surprising. That’s what students should do; if other students want to rally for Israel, that’s fine, too. Unfortunately, the administration does not understand free speech at all, adopting the right-wing definition that says you are only allowed to freely agree with them.
They turned the police loose on the students. Protest leaders were summarily dismissed from the university, and evicted from housing, given minutes to clear out and get out.
They attempted to shut down the campus radio station. They prohibited students from putting posters on their dorm room doors. They colluded with conservatives to silence any protests.
The students sat on the ground and sang as police in riot gear approached them. Eventually, more than 100 of them would be arrested; their tents, protest signs and Palestinian flags were gathered into trash bags by the police and thrown away. One video showed officers and university maintenance workers destroying food that had been donated to the encampment, making sure it would be inedible. According to student journalists reporting from WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station, one arrested student protester asked the police to be allowed to go to their dorm to collect medication and was denied; as a result, they went into shock. The arrested students were charged with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged more than $60,000 a year to attend.
The day before her administration asked the New York police department to storm their campus and arrest their students, Minouche Shafik, the Columbia University president, testified before Congress, saying that she wanted her university to be a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. But Shafik, who was called to testify after missing a hearing last year where the presidents of Penn and Harvard were each grilled on their insufficient hostility to pro-Palestinian students, appeared eager to please the Republican-controlled committee. The Penn and Harvard presidents who had testified each lost their jobs soon thereafter; Shafik clearly entered the hearing room determined to keep her own.
A “safe and welcoming environment,” hah. Shafik and others made a knee-jerk over-reaction to the existence of opinions that their moneyed conservative interests disliked, and suddenly they’re the Gestapo. Students have since occupied one of the lawns at the university with tents and banners flying, and you can guess how the administration is reacting.
In yet another sign of the ongoing division between students and faculty on one side, and administrators on the other, the Barnard and Columbia faculty members of the American Association of University Professors have loudly deplored the actions of the administration.
Joint Statement by the American Association of University Professors,
Barnard and Columbia Chapters
April 19, 2024
The American Association of University Professors has defined two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance: the freedom to teach and do research without interference from entities external to the profession; and the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students.” In the last three days, Columbia University President Shafik and her administration have seriously violated both. We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs. She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students.
President Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17 has profoundly disturbed us. In the face of slanderous assaults on Columbia faculty and students and of gross interference in academic practices by Congressional inquisitors, President Shafik not only did not object—she capitulated to their demands. Academic freedom was formulated from its very beginning to safeguard faculty from political or other non-academic sources of intrusion. President Shafik, the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees, and the former Dean of the Law School allowed this freedom for Columbia faculty to be publicly shredded. They effectively pledged, on the Congressional record, to end academic freedom at Columbia.
President Shafik’s decision on April 18 to call upon the New York Police Department to arrest over one hundred students for engaging in a peaceful protest is a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance. Section 444 of University Statutes, put in place after the police attacks of 1968, requires “consultation” with the University Senate executive committee before anything so drastic as yesterday’s attack would be permitted. President Shafik’s administration did not consult; they informed the committee of its decision. “The Executive Committee did not approve the presence of NYPD on campus,” said the Executive Committee Chair, adding that the Committee came to their decision “unequivocally.” President Shafik’s decision to invite the NYPD to campus was thus undertaken unilaterally, disregarding the very idea of shared governance.
In Wednesday’s hearing, President Shafik repeatedly claimed that she was inaugurating a new era at Columbia. Her actions thus far suggest that this era will be one of repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty. As the protesters’ chant rightly states, “Protest is democracy; this is a travesty!” AAUP Barnard and Columbia pledge continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise. We have lost confidence in our president and administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university.
The administration is selling out the university and betraying faculty and students.
“It’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor who was on the school’s lawn when the police entered. “The students were extraordinary. Chanting. Crying. It felt like a total violation of everything an academic institution is supposed to be.” She said the arrests were political theater aimed at appeasing Congress without concern that students were collateral damage.
“Palestine was always going to be the issue that broke this university,” said Ry Spada, 24, a history major who is Jewish and was part of the pro-Palestinian protest Thursday night, identifying as non-Zionist. “This year and this topic.”
James Applegate, an astronomy professor who is part of the executive committee of the Columbia University Senate, said he is more concerned about what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the ongoing loss of academic freedom and the culture on campus than he is about police making peaceful arrests of student protesters.
I don’t even understand that last comment. Students are being arrested, dismissed, and evicted — it’s important to stand on principle, but these are young people who are being actively harmed. I stand with the students and a liberated Palestine. This isn’t stopping, and shame on any college professor who supports the tyranny of Columbia University and Barnard College.
I don’t think my local theater is planning to book this one, so I’ll probably have to wait until it’s streaming. It looks like a hit to me!
I made a brilliant planning decision way back at the beginning of the semester. Bless you, Fall Term PZ!
My big course this term is EcoDevo — big ol’ textbook, lots of papers from the scientific literature, all new lectures, etc. One part of the course is that the students have to do presentations on aspects of eco devo that interest them, and I scheduled that for the last two weeks of the class, which is coming up. That means I have no new lecture prep coming up! My weekends have been frantic this year: Saturday is dedicated to reading and studying, and Sunday is spent assembling those one hour lectures and putting together lists of concept questions. But not this weekend!
My second biggest class is called BioComm, and it’s a course in which I shepherd students through the exercise of writing a formal research paper, and this term by a terrible miscalculation I have 8 students. It’s too many. Never again. The problem is that I have to personally read these long papers in multiple steps of their development, and it’s a hell of a lot of grading and criticizing and revising. And here it is, the end of the semester, and there’s a pile of 20+ page papers sitting in my in-box.
So this is where I planned brilliantly: the weekends where I don’t have to work to make content for my eco devo course, are these final weekends where I instead have to read and mark up a monstrous mountain of student writing assignments! Perfect dovetailing! Two courses meshing smoothly together to bring me to the brink of insanity, but not quite over the edge into a gibbering breakdown!
My biocomm students get another chance to address my criticisms next week, so next weekend will be similarly consumed with a returning pile of papers, but then, in two weeks…FREEDOM! Spider time! Also I get to spend the summer preparing for yet another new class in the fall, so even my relatively free months have wicked shackles holding me back.
The last time I met Dennett was at a Darwin Day event where we were a double bill. We had a good time, he told me stories about his heart surgery, mentioned that all he really wanted to do was get away to his farm and make apple cider, we got to talking about evolution, and I told him I didn’t care much at all for his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — it was naively adaptationist. He asked my opinion of free will, and I told him I never argue about it, because it was all an illusion and it didn’t matter whether minds had it or not. We got along famously, and corresponded for a while afterwards, until the fact that I was disenchanted with Dawkins, despised Harris, thought the whole idea of the “four horsemen” was disappointing jingo, and that sexism was poisoning everything, made me persona non grata among prominent atheists. Oh, well, we were friends for a while.
Now Dennett has died. That’s a sadness, because he was a good guy and brought a thoughtful, humanist perspective to atheism. I hope someone is taking care of his apples.
With Hitchens and Dennett dead, and Dawkins doddering on the edge of irrelevant crankiness, I guess that leaves young Mr Harris, the least of the quartet, holding the legacy of the Four Horsemen, and that propaganda concept can now fade away, unlamented. Dennett’s legacy will continue and his books are worth thinking about, even when I disagree with them.
I’m so used to thinking of myself as a radical iconoclastic weirdo, but now you’re telling me that I’m actually holding traditional American values?
Maybe I am the real conservative here? This is messing with my identity.
I’ve never played Warmhammer, never owned any of the books or models, and I only just today learned something surprising.
Numerous Warhammer players are cancelling their subscriptions and announcing a boycott of Games Workshop after the company retconned their Adeptus Custodes faction to add females.
The surprise is that they never had feeeeemale characters in their game before? What?
Following this retcon and the subsequent gaslighting from Games Workshop, numerous hobbyists, enthusiasts, and former customers have cancelled their subscriptions to Games Workshop’s subscription service Warhammer+ and have pledged to boycott the company going forward.
On April 14th, X user GrimmDark1 shared a screenshot of him canceling his subscription. He wrote, “Kiss my a** GW. Not another penny.”
He explained why he canceled and why he’s boycotting in a subsequent post, ‘For those asking “wut happen?’ GW disrespected their lore by changing decades old lore of the Custodies only taking males from the highborn families of Terra to become Custodies to ‘Nah women can be Custodies now too, and they’ve totally always been a thing since the beginning! Even though they’ve never been mentioned in any codex or BL book before. We totally aren’t doing this for ESG money from Blackrock and Vanguard!’.”
Uh, OK. They need to realize that it’s a game, and it’s already got a complicated and twisty lore, so adding one more twist is nothing that radical. But great, sure, stop playing, no one is forcing you to play, and in particular, no one says you have to play the one faction tainted with the imaginary scent of pretend womankind. Gamers are weird, man.
Is this part of the article a joke? Or are these people this delusional?
This boycott of Games Workshop and Warhammer due to its obvious embrace of feminist ideology can only be seen as a good thing because it means less people will be subjected to future propaganda that Games Workshop will inject into its games, books, and TV shows. It also means the demoralization that comes along with this propaganda will be blunted.
This demoralization was noted by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov who warned about it back in the 1980s. He shared that this demoralization campaign employed psychological warfare techniques to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite an abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their family, their community, and their country.”
He elaborated, “It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it’s divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy- exposed to the ideology of the enemy in other words Marxism, Leninism ideology is pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism. American patriotism.”
It’s good to be reminded of what the general public finds important, and what it doesn’t.
If you don’t like graffiti look away like you do for genocide
