Ooh, 16 September? I’m sorry, I think I have an appointment to scald my skin off with a bucket of boiling hot vomit that night. I guess I’ll have to pass.
Lawrence Krauss should look at that and be reassured that this too shall pass. You can be an alleged rapist and still be invited to share the stage with one of the Big Names, and that Big Name will still welcome you. It’s quite the cozy little boys’ club.
I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It
How often have you heard those fiercely principle free speech activists say that? Too often. How often do they actually mean it? Rarely.
Here’s a perfect example.
On March 3, a small team of conservative activists converged on Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif. live-streaming their actions on Facebook with this description: “Infiltrating Berkeley’s Marxist Hive.”
“Fucking Commie scum,” shouted one conservative activist, taunting the bookstore employees who met them at the door. He wore an American flag on his shoulders and a “Make America Great Again” hat. “We’re gonna burn down your bookstore, you know that right? he said.
I’ve been to Revolution Books in LA, and they also have stores in New York and Chicago that I know of. I like the people there. They also have a thoughtful and wide range of books, and they’re about more than just selling books — they’re community activists, and they work hard to support the poor, ex-cons, anyone. They’re about as Christ-like an organization as you’ll find anywhere, far more so than most churches. So it’s shocking/not shocking at all to see the MAGA crowd threatening to burn them down, and actually making prolonged assaults on their right to exist.
Marxism is at the heart of the bookstore, founded upon the ideals of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party and author of The New Communism. These values make the store a favorite target of conservative activists, and 2017 brought a wave of intimidation and confrontation. Last September, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos made a brief visit to Berkeley, an event that drew police from around the region. That evening, a band of between 30 and 40 right-wing activists stormed Revolution Books. The attackers also recorded that episode on video, rattling windows and confronting patrons.
Following that initial incident, activists orchestrated eight more visits to the store—posting their exploits in online videos. In one clip, a protester elbows a bookstore supporter in the face, smashing his glasses.
The harassment extends beyond physical confrontations. Right-wing activists also “dox” their targets, sharing opponents’ personal information online. In digital forums, these activists have released contact information for bookstore employees, patrons, and supporters. Revolution Books has received up to 60 calls a day from people mocking or threatening the store.
OK, I can’t get into Bob Avakian myself; if you don’t either, fine. But that shouldn’t matter. How can you use free speech to such an extent that you demand that Nazis be given free reign, while threatening and harassing people who sell books? The alt-right has killed people; Revolution Books offers them employment, help, and information. Yet I’ve heard almost nothing until now about this kind of abuse.
The “free speech” pretense is all a lie.
Or it could just be some bored guy’s odd project.
It’s International Women’s Day! Congratulations, ladies, on the one day a year we’ll acknowledge your existence, but you still aren’t getting a raise, and hey, why should we hire you anyway when you’re just going to get pregnant and go goof off with babies instead of doing your work?
To add further insult, the internet is going to be full of indignant stupid men whining about why women get a special day and they don’t, which means someone has to clean up the garbage. Richard Herring has volunteered to do the cleanup, and has begun his long day of informing dull plodding fools that there is also an International Men’s Day on 19 November. It will be simultaneously entertaining and infuriating.
He’s also using it as an opportunity to raise money for Refuge, a charity for women and children who are victims of domestic violence, so you could also donate to that.
I was listening to Monette Richards and Steve Shives talking about #MeToo this morning while preparing for my class. It’s a good discussion, and I only objected to one thing: they talk for a bit about how social media, YouTube, Facebook, etc. was enabling a bold new wave of rotten people. I’m old enough to remember a time before any of those things, and before the internet even.
It was bad then, too.
But it was different. Case in point: look at the John Birch Society. They were thriving in the 50s — they were more mainstream then — and the 60s, and they were peddling some heinous, hateful shit, even without a YouTube channel. They were recruiting racists, they were putting together marches, they were setting up their own private conferences. Even as a pre-teen I was exposed to their horrid dogma (and was repulsed by it — you know you’re pushing bad propaganda when even an 8-year-old can see through it). They were a minority, but they were influential, in a very bad way, and they were more cloaked.
I think the difference is that back then, if you supported an evil organization, whether it was the KKK or the John Birchers, you would proudly tell them, but you didn’t have a bullhorn to announce to the public at large that you were signing on with the bad people. It was more of a surreptitious growth, just as damaging, but you weren’t seeing it flamboyantly displayed. Nowadays when you think the alt-right is just peachy, you openly support it with an upvote or repost on Facebook, or you leave an ugly misspelled comment on YouTube, and everyone knows, oh yeah, those assholes have another fan.
But the point is that those supporters were doing the same thing way back when. It was just quieter. Nowadays the big difference is that everyone is wearing big bold colors that declare where you stand. I don’t know whether that’s better or worse, because the awful reactionary conservatives were pretty pernicious even without their own Facebook fan page.
You can also wear big bold colors that say you are on the side of righteousness by supporting the conference Monette is organizing, Secular Women Work. Attend or get a t-shirt by donating to their kickstarter.
He kind of wants to throw it out.
In the classification system, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species–humans should not be in the animal Kingdom as "God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27). No animals were made in God's image. Humans should be separated out to show this difference.
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) March 7, 2018
How odd. You know, the classification system he’s complaining about was formulated by Carl Linnaeus, who happened to be a pre-Darwinian Christian who also believed in a literal creation of different “kinds” by a god, just like Ham, but without some of the dogmatic stupidity. He’s the one who put humans in the animal kingdom.
Of particular interest is the fact that Linnaeus classified the human species in the animal kingdom. In different editions, he made numerous modifications to the details, but “man” was now part of the natural world, though distinguished by “his” soul. The term “homo sapiens” to describe our species (literally: “know thyself”) is due to Linnaeus, in the third edition.
The reasoning was straightforward. He thought all organisms were created by his god, beetles, camels, and salmon as well as humans, so he had no reason to separate out Homo sapiens as a distinct, exceptional creation event, unlike all those other species.
I think Ken Ham’s religious purity has been tainted, and he’s leaning towards accepting a natural history for animals, and is desperately shoring up human exceptionalism as a refuge for his incomplete beliefs.
He’s probably going to burn in hell for that.
This morning, my wife and I went to the gym, and because the weather the past few days has been the worst — there’s a thick layer of slick ice beneath all the snow — we decided to walk rather than take the car. That may have been a mistake. It’s dangerously slippery for feet as well as wheels, and Mary did take one unpleasant fall (but she’s OK!). It was slow plodding, but the one good thing is that it took us long enough to do the hike that I caught up with my podcasts.
So, as I was picking my way carefully across the glaciers that are our sidewalks, I listened to this episode of Serious Inquiries Only, “Are We Headed for Another Depression? with Dr. Robert S. McElvaine”. Spoiler: the answer is probably, by the way. But they were talking about the history of our two political parties, and how even, over a hundred years ago, the Republican economic policy was all about rewarding the rich and allowing the benefits to trickle down, while the Democrats were all about rewarding the poor and middle class and allowing the benefits to rise up. They cite Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech, which is mostly about monetary policy and is ineffably boring to me, but does include this paragraph:
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Reagan didn’t invent trickle-down economics, it’s been the nasty heart of the Republican party for a long time. They’ve been wedded to evil economic policy for a long time.
But then they also pointed out that the Democrats of that time, especially the Southern Democrats, endorsed wicked social policies, being against civil rights and equality, but then as we all know, in the Sixties, thanks to the infamous Southern Strategy, the Republicans adopted the regressive civil rights stance of the Southern Democrats, and there was a major recombination event. Before 1960, the Republicans had bad economic policy + better (at least, neutral) social policy and the Democrats were better economic policy + terrible social policy. After the Recombination Event of the Southern Strategy, Republicans were bad economic policy + terrible social policy, while the Democrats were better economic policy + better social policy.
OMG, I thought, this was elementary genetics. This is bog-standard theory for one of the benefits of recombination — it can combine deleterious alleles at different loci into single individuals who can then, by their elimination by natural selection, purge the gene pool of multiple bad alleles at once. For example, as mentioned in this recent paper.
Current theory proposes that sex can increase genetic variation and produce high fitness genotypes if genetic associations between alleles at different loci are non-random. In case beneficial and deleterious alleles at different loci are in linkage disequilibrium, sex may i) recombine beneficial alleles of different loci, ii) liberate beneficial alleles from genetic backgrounds of low fitness, or iii) recombine deleterious mutations for more effective elimination.
Cool beans! Now the Southern Strategy makes biological sense to me, at least.
All we need to do is purge the country of the Republican party, and we clean out two deleterious traits at once. That’s something to look forward to, anyway.
A Minnesota Democrat, Linda Slocum, has proposed some sensible gun control regulations for the state.
Slocum’s bill would expand the definition of assault weapons and ban those weapons, prohibit many private gun sales, outline felony charges for possession of bump stocks, silencers and high-capacity magazines, restrict ammunition sales to licensed dealers, and outlaw gun ownership for individuals who fail to pay court-ordered child support.
Those restrictions sound reasonable. Heck, they sound excellent, and I’d vote for Slocum if she were my representative. However, you can guess what happened next.
Thousands of angry emails have poured into the office of state Rep. Linda Slocum (D-Richfield) since she introduced the proposed restrictions, but one of those stood out, reported KMSP-TV.
“He threatened to kill me,” Slocum told the TV station. “(He said,) I have my gun, and I’m ready to come and get you — and it was very threatening.”
Other messages compared her to Hitler, called her a whale or included lewd comments and profanity, but Slocum said she would seek charges if that man called again.
One of Slocum’s aides received what he described as a threatening call while working late on Feb. 26, but state police investigated and decided not to press charges, reported the Pioneer Press.
“He said, ‘You better hide because I have my gun and I know where you are,’” said legislative assistant Adrian Benjamin, who reported the threat to capitol police — which then passed on the report to the Minnesota State Patrol.
And there you have it. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to get rational gun laws in this country — because so many of the gun-fondlers are irrational, violent lunatics, and they are armed.
Lawrence Krauss has been cut off from the Richard Dawkins Foundation and Center for Inquiry, after years of being one of their most prominent featured speakers. Now he has also resigned from the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and has been put on paid leave from Arizona State University.
The university, in a statement issued late Tuesday, said it began a review of the professor’s conduct after it was contacted for the article.
“In an effort to avoid further disruption … as the university continues to gather facts about the allegations, Krauss has been placed on paid leave and is prohibited from being on campus for the duration of the review,” ASU said in a written statement.
Krauss is busy denying everything. It’s kind of shocking how rapidly his academic empire is crumbling around him, but then I have to think of the women who never had a chance to build a little academic province of their own, and I guess I can’t feel too bad about it.
He does still have one bulwark desperately making a last stand for him: Wikipedia.
…as of today, March 5, Krauss’ Wikipedia page has no mention of any recent developments – not the allegations themselves, not Krauss being barred from multiple college campuses, not several of his upcoming talks being canceled. If you look at the talk page, you can see several contributors deleting edits by other users that mention these things, and insisting that the Buzzfeed article is just “gossip” and that “Buzzfeed isn’t usually considered a reliable source”, and that this merits totally excluding any mention of it.
Note: as of today, the 7th, the Wikipedia article does now include a paragraph on the allegations — I guess since the article was touting his ASU position and his leadership of the Bulletin, and those are now no longer operational statements, that had to be amended.
That dismissal of Buzzfeed has become the routine defense of Krauss — and these clever, serious, objective skeptics don’t even seem to notice that they’re committing the genetic fallacy (also, skimming through the wiki talk page, they commit another fallacy: that because these accusations are serious, if they were true, he would have been arrested, therefore they don’t need to be reported. Who needs philosophy and logic when you’ve got the police to do your thinking for you?)
But Adam Lee has an excellent defense of Buzzfeed, so I’ll just let him continue.
While Buzzfeed does publish its share of silly clickbait, their investigative unit employs 20 journalists and engages in serious, important reporting. One of their reporters was a Pulitzer finalist in 2017; another won a Pulitzer prior to being hired there. Ironically, BuzzFeed’s own Wikipedia page has categories for “Notable stories” (significantly, including the sexual-misconduct accusations against Kevin Spacey) and “Awards and recognition”.
As for the journalists who wrote the Krauss story, one of them, Peter Aldhous, has reported for the journals Nature and Science and teaches investigative and policy reporting at UC Santa Cruz. The other reporter, Azeen Gorayshi, has written for the Guardian, New Scientist, Newsweek, and Wired, among others. The editor, Virginia Hughes, has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, National Geographic, and Slate.
If this doesn’t meet the definition of serious, noteworthy journalism, then no such thing exists. Clearly, the Guerrilla Skepticism group is employing their own biased and highly selective definition of “reliable source” in order to avoid mentioning stories that would cast their hero in an unfavorable light, even in a supposedly neutral and comprehensive encyclopedia article. (The State Press, a student-run newspaper at Arizona State University, has since published their own article about Krauss.)
Yeah, you actually have to read the news articles to assess them. I was also surprised, once upon a time — I thought Buzzfeed was synonymous with superficial clickbait. But then I discovered that they had really built up a substantial news group,
with people I knew who had excellent journalistic reputations, and they were really digging deep.
One of the things about Buzzfeed that may rub some people the wrong way is that they’ve run quite a few stories about the culture of sexual privilege and harassment in academia. It’s not so much that they’re a bad news organization as that they’re a very good news organization that isn’t afraid to challenge powerful, influential people.
You know, like we used to imagine journalists were supposed to do.
I should mention that Krauss does still have some other defenders. His scheduled speaking tour with Richard Dawkins in Australia and New Zealand is still on.
Oops. Spoke too soon.
Think Inc. wish to advise that Lawrence Krauss has stepped down from the Science In The Soul shows in Australia and New Zealand this May. The ‘Science In The Soul’ shows will continue with Richard Dawkins with a special guest co-host announcement forthcoming.
— Think Inc. (@thinkincAU) March 7, 2018
Those professorial propagandists probably expected the students to actually read the book — how else could they have come up with such a bizarre idea?
The postmodernists probably also forced the students to think about and analyze the text. <shudder>
