A gathering of freethoughtbloggers

We’re doing this again, only this time I’m planning ahead a bit more. At 3pm Central, I’ll be hosting a few more of the bloggers on this network — exactly who will be a surprise.

We’ll go live at 3 or thereabouts. I think you can also do a text chat here with us.

Our guest was Matt Herron of Fierce Roller, and we talked about the evolution of multicellularity (a very cool subject — he works on Volvox, which is right there on the boundary between colonial and multicellular organisms), a little bit about weird creationist ideas, and a bit about social justice in the science community. Check out his blog!

You are not being censored!

Well, probably. Not most of you anyway.

We stealthily migrated to a new host server in the dead of night, and everything went smoothly except for a few minor glitches…one being that our comment whitelists kinda got lost. If you posted something and it did not get automatically approved, give it a little time and we’ll get around to whitelisting you again.

If we like you, that is.

Enough with this buggy hosting service

Freethoughtblogs is moving! We’re not getting much help with the bugginess from our current hosting service, so we’re packing up the ol’ collection of data and moving it to a new site. This’ll be mostly invisible and painless, but there might be a brief lockout tomorrow or the day after as the transition is made. The pattern of glitchy interruptions should end early this week.

Open thread

We are currently struggling with technical difficulties — we’re up, we’re down, we’re taking forever to load, pages pop up instantly, you just don’t know what you’re going to get when you visit freethoughtblogs today. So for those who brave the hostile technology, say what you want, while we hammer on the infrastructure.

Where is the money going?

If you read these tales of the horrifying reality of the academic job market, you will learn that adjunct professors are paid a pittance, and often have to do piece work, teaching multiple classes at multiple colleges to make ends meet. They’re getting paid next to nothing for what ought to be the central work of the university. So the money isn’t going into their pockets.

And then you learn that many universities are relying almost entirely on adjuncts to do their teaching.

It is insane to see that my department has only 3 FULL TIME PROFESSORS and 20 ADJUNCTS!!!

So the cash must all be flowing into the pockets of those 3 professors? Nope. Most tenured professors are making a comfortable middle class income, but aren’t getting rich. Tenure means stability, not wealth. If you’re looking for a profession that will give you opportunities to rake in fabulous sums of money, don’t look to the professoriate.

The students must be laughing themselves to the bank with all of their cheap educations, right? No, you know that’s wrong: skyrocketing tuition costs have been the order of the day, and students are graduating with legendary debts, debts that would have been unheard of for my generation. Money is pouring in, but it’s not going to the educators.

It’s going to academic parasites like Elsevier. It’s going to academic bureaucracies that have lost sight of what their institution is for: we have big advertising goals that are not necessarily in alignment with making the best damn university we can. We sink cash into college athletics, without assessing whether it actually benefits our mission. The highest paid state employee in most states is the college football or basketball coach, which is utterly nuts.

If you look at the methodology behind college rankings, it’s all stuff like graduation rates (here comes the pressure for grade inflation) and class sizes (hiring lots of cheap adjuncts actually benefits your rankings) and peer evaluation (them that has a good reputation gets a good reputation). It would be really interesting if US News & World Report announced that they were going to multiply colleges’ final score by the full-time/part-time faculty ratio; a lot of schools’ much sought after rankings would tumble down rapidly.

But there are many vested interests that are working hard to avoid having anyone gaze at the teacher-student interactions that ought to be the center of any evaluation of a university’s quality.

Wonder Woman and the alt-right conservative cult

The Wonder Woman movie is coming to Morris this weekend! I’m looking forward to it and will be there, even though I’ve been disgusted and disappointed by all the recent DC comic book movies, and despite the fact that the whole Wonder Woman concept has a complicated and somewhat fraught history. I have hopes that this one will be a step up.

But of course the news is all about the men. Alamo Drafthouse theater chain has announced several screenings for women only, and naturally enough, some arrogant privileged men have staggered back in horror and compared themselves to Rosa Parks for refusing to bow down to this awful discrimination.

I’ve got news for them: this is an advertising gimmick. It is not an announcement that they plan to perpetuate ongoing oppression of men, because men as a class are not oppressed. I know this is a shocker, but you can still see Wonder Woman at another showing, not all theaters are trying this promotion, and besides, why do you want to go to a wussy movie that stars a woman as the hero? Aren’t these the same people who were outraged that Ghostbusters was rebooted with a female cast?

Maybe they should go catch a showing of Bound, or Julia, or Tru Love, or The Hours, which are all woman-centric stories, and men are not restricted from watching them. Or maybe Y Tu Mamá También, very sexy, but also confusing for the manly macho types.

Roy Edroso has thoroughly dismasted all the poor boys complaining about giving women only a first shot at the movie, so I won’t rehash all of it, but his opening paragraph brought up something else of concern.

The Trump Presidency is making it hard for even conservatives to take conservatism seriously, so rightwing outlets increasingly avoid The Leader’s nonsense and console themselves with culture-war fantasies. National Review, for example, recently featured long paens to the conservative values of Billy Joel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and celebrated the holiday weekend with “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Memorial Day Movies” — which they advertised as “films certain to drive your liberal friends crazy,” because they’re war pictures and liberals all think “serving one’s country in uniform” is just something to be “dismissed or derided.” Take that, Hanoi Jane!

I’ve been getting a fair bit of email from young assholes along the lines of “Your son joined the army? You must be so ashamed of him, you pinko liberal pacifist!”, because of course in the republic right now,

  • believing that we should throw soldiers unprepared with no achievable goal into random combat adventures around the globe is patriotic, while

  • believing that a leaner army with less exploitation by defense industries and commitment only to necessary, limited interventions and defense means you hate our troops.

I have a lot of respect for a responsible, restrained military, and none for the armchair generals and gung-ho bloodthirsty civilians who think war is a glorious thing. To assume that as a liberal I dismiss or deride the men and women in the armed services is equivalent to suggesting that because I think Betsy DeVos is a criminally incompetent twit I must also hate education. It’s a stupid deduction.

I am also proud of my army captain son, as I am of all three of my children. One of the things I can be proudest of is that all of them grew up to be their own independent people with their own ideas (that they actually think about). That I was never tempted to join the military does not imply that I consider that decision to be a bad one. I didn’t raise my kids to be my clones.

I also had grandparents and in-laws and uncles who served with distinction in the army, navy, and marines in WWII; I have family in my generation who served; I have nephews who were in the military. The conservatives have a cartoon version of liberals in their heads, and aren’t shy about projecting it on us despite all evidence that they are wrong.