Going nuts over a flute

I had heard about it, but hadn’t seen it until now: apparently Lizzo desecrated a sacred, holy artifact of the Founding Fathers. That is, she played a flute once owned by James Madison. You can see it for yourself here…along with the over-the-top reactions of Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, who were outraged about something.

Don’t ever let them try and tell you that they aren’t racist. There is absolutely no other reason to be upset that a professional flautist played a flute while black that was owned by some guy who owned slaves in the 18th century.

How can you research the science of race when bad actors are eager to distort your conclusions?

There are interesting questions in the population genetics and evolution of different human groups, and it would be nice if there weren’t wretched ideologues who will happily misinterpret every difference between two groups of people, or even two people, to turn a description of differences into a ranking of superiority. It’s the Jordan Peterson problem of turning everything into evidence of a hierarchy.

Jedidiah Carlson provides some specific examples of how the right wing mangles research. It’s easy to see when the current fad is for murderous mass shooters to provide manifestos with their interpretation of the science; they are happy to name the credentialed scientists who provide fodder for their delusions.

The Buffalo shooter’s scientific bibliography has clear echoes to a similar citation scandal that arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this era, the National Front (NF), a neofascist political party in the UK that had been steadily growing throughout the 1970s, distributed a series of pamphlets with articles referencing mainstream academic research. Their goal was to justify the organization’s platform of ethnic nationalism, white supremacism, and eugenics using contemporary science. The first wave of NF propaganda proclaimed, “scientists say that races are born different in all sorts of ways, especially in intelligence. This is because we inherit our abilities genetically.” Here, the NF cited the work of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen, two of the most vocal proponents of the hereditarian theory that genetics could explain IQ differences between racial groups. Steven Rose, a champion of radical science and coauthor of Not in Our Genes with Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, lambasted Eysenck and Jensen in a 1978 letter to the editor of Nature, calling upon them to “publicly and unequivocally dissociate themselves from the National Front and its use of their names in its propaganda.” Eysenck and Jensen both complied with Rose’s request, albeit without a hint of apology for the societal harm their research precipitated. Eysenck asserted that he was “absolutely opposed to any form of racism” and claimed that “No-one familiar with Professor Jensen’s or my own writings could possibly misinterpret our arguments about the mean differences between various racial and other groups with respect to intelligence as implying the kind of policies advocated by the National Front.” Jensen echoed this self-absolving and patently false sentiment but also took the opportunity to lash out against his leftist critics for being, as he believed, as guilty as the far right in their desire “to promote and to gain public acceptance of a particular dogmatic belief about the nature of racial differences.”

That’s fascinating. Jensen actually tried to argue that oh no, he’s not a racist!, while producing some of the most outrageously bad pseudoscience defending racist discrimination. This is an ongoing problem in recognition, because it is common for racists to deny they are racist, while promoting awful garbage that they will never deny. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, “Jensen worked hard to develop a reputation as an objective scientist who “just never thought along [racial] lines,” and to portray critics of his racist conclusions as politically motivated and unscientific.” Right. That’s why he has a long entry at the SPLC.

Jensen is way, way out there, and it’s patently obvious that he was a screaming bigot manipulating the data to support an evil conclusion. But there have also been other scientists, less aggressive about their racism, who have been quietly smuggling bad science into the literature. How about kindly old Grandpa EO Wilson, who, after his death, was found to have been supporting all kinds of openly racist ideas? On the one hand, we’re supposed to objectively evaluate scientific ideas, but on the other, we’re supposed to somehow ignore the biased presuppositions that have led to those ideas, which makes no sense. People regarded sociobiology with suspicion when it first came out, because we were supposed to consider only the limited set of facts presented within it, but somehow we should overlook the fact that it quickly acquired a following among the worst kinds of people, the ones who wanted a racist conclusion and could read between the lines and see that sociobiology was a tool to reach that conclusion? Only racists are allowed to see the obvious interpretations, critics are “politically motivated and unscientific”, which provides a useful ratchet to make sure only the racist perspective gets widely disseminated.

So what do we do about subjects like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, which promote, with the authors’ open consent and approval, bad ideas like genetic reductionism or determinism? I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of censorship, so perhaps a better idea would be if the various channels of scientific communication, the journals and blogs and so forth, were more proactive in rejecting work that is so clearly constructed around fallacious premises? Good luck enforcing that. The gatekeepers seem to have mostly bought into the bad ideas, since they’re typically privileged beneficiaries of the biases.

And then even work in which the authors were not advocating racism (near as I can tell) will be chewed up and twisted by malicious actors to arrive at a malicious conclusion. There’s no avoiding that.

Much of the scientific community’s outrage in the aftermath of Buffalo centered around the shooter’s citation of a paper colloquially known as the “EA3” study (Lee et al., published in 2018 in Nature Genetics). This study, carried out in over 1.1 million individuals of European descent, identified hundreds of genetic variants associated with “educational attainment” (often abbreviated to EA)—i.e., the number of years of school completed, often taken to be an “easy-to-measure” proxy for intelligence. The shooter’s reference to the EA3 study came in the form of a screenshot of a plain-looking document (figure 1) proclaiming, “The latest findings on genetics and intelligence show that biological factors contribute to the gap in intelligence between European and African populations.” Beneath this image, the shooter weighed in with his own interpretation, punctuating his earlier claims that “whites and Blacks are separated by tens of thousands of years of evolution, and our genetic material is obviously very different.”

Many variations of this table can be found throughout the internet, but the earliest version can be traced back to a thread on 4chan (an anonymous and largely unmoderated online forum) timestamped to September 15, 2018, barely six weeks after Lee et al. was published online (on July 31, 2018). The original post that initiated this thread (figure 2) is a perfect example of what sociologist Aaron Panofsky calls “citizen scientific racism”: an individual, having come across the EA3 study, collected the top EA-associated variants from a supplementary table of the paper, annotated these variants with the allele frequencies in European and African populations using publicly available data from the 1000 Genomes Project, and curated a set of EA-associated variants with the greatest differences in population frequency to argue that Europeans are genetically predisposed to higher intelligence.

The responses to this thread rapidly crystallized into a simple propaganda strategy: turn these “findings” into a standalone unit of easily-digestible visual information—or a meme, for lack of a better term—and let it organically spread across other online spaces. Shortly thereafter, another user took these suggestions to task and independently reproduced the original post’s analysis, presenting the results in a table similar to that shown above. Within hours, this image began to circulate in other 4chan threads and mutate into alternate versions, often accompanied by zealous calls for diffusing these memes throughout the internet. “SPREAD THESE IMAGES LIKE WILDFIRE,” encouraged one user. “This is the new IOTBW” said another, referring to the racist slogan, “It’s OK to be white.” The meme was even passed on to a cabal of popular alt-right bloggers and Youtubers who “have several PhDs and can give you a hand…plus they’re fantastic propagandists.” This collective enthusiasm for propagandizing the EA3 study appears to have been wildly successful. Altogether, variations of this meme have been posted over 5,100 times on 4chan and regularly appear on more mainstream social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Quora. Contrary to the scientific community’s prevailing narrative that the shooter was an isolated extremist who happened to stumble upon the study,20 these data demonstrate that the EA3 study has been a significant force in empowering far-right extremists for years, virtually since the day it was first published.

(Note that Carlson article includes many figures that illustrate the point he’s making, but he’s flagged all of them with a “do not replicate” watermark. They often come from places like 4chan, so I agree, let’s not promote these vile sources.)

One step forward that Carlson promotes is the revitalization of activist-scientists. We need to speak up on all fronts, rather than passively sitting by while nonsense gets published in multiple outlets.

Weaponized science continues to threaten far more than the public image of scientific authority. Today, it has morphed and evolved to find new victims and modes of victimization, and exploits whatever platforms and resources are at its disposal to promote its message. Synthesizing the lessons learned from past radical science movements provides us with a path forward: our collective response to weaponized science must be fiercely multimodal and operationally diverse, taking place in the pages of scientific journals, the digital streets of social media, and the physical spaces of our institutions and cities.

He also gives us three challenges.

First, we must further educate ourselves on the ecosystem of weaponized science. Second, we must actively resituate our appetite for scientific progress towards the service and liberation of our communities. Finally, we must channel this knowledge and desire for change towards the development and implementation of creative strategies to disarm weaponized science, inoculate against its normalization, build resilience and solidarity, and spread those ideas like wildfire.

All right, I think I’ve been doing the first. I’m depressingly familiar with the bad science that gets published in all kinds of outlets. I’ve been involved in the second already, too, as one of those people who strongly believes that science should be serving a larger social purpose. The third…I’m not sure about what creative strategies I could implement, beyond just telling all of you what sucks about some of our modern science.

Gavin McInnes is a truly deplorable person

Creep.

How did this guy get any attention at all?

These quotes come from a book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism. I haven’t read it, I don’t think I could read it without hurling it into the trash. It must be rough to be an author writing a necessary book critiquing a subject that can only inspire deep revulsion.

The Proud Boys name first came to Gavin McInnes while he watched, with disgust, as a twelve-year-old boy with brown skin sank a musical number onstage at a school recital.

This little Puerto Rican kid comes out, and he goes, ‘I’ll make you a proud boy!’ It was the gayest fucking song, he said. When I was watching I was like, this is obviously the Hispanic son of a single mom. He did high-five a grown man afterward, but couldn’t have been the real dad.

The origins of the Proud Boys, the nation’s most notorious political fight club, can be traced to one reactionary bigot behind a microphone who hate a child he figured was a fatherless Puerto Rican. McInnes seems to embrace this characterization, though his wife is apparently appalled by it.
She’s pissed, she’s like: ‘So your whole thing, your whole organization, is mocking a twelve-year-old gay boy?’ he said. And I go: ‘That’s such a crude way to put it but yes. Yes it is. Because that little boy personifies how far gone we are.’

They know nothing about the boy. They don’t know that he’s gay, they don’t know that he’s fatherless, they don’t even know that he’s Puerto Rican, but McInnes invented this figure of hate and built his own public identity around it.

That Gavin McInnes is a notoriously popular public figure personifies how far gone we are.

To answer my question from the beginning, that confession came when McInnes “recalled the story for his guest, a comedian named Aaron Berg, who sat giggling…” There are a lot of enablers out there, people who think being transgressive is all it takes to be funny, who will sit and giggle at the most disgusting anecdotes. He built an audience of assholes, and that gave him what populist power he has.

Is this really where the discourse is at now?

Fresh off his demented obsession with women, and trans women, and what is a woman, and making a whole dumb-ass movie in which he demands that he be provided with a neat, pat definition of a woman (and getting upset because no one could give him an adequate one, which ought to have told him that his tidy binary premise was false), Matt Walsh has found a new cause célèbre. He’s unhappy with a Disney remake of the Little Mermaid because…

You know what else is unscientific? Mermaids. Period.

At the same time, he tries to argue that the appearance of mythical creatures like mermaids is a reflection of the culture, not necessarily a scientifically valid truth. Maybe mermaids are just a cultural artifact, like centaurs or trolls or gods, Mr Walsh. Get over yourself. You’re just reaching for justifications to excuse your bigotry.

It would be reassuring if I could just dismiss Matt Walsh as a deeply stupid person, but I’m afraid the evidence so far is that he is definitely a hateful bigot.

He’s also a useful example to illustrate how reason and science can be twisted into bogus rationalizations for unreasonable and unscientific and even wicked conclusions.

Right on schedule, now Walsh is claiming it was all a “joke”.

Was I supposed to laugh?

Remember, racism is bad

Wizards of the Coast, publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, is suing another company that is resurrecting an old TSR (original publisher of D&D) title, Star Frontiers. They say the the game besmirches their reputation because it gets a bit racist. Maybe a lot racist. I could argue that a lot of fantasy tropes are rooted in dividing people into imaginary races, so maybe the company in the glass house shouldn’t be throwing stones like that.

Except… excerpts from the game do sound hella racist.

That last bit is painful to read.

Think about your race carefully as some races are more superior in power etc., some races have latent issues, similar to blacks having issues with sickle cell enemia [sic] and family issues. Remember racism is bad, do don’t do racial things like racism. Have fun with it but remember some races are just sometimes superior in some ways.

Wizards of the Coast might have a case. The new TSR seems to be blatantly un-self aware, and they seem to be saying the quiet part out loud, naming their strong dumb race “negro” rather than hiding their stereotypes behind names like “orc”.

They’re also eager to cater to the transphobes, asking if any of their testers would like a trans “race”.

But remember racism is bad, don’t do a racism.

Cancel Culture strikes again!

Poor Mary Nicosia. She’s a victim. A wealthy, white victim of racism.

Nicosia spent much of her time at the mic complaining about the cruelty of cancel culture, saying she’s suffered since Jones announced his suit.

The mom teared up about the “unbearable pain” caused to her and her family by the lawsuit by Jones, noting how she was suspended from the board of the Landmark Society of Western New York.

“To see our entire world collapse in a matter of hours was bewildering, it was like a bad dream,” she complained.

Incomprehensible! How could this happen? She just held a Juneteenth party for her rich white friends with buckets of fried chicken and bottles of Hennessy — oh no, that has nothing to do with stereotypes — and then, while explaining herself, it’s revealed that she runs a horribly racist Twitter “parody account”. Ooops. But no, she doesn’t have a racist bone in her body!

I’d love to hear what this crap is “parodying”.

Oh. Her lawyer claims it was about making fun of liberals.

Nicosia’s lawyer, Corey Hogan, displayed the invitation for the party at the presser in an effort to absolve his client of racism, saying it was called the “1st annual Liberal Smashin Splish Splash Pool Party.”

Hogan insisted it was intended to mock liberals, and was about politics, not race, and claimed the KFC buckets were not intended to hold meaning. Most of the decorations, he said, were meant to be “liberal bashing.”

Her husband, a dentist, is also complaining that he was victimized.

Nicosia’s husband, Dr. Nicholas Nicosia, also spoke, insisting that “there’s been nothing with any interaction with us that would even suggest that we’re racist.”

Instead, he complained, it was “cancel culture” — calling it “an organized, malicious, well-orchestrated, politically charged attack” motivated in part because they were seen as a “snooty couple that lives in a big mansion.”

“It took me 32 years to build my reputation, and less than two hours to destroy it,” he sniffed.

I think he was carefully crafting a reputation that, once it was exposed outside their little bubble of entitlement and privilege, was seen to be hateful and horrible. It wasn’t cancel culture that brought it down, he’d just spent 32 oblivious years building a rotten life.

How sad. She coulda been another Libs of TikTok.

You mean professors aren’t kings?

What exactly does it mean to be “cancelled”? That seems to be an infinitely flexible word when used by its “victims”. Popehat straightforwardly recounts a recent event of some interest to me — students walked out on an academic lecture. Horrors!

Mr. Silvergate is a Harvard graduate and professor, crusading attorney and defender of rights, repeatedly published author of important books, founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, and a sought-after gripping speaker. He has not been fired, expelled from any organization, depublished, or even (so far as I know) shunned on Martha’s Vineyard. Here’s what happened: he was invited to speak to private high-school students on the subject of free expression, he used the racial epithet commonly known as the n-word in the course of accurately quoting the title of Prof. Kennedy’s book, he did so several times, some of the students walked out, he continued to speak with the rest of the students, later the school sent its community an apology for the epithet being used in the classroom and said it was inappropriate, and the school wouldn’t print Mr. Silvergate’s response. In other words, some people (rightly or wrongly, rationally or irrationally) didn’t like some of his free expression and responded with their own free expression. If there have been other consequences, he hasn’t mentioned them.

That was it. Students left in disgust, and the school apologize to the students and refused to engage the speakers again. This was being “cancelled”. Now you might say “Popehat is a lawyer!” and that therefore he cannot be trusted, so I stooped to looking at the source, an essay on…ugh…Quillette. It turns out Popehat was right on. The cancelee speaks:

The lessons taught by this sad tale are sobering. One is that it is apparently acceptable for students to signal their disagreement with a speaker by walking out of an assembly [Yes, it is. Students are not a captive audience] rather than subjecting his or her ideas to the testing that vigorous dialogue allows [Dialogue is not a test. It is especially not a test when one side is a seasoned professor or lawyer and the other is a high school student. You do not have a right to beat up kids.]. We know that practices from higher education have permeated the K-12 world, and that today a third of college students believe that it is sometimes or always acceptable to shout down speakers [Irrelevant. He wasn’t shut down.], or to try to prevent them from speaking on campus[Irrelevant. He was allowed to speak; they just decided they would rather not bring him back.]. Another 13 percent believe that is it sometimes or always acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech [Irrelevant. This did not happen here.].

Another lesson is that the educational authorities at a storied academic institution are so afraid of offending the sensibilities of censors that they would rather discourteously [Discourteous? Here’s what the school said to students: “As members of the Milton community, we know not to use the ‘n-word’ due to its repugnant history and connotation. Thus, it was shocking and uncomfortable to hear the word voiced multiple times by Mr. Silverglate.” Rather mild.] ignore a guest speaker’s request to respond to a mistaken charge than permit the airing of a full debate [“DEBATE ME BRO!” No institution has an obligation to give you a platform.]. What happened at Milton is hardly an attractive display of diversity, inclusion, or equity. [I think respecting the student perspective is a fine example of DEI.]

This is juicy stuff for the yahoos at Quillette. A few people point out that he wasn’t “cancelled”, but a majority seemed to welcome the opportunity to rant about the “n-word”, and for some reason, go on and on about “trannies”. It’s always about hating someone.

Who woulda thought Popeye was so precious to Republicans?

Randy Milholland, creator of the webcomic Something Positive, has busted into the big leagues and is now responsible for the Sunday Popeye strips. He’s doing a fine job!

I hates debate trolls, too! He’s also refreshing a few things about the strip.

After nearly a hundred years in existence, the Popeye comic strip is reportedly getting a woke makeover, with the strip’s latest cartoonist promising more ethnic diversity and “more characters who aren’t heterosexual.”

Cartoonist Randal K. Milholland described the Popeye character as being “gender fluid,” citing old episodes in which the plot required Popeye to dress in drag.

“I [want] to bring in more characters who aren’t heterosexual,” Milholland said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News. “I don’t live in that purely straight white world, and I don’t think a lot of other people do either.”

Good news, I would think. Unfortunately, that quote is from Breitbart, where talking about “a woke makeover” is like waving a strip of red meat at a very stupid and confused bull who has forgotten what a normal diet is and thinks an all-meat meal is exactly what real bulls eat. The comments section is bizarre — the idea that a comic strip might include non-straight characters enrages them.

It’s got 600 comments and they’re all as detached from reality as that sample! Did you know that having a gay character in a comic strip represents the Neo-Maoist erasure of history and destruction of culture? They also kind of lose the plot somewhere in there and start ranting about black characters in comic books, all while periodically quoting the Bible. I don’t think any of them are very tightly moored to reality.

I’m starting to pity Texans

It’s easy to hate the demented fucks they keep electing, but then the citizens of the state have to live under the inanity they produce. Maybe some day they’ll figure it out, but until then, they get to suffer the consequences of their actions.

So now they’ve got conservative ‘educators’ who specialize in double-think.

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction.

The group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum change requests. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms.

Uh-oh. If the goal is to not “feel discomfort”, there goes math. You know, one of the things we need to do in education is stretch brains a little bit, which does cause some stress. Hiding the reality of slavery behind euphemisms is not education.