Wow. Tenure expectations are really tight nowadays

You win a Pulitzer prize and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, and you still get denied tenure? Those are standards that are impossible to reach for most of us. There must be extenua…oh. She’s black.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who founded the Pulitzer-winning “1619 Project,” was not offered tenure at her alma matter, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Instead, she was offered a different role with the option for a tenure review in five years.

The reversal from the university, which previously announced the MacArther Fellow would teach in the Knight Chair position that comes with the expectation of tenure, came after conservative pushback to the “1619 Project” but wasn’t supported by the faculty and tenure committee.

Oh, that’s interesting. Tenure comes in stages: first you get a thorough grilling by your peers at the university, and then if you pass that, a recommendation to grant tenure is passed to the regents or trustees or in UNC’s case, a board of governors consisting of people appointed by the state government, who have final say. It’s extremely unusual for a tenure decision by the faculty to be rejected by Those On High — the board usually consists of wealthy donors who have no knowledge of the fields they stand in judgment over, and rejecting a faculty decision is going to make those faculty very unhappy.

Yet they took that step in this case, against an incredibly well-qualified candidate and genuine super-star in journalism. Why? Why would a bunch of political appointees in a politically conservative Southern state decide to break from a policy of hands-off to meddle in an academic appointment?

Failure to tenure Nikole Hannah-Jones in her role as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism is a concerning departure from UNC’s traditional process and breaks precedent with previous tenured full professor appointments of Knight chairs in our school. This failure is especially disheartening because it occurred despite the support for Hannah-Jones’s appointment as a full professor with tenure by the Hussman Dean, Hussman faculty, and university. Hannah-Jones’s distinguished record of more than 20 years in journalism surpasses expectations for a tenured position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.

I think we have a clear case of Konservative Kancel Kulture at work. She’s one of the founders of the 1619 Project, and they reached out and stomped on her.

I’ll be waiting a long time before I hear the usual defenders of Academic Freedom and Free Speech Uber Alles say a single word about the decision, won’t I?

The rabidly martial rhetoric of that bad philosopher, Peter Boghossian

Whew. Peter Boghossian has gone full on crackpot. He’s nuttering along like a Baby Mussolini, claiming he is the true and rightful defender of Western Civilization (whatever that is), and declaring war on everyone who disagrees with him…because it’s really important that we allow freedom of expression…? Yeah, he’s that incoherent.

People want you to think a certain way, but let’s be clear about something. I’m done playing, I think Douglas is done playing, I’m waging full scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western Civilization. I am taking no prisoners. I have very large scale projects coming for the enemies of reason and science and rationality. These people are divisive neo-racist hatemongers, and there’s simply no…we must broker zero tolerance with this ideology, and the only way forward at this point is full-scale ideological war and I will take no prisoners and that is what I’m devoting my life to. I will…I seek the complete eradication and extirpation of the ideology from every facet of life.

His rant reminds me of this classic exchange.

Bluto: Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

Otter: Germans?

Boon: Forget it, he’s rolling.

He’s just reciting martial cliches. He’s not going to eradicate or extirpate anything. He’s not going to take any prisoners because he’s not going to have an opportunity to capture anyone. It’s all noise and posturing.

Boghossian was never much of a presence in the now-defunct New Atheist movement. I remember when he started appearing on the scene, and it was almost entirely by attaching himself leech-like to the most horrible, controversial phonies around, like Molyneux, which was amazing — Boghossian is supposedly a philosopher, but he was endorsing a ridiculous cult-leader whose “philosophy” is an incoherent mish-mash of racism and misogyny? I dismissed him then, but now he seems to think he’s been promoted to be the General Patton of conservative atheism.

There’s more, and recently. Here’s an hour-long video in which he gets together with Bruce Gilley and Dennis Linthicum to complain about diversity and tolerance in academia.

In case you have no idea who those other people are, Bruce Gilley is head of the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Scholars, a fringe political organization funded by right-wing millionaires which deplores “political correctness” and wants “a return to mid-20th-century curricular and scholarship norms, and an increase in conservative representation in faculty.” Yeah. One of those. Gilly himself became notorious with his “scholarship” that decreed that colonialism was a good thing. Fascist organizations everywhere clamored to have him defend their views.

The German parliament, the Bundestag, is rarely an exciting place, and even less often the site of debate and protest. But in December, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) managed to scandalize the German public by hosting an academic lecture on German colonialism.

The speaker the AfD invited has made a name for himself as a colonial revisionist in the most literal sense: Bruce Gilley, professor of political science at Portland State University, became the subject of global debate in 2017 when the (small but renowned) journal Third World Quarterly published his essay “The Case for Colonialism.” In it, Gilley argued not only that colonialism was “objectively beneficial,” but also that it should be reconsidered as a model of governance for countries in the Global South today. Critics, while scandalized by the proposal itself, mainly focused on the question of how a paper that was “blind . . . to vast sections of colonial history,” contained major “empirical shortfalls,” and was essentially “the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes” made it through peer review. As it turned out, the paper had been rejected by three peer reviewers, and the decision of editors to publish it without consulting the editorial board of Third World Quarterly led to the resignation of most members of the board and the retraction of the article.

He takes the interesting position that sure, there were excesses in colonialism, it wasn’t perfect, but all the hand-chopping and murder and rapes were reactions to the resistance offered by the colonized people, and wouldn’t have occurred if they’d just accepted the gifts of Western Civilization. Meanwhile, the collapse of post-colonial nations wasn’t really caused by the colonial institutions and the history of depradation, but was just the true nature of those people emerging, justifying further the loving hand of colonial imperialism.

Dennis Linthicum is a politial non-entity — a Tea Party member of the Oregon senate, one of the chickenshit Republicans who went into hiding in 2019 to undermine Oregon’s efforts to combat climate change. His contribution here seems to be to recite lists. He’s an incredible bore.

And finally, Peter Boghossian seems to have been invited because he is a notorious asshole who is comfortable with the likes of Gilley and Linthicum.

They got together to whine about the university imposing a race studies requirement in the curriculum, and about the university prioritizing diversity, which they claim is racist (that’s what he means by “neo-racist”) and against academic freedom. How dare they address contemporary issues, rather than pretending it’s still 1950!

At about the 16 minute mark, Boghossian gets on another roll.

Let’s be blunt about what we face. We face a group of small-minded, petty ideologues who have hijacked a public institution, who are hell-bent on ripping down Western Civilization. This is explicit in the doctrines of Critical Race Theory. They have created a system and a structure in which any form of dissent is punished as the new heretic, you are a heretic and you have committed blasphemy against the ideology. This is an ideology that proselytizes the consciousness of what is ordinarily…people who are ordinarily reasonable. What this is not is a partisan issue.

Not a partisan issue, which is why he got together with his far-right pals to rant. Sorry, if it’s not a partisan issue, where are the people who are not right-wing ideologues in this discussion?

I have news for Boghossian: there aren’t any universities that are trying to tear down Western Civilization. The destruction of America isn’t explicit or implicit in Critical Race Theory — if anything, the idea that we should come to grips with the failings of Western European and American history is the only way to save this culture.

You know, sometimes people are just plain wrong, an idea I’m sure Boghossian would agree with, and pointing out that people like Boghossian and Gilley are wrong in their interpretation of history and culture isn’t labeling them as heretics, any more than telling someone they don’t understand vaccines or the shape of the Earth is branding them as heretics. Boghossian is wrong about just about everything. He’s also an ass.

I expect he won’t have his platform as a member of academia for long. He’s an untenured assistant professor with a history of uncollegial behavior who is happy to condemn his institution, so I would be very surprised if he were retained — he has already been denied promotion to associate professor. He’s going to be reduced to fantasizing about running over “Wokists” with a tank without an academic title.

Agreed, it’s not just a Southern thing

I mentioned how my Yankee education didn’t praise slavery, it just kind of ignored it. But someone on Twitter pointed out that we get some egregious racism in the Northern schools, too.

The investigation began after the assignment on Feb. 1 presented sixth-grade students at Patrick Marsh Middle School [in Madison, Wisconsin] with the following scenario: “A slave stands before you. This slave has disrespected his master by telling him, ‘You are not my master!’ How will you punish this slave?”

The report said the assignment also “included other offensive questions.”

Please don’t ask students to imagine themselves in the role of slavemasters. Also — do I need to say this? — don’t ask them to role play being a Nazi concentration camp guard. It’s asking them to empathize, even temporarily, with horrible human beings.

Bad textbooks are the reason we need Critical Race Theory

I’ve been involved in textbook battles for decades — conservatives/creationists have been smart, and worked to undermine elementary school education, and it’s been effective. The Texas Board of Education has been a running sore on science education for years. Check out the NCSE!

I’ve mainly been focused on science textbooks, but the rot goes all the way through to everything. To show that, Michael Harriot did something absolutely brilliant: he looked into the educational background of those prominent Republican opponents of critical race theory, and asked what these people were actually taught as kids. There’s a lot of work here, but it’s all public information. He just looked up where and when certain Republicans went to school, and then looked up what textbooks were in use, and read how they treated race in America.

It’s horrifying.

Read it if you really want to know what kind of crap poisoned the young minds of Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, John Kennedy, Mitch McConnell, Tommy Tuberville, and Tim Scott. The Daughters of the Confederacy were busy shaping children’s plastic little brains. Here, for example, is what Moscow Mitch was taught.

After moving to Louisville, Ky., and attending duPont Manual High School, McConnell would have learned from an education department that provides grants to Kentucky Educational Television for Kentucky’s Story, which still teaches this about slavery in Kentucky:

Because many owners and servants worked side by side or had frequent contact, the bond between them was more patriarchal than was the relationship shared by slaves and masters in other states. While exceptions can be noted, it is generally believed that Kentucky’s slaves experienced a less harsh life than did those living elsewhere…

Many aspects of the slaves’ lives resembled those of white laborers…In addition to these evening and Sunday activities, masters encouraged their chattels to engage in recreational activities, such as dancing and singing, that provided emotional release; happy slaves worked better than did discontented ones.

Religion also played an important role in the slaves’ existence. Churches encouraged masters to treat their people kindly and urged slaves to be good Christians, to serve their earthly masters as they would their heavenly father and to look for rewards in the hereafter for services rendered on earth.

It’s weird. There’s also this strange vibe where each state, in addition to claiming that they really treated slaves nicely, has to explain they were really so much better than those other Confederate, slave-holding states. They all had happy slaves, but our slaves were the happiest.

Unfortunately, Harriott doesn’t get around to analyzing Yankee textbooks — but there’s a fair amount of work in what he did cover, so I understand. I was educated in Washington state, a part of the country that wasn’t even a state at the time of the Civil War, and I have no recollection of learning anything about black people or civil rights. We sure learned about Lewis and Clark and the Whitman Massacre and Chief Joseph, though, which meant we were inculcated with the idea of the Noble Indian who had to fade away to make room for the heroic white destiny. There was also some mention of the Japanese internment, but, you know, we had to win the war. It was such a shock to learn that Jimi Hendrix was from Seattle. There are black people in Seattle? They didn’t teach us that, I had to find out for myself!

In my education, the schools committed the sin of omission, but at least my teachers skipped over the dancing, singing slaves and their kindly masters.

We also didn’t do horrifying in-class exercises like these:

Slavery was just like being denied recess!

Why are you afraid of critical race theory?

I don’t get it. As a white man, I love critical race theory — it explains so much, helps me understand my failings, and yet also provides a framework for comprehending my role in American racism that doesn’t condemn me (I know, it’s a selfish way to think about it, but that’s what’s great — it should appeal to people who only think of themselves). Yet, somehow, it gives Republicans the heebie-jeebies.

Schools across the country are working to address systemic racism and inject an anti-racist mind-set into campus life. But where advocates see racial progress, opponents see an effort to shame White teachers and sometimes students for being part of an oppressive system.

In particular, conservatives have seized on the idea that schools are promoting critical race theory, a decades-old academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism. It holds in part that racism is woven into the fabric of the nation’s history and life — a product of the system and not just individual bad actors.

Critics say this approach injects race into what should be, in their view, a colorblind system. Proponents counter that U.S. schools have never been colorblind and insist they aren’t pushing critical race theory anyway. The equity work is critical, they say, to address systemic barriers holding back students of color and to create schools that are truly inclusive.

Look at the peculiar twist in there. Conservatives see it as a tool to “shame white teachers”, but CRT teaches that racism is “a product of the system and not just individual bad actors”. I have benefited from historical biases in education and employment, but that doesn’t mean I have to be ashamed of who I am — it means I have a responsibility to work to change the system, so that everyone has the same opportunities I did.

What’s so terrible about that? Other than the generations of people denied those opportunities, of course.

That conservatives oppose CRT tells me something: that they oppose any change to a pattern of systemic oppression, because they benefit from the system. Breaking that pattern might liberate millions of people, but it hurts the profits of an extraordinarily wealthy minority. So the rich are hurling money and propaganda at the idea because they don’t want you to know you are living under an oppressive system. It’s their system, you know.

And that’s why Tucker Carlson exists. He is an openly racist white supremacist who peddles flagrant misinformation, and he’s not going to be fired. He feeds fear to build a base, and has the money from rich media owners to thrive.

“He’s a good example of how much you can get away with at Fox if your ratings are high,” one current network staffer told The Daily Beast. “Aside from that, he just perpetuates the right’s catastrophe platform. They cannot win with their supposed limited government, fiscal conservatism, because not even they really believe in it. So all they do is fear monger.”

To this point, Carlson has seemingly delighted in his ability to see just how far he can push the envelope, bouncing from one controversy to the next only to see his status and influence grow at Fox News and among the right-wing mediaverse at large.

That’s systemic racism at work. You also won’t fix it by firing Carlson, because he’s a cheap, low-talent goon who would just be replaced by a different cheap, low-talent goon…Jesse Watters, for instance, or some Republican congress-slime, like Kelly Loeffler. They’re fungible. CRT is telling you to stop looking at the tips of the tentacles and instead target the whole dang supra-esophageal mass up there in the head, and that makes the perpetrators of the system afraid.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call out the tentacles, though, especially when they’re so ripe for ridicule. Watch Joy Reid (you know, “the race lady” in Carlson’s parlance) tear into his schtick.

Next, though, we have to tear into Rupert Murdoch and the other wealthy assholes who continue to enable Carlson, no matter how stupid he is.

Where are our conspiracy theories?

I’m feeling left out. I just encountered yet another story of a shadowy cabal conspiring to destroy humanity by promoting transgenderism, and it got me wondering why we don’t have our own silly conspiracy theories.

While prominent Jewish transgender activists like Jazz Jennings and Jennifer Pritzker, and Jewish-themed shows like Transparent, serve as one face of this imagined conspiracy, white nationalists believe the real power is wielded behind the scenes by Jewish billionaires, talent managers, media and entertainment executives, journalists, and advocacy groups like the Anti-Defamation League. They think this shadow network is working patiently to normalize transgender acceptance in popular culture; as another Occidental Observer writer put it, “the stunningly disproportionate Jewish involvement in the ‘transgender rights’ movement reveals it as yet another form of Jewish ethnic warfare.”

This Jewish activism, they are convinced, is laser-focused on attacking white, Western society at its most vulnerable and sacrosanct point: the sexuality of children.

As Henrik Palmgren, leader of the white nationalist multimedia company Red Ice said in 2015, the Jewish parents of Jazz Jennings, by supporting their young daughter to become a trailblazing advocate for trans empowerment and acceptance, were enacting “one of the most disturbing agendas the Zionist elite have ever created.” This attempt at “normalizing the abnormal,” Palmgren wrote, “will sacrifice the physical and mental health of numerous children for decades to come.”

I mean, look at that! Why? Who gets together in meetings and schemes to cripple children? What loon would think that the “most vulnerable point” of Western society is allowing a tiny minority of young people to define their own sexuality? It’s not an effective strategy, and I also can’t believe that any subgroup that acquires “real power” would be interested in destroying the culture they are succeeding in. If anything, history tells us that the powerful tend to work to maintain the status quo.

That got me wondering, though, if I believe in any conspiracies. I don’t know; I think billionaires are the most horrible, disruptive force in society, but I don’t think they’re intentionally working together to nefarious ends — they’re just selfish people who are exploiting the system independently. Republicans are doing great evils, but again, it’s not a plot. It’s just ignorant people mired in fallacious dogma. Creationists are just pathetic. There’s no one on the other side I’d consider an evil mastermind, the other side seems to be full of bumbling, incompetent human beings, just like my side.

That’s a problem, maybe. It would all be so much easier if we could identify a distinguishable group to demonize, but instead, they is us.

“Professor” Edward Dutton is a fraud

Unsurprisingly, that ugly racist, Edward Dutton, who calls himself a “professor”…isn’t. The University of Oulu seems to be a bit embarrassed by him.

That’s from 2019. If you follow the Twitter thread, you will be entertained by a series of pissed off racists.

They crossed the streams!

Sorry in advance, everyone, I got sucked into a dark hole and I’ve got to purge myself onto you. Somehow, I stumbled onto this unsavory character, Edward Dutton, who calls himself the “Jolly Heretic” — he’s not very jolly, and he seems to have embraced good ol’ mainstream 19th century pseudoscientific racism, so he’s not very heretical, either. Here’s a brief bio:

Edward Dutton is a prolific vlogger and author whose books have been published by Arktos Media, a Budapest-based white nationalist publishing house, and Richard Spencer’s Washington Summit Publishers. Dutton is listed as part of the “Editorial Circle” for Spencer’s online publication Radix Journal. He also sits on the advisory board of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudo-academic journal that traffics in scientific racism.

Unsurprisingly Dutton was denounced as a “white supremacist” in an op-ed for The Gaudie, the student newspaper of Dutton’s alma mater Aberdeen University, over his racist rants and associations with antisemites and white nationalists. Indeed, Dutton has made appearances on multiple white nationalist shows where he’s claimed white people have higher IQs than nonwhites and fretted over declining white birthrates.

In a jovial discussion of racial differences during a Dec. 2020 livestream with Richard Spencer, Dutton claimed that “white-Black” marriages are the “least likely.” He explained that “Black females are penalized because they are not particularly feminine looking,” but that “it’s Asian women that of course everyone wants” because they “have these child-like features” which are a “sign of good genes.”

Of course he’s on YouTube. He has over 50,000 subscribers.

He calls himself “Professor” Dutton, which was hard to believe — what legitimate university would hire someone this disreputable? Apparently, though, he actually is an adjunct professor of the Anthropology of Religion and Finnish Culture at Oulu University in Finland, and is also a professor of evolutionary psychology at Asbiro University in Łódź, Poland. How he got these appointments is a mystery, but I’ll just guess that there are racists lurking in all the odd corners of academia, and he got these presumably nominal appointments through friends in very low places.

What also got my interest is that this screamingly vile racist pig not only has a successful YouTube channel, and some peculiar academic appointments, but has also cultivated associations with transphobes. It’s so amazingly repellent that I couldn’t look away. Would you believe Ray Blanchard appeared on Dutton’s channel? I’d never heard of Dutton before, but Blanchard…there’s a guy beloved by transphobes, and also possessing genuine credentials as a professor at the University of Toronto. Why would he agree to appear with a known white supremacist and all-around repugnant racist? What’s the connection?

During the Feb. 25, 2021 livestream Blanchard promoted his claim that trans women — whom he repeatedly referred to as “biological males” — can be divided into two basic categories.

The first category, Blanchard said, consists of trans women who “could be thought of as just extremely effeminate homosexual males who went the extra step to conclude that they actually are women, and that they want to be living as women.” He further described them as “drag queens who take their work seriously.”

The second category, according to Blanchard, is made up of people who begin as “fetishistic crossdressers” who, at a young age, engage in “masturbatory activities around women’s clothes,” a practice which “gradually gives rise to a more generalized sense of being … women.”

Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia” to describe this latter category, though it is not widely accepted as a reason for why trans women experience gender dysphoria or choose to transition.

So that’s why Blanchard was willing to hang out with a flaming racist: it was an opportunity to peddle his bogus, discredited ‘theory’ of autogynephilia to a a gullible, biased host who’d happily let him babble, and would nod in agreement. I’d say “ugh”, but I guess it’s good that slime attracts slime and make each other even more disgusting.

Also bizarre was this little interlude:

Later in the livestream Blanchard defended asking transgender people invasive questions about their genitals.

“As far as them being touchy about people asking questions about their genitals, all I can say is there are many shibboleths around that transsexuals impose because they have a fragile story that they want maintained,” Blanchard said. “And if people ask too many pointed questions it becomes threatening.”

Blanchard told Dutton that he had seen “many, many times the outrage you’re describing when people wonder what genitals a transsexual has,” and that “their rant is always ‘How dare you wonder what my genitals are.’”

He added, “In reality, 99.99% of normal, straight normies who meet a transsexual are wondering ‘Gee, what’s between their legs?’ That’s what’s going on in the head of most people. But transsexuals don’t want this question raised, and so they act as if it’s some gross breach of etiquette that only you and your stupidity were ignorant of.”

I, a straight normie, must be in the elite 0.01% because no, that’s not going on in my head. I also don’t ponder the genitals of cis people I meet. I particularly don’t quiz anyone, cis or trans, about the appearance of their genitals, and would consider it a gross breach of etiquette if you were to start asking about mine. That’s not mere prudishness: my interactions with almost every other person on the planet simply don’t involve genitals, so it’s an irrelevant concern, and obsessing over them is an alarming social signal. So why is Ray Blanchard focusing on them?

Is it because he’s a perverse creep?

He also can’t be all that bright. He apparently didn’t even consider the optics of so blatantly merging his transphobic cause with far-right racism. I do wonder if all the JK Rowling fans out there are at all perturbed by this association, or if they’re just all going to coalesce into a whirlwind of indiscriminate hate?

George Floyd’s murderer: GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY

For once, maybe justice has been served. The jury found Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts.

I was prepared for the worst, because all day the news has been full of stories about Minneapolis bracing for the verdict, windows being boarded up, new concrete barriers being installed, etc. Now all we have to be ready for is grateful crowds of citizens solemnly appreciating a righteous decision…oh, and roving gangs of cops looking for any excuse to bash heads in revenge.

Why do we give these incompetent asshats guns anyway?

Unbelievable.

A police officer fatally shot a Black man, identified as Daunte Wright, after he was pulled over in a Minneapolis suburb Sunday, leading to clashes between protesters and law enforcement. On Monday, the police chief for the city of Brooklyn Center said the unidentified officer intended to use her Taser but instead grabbed her gun and shot Wright.

During a press conference, police released bodycam video of the shooting. In the video, the officer who shot Wright shouted “Taser” multiple times before firing her gun at Wright at close range while Wright was in the driver’s seat.

“I just shot him,” the officer said as the car drove away.

This officer should not have been armed. She should not have been on the street. She just murdered a man “by accident”, only it’s not an accident if you are so badly trained that you blast away with a firearm when you “intended” to use a taser.

Why do the police need guns to make traffic stops? Why did she even need to use a taser against him?