Someone noticed Pinker’s sleaziness

There’s a petition making the rounds to have Steven Pinker’s recognition by the Linguistic Society of America removed. I don’t expect a petition to accomplish much of anything, but this one is nicely written.

As we demonstrate below, Dr. Pinker’s behavior is systematically at odds with the LSA’s recently issued statement on racial justice, which argues that “listening to and respecting [the experience of students of color] is crucial, as is acknowledging and addressing rather than overlooking or denying the role of the discipline of linguistics in the reproduction of racism.” Instead, Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes.

Though no doubt related, we set aside questions of Dr. Pinker’s tendency to move in the proximity of what The Guardian called a revival of “scientific racism”, his public support for David Brooks (who has been argued to be a proponent of “gender essentialism”), his expert testimonial in favor of Jeffrey Epstein (which Dr. Pinker now regrets), or his dubious past stances on rape and feminism. Nor are we concerned with Dr. Pinker’s academic contributions as a linguist, psychologist and cognitive scientist. Instead, we aim to show here Dr. Pinker as a public figure has a pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.

It then proceeds to document instances where Pinker played fast and loose with the facts to advance his dogma of progress constantly marching forward, as long as we ignore the inconsequential suffering of poor minorities. It’ll be ignored, but maybe a few people will wake up to his dishonest messaging.

Do academia next, Jim

Well, maybe not Jim Sterling, since he doesn’t have the connections, but he certainly does a bang-up job of exposing the structural decay in so many entertainment industries. Video games, comic books, pro wrestling, movies all reek of rot and corruption right now.

The problem, as always, is money and capitalism. There’s always a selfish grifter happily exploiting any successful industry, clawing more and more wealth and power to themselves at the expense of others, preferring to maximize wealth inequity at the expense of distributing the art and science to others.

I regret to inform you that Jordan Peterson is writing again

I guess he’s recovering. Good for him. Unfortunately, he’s now inflicting more bad takes on us, in this case, the story of Tomas Hudlicky, who wrote such a bad paper in Angewandte Chemie that many of the board members of the journal quit in protest. To the minds of Peterson and other conservatives, this means Hudlicky was burnt at the stake.

I’m not kidding.

So I felt like pointing out that the charred corpse of Dr Hudlicky is still ambulatin’ around, and it’s the board members who have suffered the consequences. Also that Hudlicky sounds like a nightmare of a PI.

Start your weekend with some happy news

Graham Linehan, the ‘noxious transphobe and serial harasser of trans folk, has finally been banned from Twitter.

This is a remarkable turn of events because all of the big social media companies have been remarkably resistant to actually doing anything about the trolls and haters and racists and misogynists that dwell happily within their services. They just spewing and spewing, their targets report them, and the companies come back with some feeble comment that Nazis and bigots don’t “violate their terms of service.”

So what’s going on? It would be nice to believe that corporate executives were hit by a lightning bolt, reflected on their misspent lives, and decided to put up a facade of human decency. This is not the case, however. They’re just looking at their spreadsheets and seeing that their blinkered neglect of civilized behavior is projected to cause them to lose lots of money. They won’t be “cool” anymore.

Facebook leads the way.

Zuck’s social network continues to hemorrhage users, new research suggests.

Facebook has an estimated 15 million fewer U.S. users today than it did in 2017, according to a study released Wednesday by Edison Research and Triton Digital. The share of people 12 and over using Facebook was 67% in 2017, but declined to 62% in 2018 and 61% this year.

Zuckerberg probably has nightmares about his cash cow becoming the MySpace of the 2020s. It could happen.

Facebook on Thursday posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in U.S. stock market history after releasing a disastrous quarterly report.

The social media giant’s market capitalization plummeted by $119 billion to $510 billion as its stock price plummeted by 19 percent. At Wednesday’s close, Facebook’s market cap had totaled nearly $630 billion, according to FactSet.

Don’t cry for them, they’re still worth $500 billion. They’re not the future, though, and Twitter is probably glancing nervously at Facebook, wondering if they’re next, hence the sudden interest in cleaning up the shambolic mess of their service. They’re probably also looking to differentiate themselves from their new “competitor”, Parler, where all the right-wingers are flocking.

Parler sounds lovely, if you like wallowing in anti-semitism while pretending to be a bold independent spirit standing up for liberty, like most right-wingers.

The Parler website even has a “Declaration Of Internet Independence” slamming the “Technofascism” of Silicon Valley and Twitter and claiming that “millions”—yes, millions—have been banned for their political ideology. “We The People have had enough!” they cry, demanding “Free Speech” and “Liberties” and other good things with Randomly Capitalized Letters.

Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful company?

In reality, the largest group of accounts targeted for suspension from Twitter have been bots and terrorists, like the tens of millions of fake accounts removed after the scale of Russian interference in the 2016 election became clear, or the roughly 250,000 accounts associated with ISIS/ISIL removed after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.

Graham Linehan is just the latest victim of an effort to clean up the rubbish. Maybe he should set up a Parler account?

Ask a NY paramedic how we’re doing

Feel the rage.

Some of us can’t stop thinking about it. I woke up this morning to about 60 new text messages from paramedics who are barely holding it together. Some are still sick with the virus. At one point we had 25 percent of EMTs in the city out sick. Others are living in their cars so they don’t risk bringing it home to their families. They’re depressed. They’re emotionally exhausted. They’re drinking too much. They’re lashing out at their kids. They’re having night terrors and panic attacks and all kinds of outbursts. I’ve got five paramedics in the ground from this virus already and a few more on ventilators. Another rookie EMT just committed suicide. He was having trouble coping with what he was seeing. He was a kid — 23 years old. He won’t be the last. I have medics who come to me every day and say, “Is this PTSD I’m feeling?” But technically PTSD comes after the event, and we’re not there yet. It’s ongoing stress and trauma, and we might have months to go.

Do you know how much EMTs make in New York City? We start at $35,000. We top out at $48,000 after five years. That’s nothing. That’s a middle finger. It’s about 40 percent less than fire, police and corrections — and those guys deserve what they get. But we have three times the call volume of fire. There are EMTs on my team who’ve been pulling double shifts in a pandemic and performing life support for 16 hours, and then they go home and they have to drive Uber to pay their rent. I’m more than 15 years on the job, and I still work two side gigs. One of my guys does part-time at a grocery store.

Heroes, right? The anger is blinding.

One thing this pandemic has made clear to me is that our country has become a joke in terms of how it disregards working people and poor people. The rampant inequality. The racism. Mistakes were made at the very top in terms of how we prepared for this virus, and we paid down here at the bottom.

Remember that when some asshat tries to tell you that capitalism is meritocratic. How much do Wall Street bankers get paid? How many lives do they save?

Racist statues explained

I understand why people commission racist statues — they’re racists. But who is making them? This little video explains what’s going on. Racist statues incorporate planned obsolescence and aren’t built for the ages! They’re like computers that way.

Maybe we should start tearing down all statues, to give sculptors something to do.

Mythicist Milwaukee is back, and I can smell the stench all over the midwest

Last year at around this time, Mythicist Milwaukee was putting together a con called “Minds IRL”, to be held somewhere near Philadelphia. They were cagey about precisely where; everyone knows that the Mythicist crew is a gang of racists and frauds, so there were protests planned, and the Top Secret Location was only revealed by email at the last minute. It was finally held in a casino. If you wanted to revel in the presence of Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Tim Pool, and Andy Ngo, this was the place to be. If you couldn’t make it, Talia Levin committed a photo journalism and took pictures of all the white people chortling over the N word. It looked to be exactly as bad as you would have predicted it to be.

Well, shucks, guess what? The same org is planning another right-wing confab this year in August. It has another name change to Better Discourse, ironically enough. It’ll be in Milwaukee, somewhere — once again, they’re playing peek-a-boo with the exact venue — and they’ve dug deeper into various rat holes to pull up some even bigger rats! Carl Benjamin AKA Sargon of Akkad will be there again, because he was such a beacon of hate the first time around, but now they’ve found an even shittier star…Milo Yiannopoulos! And you thought his 15 minutes of fame were over months ago.

Also on the roster: Peter Boghossian. He’s going to have Impossible Conversations with various racists which will probably be nothing but mutual circle jerks. Fun!

They got Jack Posobiec III! He’s the pizzagate loon, now a “serious” journalist for OAN, who will be on a panel to evaluate “President Trump first four years in review”. You can guess how that’s going to go.

David Silverman is showing up, in case you wondered what slum he’d fallen into lately. There are various other ne’er-do-wells scrounged up to populate the event and take up space and get media attention.

It’s weirdly organized. There are only five sessions, all panel conversations, in a one-day con: the aforementioned Trump fluff, the minority celebrities get a panel to talk about how to overcome racial inequalities (sounds good from the title, but featuring a rap artist fresh from appearances on Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Ben Shapiro, and a comedian whose schtick is funny middle-eastern accents, it’s less promising than you think), White People Explaining Why Immigration is Bad, Free Speech Warriors scheming to cancel “Cancel Culture”, and a spirited defense of racial slurs. That’s it. That’s all of it. All for the low, low, low price of $350, you can bask in the welcoming atmosphere of more conspiracy theorists and racists and pseudo-intellectuals than you can shake a stick at in a clandestine hide-away in Milwaukee, and party with them afterwards. When it’s all over, you get the big prize of going home with a nice viral load, since this is an in-person con, and you know most of the attendees believe face masks impinge on their civil liberties.

It’s being put on by an atheist organization. Remember the good old days when everyone was howling at Skepticon because it wasn’t a “true” skeptic/atheist conference, because it included all that crap about humanism and diversity and social justice? “Mission creep,” they whined, “you’re stretching the meaning of the words beyond all reasonable interpretation!” Keep in mind what they really meant, that reason can only bend in one direction, towards right-wing zealotry and conspiracy theories and racism.

And “Cancel Culture”? Really? If “Cancel Culture” were a real thing, Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t be your headliner.

Fuck. If I had a time machine, I’d go back 20 years to tell myself to avoid getting involved in this up-and-coming atheist movement. It’s just bad.

The data is suggestive

It’s been almost a month since George Floyd was murdered, and protests erupted across the country (and the world) very shortly after, so there’s been time enough for the coronavirus to piggy-back on the crowds and cause a surge in infection rates. But look at these plots, especially for Hennepin county!

That’s good news, but it’s a little confusing. Why aren’t those big crowds perfect petri dishes for the pandemic?

What’s more, a new analysis based on cell-phone tracking data suggests a surprising reason for the lack of protest-related spikes in COVID-19: In the cities with large protests, the wider population actually spent more time at home during the demonstrations — suggesting that any surge caused by virus transmission at the protests themselves would have been countered by an increase in social distancing among the rest of the cities’ populations.

While experts consulted by BuzzFeed News agreed that wearing masks and being outside may have reduced the risk of viral transmission at the protests, they pointed to other possible factors as well. Many of the protesters were young, for example, meaning that new infections that occurred while they were demonstrating would be less likely to cause severe disease and show up in official case counts. And even though hundreds of thousands participated in the protests, that’s still a relatively small number compared to the total population of the cities involved — so it might be hard to notice transmission of the coronavirus at the protests.

“The fact is that we will just never know for sure, because there’s too many moving parts,” Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Irvine, told BuzzFeed News.

Epidemiology is hard — too many variables, too many moving parts. This suggests, however, that you shouldn’t expect dramatic surges from the recent Republican rally, for the same reasons: small crowds relative to the greater population. That participants were generally older might have more effect, though, and BLM protest participants seem to be a lot more careful about using masks and distancing..

What’s worrying is that the article also shows recent rapid rises in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and South Carolina, and the country overall. That’s associated with states that have been generally opening up, and reducing mask and social distancing expectations. The lesson: general policy is far more influential than limited events. Republican governors are greater threats to public health than grassroots protests.

Hsu resigns his vice presidential appointment

Good news!

Note that, as everyone has been trying to explain to the reactionaries, he was not fired, he still has his professorial appointment, but he no longer has his administrative position. That’s a step forward.

I look forward to Quillette’s tears.

Wait, wait, wait…there are people who protest against Juneteenth?

What do they want to do, repeal the emancipation of slaves?

I guess this is Trump’s America now.