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.

As if we’ll now forget Galton and Pearson

Every year in my classes I’ll spend a little time talking about Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. It’s unavoidable. They were early pioneers in genetics and were extremely influential in their time, so I have been and will continue to bring up their contributions and their flaws. Galton was a wealthy guy who endowed a Chair in Eugenics at University College London, and Pearson was the first person appointed to it; just the strong association with eugenics ought to be enough to taint the history of the two men. I like to let my students know about how Galton, for a time, kept a device he called his ‘pricker’ in his pocket so he could surreptitiously score the attractiveness of women he met, which he later published as a list of the quality of women across the UK — the women of London were the most beautiful, while those in Scotland…weren’t. And you thought MRAs were a recent phenomenon!

We don’t need to bestow special honors on these harbingers of a century of racism and oppression, so UCL has decided to dename any buildings with their names on them.

In the meantime, the names have been changed to Lecture Theatre 115 (formerly the Galton Lecture Theatre), Lecture Theatre G22 (formerly the Pearson Lecture Theatre) and the North-West Wing (formerly the Pearson Building).

Not exactly poetic names, but better than trumpeting the names of racists.

Next up: all those corporations and rich alumni who buy the names of university buildings might want to consider the transitory nature of the honor, because when we start an accounting of the crimes of capitalism all those signs might come tumbling down. It’s always annoyed me that some rich dweeb with no real association with what goes on inside them gets to come along and have their name enshrined on the doors to a building.

Ooops, speaking of which, the Natural History Museum has decided that their new director will be the rich parasite who runs Amazon UK.

The new director has extensive experience of running online food businesses, and has also previously served on boards and acted as a trustee for high-profile museums. Gurr was the chair of the Science Museum’s board from 2010 to 2014, and was a trustee of the National Gallery.

He also acted as a non-executive director at the Department for Work and Pensions, which attracted criticism from the Labour MP and tax campaigner Margaret Hodge, who described his appointment as “disgusting” because Amazon was involved in a row over its taxes.

Oooh, “extensive experience of running online food businesses”. That doesn’t even make him qualified to run the museum cafeteria, but now he’s in charge of the whole show? This is a disaster in the making — rich executives are only good at figuring out how to loot and pillage, which, come to think of it, may be his best qualification to run a British museum.

Look for the helpers: Hsu has some peculiar friends

Yesterday, I told you that Stephen Hsu had gotten a bunch of signatures supporting his work, the effect of which was rather blunted by the fact that a lot of them were from racists. You’d think such a smart guy would have figured out that if you’re trying to argue that you aren’t an asshole, getting testimonials from other assholes doesn’t help. Well, now he’s got another major endorsement: Quillette and Claire Lehmann are backing him 100%. Oy. I guess he’s having his friends help dig his grave.

Lehmann’s defense is a real piece of work. She compares Hsu to Vavilov, and damns one person who criticizes him as…a democratic socialist.

Wow. So much wrong.

  • Vavilov was the victim of a Stalinist purge. No one is planning to send Hsu to a gulag.
  • Vavilov was a respected early Mendelian who was doing research within a theoretical framework that was well-respected in the world outside the USSR. Hsu is not a geneticist, he’s a loon promoting discredited ideas outside his expertise.
  • Lysenko was a political creature who exploited the wishful thinking of an ideology to claim facts that were not in evidence, or that had been disproven. That’s Hsu, too. He knows nothing of genetics, but he’s making absurd claims to prop up support for eugenics.
  • Lehmann caricatures ideas about genetics and the environment. Lysenko was a horrible fraud, therefore acknowledging any contribution of environment to the expression of genes makes you a modern Lysenko. Being a pure Mendelian who believes genes are fixed and invariant in their effects makes you a noble martyr to truth. It’s all bullshit.
  • Hsu is not being targeted “for his research and writing”. I haven’t seen anyone even mention his research in theoretical physics as a problem. It’s his dilettantish dabbling in fields outside his experience and playing on his authority in physics to justify his claims about biology that are a problem.
  • Hsu is not being misrepresented as a racist and sexist. He advocates for racism and sexism, he has a following of racist, sexist friends, and he publicly endorses racist, sexist ideas. His version of condemnation is to say, ‘I am not a racist, but hey, how about them differences in IQ scores?’
  • Hsu is not at risk of losing his livelihood. He may be asked to resign his title as Vice President for Research and Innovation (he may lose a bit of salary for that, but also gets out of some administrative duties). He’ll still get paid as a high-ranking professor, not to mention that he has made millions founding and selling a couple of Silicon Valley companies. He’s not at the slightest risk of starving to death in a prison camp.
  • I’m with Kevin Bird. Seeing the oppressive capitalist foundations of American wealth inequality getting shaken up is a good start. It’s not quite the change we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, though — we’re going to need to see Wall Street dethroned from its power and influence on government to be comparable.
  • Having the craniometry cabal at Quillette backing him is not evidence that he’s not a racist. Quite the contrary.

I’m hoping that the activists in Michigan can just point to the dishonest support of Quillette as confirmation that Hsu is a goddamned racist who has no right to be leading anything at MSU.

Dave Rubin is a first class twit

Here’s another thing conservatives fear: children’s programs against racism.

I have two grandkids who are two and under, who both love Elmo. I’m happy to have them learn that racism is bad.

(I know, Rubin will deny that he’s a conservative — he’s a “classical liberal”, don’t you know. But really, he’s a right-leaning conservative who only approves of liberal ideas that benefit him directly, like all conservatives.)

Stephen Hsu strikes back!

Since Hsu is getting pestered by these accusations of scientific racism and demands that he be dismissed from his administrative (not academic) role, he has decided to refute those claims with a letter and petition of his own. Curiously, he isn’t able to deny the accusations with evidence, which doesn’t stop him from simply asserting his denial, and has decided instead to respond with signatures from his scientifically authoritative friends in his support.

What’s amusing is that those signatures are from a bunch of known scientific racists. It’s like getting a bunch of Aryan Nation skinheads to testify that no, he ain’t racist, nosir, not racist at all. Very convincing!

As Kevin Bird says,

To be clear, all these academics are free to research, write, speak, and publish as they wish. However, in the context of defending a colleague against accusations of scientific racism, a more strategic decision may have been to not sign at all. Furthermore, a concern for MSU is that many academics of questionable reputation and/or people who have been misled about the campaign and charges against Hsu are jumping to defend freedom of inquiry despite it’s inappropriateness in this case. The inability of counter-campaign proponents to distinguish academic freedom from the powers and privileges of university leadership is a substantial shortcoming of the counter campaign.

Hsu is free to do all the physics he wants, that is what he was hired for. His extra-curricular ravings about biology can be dismissed out of hand, and really, he shouldn’t be rewarded with a high position in the administration where it looks like he’s representing Michigan State.

“Death of the author” dies at age 53

A satire site summarizes JK Rowling’s swan dive into the sewer:

“What’s amazing is that not only has J.K. Rowling positioned herself as the female Orson Scott Card,” said comparative literature professor Nicole Mathews, “but she has also done so in a fraction of the time. It took Card decades to fully explain his deeply upsetting hatred and many more years to face backlash. Rowling is managing to accomplish this in a matter of weeks. That’s powerful. That’s progress.”

“And just like Orson Scott Card, Rowling included a ton of pro-trans symbolism in her books without realizing it,” Mathews added. “What was once Ender’s soapy naked bathroom fight with another boy is now the magical Sorting Hat that places you into a category when you are born into the school, forcing you to figure out your own place for yourself.”

Now explain HP Lovecraft. He was an out, hate-filled racist from day one, and wasn’t embarrassed by it, and his work still holds a certain degree of squeamish respect. Could it be the hypocrisy of pretending to be a liberal, open-minded progressive while hiding the rotten blemish at your core is the damning part? Maybe not…Card was always a conservative Mormon at heart.

Maybe what’s dying here is the “death of the author” itself.