Hsu is rightfully embattled — he shouldn’t have any authority

Look, I don’t hate physicists — I have friends who are physicists! They can use my bathroom any time! It’s more that there a few rotten apples who insist on ignorantly stepping into my discipline and making grand (and false) pronouncements about how biology works, apparently because knowing physics makes them think they know everything. And it’s annoying, especially when they get grant money for it (e.g., Paul Davies), publish rubbish in physics journals without question, and get fawned over by the mass media for it. I’ve also noticed that there’s a kind of thin actinic line of other physicists who reflexively rally to the defense of any of their own, no matter how inane, against interlopers from outside the domain of physics — which is kind of hard to imagine, since they simultaneously believe that everything is in their domain.

I have to snipe again, though, because another physicist is in the news. Students and others are calling for the removal of Stephen Hsu as VP of Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University.

Some physicists think that because they know physics, and physics is difficult, that they are qualified to work in other disciplines. Sometimes a physicist wandering from physics turns out fine, particularly if they make use of their obvious quantitative skill; I’m thinking here of David Layzer’s well-known critique of Arthur Jensen’s IQ work. Other times it is disastrous, such as William Shockley’s eugenic proposals. Yesterday evening the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) of my own university, Michigan State University, posted a long Twitter thread that shows that the Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stephen Hsu, here at my own university, Michigan State University is much closer to Shockley than he is to Layzer.

I’ve written before in this space on how scientific racism gains purchase when supposedly mainstream sources publish and promote it. I find the evidence in the GEU Twitter thread to be good examples of Hsu promoting outrageous figures by appearing with them on podcasts and Youtube videos, such as that of the loathsome Stephan Molyneux.

Hsu shares a conceit all too common among physicists: that “it’s really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world — that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.” But his behavior shows that this is manifestly untrue. All the quantitative sophistication in the world does not help in disciplines that require interpreting texts in historical contexts, understanding social nuance, or properly recounting the past for present-day audiences. Add in a heaping dose of conspiracy arguments and you can quickly end up promoting racist, especially antisemitic interpretations of history. This is what happened when Hsu interviewed his friend Ron Unz last year. The Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation at my University heaped praise on a promoter of Holocaust denial on his podcast; clear evidence of Hsu’s complete lack of scholarly and intellectual judgement.

This isn’t some harmless academic argument, like how many aliens are dancing on the planets of the galaxy, but the promotion of bad ideas that do great harm to people. Hsu consorts with racists like Stephen Molyneux and Ron Unz; he openly promotes eugenics; he holds ridiculous ideas about the unlimited perfectability of human genetics, despite being pig-ignorant of biology; he believes women are inherently less suited to careers in science and engineering. His views are rejected by the American Society of Human Genetics, but I guess his authority in theoretical physics overrides that. The real shocker here is that MSU was willing to promote a blatant, unapologetic bigot with ties to racist, white nationalist organizations to a prestigious position in their administration. I guess believing in the intrinsic inferiority of minority students is no obstacle to putting the guy in a position of power at a university.

I tangled with Hsu a few years ago, ripping into his belief that we can breed people for an IQ of 1000, as if IQ is a real entity and breeding people is like breeding chickens. Remember the chickens, the mainstay of his argument?

That fat chicken is your brain. Let the dumbass physicist control your breeding, culling the less brilliant progeny from your line, and eventually your many-times-great-grandchildren will have great huge brains and be many times smarter than Stephen Hsu, and nah, there won’t be any side effects and we’ll just ignore the inhumanity of the process and we’ll pretend there aren’t any physical limitations. All you have to do is imagine an immense perfectly spherical brain floating in a frictionless vacuum.

They’re afraid!

The thin blue line is cracking. A few members of the Minneapolis Police Department are realizing that their jobs are in peril, and are ready to throw Derek Chauvin to the media wolves and an angry citizenry, and wrote an open letter disavowing any association with the ‘bad guys’ of the police force.

Members of the Minneapolis Police Department spoke out on Friday out against former police officer Derek Chauvin in an open letter addressed to “everyone — but especially Minneapolis citizens.”

“Derek Chauvin failed as a human and stripped George Floyd of his dignity and life. This is not who we are,” said the letter, signed by fourteen MPD officers. “We’re not the union or the administration,” the letter says.

“We stand ready to listen and embrace the calls for change, reform and rebuilding,” says the letter, which comes as powerful police unions across the country are digging in, preparing for a once-in-a-generation showdown over policing and new polls that indicate that most Americans now acknowledge that African Americans are more likely to be mistreated or even killed by police.

“There were many more willing to sign, but the group opted to showcase people from across the PD as well as male/female, black/white, straight/gay, leader/frontline, etc. Internally, this is sending a message” said Paul Omodt, a spokesperson for the officers who penned the open letter.

Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t believe you, and fuck you. The MPD has had a reputation for brutality for decades, and the minority population of Minneapolis has a rich collection of stories. Where were these police in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980? Prioritizing loyalty to a corrupt union and fellow gang members, that’s where. Standing in unity with bad cops. Probably getting in a few licks of their own. This is like those cops who now take a knee for a photo op before heading out to bust heads with a baton or shoot bystanders with rubber bullets or hose down crowds with pepper spray. I’m not impressed.

That is who they are.

Don’t be swayed when the bully starts sniveling and begging for mercy. They all do that.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about the unintended consequences of technology — I hadn’t thought about it before, had simply taken it for granted, but the ability of popular cell phones to record video is only about 12 years old, and has progressed rapidly to the point where the majority of consumers won’t accept a phone that lacks video recording technology. Better and fancier phone cameras are a major selling point! They are now used all the time to record the viciousness of the police, and are much more reliable than the body cams that somehow magically get turned off just before a cop kills someone.

I might have been much more sympathetic to a subset of cops making a plea for “change, reform and rebuilding” in 2005, before it became apparent that they were going to have problems getting away with brutality, and before all those videos emerged revealing how horrifically cruel and callous the police were. It’s too late for them now.

Fly any flag you want at NASCAR! Maybe.

NASCAR, a sport I have negative interest in following, has decreed that Confederate flags are no longer allowed at their events, which have always been characterized by good ol’ boys waving traitor’s flags and decorating their cars with them. Bold move! I imagine a fair number of their fans are choking on their chaw right now. One of them, Ray Cicarelli, has announced that he will no longer be participating.

Ciccarelli said he does not like the direction NASCAR is headed, adding that he does not believe in kneeling during the National Anthem, nor does he believe in taking away the right for people to fly whatever flag they choose.

What an interesting position to take! So you can fly whatever flag you want…although I’ve noticed a remarkable dearth of these flags at NASCAR, but then, I haven’t paid much attention. I think you’d get beat up pretty bad if you tried.

So you could commend his commitment to free speech, except that he also declares that you shouldn’t be allowed to kneel during the Glorious Patriotic Drinking Song, which means his reasoning isn’t at all based on personal liberty. What could his rationale be?

I mean, the reason the Confederate flag is on a shit list is because it represents white supremacy, bigotry, and oppression — and also, incidentally, slavery — so it’s easy to understand why The Libs think it is inappropriate. Is Mr Ciccarelli in favor of those things?

The real reason Ciccarelli is leaving the game:

Impressive. A perfect record.

Let there be change at last

Give ’em hell, John Oliver. Good summary.

I would also point out a fact revealed in this thread: most police activity isn’t about preventing crime, it’s about inventing crime, finding reasons to harass and intimidate and punish people to justify their existence. That’s the reason crime rates go down when the police go on strike: it removes a significant factor, the mere reporting of crimes that are generated to give the illusion that they are essential. Cop busy work is harassment of citizens.

Ever policeman in the country needs to be thinking about alternative employment opportunities. Preferably something that doesn’t involve carrying a gun or baton.

Did he think he’d go to heaven?

In the news, residents of Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it in a river.

I knew nothing about the guy and had to look him up, where two prominent facts are mentioned.

A. He made a lot of money in the slave trade. In fact, he held the highest office in the Royal African Company, so he was the head honcho of the institution responsible for the British side of the slave trade.

B. He was loved in Bristol as a tremendous philanthropist, founding churches and hospitals and poorhouses, and was spending a lot of money on local, British charities.

Huh. So he was busy generating great misery in the black people of Africa, and using the profits from that ugly enterprise to benefit the white people in his hometown. Those two perspectives are irreconcilable, unless he also thought his black victims were undeserving or non-human. I rather suspect that the suffering he caused greatly outweighed the good he did at home, especially since his goodness was fortuitously focused on maintaining the institutions that kept him wealthy and powerful. So, yeah, throw his monument in the river. Recognize that the good we do for our local benefit has to take into account the global harm that we do.

It’s also an interesting example of how European communities benefited at the expense of African and Asian peoples.

Now, Belgium…about King Leopold II…

The police are a mob of bullying cowards

The Asheville police bravely assaulted a first-aid station. It was clearly marked, it was staffed by doctors, nurses, EMTs and such people, and no one in the group was participating in the protests. They were just there to help people. Yet the police charged in, knifed all the water bottles, looted bandages and sutures, trashed everything in sight, and harassed the medical staff.

The excuses given: they were only supposed to confiscate medical supplies (why?). They had to search for explosives (in a med station?). They had to get rid of the water bottles, because protesters had thrown them at the police.

Take a closer look at those police.

Holy crap. They’re armored up like storm troopers from Star Wars. And they’re afraid of thrown water bottles? Did they watch Return of the Jedi, think it was a documentary, and worry that there were Ewoks among the protesters?

I also have to point out that they chose to fight medical assistants who have been struggling to get proper PPE for months, and who in this bold assault were wearing t-shirts and handkerchiefs tied over their faces, and were volunteers who weren’t getting paid. How much overtime did Asheville sink into depriving its citizens of medical assistance?

FTP.

Pinker parodies himself

We’re in a time of crisis, when a sense of injustice is acute, when communities are in flames and people march in protest, when white supremacists run the country and the police have willingly become a tool of fascism. What we really need right now is some clueless dweeb from Harvard to come along and reassure us that it’s all an illusion, the country is really becoming less racist, therefore all you white bigots out there can relax and not feel guilty because the statistics say you are all becoming better angels, even if you’ve institutionalized social norms that allow black concerns to be minimized even as you’re throwing huge numbers of them into an inhumane prison complex. That dweeb is the self-appointed guru of white denial, Steven Pinker. You can always count on him to show up at a cataclysmic failure of the system to let us know that this terrible event doesn’t really expose an ugly reality. Everything is getting better, don’t you know. So he takes to twitter to make his usual Pollyannaish pronouncement.

Good god. He’s a psychologist. He has to know that people are really good at rationalization, making self-reported attitudes difficult to trust. Look at this one graph he shows (as if a graph is more powerful than one photo of a cop with his knee on a black man’s neck):

What, exactly, is that supposed to demonstrate? That white people have become less racist since the 1970s, or that racists have been shifting their rationalizations since the 1970s? Are “Inequality is due to lower motivation among blacks” and “Inequality is due to lower ability among blacks” the only two excuses white people give for discrimination, so those two responses encompass the totality of the rationalizations? Has he even considered that both responses are pretty damned racist and are centered on explaining the othering of black people? Has he considered that a shift in what is socially acceptable to say in public doesn’t necessarily imply a shift in underlying attitudes?

Also, wow, over half the white respondents are making those two equally racist arguments. I don’t find this at all reassuring.

Pinker is referencing a black social psychologist (also a big shot at Harvard, which ought to be a caution to anyone reading their work — he’s black, but also in a highly privileged position) who is also cautiously optimistic about the future, but isn’t trying to bury the lede in happy-clappy noise.

We had all thought, of course, that we made phenomenal strides. We inhabit an era in which there are certainly more rank-and-file minority police officers than ever before, more African American and minority and female police chiefs and leaders. But inhabiting a world where the poor and our deeply poor communities are still heavily disproportionately people of color, where we had a war on drugs that was racially biased in both its origins and its profoundly troubling execution over many years, that has bred a level of distrust and antagonism between police and black communities that should worry us all. There’s clearly an enormous amount of work to be done to undo those circumstances and to heal those wounds.

Pinker really is the Norman Vincent Peale of our generation. We don’t need some racist-leaning, evo-psych-loving, IDW-associated professor telling us that everything will just get better gradually over time if we’re patient and wait for white people to become more tolerant. Action is the agent of change. Every incremental shift is the result of people standing up, speaking out, shoving reality in the face of the complacent and demanding change. There is no magic internal trend towards less racism, especially not among the people who hold all the power.