This image has been photoshopped

Currently making the rounds:

I was suspicious, though. It’s too good to be true. So I snooped about, and found the original on the ADL website.

OK, now, really — who thought they needed to edit the original sign to make it less evil and more obviously stupid? That was a waste of effort. Just an unretouched photo of these clowns in their costumes with their traitor’s flags and their blatant anti-semitism is appalling enough, don’t you think?

The ‘elites’ will be fine, the merely competent will suffer

We sometimes speak of the American university, as if it is all one thing, where you’ll attend and be pampered for four years and pop out at graduation to a job and a well-paid career. Corey Robin exposes the inequities of the university system by comparing City University of New York, a massive public university, to the Ivy League colleges.

For decades, a handful of boutique colleges and powerhouse universities have served as emblems of our system of higher education. If they are not the focus of discussion, they are the subtext, shaping our assumptions about the typical campus experience. This has remained true during the pandemic. The question of reopening has produced dozens of proposals, but most of them are tenable only for schools like Brown; they don’t obtain in the context of Brooklyn College. The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a more equal society. It’s time for a similar conversation about the academy.

In academia, as in the rest of society, a combination of public and private actors directs wealth to those who need it least. While cuny struggles to survive decades of budget cuts—and faces, in the pandemic, the possibility of even more—donors lavish elite colleges and universities with gifts of millions, even billions, of dollars. Sometimes these donations fund opportunities for low-income students, but mostly they serve as tax-deductible transfers to rich, private institutions, depriving the public of much-needed revenue. What taxes federal and state governments do collect may be returned to those institutions in the form of hefty grants and contracts, which help fund operating budgets that Brooklyn College can only dream of. This is the song of culture in our society. The bass line is wealth and profit; the melody is diversity and opportunity.

It seems that massive endowments only get more massive year after year, while the smaller public colleges are reduced to begging for scraps from state governments. We’re expected to do just as much as universities swimming in money from wealthy alumni, for less, with less support and less press.

There’s also a significant distinction: rich people send their kids to the already-rich private universities; everyone sends their kids to the community colleges, the state universities, the small public colleges. When you pretend an Ivy League college is representative, and when you starve the state-funded institutions, you are making the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer. You are also killing a major engine of class mobility, which I sometimes suspect is the actual purpose.

Yet, for all the talk of the poor and students of color at the Ivy League, the real institutions of mobility in the United States are underfunded public universities. Paxson [Brown University president and the deputy chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, because that’s the kind of person who ends up running wealthy universities] may believe that “a university campus is a microcosm of any major city in the U.S.,” as she told NPR, but cuny is no microcosm. With nearly two hundred and seventy-five thousand students and forty-five thousand staff—a population larger than that of many American cities—it is what the Latin root of the word “university” tells us higher education should be: the entire, the whole. More than seventy-five per cent of our undergraduate students are nonwhite. Sixty-one per cent receive Pell Grants, and the same percentage have parents who did not graduate from college. At City College and Baruch College, seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students, respectively, start out in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles. For hundreds of thousands of working-class students, in other words, a cash-starved public university is their gateway to the middle or upper-middle class.

In my career, I’ve been educated at state universities and only taught a state universities. I’ve visited the famous big name schools, like Princeton and UPenn and Yale, and mainly been struck by the disparities in privilege, not any differences in quality of content. We have to work harder in state colleges, and even harder in community colleges, but we bring the same information to the students, and the same opportunities. The only advantage to the expensive private schools is the opportunity to mingle with other people who can afford them — you don’t learn more, if that’s what you’re after, you just get to make connections with other spoiled rich kids.

What worries me now is that I see state legislatures, which are always keen to take a butcher knife to education at all levels, seeing the pandemic and economic failure as a reason to cut education to the bone, which is incredibly short-sighted, fails to see the need for building long-term investment in the human infrastructure of our society, and is going to hit the poorest population, the people who have the most to gain, hardest, while the wealthy institutions are unaffected. The economic inequities in the US have been expanding for a long time, and are a source of inefficiency and corruption already, and they’re just going to grow further in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Boy, the extinction spiral is a wild and depressing ride.

Michelle Malkin still has a fanbase? And it’s enhanced by including Milo?

Milo Yawannapissoff and Michelle Malkin have been collaborating, and the results are even more awful than you can probably imagine. They decided to work together to create an “America First” reading list for their followers. Just from their choice of subject you can tell it’s going to be a collection of racists’ greatest hits.

So what’s on it? Lots of Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza, obscure racist tracts and not so obscure racist fiction, like The Turner Diaries, Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Vox Day, and categorized as “U.S. politics, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The cherry on top? They include The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They also toss in a scattering of genuine Western classics like The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy, but really, they’re only there to put a shiny sugary glaze on the pile of shit they think are valuable contributions to the canon. It’s also rather demeaning to lump A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome.

They provide summary blurbs to go with the books. The Iliad is “What it’s like to be around an unstoppable killing machine.” Mein Kampf is “History’s most demented autodidact sets out his political vision.” Kevin MacDonald’s deeply racist and anti-semitic book, The Culture of Critique, is a “Highly controversial historical survey of the roots of anti-semitism”.

Say what you will about the classic Western canon of literature — it is full of Old Dead White Men — but I don’t think that a compilation of recent racist propaganda and fleeting pop culture nonsense is an improvement, especially when it’s driven by a blatant far-right conservative agenda, and written by a pair of not-very-bright boobs.

Amazon employees with courage

You have to give a lot of credit to Tim Bray, an Amazon vice-president who quit over the company’s treatment of workers. He was making a big sacrifice to expose Amazon’s corruption.

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

He makes a point of mentioning the names of the fired activists:

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Even if it wasn’t intentional bigotry, it’s still no coincidence that Amazon is hiring the underprivileged and desperate to do tedious labor in their warehouses.

He even provides a solution…a solution that has to be enforced outside of the Amazon executive boardroom.

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

As long as Republicans and conservative Democrats hold power, though, no one is going to have the political will to make Jeff Bezos do the right thing.

Capitalism is not the core philosophy of evolution

Abe Drayton, who appeared in last Sunday’s hangout, has a fine article centered on Mexie’s discussion of the injustice of capitalism towards disabled people. You should watch it, but also read Abe’s commentary.

Capitalism relies on the lie that human nature is all about greed, competition, and aggression. That is not what drives civilization, it’s what constantly tries to dismantle it. Every advance we have made in human wellbeing has come from the mass of people working together against those obsessed with competition and power to create a world that’s better for everyone. Capitalism does not give a damn about you, but fortunately those obsessed with capitalism are wrong – it is not an inevitable result of human nature, it is a perversion of it. A better world is possible, and we can move in that direction the same way we always have – by expanding the “tribe”, by pooling our resources and efforts, by caring for each other, and by using our collective power to force change.

Lay people seized upon Darwin’s idea of natural selection to distort it in directions favorable to capitalism, and started a dreadful feedback loop that justified exploitation — “I’m rich, therefore I deserve to be rich by natural law, and you’re poor, so you don’t deserve what little you have” — and ballooned it into a rationalization for our current nightmare. It’s what allows creationists to caricature evolution as nothing but a history of death and suffering.

It’s more mainstream than that, too…the whole idea of “Darwin Awards” is terrible and unrepresentative, unless you also give the award to individuals who increase the success of others and themselves with generosity and cooperation. The human species did not succeed because they were the best at killing — they’ve always improved our common survival by working together and building communal social structures.

News from the hinterlands of despair

I haven’t been sleeping at all well lately — that’s an understatement. I tend to go to bed at around 10 or 10:30 when I can’t even keep my eyes open, and then wake up around 2 or 3am and try by force of will to shut them, which usually doesn’t work at all. If I’m lucky I might fall back asleep around 4 to lie in restless semi-unconsciousness until the fornicating birds shrieking outside my window wake me back up as the sun rises.

Sometimes I just give up and pull up the iPad to read in bed for a while. That’s often a bad outcome — last night, I’m just browsing in the dark and come across “We Are Living in a Failed State”. It’s about time we noticed. I knew we were doomed when Ronald Reagan started spewing that “shining city on a hill” nonsense, which meant our leaders were lying to us and to themselves, and setting up a ridiculous fdcade to conceal real problems that needed real solutions, and worse, were actually all about building an intolerant theocratic state. But at least now in 2020, with disaster all around us, a few people are awake enough to tear down the false front.

Every paragraph in the article is a laser that burns away the propaganda our government has accreted around itself.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

It’s not a perfect summary, though, because it omits one critical target. It fails to discuss the contribution our failed media is making to the problem. Rupert Murdoch is briefly mentioned in passing, but no analysis of American failure is complete without pinning media moguls to the dissecting tray and taking a scalpel to them. Our media is sensationalist and dishonest and backed up by the ruling class and their money; stories are only as good as the number of eyeballs and clicks they gather, which translates into advertiser money, which roots the media directly in filthy loam of capitalism.

For instance, right now the hot stories that dominate the media are tales of protesters descending on state capitols in their shiny $40,000 pickup trucks, waving guns and Confederate flags, and pretending to be true Workers, needing to have stay-at-home orders lifted so they can get back to work producing food and manufactured goods for the American People. Actually, they’re shady phonies who want to force service workers to get back into the hair salons and coffee shops to provide them with the luxuries they desire.

These events are sensationalized by the media by putting reporters into the midst of the mobs, where it looks like a mass movement. Step back a few feet, and you see them for what they are…small demonstrations by a scattering of 20 to 200 middle class nuts riled up by Fox News saying ignorant things. For context, think back to the Women’s Marches in 2017 — teeny-tiny Morris, Minnesota, population 5,000, had almost 300 people peacefully protesting in our streets, while the large cities had huge demonstrations of tens of thousands of people.

I don’t trust our media to recall events as far back as three years ago, let alone put current events in perspective.

But enough of the Atlantic, that middle of the road semi-liberal magazine for the comfortably middle-class, like me. You’d expect that kind of site to be full of horrified soft people. Let’s look at the Marine Corps Times, instead, where we can expect to find tough talk and gruff can-do assertiveness, right?

There we find “I’ve reported on war for years. I’m more afraid now than I’ve ever been.”.

For years I kept one eye on the hysteria and extremism that’s been brewing in America while I covered atrocities half a world away.

Now that I spend more time in the states covering the Rust Belt and Appalachia, I must admit: I’m more afraid now than I ever was in a war zone.

Let me be clear: I’m not afraid of being killed in a gun battle or bombing on American soil, although by the looks of some of those protesters with the semi-automatic, military-style weapons, they appear to be itching for armed insurrection. They may just be waiting for some supreme conspiracy theorist, like QAnon or the president, to give them the green light.

Warzone deaths, while horrible, can at least be instantaneous and painless.

Nowadays, I’m afraid that America’s demise, (not to mention my own), will be slow, agonizing and too much to bear.

The last four-plus years of U.S. happenings have been fraught with the kind of anti-intellectualism and hatred of “outsiders” I’ve seen peddled by inept, tinpot dictators the world over and those with cruel acumen to sustain their tyrannical rules.

I’ve seen some of what’s playing out in America in countries riddled with bullet holes and craters where suicide bombers drove into a crowded market. Before they were destroyed, some of them were pretty nice, stable places.

I’m afraid this hatred of reason and logic that pervades Trump’s daily televised rallies from the White House is just the beginning of our slow painful decay into one of those nations that “once was” much more than it is now.

I should have known. What I’ve seen of the American military, as filtered through my son’s perspective, is less macho swagger and more pragmatic planning for the worst. More cautious realism, at least as long as we don’t look at the higher echelons and the defense contractors (there’s another place where capitalism has poisoned the purpose of the military).

So far, this was great bedtime reading, just what I needed to make sure I wouldn’t get any sleep at all last night.

So I tried turning to the lighter side. David Futrelle is writing about…Andrew Anglin, Rape Gangs, Sex Slavery and Breeding Farms. Yeah, the Nazis are all excited about the prospect of a post-apocalyptic future in which true Aryans get to roam freely over the wasteland, killing the mud people and rounding up the women to work in breeding farms, all for the purposes of fun and to build an army of white men to kill Mexicans. He really hates Mexicans, for some reason which I don’t understand — all the Mexicans I’ve met have been lovely people. Meanwhile, white Americans are fantasizing about Aryan Rape Gangs — that’s what Anglin openly calls them — and enslaving white women.

It makes one almost wish that we had roaming gangs of warriors who would cut down anyone who calls themselves an “Aryan”, flaunts a swastika tattoo, or waves a Confederate flag. Or at least a Republic that openly condemn people who practice such antisocial, antihuman activities.

Oh, well. It was something after learning what horrible corruption and failure that our country has collapsed into to read something that says how much worse it could be. See! A ray of sunshine! We haven’t quite hit bottom yet!

CFI has learned nothing

After the embarrassment of firing Kavin Senapathy and removing all of her previous contributions, it finally got through to the board that that was unethical and they have restored her articles. This being CFI, though, they couldn’t let it go and sent out a memo insulting Senapathy and asserting that they were not a racist organization because they knew some brown people.

Gah.

So of course Senapathy has fired back.

Speaking of caricatures, they boast that they work alongside “a vast array” of non-white people. As someone who has been committed to learning about the legacies of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism over the past few years, I quickly saw the dehumanization in this statement — whether or not it was intentional, this is tokenism. Do not refer to minorities as “a vast array.” And do not parade associations with non-white people as if it’s praiseworthy. Period. (Not to mention that this is a gross exaggeration; they don’t actually work with many non-white folks.)

Where has CFI used its platform to expose these fallacies? How? Evidence suggests otherwise. For instance, CFI let the African Americans for Humanism domain expire. As I observed in Undark, their magazine Skeptical Inquirer published a one-off “race issue” with articles written exclusively by white men. Contrary to their claim that they are “committed to diversity and to bring more people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds into its community of secular people and skeptics” they have refused several generous and well-referenced attempts to convince them to take the basic step of adopting a formal Diversity & Inclusion policy.

Some of the influential white men who shape the policies of CFI get serious criticism.

Dawkins does not remotely confine his criticism of Islam to sexism, homophobia, or any other injustice that might plausibly demonstrate altruistic intent. Instead, it is often frivolous, gratuitous, and designed to insult rather than reform. Dawkins’ shallow argument that he isn’t stoking Islamophobia and racism because “Islam is not a race” is a reductionist and disingenuous argument that has been thoroughly refuted time and again. As a brown American who was raised Atheist, I know firsthand the effects of people like Dawkins labeling Islam as “evil” — Islam is not a race, but I’ve been called slurs due to the assumption that my brown skin and dark hair mean I could be Muslim. I can only imagine what it’s like to be a hijabi woman in America. Based on hate crimes against Muslims alone (and racist hate crimes that wrongly target non-Muslims, like the Sikh temple shooting), it’s clear that Islamophobia stokes racism. And it’s frankly nauseating that the so-called “Center for Inquiry” continues to defend this.

Then let’s get into the consequences of CFI’s long-term neglect of social justice issues. We’re in a crisis situation right now, where American racism has made the problems worse, and you would have thought a leading organization dedicated to scientific skepticism would appreciate the importance of the issues…but all they provide is a few token statements while firing one of the few writers they had who had taken race seriously.

We agree on one thing — scientific thinking is crucial during this pandemic. It’s too bad that CFI’s efforts to help address this pandemic will be hindered by its dire lack of understanding of how Black communities and other non-white communities in the U.S. were already been dealing with epidemic levels of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and a slew of other conditions, beginning at birth. They don’t try to understand the sociopolitical factors that will influence the development and deployment of treatment and prevention strategies, including vaccines. They haven’t begun to understand the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, and the history of racist pseudoscience that’s alive and well today — a history that runs a direct line to how the pandemic has run its course. Gestures like Skeptical Inquirer deputy editor Ben Radford writing that “it’s important to recognize that the measures taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus in America and around the world — while necessary and effective — have taken a disproportionate toll on minorities” hardly make a dent.

CFI has simply lost all credibility.

If you thought eugenics was only an abstract notion…

You might want to look up Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist and general bigot, who wrote a piece for John Brockman’s Edge site on Chinese eugenics in which he’s practically drooling at the prospect of manipulating the human germ plasm. No, really, the West is doomed if we allow the Chinese to race ahead of us in practical eugenics!

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world’s most populous country depends upon it.

Oh god. The high-decoupling.

First, sequencing DNA is not eugenics. Telling me how many genomes they sequence per year is not the same as telling me they have a eugenics program in operation. The Chinese government’s crackdown on He Jiankui suggests that they are a bit more hesitant than Miller imagines.

Second, the whole idea that they can get a 5-15 IQ point per generation increase is ludicrous. He’s postulating that a) the observed variation is entirely genetic, and b) that a ruthless pattern of selection is desirable and would have no unforeseen consequences. You can get equal, more equitable, and less disruptive effects by investing in better education. Note that IQ scores have been going upwards for the last century without the state choosing to cull the undesirables.

Third, the idea that IQ scores are a proxy for “competitiveness”, rather than the ability to do well on IQ tests, is a fallacious leap.

Fourth, why would you think eugenics would increase welfare and happiness? It would do the opposite for the majority of the population that lacks the arbitrary genetic markers they use for selection.

Fifth, he is an evolutionary psychologist, which means his understanding of “evolutionary behavior genetics” is feeble at best.

But he does imagine a country that tightly regulates its families on the basis of poorly understood DNA sequences is a “utopian ethno-state” that will increase the welfare and happiness of its citizens, which makes him a kind of third-rate villain in a dystopian SF novel.

If DNA data were as powerful as he imagines it is, though, don’t worry about the Chinese supermen overwhelming us. Comrade Geoffrey has done his part to sabotage the program by donating his DNA, corrupting the database with his genome rich mainly in ignorance and arrogance.