The entanglement of science with money and crime

The system in the USA has led to deep systemic flaws in all kinds of important institutions. One of the arguments Lawrence Krauss used to try to dissuade me from criticizing Jeffrey Epstein was that he gives so much money to so many scientific enterprises. He’s a friend of science! He donated to Krauss’s Origins Project at ASU. He was dropping millions of dollars on various universities. Look at Harvard, they were happy to take cash from a child rapist.

My university is a small liberal arts college, not well known at all, so I don’t think anyone as perverted as Epstein has donated to us, but I have to be honest. We’re always cash-strapped, so if Epstein had called up and said he wants to give us a million dollars, our administration might well have leapt at it. It’s hard to blame the recipients of corruption when our country is trying so hard to make our educational institutions so desperate (not Harvard, though — Harvard never has any excuse, other than that they’re greedy and grasping for more).

Read this long thread from Nathan Oseroff-Spicer to see how deep the rot has gone.

He highlights two big names, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker. They are not accused of participating in any of Epstein’s sex crimes. Instead, what you see is an unhealthy respect for the wealthy, which motivates them to actively defend a child rapist, or in more generous circumstances, to kindly turn a blind eye to his activities. They are part of the silencing machine of rape culture. Epstein, and many others, are exploiting the system to rape and abuse, but even larger numbers of well-connected people are conspiring to keep it quiet. They wouldn’t even think of raping a child, but hey, that guy who would — he’s bringing megabucks to our research program. Let’s keep his activities out of the public eye, let’s minimize the complaints of his victims, let’s accuse anyone who criticizes rapists of inciting a “moral panic”. As Rebecca Solnit writes:

Monsters rule over us, on behalf of monsters. Now, when I think about what happened with Strauss-Kahn, who was subsequently accused of sexual assault by several other women, and with cases like his, it’s the secondary characters who seem to matter most. These men could not do what they did without a culture—lawyers, journalists, judges, friends—that protected them, valued them, devalued their victims and survivors. They do not act alone, and their might is nothing more or less than the way a system rewards and protects them, which is another definition of rape culture. That is, their impunity is not inherent; it’s something the society grants them and can take away.

You want a particularly vivid example? Just look at Alexander Acosta, the attorney who negotiated that absurdly evil sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein in Florida. He arranged a slap-on-the-wrist prison deal for Epstein — he was free to go about his business, but just had to report in to the prison at night for 13 months — and as a reward, Acosta was promoted to US labor secretary. Now in his elevated position, he’s using his power to cut the budget of the agency responsible for combating child sex trafficking by 80%. Solnit was understating the problem.

Our country is run by a wealthy sex predator who elevates amoral people who have defended other wealthy sex predators to positions where they can protect more sex predators. Meanwhile, academics at wealthy institutions tut-tut those who point out the obvious conflict here as part of “a growing sexual-assault bureaucracy” that “maintains a vested interest in fueling the panic”. We’re being impressively gaslit by these apologists for rape culture.

There’s very little penalty for actively working to maintain rape culture. I learn from Rebecca Watson that Krauss is being rewarded with cruise to Cambodia and Vietnam, with his good buddy Richard Dawkins, funded by the Origins Project — you know, the foundation that used to be funded in part by Jeffrey Epstein. You too can join this luxurious 8-day / 7-night riverboat cruise with Krauss and Dawkins for the low, low price of $10,000.

Krauss is still the president of the board of directors of the Origins Project Foundation — his dismissal from his position at ASU doesn’t affect that in the slightest. Take a look at all the well-known people serving on that board. Some of them I’ve met and engaged with in the context of the atheist movement, and there they are, willingly serving a known sexual harasser and creep. I can sympathize with wanting to support a good cause, but they’re doing it by enabling a bad man. That’s how rape culture thrives.

I’m glad to be out of it. Especially since Rebecca is going to launch all those moral cowards into the sun.

Sorry, it’s Tucker Carlson

I know, it’s early in the morning, my fellow Americans, and you’re still working on your coffee and cornflakes, but if I have to be exposed to this talking emetic, you get it too. He’s now calling people who demand greater diversity in congress “racists”.

That’s perverse. So congress can go on for hundreds of years as a body consisting almost exclusively of white men, and that’s not racist, but anyone suggesting that there be a more balanced representation that includes more women of color is racist. That’s how systems of exclusion and oppression perpetuate themselves, by turning any resistance to a discriminatory system into a feeble rationale about that being discriminatory. You have to be really gullible to accept such a game, but that’s Tucker’s audience.

Tlaib is making a reasonable suggestion that any group that makes decisions for minorities ought to include representation of the target group.

Who are antifa?

A sociologist who studied antifa activists reports on their motivations:

For most people, fascist activism and organizing are abstractions removed from their daily lives; images on television and news reports, cartoonish villains. For the antifa activists whom I researched, fascists represented an intense and immediate threat.

Many militant anti-fascists become involved in this form of activism because aspects of their identity are directly targeted by fascist violence; they are queer, transgender, gender non-conforming, people of color, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and certainly identified in ways that intersected across these categories.

For them, anti-fascism was a means of ensuring their safety from a movement that threatens their very existence and venerates violence as the highest form of action. Even the antifa activists who identify as cis heterosexual white males are the targets of fascist violence as “race” and “gender” traitors.

Antifa activists routinely describe both verbal threats and physical assaults made against them by fascists. Those who suffered from physical assaults often struggled from PTSD as a result of fascist violence.

What about the police? Aren’t they there to protect the peace?

From a militant anti-fascist perspective, the role of the police has been either ineffectual or outright complicit in fascist violence. It is a criminological truism that police rarely arrive to an incident in progress. A great deal of anti-fascism is informal and spontaneous response to fascist presence in a subcultural or public space. Such “everyday anti-fascism” intervenes against an immediate threat long before any law enforcement could arrive on the scene.

In the case of protest scenarios, especially in Portland, there is evidence of collaboration and collusion between far-right protesters and police with officers engaging in friendly banter with far-right leaders via text message and police logs indicating the targeting of anti-fascists while ignoring armed alt-right activists.

In this context, antifa activists view their actions as the only means of defense against a demonstrable threat from fascist activists. Militancy becomes a move designed to match the violence of far-right activists with a counter-veiling force. I noted after Charlottesville the danger of drawing an equivalency between the violence of the far-right and militancy of antifa activists, and it rings true today.

In response to fascist organizing and even threats of violence, antifa activists mobilize public shaming and confrontational protest. They do so as part of a countermovement strategy designed to demobilize the fascist movement, and in doing so secure the safety of themselves, vulnerable populations, and their communities.

Stanislav Vysotsky doesn’t make excuses for the fascists, unlike far too many people who are promoting the “never punch fascists under any circumstances” approach.

Close the camps NOW

Today is a day of protest. People will be rallying to let our congressional representatives know the border camps must be shut down — the Morris event will be at 5:30 today, outside the library.

This is a crisis. The comparison to Nazis has never been more appropriate — the border patrol is packed with the worst people, bigots who are actively dehumanizing immigrants and subjecting them to horrendous conditions.

This secret Facebook group for border patrol members, “I am 10-15”, that has been pumping out sewage for years is revealing — imagine if the conversations of Nazi prison camp guards had been preserved for posterity, I’m sure they’d sound just like this.

Recent posts shared with ProPublica include a meme using graphic language to mock CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation and a comment that referred to soccer star Megan Rapinoe as a man. A separate thread made fun of a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag.

One poster wrote, “At least it’s already in a trash bag.”

Another wrote, “Sous-vide? Lol,” referring to a method of cooking in a bag.

That’s a child they are laughing at.

Several of our representatives went on a tour of the “detention facilities” (the nicest euphemism anyone can come up with for these hell-holes), and it’s a horror show.

California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu also spoke of CBP’s unwillingness to let the lawmakers see the whole facility — and even accused the officers of cleaning up before the group arrived at one of the stations.

“CBP didn’t want us to talk to them. They actually prohibited us from doing it, but we went ahead and did it anyway,” she said of the El Paso station. “There were 3 cells of about 15 women each, and the tears were streaming down their faces as they talked about their children being separated from them, the lack of running water, the fact that they had been there for over 50 days and had no idea when they were going to leave.”

The conditions described by Kennedy, Ocasio-Cortez, and other politicians corroborate what attorneys — and migrants themselves — have said Border Patrol stations are like. On Monday, the Associated Press obtained footage of an interview with a 12-year-old girl who had been held at the Clint, Texas station. The girl, who was separated from her aunt at the border, said she and the other children were “treated badly,” forced to sleep on the floor, and were barely given food.

That the jailers prohibited anyone from recording, or even talking with the prisoners, says it all. They know they’re doing evil, and that they’re being dragged into the light, and they don’t like it.

Fire them all. Shut the camps down. Let the people go free and reunite the broken families.

When a glossary speaks truth

The Guardian helps us decode Silicon Valley jargon. A sampling:

diversity and inclusion (ph) – Initiatives designed to sugarcoat Silicon Valley’s systematic failure to hire, promote and retain African American and Latinx employees. The phrase is usually invoked when a company is expounding on its “values” in response to incontrovertible evidence of widespread racial or gender discrimination.

free speech (ph) A constitutionally protected right in the US that is primarily invoked by tech bros and internet trolls when they are asked to stop being assholes. Syn: hate speech. See ideological diversity.

ideological diversity (ph) – The rallying cry for opponents of diversity and inclusion programs. Advocates for ideological diversity argue that corporate efforts to increase the representation of historically marginalized groups – women, African Americans and Latinos, among others – should also be required to increase the representation of people who believe that women, African Americans and Latinos are inherently unsuited to work in tech.

meritocracy (n) A system that rewards those who most deserve it, as long as they went to the right school. The tech industry is a meritocracy in much

same way that America is a meritocracy. See diversity and inclusion.

That’s exactly how I translate those terms in my head.

Fathers and baby girls and our nation of evil

I have three kids. One of them is a daughter (not that I like daughters more than sons, they’re all great, but that it’s relevant today). This is Skatje when she was a child:

Now she has a daughter. This is Iliana.

It’s a video. Go ahead, watch it. It’ll melt your heart. I check Skatje’s Instagram every morning, because nothing will cheer me up more than seeing that happy little baby. Well, maybe seeing my happy little grandson is just as heartwarming, but they’re not in competition.

Little kids are all wonderful. There’s a great big emotional trigger in those faces, and it makes me want to hug them and protect them and make the world safe for them.

You know, like a dad.

So I turn to the news today, and there’s The Picture. I’m not going to show it here, because it breaks my heart. It’s the photo of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, drowned and dead on the banks of the Rio Grande. I can scarcely bear it.

“They wanted a better future for their girl,” María Estela Ávalos, Vanessa’s mother, told The Washington Post.

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Tania Vanessa Ávalos and their daughter, Valeria, on Valeria’s first birthday.

They traveled more than 1,000 miles seeking it. Once in the United States, they planned to ask for asylum, for refuge from the violence that drives many Central American migrants from their home countries every day. But the farthest the family got was an international bridge in Matamoros, Mexico. On Sunday, they were told the bridge was closed and that they should return Monday. Aid workers told The Post the line to get across the bridge was hundreds long.

The young family was desperate. Standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, America looked within reach. Martínez and Valeria waded in. But before they all made it to the other side, to Brownsville, Tex., the river waters pulled the 25-year-old and his daughter under and swept them away.

As a father, I see this story, and I think — let them in. Let them all in. Tear down the walls and gates and blockades and embrace these people as fellow human beings in need of help. We have an obligation to everyone that is compromised by selfishness and greed and an evil hatred of others, and if we were a humane and great good state, we would be working to help, not harm.

Instead, we exploit our neighbors and when they flee the conditions we have created, we bar the door and watch them die. We watch children drown. The ones who make it across are thrown into concentration camps, and parents and children are separated, and kept in inhumane conditions.

We are the bad guys here. Not just slightly bad, either: history is going to look back on us and call us monsters. We kill baby girls and the fathers trying to protect them.

Then we get into debates about the meanings of words, and parse out the laws in our books, and reinterpret our history, all to justify cruelty and our privileges and dehumanize desperate people. There are people on the internet right now trying to claim that that family deserved it. There are politicians who are thinking are laws are not cruel enough.

The bodies of the dead lining our border tell us, though, that we are wrong. We are an evil empire that builds prisons to control people, and maintains armies and guards to make them fear. That is not hyperbole. The corpses of children tell us it’s an understatement.

I’ll just watch Iliana some more, and hope she is better treated than other baby girls…but they all deserve better than we give them.

Knitters & spiders rule, libertarians & centrists drool

David Neiwert was banned from Twitter. The reason: an alt-right troll with a Pepe the Frog avatar had reported him for using a profile picture that featured the artwork of his latest book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. Neiwert is a serious journalist, the troll is an awful little man who bragged about getting him banned, and the troll has experienced no consequences for being a weasely fascist apologist. Neiwert has compromised with Twitter to get the ban lifted, and it’s astonishing that they had to have any conversation at all…and that Twitter didn’t simply acknowledge a mistake and apologize and lift it immediately.

Neiwert has a few words for the medium.

…they couldn’t really explain why and how an account featuring a well-known (but ambiguous) hate symbol—namely, Pepe the Frog—in its profile and its avatar could report me and have me suspended, while that account remained untouched. I was told that this account’s posts weren’t notably hateful (truthfully, they were more in the vein of trolling than of overt white nationalist hate-mongering), so given that context, they chose not to act. That, however, fails to explain why—given that a quick perusal of my timeline would reveal that not only does my work not promote hate speech, it actively opposes it—I wasn’t afforded the similar benefit of the context.

This leads us to what I see as really the abiding problem for Twitter, and for all the social-media platforms, particularly YouTube and Facebook: wildly inconsistent and frequently wrongheaded enforcement of their rules. Twitter’s reassurances otherwise, it is painfully clear that many of the people in charge of making these decisions are either horribly trained or are ideologically ill-suited for the task. Let’s be clear: Hiring libertarians, particularly those inclined to equate hate speech with speech opposing it, for these tasks is a recipe for disaster. So is hiring people who have no idea that fascists are not liberals, or that neo-Nazis are no different than militia “Patriots.” Proper, thorough, and effective training is absolutely essential for these platforms to achieve their goals of ensuring community safety and having a welcoming platform reflective of an open democratic society, and its accompanying marketplace of ideas.

As long as people in power bend over backwards to be “fair” to racists, fascists, and misogynists, there’s going to be this phony conflict that advantages the assholes willing to exploit centrist and libertarian waffling.

Meanwhile, over on Ravelry…

Read the full policy. Note that there are 8 million users on Ravelry — this isn’t some obscure backwater of the web.

We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.

This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.

We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.

Policy notes:

  • You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
  • We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
  • We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
  • We are not banning people for past support.
  • Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
  • Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.

You can help by flagging any of the following items if they constitute support for Trump or his administration:

  • Projects: Unacceptable projects will be provided to the member or made invisible to others.
  • Patterns: Unacceptable patterns will be returned to drafts.
  • Forum posts: right now, only posts written after Sunday, June 23rd at 8 AM Eastern
  • Profiles: Unacceptable avatars or profile text will be removed.

Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work. For citations/references, see this post on RPG.net: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-po…

See, Twitter and Facebook, it’s not that hard. It’s possible to be politically neutral and fair, while also shutting down hate speech and Nazis.

Even back in my usenet days, the fabric arts groups had a reputation for being practical, no-nonsense associations that were intolerant of intolerance. It’s good to see their reputation is holding up.

Do I need to take up knitting now? I’ve kind of got my hands full with my arachnology projects…wait. Knitting. Spiders. Do you realize how naturally those two go together? You can’t argue with 300+ million years of the fiber arts.

If you’re wondering what triggered this policy, here’s the background.

Everything wrong with Twitter in one story

In their mad flailing about to defeat the bad PR about how their site is a haven for racists and misogynists, while trying carefully to avoid alienating anyone who might be bringing them buckets of money, Twitter managed to ban David Neiwert. You know, the David Neiwert, the journalist who has been carefully documenting the rise of the rabid right for decades, who is no friend to these extremists?

Neiwert shared with The Daily Beast the appeal he sent to Twitter:

“My account was suspended because of the photo of the cover of my book in my profile. This book, ‘Alt-America,’ is a history of the rise of the radical right in the United States over the past 30 years. It naturally has an illustration featuring KKK hoods because that is its subject. I am one of the nation’s leading experts on this subject, and it is insane that you would suspend my account because of this photo. I refuse to remove it on principle.”

Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump was published in 2017 and chronicled the trajectory of far-right and white supremacist groups since the 1990s. Neiwert had used the cover illustration on his Twitter profile without trouble since the book was published.

The problem here is that Twitter insists on implementing the cheapest, most superficial, most easily gamed methods to sniff out bad actors on their medium, meaning that the dishonest thrive and the forthright are silenced. This is not a good sign that they’re getting a grip on the infection they’ve enabled.

I wonder if I’ll get banned for posting the same cover image?