The Halloween Incident of 1993

This is a poor choice of a Halloween costume

Every year around this time, my university beats itself up over something that happened 30 years ago. It’s a well-deserved thrashing, and I hope they keep it up for many years to come. Here’s what happened (taken from the University Register, 10/13/2023).

Members of the wrestling team, dressed in white robes, burned a cross in a field outside of town, as a mock Ku Klux Klan meeting. Members claimed it was a “harmless Halloween prank among friends,” but the community did not see it that way. There was outrage at all ends for the insensitive, reckless, and above all, racist act.

Also relevant:

Several members of the wrestling team drove two black teammates to an off-campus location, where other wrestlers pretended to be white supremacists by putting pillowcases over their heads. One of the black wrestlers ran away and called 911 for help.

I think it’s good to remember this stain on our reputation. I also have to highlight the incredible not-pology of the assistant wrestling coach, Frank Pelegri, who assisted in this travesty.

I have failed to be sensitive to the feelings of those persons outside of the prank who perceive a Halloween prank amongst friends as an act of racism.

That deserves to be enshrined in the ranks of world-class bad apologies. It was an act of racism, through and through.

Pelegri resigned after the incident, so at least there’s that.

The neuroendocrinologists strike back

I keep seeing these naive pop culture simplifications of sex and gender — it’s all about gametes, or Y chromosomes, or hormone titers. It’s all about finding the one magic criterion that defines the unambiguous binary that certain people want. It’s the opposite of good science. You should be looking at the evidence to see that sex is messy and complicated and defies reduction to the state of a single variable.

It’s a relief, then, to look at the actual scientific literature and see that scientists working in the field all pretty much agree — it’s not a simple binary. So here’s an article by real, genuine, qualified neuroendocrinologists declaring that they’re fed up with the notion of a simple binary. It’s titled Deconstructing sex: Strategies for undoing binary thinking in neuroendocrinology and behavior by Massa, Aghi, and Hill. It’s also behind a paywall, goddamn it, but at least I have access. Here’s the introduction, which is pretty strong.

Neuroendocrinologists have long known that “sex” is a specious category. Much of our research relies on identifying mechanisms that produce differences in brain morphologies and behaviors, including how factors like hormones, chromosomes, and life experiences differences across “the sexes.” This work makes evident that “sex” is not a biologically coherent concept (Karkazis, 2019; Roughgarden, 2013) but is instead a constructed category reliant on several biological criteria that do not always align (Ainsworth, 2015). However, research across the biomedical sciences regularly treats “sex” as a single, internally consistent variable. And even while recognizing that “sex” is multifaceted and dynamic, even neuroendocrinologists often collapse the multiplicity (Karkazis, 2019) by selecting a single trait to sort research subjects and specimens into sex categories – a practice that obscures relevant physiologies and precludes the possibility of more specific (and more accurate) analyses.

While its shortcomings are well-established, “sex” remains deeply entrenched in our field. Scientists seeking to adopt more nuanced frameworks must contend with the limitations of existing resources, methods, and practices, much of which rely on binary (or otherwise simplistic) sex categorization. To encourage support for this paradigm shift, we first delineate how reliance on gross “sex” categories damages scientific knowledge and leads to harm of marginalized communities. We then examine how current policies may exacerbate these problems before providing reflective questions to help scientists critically examine the use of “sex” across the scientific enterprise. These questions, supported by a litany of neuroendocrine research, encourage researchers to conceptualize and study sexed physiologies as multiple, interacting, and variable. Furthermore, as an extension of discussions held during the SBN 2022 Symposium on Hormones and Trans Health, our guidance challenges researchers to break free of gendered preconceptions and conduct research which centers the impact, direct or indirect, on marginalized groups. We believe this critical reflection and scientific reorientation is vital to improve our science, widen the applicability of our findings, and deter the (mis)use of our research against marginalized groups.

This is what I’ve been saying all along, so obviously I agree with it. The authors go on to point out that sex is a multi-dimension category, not a simple variable.

“Sex” is a constructed category, not a biological variable – and our science should reflect that. Deconstructing “sex” and moving away from reductive approaches requires immediate local changes to experimental design and methodology as well as a deeper understanding of social influences on and of the scientific enterprise (purple and green, respectively, in Fig. 1). What follows are guiding questions we offer to facilitate this much-needed shift. We hope that thinking through these questions will impact how science is conducted – whether that means using specific relevant physiologies to determine sex category; moving to a multivariate, interacting, and continuous conceptualization of sexed variables; or moving past sex categories all together – and lead to a more comprehensive, accurate, and responsible scientific enterprise.

I have to say, though, that I’m not a fan of those kinds of meaningless diagrams. I’ll let it slide out of appreciation for the context.

Ken Ham sees racist pigeons!

Ken Ham is outraged that the liberal media and woke scientists are inserting racism into ecology. He cites an article titled How L.A.’s bird population is shaped by historic redlining and racist loan practices. He thinks this is imposing racism on birds.

When you think of bird habitats, racism might not be the term that comes to mind! But recently the Los Angeles Times ran an article on how the bird population in LA is “shaped by historic redlining and racist loan practices.” Why?

Well, because more birds, and a greater diversity of birds, are found in areas with more trees and shrubbery. Those areas tend to be wealthier, both now and historically. Fewer birds are found in areas made of mainly concrete and buildings. And those areas tend to be more impoverished.

Birds preferring greener habitats are, of course, not surprising to anyone who knows even a little bit about birds. But those who look at the world only through the lens of so-called race will see racism everywhere—even observing “remarkably segregated” birds! Such ideas are permeating our culture.

Uh, yeah. Animal populations will be shaped by environmental factors. One of the environmental factors observable in cities is the effect of poverty and the availability of greenery. Something that has historically shaped the distribution of greenspace is racism. There is a pretty clear chain of cause and effect and correlation here.

I mean, Ham explained it clearly and succinctly. Does he not understand it? Does he think the scientists went off with an a priori assumption that racism did it, and then cherry picked observations to justify their conclusion? That’s how creationists do science, after all.

But don’t worry, he has a solution to all this racist thinking. The problem, as he sees it, is that people don’t hear enough of the Western canon of classical music.

An assertion that probably just gave you whiplash…but that’s what he wants to fix. Play Bach in the streets, and chase those racist birds away, I guess.

Yes, this kind of thinking can now be found everywhere—from bird studies like this to which classical music is selected for students to learn to play. I was recently speaking with a piano and voice teacher who has a passion for high-quality music education. He shared that progressivism has completely overwhelmed the fine arts, including music, to the point where the standard canon of Western classical music (think Bach, Beethoven, Handel, etc.) is being ignored in favor of only minority or underprivileged group music (so music isn’t selected based on merit or even historic value but on intersectionality).

I don’t believe him.

I do believe that music curricula might be including more diverse selections than the traditional repertoire, but come on, do you really think students never hear Für Elise or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik any more? That music instructors don’t care about the musical merit of a piece? Absurd.

But really, this was just a clumsy and feeble attempt to plug his friend’s “new” musical program that will teach music through the lens of a biblical worldview. I’m used to creationist non-sequiturs and bad reasoning, but this one extreme, even for Answers in Genesis.

That’s what I could do in my retirement!

Earlier this Fall, I was crippled for a while by excruciating inflammation of my ankles. I am happy to report that this has completely cleared up, and I’m pretty good below the knees. Unfortunately, I then suffered from aching elbow joints — they swelled up nastily, but that’s gone down now, and instead I’ve got skin peeling away at my elbows, now that they’ve shrunk down again. So a couple of days ago, my right knee decided to freak out on me, and walking has become painful once more. I hobble about with a stylish cane nowadays.

I can safely say that my left leg is one body part that is holding up, so far. I’ve been getting a few complaints about it having to do most of the work of shuffling me around, but I keep telling it it needs to wait its turn. It can only betray me once my right knee has recovered.

Anyway, it’s getting harder to lecture dynamically — I don’t like to hide in a corner and just tell students what to think. I’ve been trying to think of alternative jobs I could do while relatively immobile in a single room, and I think I’ve got one.

OnlyFans.

AMissouri teacher has been suspended after school administrators learned she’s an OnlyFans star.

Brianna Coppage, 28, taught English classes at St. Clair High School until she was placed on leave Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Coppage began posting on OnlyFans over the summer as a way to boost her annual income, she said.

The Post-Dispatch reported that her teaching job brought in about $42,000 last year. She told the outlet that she made up to $10,000 extra per month through OnlyFans.

Whoa. That’s $120,000/year, about 50% more than I make as a lowly college professor. I could just roll around on silken sheets, keeping the stress off my failing joints, and get a substantial raise.

I can think of no flaws in this plan.

What’s an arachnophile who needs his morning coffee to do?

She looks very happy in there — she’s been expanding her web, dropping gumfoot lines to the bottom of the cup, scouting out the slippery edge of the cup, and grooming herself. I don’t think it’s a great spot to capture small insects (but what do I know? I’ve got a spider in my coffee cup, maybe flies visit it all night long), so I’m going to have to relocate her.

Also, I need my coffee.

Where has techno-optimism gotten us?

Back in the 2000s, I used to write for Seed, the glossy, artsy, fabulously interesting magazine that tried to do for science what Wired did for technology in the 90s. I liked the magazine, but it tried too hard and went belly-up in 2012, leaving behind a diaspora of science writers who’d been briefly nourished at its teats.

That was too bad, but maybe it was for the best: it could have encouraged a generation of obnoxious twits who thought they understood science, but really just liked fancy fonts, odd layouts, and money. You know, like Wired spawned. Imagine a world where naive pseudo-scientists announce that we just need to science more shit and all our problems would be solved, and we just need to tweak a few genes and mix up some new pharmaceuticals and…oh, wait. We live in that world. Never mind.

Anyway, what brought this to mind is that Marc Andreessen, the very rich guy who turned an early investment in Netscape into billions of dollars, and who has been rewarded with regular columns in the Washington Post, has scribbled up something he calls the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which I haven’t read. I don’t want to read it, because I’ve read a few of his WaPo columns, and he’s just another spoiled conservative wanker who actively repels me with his narrow, selfish perspective. But Dave Karpf read it! He didn’t like it.

In the manifesto (which, let’s be honest, reads more like an extended twitter thread), Andreessen positions himself as a brave, bold truth-teller: We are being lied to he declares. We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology… Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential… For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently… It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag. It is time to be Techno-Optimists.

This is a familiar diatribe. Louis Rossetto used to say exactly the same thing back in WIRED’s startup days. Rossetto insisted that the media and the government were clinging to power by trying to scare people away from the liberatory power of the internet. The only thing that could stop inevitable technological progress was a culture of pessimism and fear. As recently as 2018, Rossetto was calling for a return to “militant optimism,” insisting that the sole barrier to our bright, abundant future is a pessimistic mood. Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Peter Schwartz all hit similar themes throughout the 90s. Their “Californian Ideology” was a mix of libertarianism and technological optimism, declaring that all of the world’s problems could be solved if we would just sit back and let the engineers of techno-capitalism do their work.

I asked the same question Karpf does: who is lying to us?

Who is lying to us, Marc? You serve on the boards of trillion-dollar companies. A few of your peers own media companies. A few others have chosen to bankrupt media companies that write mean things about them. You have been celebrated for thirty years as the genius-inventors-of-the-future. If the public is turning against you, who ought to be held responsible for such a change in the public mood?

Isn’t it funny how the richest people in the country, the ones who have profited exorbitantly off the current system, are so upset at any criticism of the system. It’s as if a mysterious entity is threatening to take some of their yachts away, when in reality, the sheep are too busy trying to forage for grass rather than look up and plot to overthrow the minority that are gnawing on rack of lamb. Maybe the rich are worried we’ll notice, so they give us these semi-religious artifacts of techno-idolatry as a distraction. And it’s been working!

What makes Andreessen’s 90’s retread so odd is the way he frames it as a challenge to the status quo. Technological optimism has been the dominant paradigm throughout my adult life. We have spent decades clapping for Andreessen and his buddies. We have put them on magazine covers. We stopped regulating tech monopolies. We cut taxes for the wealthy. We trusted that they had some keen insight into what the oncoming future would look like. We assumed that the tech barons ultimately had our best interests at heart.

Even amidst the techlash years, public criticism of the tech platforms ultimately amounted to very little. The ranks of the tech billionaires grew. The largest companies that we associate with digital technology reached trillion-dollar valuations. Their every announcement of a bold new technological future was treated with extraordinary credulity. (remember the metaverse? Remember Web3?)

I have a special place in my heart for this little passage, though.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

That’s ripped straight from the book, Jurassic Park — the section where the protagonist rails against modern science, handing all-powerful tools to students who don’t know what they’re reading. I read it as a grad student, and I could tell you it was straight-up bullshit. But I’ll let Kieran Healy dismantle that claim:

Yeah. Exactly. Andreessen is a guy with a bachelor’s degree, nothing more, who got lucky. If I were playing God, and one of my students got $1.7 billion, I’d at least insist on a small percentage. All we can really do is guide students to interesting stuff and hope they can use it in their lives. I don’t even have a single billion of dollars, and I’m mainly worrying about how I’m going to pay for health care when I retire — I don’t have the leisure to do any social engineering.

But I do have time to look up and notice who has all the money and power and desire to play god with everyone else’s lives. One of them is this bullet-headed fuck:

Oh. So that’s why he was called “the Corsican Ogre”

I am coming off a four-day weekend, and I had decided I needed to get my mind off things, so my project was to read a book about a period of history I know very little about, a distraction from this period of history that is so thoroughly fucked up. I’ve missed out on the early 19th century, just a little gap in my education, so I picked up this free book via Kindle Unlimited, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, by Alan Schom.

As a book, it was OK: it tended to plod a bit, as it was a condensed biography that nevertheless tried to cram in as many details as it could, but I learned a fair bit. It didn’t take my mind off the current situation, though, because the early 19th century may have been even more fucked up than the early 21st.

I have a complaint, though. The author keeps telling me Napoleon is brilliant, a genius, a general impression I had from my pop culture understanding of the Great Man: that he was a great general. Reading what he actually did, though, it’s obvious he was a narcissistic psychopath who was a terrible general. He basically took the great wealth and manpower of France and threw it wastefully at grandiose campaigns that allowed him to loot entire nations, at the cost of great loss of life.

To give him his due, though, he was aggressive and would fight to the last man: he won battles because his opponents would hesitate and back off when they lost tens of thousands of men, while Napoleon would just hurl another corps into the fray, and afterwards, write back to Paris and order another levy of 80,000 men.

Often, that wasn’t enough. His Egyptian campaign was logistically incompetent and a total failure. Do I need to even mention his ill-fated Russian campaign?

That was a moment for me. I’m reading this book, I’d gotten up to 1811, and his Spanish adventure was floundering, the French people were rioting, Austria was mobilizing, and I suddenly realized that I did know a bit about Napoleonic history — wasn’t there going to be a huge catastrophe at the walls of Moscow in 1812? I heard a symphony about that. There was no real prelude to those events, one month he’s flailing about in his fracturing and fractious empire, and the next he’s marching off to frolic in the Russian winter wonderland. It was insane.

Also appalling: he lost, was banished to the island of Elba, and then…he came back, and the enthusiastic French people, whose young men he’d slaughtered in futile, fatal wars, elevated him again in patriotic fervor, and sent him off to Brussels with another army. The masses promoting a lying boob against their own self-interest is not a novel behavior, I guess. End result: 25,000 Frenchman rotting in a field near Waterloo.

What I learned is that the Great Leaders of nations can easily be greedy, self-serving monsters who will sacrifice the lives of their supporters for their own gain, and there will always be historians who look at the body count and conclude that they must be a genius. My cynicism has risen again.

But it’s not all negative news. I also learned how to deal with petty tyrants: banish them to a small island in the south Atlantic (far enough away that he’s not going to be able to row back), and give them a nice house and a small party of their sycophantic supporters and let them cheat at cards (Napoleon was notorious for cheating disgracefully at games of chance, which says a lot about his character) together. Give them five years to grate on each other’s nerves, and also, for one or more of the party to slowly poison the unpleasant ex-dictator. It was a little pocket of hell on Earth. The British dealt with him generously, and it was the most unkind torture they could have performed.

At least I got a little pleasure from fantasizing about the banishment party I’d ship my least favorite modern monsters to. If I were to exile Donald Trump, for instance, who would I send to accompany him? His own children, for sure, and Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Sydney Powell and a few Fox News hosts. It’s easy to imagine a true hell-hole made up of his own most persistent supporters.

World-class sarcasm

Have you seen Piers Morgan’s interview of the Egyptian comedian, Bassem Youssef? I know, you hear “Piers” and you are immediately repelled, but it’s worth it — Morgan is so effectively punctured, without even realizing it, that he’s left floundering about like an empty balloon. Youssef totally dominates and leaves Morgan whimpering about ‘language,’ and also manages to skewer Ben Shapiro, all while making Israel look like a lying bully. And he does it with the most precise use of sarcasm I have ever witnessed.

Absolutely brilliant.

There’s a really good question in there, too. What is a “disproportionate response”? Has a “disproportionate response” ever worked? Hasn’t Israel been engaging in an ongoing “disproportionate response” for decades, and has it brought peace to the region? Maybe they ought to try something different.

The vortex of madness that is Denyse O’Leary

I have read a whole book by Denyse O’Leary. I don’t recommend it. It was not a pleasant experience, ranking among the worst books I’ve ever encountered, which is saying a lot since she’s one of the stable of incompetents working out of the Discovery Institute. She doesn’t actually write, you see — she assembles collections of quotes with short sentences linking them and telling you what the author actually said, explanations that are often totally at odds with the authorial intent, but that’s OK, she got to name-drop a famous scientist or philosopher to ‘support’ her belief in dualism and psychic powers and life after death.

Here’s her bio.

Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul; and with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor of the forthcoming The Human Soul: What Neuroscience Shows Us about the Brain, the Mind, and the Difference Between the Two (Worthy, 2025). She received her degree in honors English language and literature.

I read the one she co-authored with Beauregard, which was bad enough. I won’t even dare to touch the one co-written with that twit, Egnor. I’m also not interested in sticking an immersion blender in my ear and turning my brain into a bloody froth.

If you don’t believe me that she could be that bad, you can get a non-lethal taste of her style and content at a blog out of the Discovery Institute called Mind Matters. Her latest post there is titled The Mind has no History, in which she attempts to tell us that the human mind leapt into existence fully formed by recounting a few examples from history. I had hopes that a history of the mind that claims the mind has no history would be short and, optimally, blank, but she does her O’Leary thing instead and slaps together a series of non-sequiturs, unaware that every word refutes her thesis.

She begins with the tremendous news that philosophers disagree with each other on the nature of consciousness, implying that dualism is shaking up the world of academic philosophy.

Briefly, the leading theory has been trashed as “pseudoscience.” Tellingly, so far as one can make out from reading the letter signed by over 100 angry prominent neuroscientists, a big issue is that that leading theory is not as friendly to “abortion rights” as they might wish. (If the theory is correct, humans may enjoy prenatal consciousness…)

Oh, right. Another of her big obsessions is abortion, and she thinks bringing up weird ideas about how the mind works is useful to justify the argument that embryos might possess a fully function mind. Sorry. Reading O’Leary often quickly throws you into the maelstrom of incoherence that is the religious anti-abortion world.

What follows, though, is a grab-bag of long quotes from the scientific literature in which we see evidence of the long history of the development of human technology, with the characteristic O’Leary misinterpretation. For example:

Usually, Neanderthal Man takes it on the ear for being less evolved than us but, more and more, no one can figure out why. Here’s a find from Neanderthal cooking from somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago:

Then she quotes an article from phys.org about the discovery of a Neandertal hearth in Portugal. I don’t know anyone who argues that Neandertals were less evolved than other species, an idea that doesn’t even make sense in evolutionary theory, and I don’t think anyone is surprised that Neandertal used fire, given that we know that Homo erectus was cooking food over a million years ago.

Next, she googled up an article about excavating wooden beams from 476,000 years ago.

Nearly half a million years ago, humans were building wooden structures, of which only a very few have been preserved:

Interesting. And…? Denyse O’Leary is the one arguing that human intelligence is sudden and binary, finding old artifacts showing that ancient hominins could carve wood is not the surprise she thinks it is. It’s a weak argument, so she asks Casey Luskin to back her up. That’s desperation!

This rare find shows that some of the very human-like forms in the fossil record — perhaps Neanderthals which lived at this time period — were actually much smarter than we thought. In any case, this kind of evidence does not support the idea that early humans were unintelligent brutes and that we are descended from intellectually primitive precursors.

Uh, that gives the game away. The scientists aren’t the ones claiming that early humans were unintelligent brutes. What’s going on is that O’Leary is steeping in the assumptions of creationist culture, and whenever it’s pointed out that her biases are invalid, she takes that as evidence that she was totally right all along.

So she finds another anecdote.

Roughly 600 limestone balls (spheroids) , the size of plums, have been found alongside tools at a site in northern Israel, dating from 1.4 million years ago. What were their makers trying to do?

I don’t know. So Homo erectus was shaping stones? Is this a revelation? Maybe they were playing, or practicing, or maybe they were just bored. How does this support O’Leary’s thesis? She doesn’t say.

She has one more example, though, and she comes so close to getting it.

Researchers: Neanderthals invented process to produce birch tar. The tar can be used for glue, bug repellent, and killing germs. This finding tracks growing recognition of Neanderthals as intelligent. Why didn’t Neanderthal culture — and other human cultures — advance more quickly? Tech progress is not a stepladder. Much depends on specific discoveries.

Maybe Victorians thought Neandertal was unintelligent, but then, they thought everyone who wasn’t white and British was inferior. We’re well past that, I hope, except in the creationist community.

Think about her last two sentences. Technological progress depends on specific prior discoveries, it is true, which means it is like a ladder, with each step building on previous steps. She undercuts her own claim, that the mind has no history, by focusing on technological advancements that actually do have an obvious history. That’s Denyse O’Leary for you, though: she piles up observations she does not understand and then simply decides they all support whatever conclusion she wanted.