I’ve seen that chess movie with Anya Taylor-Joy, and now I have lived it.
It’s true. She totally crushed me. I could say that I haven’t played chess in 30 years, but it won’t help, since Iliana had never played it before at all.
Minnesota is a fine state, with one great flaw: we’re nowhere near an ocean. It’s about as far from a seacoast as you can get.
At least Knut got to spend Fathers Day at the Pacific Ocean.
I wish someone would take me to the beach.
I couldn’t get past the opening paragraphs of this article.
While thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing their submerged homes after a catastrophic dam explosion last week, high-society Russians gathered for a glitzy restaurant festival in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, just 500 miles away from the devastating flooding.
The event, called Gastreet, saw some 5,000 citizens pay up to $2,000 dollars for the opportunity to listen to some of Russia’s top businessmen, restaurant owners, and influencers over the course of five days. The event also included concerts, lavish nightlife experiences, and gourmet dinners.
If there’s one thing that was made clear at the Sochi resort, it’s that no amount of Western sanctions, Kremlin restrictions, or spillover violence within Russia can stop the country’s rich and famous from living large—despite the raging war in neighboring Ukraine.
Ummm, yes? Is this news? Do you think this is a Russian phenomenon? People are starving in the US, and we still have our Met Galas. America continues to bomb Afghanistan with drones, it’s just too boring to make the news, while influencers get paid to pose with beer brands. Our public schools continue to get almost daily visits from fanatics with assault rifles, while a reality show called Bridezillas has been running on cable for almost 20 years.
Any time you have colossal economic disparities, you’re going to get these kinds of contrasts. Neither the oligarchs of Russia nor the investment bankers of America are going to feel any pain, and they’re all going to frolic in the wreckage of other people’s suffering.
The way conservatives have promoted stupid ideas on social issues to become the dominant narrative in the news is simple and interesting…and horrifying.
It’s been happening. The anti-choice movement in this country is driven by a small number of cranky zealots who have mastered this recipe, as illustrated by The American College of Pediatricians.
A small group of conservative doctors has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post that describe the group’s internal strategies.
The records show that after long struggling to attract members, the American College of Pediatricians gained outsize political influence in recent years, primarily by using conservative media as a megaphone in its quest to position the group as a reputable source of information.
The organization has successfully lobbied since 2021 for laws in more than a half-dozen states that ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths, with its representatives testifying before state legislatures against the guidelines recommended by mainstream medical groups, according to its records. It gained further national prominence this year as one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit to limit access to mifepristone, a key abortion drug.
They’re a tiny group, barely qualified to pontificate on the subjects they promote, and is dominated by ideological opposition to abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and trans care. That’s the glue that holds them together, rather than an honest medical consensus.
Records from early 2022 show membership of the American College of Pediatricians at about 700 people — just over 60 percent of whom self-identified as possessing medical degrees, including some holding prominent positions as hospital chiefs and a state health commissioner. The group, citing privacy, would not comment on the size or makeup of its membership.
It’s a religious organization.
Joseph Zanga, founder of the American College of Pediatricians, who had led the American Academy of Pediatrics in the late 1990s, described the splinter organization as “a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization” in a 2003 interview with the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, which promoted conversion therapy. His organization’s core beliefs are “that life begins at conception, and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children,” he said at the time. Zanga declined a Post request for an interview.
They followed the Right-Wing Recipe, though, and got picked up by the worst of the worst of media, convincing audiences that they are legitimate and credible, when they are not.
The group found an eager audience through conservative media, including the Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham shows on Fox News, the documents detail. Since 2016, the American College of Pediatricians has been mentioned in more than 200 articles published by conservative news sites such as Breitbart, Daily Wire, the Epoch Times, the Washington Examiner, the Blaze and the Gateway Pundit, according to a Post analysis. Its profile has continued to rise. The volume of articles mentioning the group during the first four months of 2023 was five times that of the same period in 2020, according to GDELT’s online news database.
“They’re part of a coordinated, politically motivated anti-science ecosystem,” said Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine and an expert in misinformation.
One more element to add to the formula: when their strategems are revealed and exposed, it is an attack on them, and they can then deploy the “silent majority” gambit.
“There’s a silent majority out there that stands with us,” she said. “This act has awoken a sleeping giant.”
The numbers may say they’re a loud minority, but they can always claim that the majority of Americans are with them, they just don’t say it aloud. This was also a popular excuse from the early days of the internet: “the lurkers support me in email,” even when they didn’t, but how could you check?
Why didn’t I know this term before? It’s useful.
The phenomenon of people believing newspapers on topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.
It’s also amusing, because the term was coined by Michael Crichton, who is a prime example of a beneficiary of the Gell-Mann effect — people think he’s credible on the things he wrote about, which he wasn’t.
This video creator also discusses what she calls Mann-Gell Amnesia, where a genuine expert gets all hung up on an irrelevant error in minor simplifications, not recognizing that science communication often involves making simplifications that need to be later corrected, as people get deeper into a topic.
It’s a long video, but hang in there for her explanation of why Michio Kaku is dead to her.
I don’t have a father anymore, and I miss him all the time. If you got one, give him a call!
I spent the weekend with my daughter and granddaughter (National Grandparents Day is on Sunday, 10 September, my wife’s birthday, so that’ll be easy to remember), and Skatje fixed a delicious dinner of fish and mushrooms, while Iliana made festive mudcakes. I haven’t heard from my oldest son yet, but that’s better than what my other son did — he called to tell me he’s going camping at the Mora Campground near La Push, and he didn’t invite me! I’m very upset. I love that part of the world.
He also reminded me of one time I was camping out that way with my brother, Jim, and how we got soaked in the constant rain there and drove into Forks to get cheeseburgers. It’s weird how the older you get, the more associations every bit of dirt on the planet acquires, and everything keeps bringing back old memories.
Anyway, Jim’s dead now too, and he left behind 3 kids who I hope are all remembering him today.
Now I need to go recover from hours of driving and an exhausting 4 year old.
I turn the students working with me into great big science nerds. We explored a barn this morning, and here’s Liz capturing and scrutinizing spiders.
RETRACTED. Another article on that bogus Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria nonsense has been pulled from the literature.
The usual suspects are all outraged at this rebuke. The odious Colin Wright wrote an article damning the journal — he claims the retraction was over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality
.
The technicality? Informed consent. Very minor. Totally unimportant. I don’t know why we even bother.
For those unfamiliar with this slop, the assessment of the psychological state of young trans people was obtained by soliciting self-reports from their parents, parents recruited from web sites where people obsessed with trans issues gather. All their data was gathered from an anti-trans website! It’s as if someone looked up the parents of scientists by finding their posted comments on Answers in Genesis, and then came to the conclusion that all evilutionists were formed by resentment of their pastors and association with god-hating school clubs, and determined that scientists were all pathological basket-cases.
I don’t know how it got published in the first place. The authors are openly biased, they pulled all their data from an openly biased website, and they even admit in the paper that there is a chance their results were biased, and somehow, it got accepted anyway. Surprise, if you poll posters to a site called “ParentsOfROGDKids,” you’ll get testimonials to the existence of ROGD.
Another surprise: they even say in the paper that The initial purpose of the survey was not for scientific publication, but information gathering for a community of parents with shared concerns.
Then, what the hell, they published it anyway.
Oh, and if you want to know where one of the authors, J. Michael Bailey (hey, I also mentioned him yesterday) is coming from, this might help:
🤮
Tenure is under attack in conservative states. Republicans want to take a career that is already difficult to enter, demands extreme flexibility in where you can live, and doesn’t pay particularly well, and they want to make it even more unattractive, and they are finding that increased uncertainty means their university positions are harder to fill.
But I’m not going to try to defend tenure here. Instead, I was floored by this one comment:
Tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job,Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, said upon passage of the bill.These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division.
That’s not their agenda, so that’s a lie. More shocking, though, is the implicit notion that no one should have a guarantee of a job. We live in a society where everyone is totally dependent on a reliable source of income for food, housing, and health care, but you are not promised the means to obtain that income. They want your life to be precarious, because then they can control you. That threat of potentially losing the job you need to live is a powerful tool of manipulation, it’s the knife at your throat they can use to force you to accept lower pay, or terrible working conditions, or long hours.
Why shouldn’t truck drivers and welders and fruit pickers and make-up artists and poets and electricians and house movers be guaranteed a job? These are all positions that are in demand (oh, sorry, except for poets — but that just says there ought to be a way for people to live while doing art), so why can’t we, as a nation, agree that this pool of ability ought to be reasonably maintained by paying the people willing to do it? Let them have the power to demand the right to live because they’re willing to do the work.
I know, this is what unions are for. Republicans hate unions, too. Republicans want your life precarious so they can extract maximal profit from you.
This is a little bit personal. When I was growing up, my father was a mechanic, a skilled job that I couldn’t do, you probably couldn’t do, and that required a lot of hard labor to do. Employers played games with him all of his life, though. Boeing was the dominant employer in the region, and they’d constantly fine-tune their work force, letting people go on short notice, and then later re-hire them, only to fire them a little later. Life under that regimen was like being a yo-yo, and it wasn’t easy having to scramble to find a new job every 6 months to a year, and maybe accepting a lesser job that didn’t suit your abilities because you’ve got kids to feed. It kept the workers hungry and willing to compromise on pay, though!
That’s what Republicans want for everyone. Professors should all be forced into adjunct positions with semester by semester contracts; they should be doing academic piecework, cobbling together a curriculum and doing research in spaces they have to periodically take down and reassemble. That’s what they want for everyone, if we’re all living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of our employers, that’s great for profit-taking. In the short term, anyway. It might compromise quality in the long run, but by then the managers will have extracted the wealth that pays for their mansions and boats and expensive cars, and that’s what matters.
Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.
One accidental occurrence is meaningless and forgivable, but when you keep hanging out with the same group of racists for over 20 years, and when you are repeatedly informed that these are bad guys, the correlation becomes rather more substantial. All you have to do is look at Steven Pinker’s history of academic friendships to see that maybe there’s a problem here.
- 1999 — Pinker joins the human biodiversity (h-bd) group begun by Steve Sailer, now the editor of VDARE, along with race science researchers like Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, race science funders like Ron Unz (of the Unz report), J.P. Rushton of the infamous, explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund, and J. Michael Bailey, who used pseudoscience to stoke transphobia and hate.
- 2004 — As editor of Best American Science Writing, Pinker publishes Steve Sailer’s essay citing inbreeding in Iraq as a rationale for an inevitable failed state, as well as fellow h-bd members Virginia Postrel and Daniel C. Dennett. Also included is writing by Max Tegmark, the MIT professor who recently attempted to fund a neo-nazi media group as part of the Future of Life institute, and two columns by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, who later wrote a ‘deeply flawed, deceptive’ book on race science and was condemned by 140 population geneticists for misappropriating their work.
- 2005 — Pinker writes a letter “to protest the shocking and disgraceful treatment of professor Helmuth Nyborg”, a fellow h-bd member who speaks at the same conferences as David Duke and researches sex and race differences in IQ. In June of 2006 Nyborg was found to be “grossly negligent”, misrepresenting his own scientific efforts and results. Nyborg is subsequently relieved of duty from Aarhus University as part of a 3 year investigation. In 2009, Pinker sends a second letter in defense of Nyborg without changing a word, addressing it this time to the new president of the university. Many fellow h-bd members join him, including Rosalind Arden, Harpending, and Rushton, as does Linda Gottfredson.
- 2006 — Pinker writes a lengthy article on the the IQ of Ashekenazi Jews by fellow hb-d members Harpending and Cochran (debunked and later proven utterly unfounded by better science and scientists) in which he blithely asserts that “Like intelligence, personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group, and slightly different, on average, between groups.” In 2019, Pinker defends Bret Stephens’ use of the discredited paper, while Stephens goes on say that he regrets not obscuring the source of the data, noting that “I could have cited from any number of other sources not tainted by Harpending’s odious racial views.”
- 2007 — Pinker provides counsel to Alan Dershowitz, with whom he taught a class on Morality and Taboo as described by the Edge.org (full syllabus here), on the interpretation of the interstate commerce law used to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein. The late Epstein was, of course, a prominent funder of the Edge.org, the elite group of scientists and thinkers which included Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, Cochran, and Pinker (as well as Gould and many others). Pinker is a bit sensitive about this connection.
- 2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).
- 2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”
- 2018 — Pinker shares a Quillette article by fellow hb-d member Rosalind Arden on the disinvitation of fellow Nyborg supporter, Linda Gottfredson, from a conference. In his note, he tuts at the SPLC for labeling her an ‘extremist’ simply because she has spent nearly half a century insisting that racial disparities in IQ are innate, immutable, and ensure unequal outcomes between racial groups. Perhaps he feels this too is a reasonable hypothesis — or perhaps he feels the conference would benefit from the work of Arden and Gottfredson correlating intelligence and semen quality. (Arden discloses their professional relationship if not the subject of their work in her article, saying of intelligence research “How often do we take the time to walk empathetically in the cognitive shoes of others? Millions of people struggle to maintain their health, their jobs, and their finances for the blameless reason that they are a little less adept.”)
- 2022 — Upon the posthumous discovery of E.O. Wilson’s approving correspondence with eugenicist (and h-bd member) Rushton, Pinker does not reflect or contemplate the implications of this discovery for either his field or his close collaboration with Wilson. Instead, he promotes an article by Michael Shermer (another one of the New Atheists that took a hard right) and remembers the battles Wilson, like Pinker, fought in the NYRB on behalf of biological determinism.
I’m also grateful that the article reminded me of the argument between Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary psychology. Gould was brilliant. Man, I miss that guy.
