You’d think Harvard professors would be more thoughtful than this

A Harvard anthropology professor, John Comaroff, had his wrists savagely slapped a few weeks ago for sexual harassment. This seems to be a common problem — many high ranking professors have vastly inflated egos, and I suspect it’s even worse at Harvard, where they already imagine themselves to be the smartest people in the world.

In 1986, a group of professors writing for the journal Current Anthropology found that the country’s most elite anthropology programs, including Harvard’s, operated based on a “hierarchy of prestige” dominated by powerful tenured faculty.

Nearly 35 years later, it is in part that very hierarchy that has allowed three of Harvard’s senior Anthropology faculty — former department chairs Theodore C. Bestor and Gary Urton and professor John L. Comaroff — to weather allegations of sexual harassment, including some leveled by students, according to people with knowledge of the matter and documents obtained by The Crimson.

All too often, a “hierarchy of prestige” is just a tall pile of assholes, which seems to be the case here. There’s a group of anthropology professors who have abused their position to make life hellish for some students — as usual, the pretty ones in an early and vulnerable stage of their careers. Ongoing investigations have been slowly trying to take apart a genteel collection of privileged jerks. Comaroff is the latest to get his comeuppance.

Comaroff was sanctioned by Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay on Jan. 20 after University investigations found that he violated Harvard’s sexual and professional conduct policies. He is barred from teaching required courses and taking on additional advisees through the next academic year.

I would trust the review committee — after all, it’s made up of Harvard professors, so it must be the best and smartest committee — and they came down with this decision after reviewing a lot of confidential information, which I, of course, haven’t seen. That’s one of the difficulties of these kinds of investigations, because they are processing sensitive and confidential testimonies and evidence, which often neither party wants made public. Another problem is that typically a victimizer can be quite charming and helpful to the people who aren’t his victims. I know for a fact that many of the people I knew who did horrible things to other people were nice to me, and it was an unpleasant surprise when their actions were revealed. That’s how they last so long in positions of power.

It’s a lesson I learned late in life, so it ought to be no surprise that an incredible number of Harvard professors don’t get it. It is disappointing, though, that 38 of them got together to write an open letter that basically says, “John Comaroff was nice to me, therefore he couldn’t possibly have ever been bad to anyone else.”

“We the undersigned know John Comaroff to be an excellent colleague, advisor and committed university citizen who has for five decades trained and advised hundreds of Ph.D. students of diverse backgrounds, who have subsequently become leaders in universities across the world,” the letter said. “We are dismayed by Harvard’s sanctions against him and concerned about its effects on our ability to advise our own students.”

The letter was signed by some of Harvard’s most prominent faculty — including a former Harvard College dean and five University professors, who hold Harvard’s highest faculty distinction.

Humble students of human nature, they are not. Do they even understand the fallacy they are committing? Did no one in this group of almost two score “prominent faculty” stop to think that maybe the fact that Comaroff didn’t hit on me or stifle my career is totally irrelevant to the issue of whether he did harm to others? Are they really that self-centered?

Oh. Harvard professors. I may have answered my own question.

Panic city

I must be tired. I was sitting in my office reviewing my lecture notes, when I glanced at the clock. It’s 20 to! My class is at a quarter to! Panic followed, because I was still tinkering with a few slides, and I had yet to get to my classroom. Chaos! Rushing about! Slamming down the last few touches! Off to the room I go!

No one was there. What’s going on? My class starts at a quarter to noon — it was a quarter to 11. Sheesh.

At least I got to go back to my office and have a cup of tea. I’m getting too old for this stuff. It doesn’t help that I’m just generally losing my mind lately.

Deplatforming works!

Remember Charles C. Johnson? No? There was a time a few years ago when he was the bad boy du jour, the awful far-right provocateur who was creeping all over social media, getting all kinds of attention, taunting and doxxing people, saying anything he felt like on social media to stir up responses. He even started a “news” site or two to peddle his brand of assholery.

Then he was banned on Twitter in 2015.

It’s like he fell off the planet after that. Sure, he tried a few more stunts, got a little attention now and then, but he wasn’t the raging viral infection he was in the early years of the 2010s. Milo Yiannopoulos should have been paying close attention, because he few years later he would be getting the same oxygen-deprivation treatment, and look where he is now, peddling gee-gaws on a militant Catholic YouTube show. I had completely forgotten Johnson myself — oh, the fickleness of internet fame — until I saw this clip on Twitter.

Blacks have a proclivity towards violence, and it’s driven by one gene, this MAOA variant that the Blacks have, Google it and do your own research. It’s all wrong, it’s fundamentally wrong, based on a few anecdotal level science papers that don’t even claim that the MAOA allele is causal, or that it’s unique to Black people. Johnson is not a scientist or science communicator. He’s barely qualified to tie his own shoes. And yet, there’s Joe Rogan, handing him a megaphone and letting him ramble on, only feebly asking, But could it really be true, though?. (In case were wondering, here’s a John Horgan article shredding the whole idea.)

That’s always been Joe Rogan’s job. He’s a popular, independent platform with a complete lack of responsibility, eager to promote the most odious trash without vetting anything. Johnson was at his peak, an attention-grabbing racist asshole, and that’s actually what made him attractive to Rogan. The time to ask But could it really be true, though? was before he brought on a liar like Johnson.

That clip, by the way, is one of hundreds that Spotify is now frantically deleting, including a multitude of cases where Rogan is happily using the N-word. People are now excavating all these clips of Rogan’s racism, like the one where he calls a Black neighborhood Planet of the Apes, which Spotify can’t touch — the internet doesn’t forget that sort of thing. And don’t forget the misogyny!

That guy on the left, who is telling his anecdotes about sexually harassing women at his comedy club, really ought to be in jail, rather than making Rogan guffaw and clap at the story of a woman being ruined.

Rogan ought to contemplate the fate of Charles C. Johnson, and Milo Yiannopoulos, all of their popularity demolished in a relative moment as more and more people used their own vileness, the tool they used to claw themselves to the top of the social media heap, to dash them down into the refuse heap of history. It happens fast on the internet, you know.

The bit about Mivart

I did that hour-long livestream yesterday, so as I’ll try to continue to do, I yanked out a much shorter segment for those who don’t have any patience for chit-chat. Also, the whole thing got instantly demonetized, I think because I talked about mammary gland development and evolution (YouTube is capricious and stupid — there was nothing prurient or explicit in what I said). Let’s see what they think of just the historical bit, where I talk about that unfortunate 19th century weirdo, St George Jackson Mivart, who got blocked by Charles Darwin and canceled by both the scientific community and the Catholic Church. See? There’s nothing new about cancel culture.

Summertime dreams

I like to haunt r/abandonedporn, where people post photos and videos of derelict buildings that they explore. I want to do that! It’s a bad time of year for it though, since it’s about -20°C out there, and if the spiders are all frozen, what’s the point? Once the world thaws again, I need to get out and do some exploring. These places are full of spiders, and I don’t have to interact with people to investigate them — spiders minus people? Perfection.

This summer you all have to help out by nagging me to get out and find abandoned houses, farms, and shacks, every weekend. I’ll reward you with pictures — lots of close-up pictures of creepy crawlies. It’ll be awesome.

For now, here’s an example: this guy explores an abandoned house and finds an abandoned 1973 Corvette in the garage. It’s February, though, so no spiders, which makes it a lot less interesting.

There’s got to be an interesting story behind it. This is an isolated, tiny house — am I the only one thinking it’s a drug house? — with an expensive car rotting and neglected. Where’s the owner? What happened that no one would claim that car? And most importantly, what kind of spiders will be flourishing there once the weather warms up?

Go unwoke, go broke

What? You never heard of Gettr? Here’s Wikipedia’s summary:

Gettr (stylized GETTR) is a social media platform and microblogging site targeted to American conservatives. It was founded by Jason Miller, a former Donald Trump aide, and was officially launched on July 4, 2021. Its user interface and feature set have been described as very similar to those of Twitter.

So, basically, Twitter for assholes, which is kind of redundant (Twitter is already for assholes!). But this one is a worse version of Twitter, if you can imagine that.

The platform experienced issues shortly after launch, including internet trolls posting content that violated the terms of service, users flooding it with pornography, and the brief hacking of some high-profile accounts. Journalists have observed the prevalence of extreme content on the platform, including racism, antisemitism, and terrorist propaganda.

I had to look it up, because while I’d heard of it, vaguely, I’d never bothered to visit it or look deeper into it.

You’ll find this hard to believe, but Gettr is in trouble.

Social media upstart GETTR fired over a dozen staff members late last year, including two key executives and its entire IT and cybersecurity teams, amid rapid growth and what former employees said were funding problems.

The layoffs came even as interest in the company, founded by Jason Miller, a spokesman for former President Donald Trump, exploded.

But three people who were canned say that behind the scenes, GETTR is struggling with more than just growing pains, warning that the recent round of layoffs may have jeopardized the platform’s security.

Curiously for a far right-wing site, it’s so open-minded that it is a recruiting ground for both the Proud Boys and ISIL. I guess if you want to watch beheading videos or see Canadians getting beaten up by roving gangs of thugs, you’d better sign up fast before it’s gone. Hey, Joe Rogan has an account there!