Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Gab, the social networking site, is having some troubles, again. They’re being attacked! By bad actors! Oh no!

This is my favorite ironic line from the complaint.

Do you want this website to stay online or do you want to be able to threaten and incite violence by somehow claiming it’s “free speech” (it’s not.)

Wholesome, pure, violence-free Gab…you know, the site that welcomed Nazis.

Since its inception, Gab has welcomed deplatformed social media users, generally attracting those on the far right. When Twitter suspended a number of alt-right accounts just after the 2016 election — including white nationalist Richard Spencer’s — Gab welcomed them with open arms.

And QAnon.

In early October, when Facebook purged a number of accounts connected to QAnon, Torba published a blog post welcoming them to the site. “Gab is happy to announce that we will be welcoming all QAnon accounts across our social network, news, and encrypted chat platforms,” Torba wrote. He added, “Members of the QAnon community have been active on Gab for several years. We have never seen any calls for violence, threats, or any other illegal activity from this group of people.”

Except for fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, of course.

The Capitol mob began organizing weeks ago for the violence that occurred on January 6, planning inside conspiracy theory and far-right online communities on platforms like Parler and Gab. Groups that typically live in the darker corners of the internet stepped into the spotlight when they took the Capitol and broadcast the breach around the web.

…

The groups that stormed Capitol Hill this week have long been active on platforms like Gab and 4chan, and more recently, they’ve adopted newer tools like the lightly moderated social media site Parler and the anonymous messaging service Telegram to organize.

And who could forget?

The platform made headlines in October 2018 after a gunman opened fire in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 worshipers. Robert Bowers, who is accused of the crime, spent years posting anti-Semitic rhetoric on Gab. His final post before the shooting read, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

No sir, no violence here. It’s all those people trying to shut down a hate and conspiracy theory site who are being violent.

Here’s another blast from tolerant, lovely Andrew Torba from last year: the people going after Gab are Mentally ill tranny demon hackers (he’s very serious).

My cell biology students would have fun with this

Or maybe some would just be confused? After all, it comes from that reputable scientific authority, the Daily Mail.

To the red marks I’d also add that mitochondria is plural, mitochondrion is singular, and a mitochondrian is, I think, a Dutch abstract painter.

I don’t think I’ll expose my students to this because I’m concentrating on teaching them good science.

I guess cowboys just hate Indians

There is this law called the Indian Child Welfare Act which, along with providing necessary protections, also helped kill the practice of tearing apart Indian families and putting their kids in boarding schools. Sounds like an obvious idea, right? It’s somewhat surprising that it was only enacted in 1978. Would you also be surprised to learn that some people are trying to overthrow that law?

It’s being challenged in child custody cases, with people actually saying that no, it is wrong to try and keep children with their relatives or their tribe, and their reasoning is unbelievable.

So a U.S. federal district judge did exactly that. He … a radical conservative judge in Texas. And he took the Indian Child Welfare Act and he checked it out the window and said that it was racial discrimination.

That’s their argument: that a law to protect an oppressed minority is racist. That’s rich, coming from a radical conservative, the kind of person who wants to preserve the privilege that maintains a white majority rule. He doesn’t care about racism, except when brown people get uppity.

What’s worrisome is that the decision was appealed all the way to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and they split.

They strike down a few narrow parts of the law, but that 16 judge panel was evenly split on whether basically the foundation of the legal status of tribes is constitutional. And so that’s how close we are to a scary result in this case. And I think that we’ll have to see what the Supreme Court will do. But it’s terrifying to think that the Supreme Court is going to take it up and all federal Indian law is on the table.

I wonder how many Trump appointees were involved. The Republicans have been doing their best to pack the courts. I wonder who could possibly want to strike down the ICWA, and it’s “private adoption attorneys, corporate lawyers and this universe of right-wing money and operatives”.

It always astonishes me, a professor at a college with a student body that is about 20% Indian, how much discrimination goes on in the communities around me — discrimination that is almost entirely invisible to me, and it’s disturbing when it rises up where an oblivious old white dude can see it.

Here’s another story, from Nebraska, in which busybodies in a public school decided to cut Lakota kids’ hair in the name of searching for lice. What gets me is all these white ranchers defending the school secretary who took it upon herself to hack at the kids’ hair (they didn’t have lice, by the way). She’s a nice lady, they say, she didn’t mean any harm, “She did it to help the children and keep the school safe”, etc. I don’t believe it. My particular culture doesn’t attach the kind of importance to long hair that the Lakota do, and if some school official had taken scissors to my kids’ hair, I would have marched to the school district office in a rage and demanded that they be fired. You don’t get to make those kinds of decisions for my children, they have more autonomy than that.

It’s an act that doesn’t have the historical resonance it does for the Lakota, so I can only imagine a fraction the anger it would generate.

As the story circulated on social media, raw emotions surfaced. Grandparents shared stories of how their hair had been cut in boarding schools decades ago.

“Having the seventh, eighth, tenth generation having to go through it again … I mean, it’s just a big eye opener because it’s being re-lived,” LeRoy said.

On March 3, 1819, nearly 201 years to the day before the children’s hair was cut, the United States signed the Civilization Fund Act. That ushered in an era from 1860 to 1978 when boarding schools nationwide, including in Nebraska, separated Native children from their families, punished them for speaking their language, and often cut their long hair.

“… All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Capt. Richard H. Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, famously said in 1892.

In 1884, Christian missionaries came to South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation and took eight-year-old Zitkála-Šá from her mother.

“I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly,” Zitkála-Šá wrote in 1900 of her hair cutting. “In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit…now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”

Are we really going to be fooled by a bunch of racists who cry that it’s racist to interfere with their racism?

I had that dream again

I’m going to blame Rebecca Watson’s latest video, where she talks about how some smart people must appreciate astrology as “just stupid fun”. I’ve been there, only it was palmistry, not astrology. And I regret it so much. I sometimes have this dream, and it makes me ache inside, except it’s not exactly a dream, more of a vivid memory that rises up to disrupt my sleep. It’s the time I hurt my father with pseudoscience.

In my teens, I was soaking in fringe nonsense. I had relatives who subscribed to Fate magazine, and those dreadful men’s magazines like Saga and Argosy, and somehow we ended up with how-to books about tarot cards and palmistry. I devoured them because I devoured every book I came across. I found them fascinating, but don’t worry — I never fell for any of that nonsense, it was more of an exercise in training myself to examine claims critically. I remember throwing myself deeply into these magazines (I can’t bring myself to call them “the literature”) and reading up on reincarnation, and ghosts, and NDEs, and Bigfoot, and UFOS, only to come away shaking my head at how pathetic the evidence was, and how grandiose the claims of the believers were.

I wasn’t doing this for the usual ego reasons I encountered among the skeptics — I wasn’t debunking stuff to show off how much cleverer I was than other people, because I didn’t talk to anyone else about it. I was curious, I wanted to evaluate these amazing stories, but out of a sense of honest enquiry about how the world worked. I didn’t read a copy of Fate magazing and then berate my Uncle Ed about how idiotic this rag was, and how nobody should believe any of it. I’d set it aside and move on to the next strange claim, for my own personal satisfaction. For all I know, my family might have thought I was a true believer, because I read all that crap and didn’t bother to say anything negative about it.

Yes, I was a nerd from an early age.

So, about my palmistry phase…I must have been about 15 years old. I was getting into it. Palmistry is wonderfully specific: every bump and wrinkle on your hand has a name and a meaning, and the length of a line or whether it was single, double, or trilple or the size of the bump had an interpretation, or rather an excuse, that you could point to while doing a reading. The specificity was appealing, but what I was not sufficiently aware of was that they were often contradictory, and that what the palmist was supposed to do was selectively piece together the various pieces to build a nice cold or hot reading of the person. That’s why it was so complicated and detailed in a piece-wise fashion — it was a vehicle to assemble stories to tell. Stories that didn’t really have any foundation in evidence or reality, for that matter.

I haven’t gotten to my dream yet. This is all background.

Oh, but I’m not done with the background yet! I have to say a bit about my father.

What my dad loved was the outdoors, fishing especially, and art. He liked to draw and paint. My grandmother had quite a few of his watercolors framed and hanging around her house (I think my brother has some of them now). There were nights when all of us kids and Dad would sit at a table and draw stuff, which I remember fondly, although I myself wasn’t much of an artist. I think if he could have lived the life he wanted he’d have been living in a cabin in the mountains where he’d paint and fish every day.

He did not live the life he wanted.

He had six kids and a high school diploma. He worked as a manual laborer, basically. He often worked two jobs, was frequently laid off (Seattle, Boeing, that up-and-down economy), and when work stabilized, he was a diesel mechanic.

OK, now I can tell you about my dream/memory, and why it hurts.

I am sitting on the steps of the back porch, reading a slim book on palmistry. Skimming, more like — it is a series of labeled diagrams of hands, more of a reference text. I’m flipping through it when Dad comes out and sits down next to me.

“What are you reading?”

Sometimes Dad would encourage me to read my comic books to him. He was a fan of Turok, Son of Stone and Burne Hogarth and adventure stories, but he’d settle for Batman or Spider-Man. I am about to deliver disappointment to my father.

“It’s a manual on how to read palms.”

My doom arrives. He offers me his hand.

Dad has awesome hands. Strong hands. Broad hands. Thick fingers. Scarred and blistered. Decades worth of grease and grime is ground into every line, every whorl. It is an intimidating hand for a soft-skinned nerdy teenager. I open up the goddamned stupid palmistry manual, and right there is a diagram of the spectrum of types of hands.

On the left, a long, slim-fingered hand, labeled an “artist’s hand”. On the right, a stubby-fingered paw, labeled a “laborer’s hand”. As a literal-minded student of the palmists’ art, I point to the latter image and say, “Well, Dad, you have spade-shaped hands.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. I cringe even now at my insensitivity. I was also ignoring the golden rule of this kind of psychic game: always tell the client what they want to hear.

Dad looks like I’d sucker-punched him. I’d stuck a knife into his self-image and twisted it hard, without even trying. I want to take it it back. I want to say, “I didn’t mean it.” Dad just looks at his hands for a minute, gets up and doesn’t say anything, and goes back in the house. I think I really hurt him.

In years to come, he’d occasionally remind me of that moment, usually with a chuckle and some self-deprecation, but he never forgot it, so I know it hit him hard. “Spade-shaped,” he’d say, and waggle those fingers at me. Or I’d try to describe my Ph.D. program, and he’d stop me by reminding me that he had spade-shaped hands.

“I love your hands,” I want to say, “those are the strongest hands I’ve ever seen, those are a good father’s hands, those are hands that worked hard for a family, those are heroic hands.” I never do, I never did, and now he’s gone. We weren’t an emotionally demonstrative family, or at least, I wasn’t, and my opportunity passed me by.

All I have left is regrets. And sometimes that memory rises up in the night and haunts me, and churns around in my brain and refuses to let me sleep. Then I have to confess my sin, with no one to absolve me.

“Forgive me, father, for I was young and thoughtless, and now I grow old and torture myself for the harm I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please let me sleep.”