Round number alert!

We’re only a few hundred comments away from a nice round 2,000,000 total comments on this blog.

Of course, that number is totally fictitious because we lost over half the comments when NatGeo took over from ScienceBlogs, and then we lost a lot more when we ported over to this site from NatGeo, but hey, the round numbers are an artifact of using base 10, anyway. The current count is 111101000001010011000 in binary, which ends in a bunch of zeroes already.

It looks like PragerU will have some competition

And Lo, it shall be named the University of Austin. The usual disgruntled suspects are marching off to set up an unaccredited university that offers no degrees to Austin, Texas, as announced by a right-wing ex-college president, Panos Kanelos, on Bari Weiss’s substack. After deploring the censorious nature of the liberal university, he declares that he has moved to an office in Austin and is going to create a new university, fiat ex nihilo, from the dregs of the canceled.

But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

I mean that quite literally.

As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.

I am not alone.

Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.

We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.

We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

What a rogues gallery. It’s going to differ from PragerU, though, in being more than a YouTube channel — Kanelos is committed to creating a physical campus, with buildings and all that stuff, somewhere near Austin. Why Austin, you might ask? His answer:

If it’s good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it’s good enough for us.

He forgot to mention that other equally esteemed scholar and fellow Austinite, Alex Jones.

He has appointed faculty! They include Ayaan Hirsi Ali (how far she has fallen), Kathleen Stock, the transphobic philosopher, and Peter Boghossian, the asshole philosopher. That’s it, so far. The curriculum isn’t going to have much breadth, I guess. Although, to be fair, they don’t even have a curriculum, yet, except perhaps to be the rubbish bin that attracts incompetent ideologues. They also have an ambitious goal of having a fully functional four-year undergraduate program in place by 2024. Ha ha.

Don’t you worry about the University of Austin, though! What they lack in academic rigor and actual scholarly talent, they make up for with the usual far-right super-grifting abilities. They say they are in the process of securing $250 million, which means some asshole billionaires somewhere are lined up to throw money at this poisonous shitpile.

Oh. We do know who is funding this grift: Joe Lonsdale, tech bro venture capitalist and pal to Peter Thiel.

Yay.

What would Hippocrates say?

Here’s an interesting ethical dilemma for you. Doctors in Greece (it’s not at all clear how many doctors are doing this) have a way of dealing with anti-vaxxers.

Mass fake vaccinations have been taking place in dozens of vaccination centers throughout Greece, media reported on Sunday. The bribe fee for doctors and nurses is apparently 400 euros. the fee is paid is by those who do not want to receive the vaccines against Covid-19 but want to gain access to several activities or simply avoid the twice per week Rapid tests for professional and other reasons.

But then a hilarious thing happened: Doctors pocketed the bribe but administered real vaccine and not “water” in order to avoid getting into trouble should the fake vaccination come out, according to a report by Mega TV.

On the one hand, this is just wrong. Doctors are bound to respect the wishes of their patients, and pocketing the 400 euros compounds the wrongness. Of course, it would also be unethical in this case to do as the patient desires.

On the other hand, this is great from a societal point of view. I want to say “keep it up!”…that is, until I meet a doctor who does the reverse, and out of misplaced, wacky ideas decides to give me a homeopathic dose of a vaccine.

I’m in hell

These drugs, man…sure, they are reducing inflammation and pain. But they’ve got little clocks built in to them, and the alarm goes off every night at 2am, man, and my brain starts racing. The gears are stripped, though, and everything is spinning and smoking and screeching and I think there’s a wobble, man, like some night my transmission is going to blow and my dorsal and median raphe are going to catch fire and my locus coeruleus is going to go sproing out my ears and my ventral tegmentum is going to snap its supports and end up dangling in my oil pan, or maybe dragging in the road throwing sparks as I careen wildly along some dark highway to an end I’ll be too stoned to appreciate.

This is not good, man, if the last few days are any guide, I’m now going to lie in a half-conscious state for a few hours with my ears ringing, flirting in and out of brief bouts of exhausted sleep until at 5am my normal, healthy, well-trained brain circuitry starts screaming at my cortex that it’s DAYTIME, THE SUN IS RISING, THE BIRDS ARE MAKING NOISE, THE CAT WANTS TO BE FED, I DON’T CARE HOW TIRED YOU ARE, IT’S TIME TO GET UP.

Two more days of these little white pills. Then I’m telling my dealer never again, just pith me now and get it all over with, man. I don’t think prednisone and I get along well at all.

Some heroes sit at a keyboard

Did you know that social media has a Nazi problem? Of course it does. But often it is subtle and requires expert scrutiny.

When Ksenia Coffman started editing Wikipedia, she was like a tourist in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. She came to learn the tango, admire the architecture, sip maté. She didn’t know there was a Nazi problem. But Coffman, who was born in Soviet-era Russia and lives in Silicon Valley, is an intensely observant traveler. As she link-hopped through articles about the Second World War, one of her favorite subjects, she saw what seemed like a concerted effort to look the other way about Germany’s wartime atrocities.

Coffman can’t recall exactly when her concern set in. Maybe it was when she read the article about the SS, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary, which included images that felt to her like glamour shots—action-man officers admiring maps, going on parade, all sorts of “very visually disturbing” stuff. Or maybe it was when she clicked through some of the pages about German tank gunners, flying aces, and medal winners. There were hundreds of them, and the men’s impressive kill counts and youthful derring-do always seemed to exist outside the genocidal Nazi cause. What was going on here? Wikipedia was supposed to be all about consensus. Wasn’t there consensus on, you know, Hitler?

So she sat down and got to work, and started pointing out the lack of skepticism in so many Wiki articles.

Not for the first time, Coffman has been removing material from the article about the tank division. She thinks it’s full of unsourced fancruft, the Wikipedia word for fawning, excessively detailed descriptions that appeal to a tiny niche of readers—in this case, those thrilled by accounts of battle. The article tells how “the division acquitted itself well” even against “stiffening resistance,” how it “held the line” and earned the “grudging respect” of skeptical commanders. One contributor has used the eyebrow-raising phrase “baptism of fire.” It’s as if the editors don’t see the part lower down the page where a soldier uses the phrase “and then we cleaned a Jew hole.”

The glorifying language, Coffman thinks, is a clear sign that this is historical fan fiction. It elides the horrors of war. If editors want such details to stay on the page, at a minimum they should use a better source than Axis History, a blog whose motto is “Information not shared is lost.”

Turn on the History Channel sometime: it’s the same thing. There’s a reason it’s called the Hitler channel, and it’s because it’s cheap and easy to grab WWII footage — often nothing but propaganda films which launder and present credulous versions of the story — and splice it into a story. Aren’t those Nazi uniforms stylish? Wow, those soldiers had to be brave and stalwart to stand up to a Russian winter. Gosh, so many tanks! Cool! Let’s not think about what those soldiers were trying to do.

You can also see it on YouTube and in video games and the newspapers, always focusing on drama and spectacle without questioning what the hell those assholes were hoping to accomplish. It just takes a little effort to peel away the gosh-wow veneer to expose the rot beneath, but someone has to make the effort.

Another example in real life, with modern Nazis: Richard Spencer is on trial, and is trying desperately to present himself as “the erudite founder of a thinktank who represented a version of white nationalism that took pains to avoid racial slurs and glorification of violence”. He’s not. The lawyers showed everyone what he says when he’s not putting on a show for the gullible.

The plaintiffs played audio for the jury of Spencer launching into a tirade in the presence of co-defendants Jason Kessler, Nathan Damigo and Elliott Kline after learning about Heyer’s death following the Aug. 12, 2017 rally. (The leaked audio was previously published by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2019.)

“Little fucking k*kes,” Spencer said. “They get ruled by me. Little f*cking octoroons… I f*cking… my ancestors f*cking enslaved those pieces of f*cking sh*t. I rule the f*cking world. Those pieces of f*cking sh*t get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the f*cking world works. We are going to destroy this f*cking town.”

So hooray for Ksenia Coffman. Hooray for Michael Bloch, the lawyer out to expose Spencer. We need more warriors like that.

Is it OK to lie in your election campaign?

I notice that we’ve had some recent election setbacks, much of it driven by the usual Republican tactic of race-baiting. It’s going to get worse in the next election cycle. It seems the major approach they’ve taken is to lie forcefully about Critical Race Theory, inventing a new bugaboo to drive racists to the polls. And it worked!

A little clarity from the opposition on how CRT isn’t what the Republicans claim it is would have been nice. Here’s an example:

I guess it’s not illegal to lie through your teeth in order to get elected, but it sure would be nice if Democrats stopped being marshmallows who let them lie. I’m beginning to suspect they don’t particularly want to fight for racial equality, or labor, or tax reform, or any of those “divisive” topics that ought to be central to their platform.

Choices…at the movies!

I decided to blow off the work for the night and go to the movies. But now that the local theater coop has put in a second screen I’ve had to make decisions every time I go. Two choices! Oh boy!

The first option was The Eternals, the latest Marvel franchise entry. It’s another mob of superheroes, with immortality added on top of the ability to fly, to punch really hard, to shoot lasers out of their eyes*. That did not appeal. I did not go. I will predict that the ending of that movie is going to be another CGI slam-fest. Plus it’s another example of dredging the bottom of the IP barrel to come up with an obscure comic book that they can pump up into a big blockbuster. I hope it bombs.

The alternative was Lamb. Yes! That looked weird and surreal, and it was.

The story: Ingvar and Maria are an Icelandic couple (the whole movie is in Icelandic, with subtitles) who run a remote sheep farm. It’s beautiful, even though much of it is shot in a gray fog and mist, with the Icelandic scenery peeking through. It’s lambing time! They deliver several normal lambs, and then one brings them up short — we don’t see the lamb for quite some time, but for some reason Ingvar and Maria are enchanted by her, naming her Ada and bringing her into the house to raise her as their child. A good part of the surreal nature of this movie is how the couple are perfectly comfortable with, and even loving as their own child, a baby who has the head of a sheep and the body of a human child, as is eventually revealed. There’s something about Ada that makes people fall in love with her. I’ll say no more, except that the movie culminates in a bloody revelation.

I entirely enjoyed it. No punching. One semi-magical mystery. Good acting. People who were human and interesting in an extraordinarily unusual situation. Also, less than two hours long, while The Eternals goes on for 2½ hours, and another prediction: I bet it ends with a teaser to persuade you to watch the next movie in the franchise.

Go see it. Send a message that we want more unique movies, rather than more of the same ol’ same ol’. I think most people would enjoy it.

*No. Just no. Eyes don’t work that way. I hate it, it’s one of the worst conventions** of these kinds of movies.

**The worst is how “mutations” are handled. Somehow, single point mutations, or maybe insertions/deletions, are powerful enough to induce metaphysical powers that break all the laws of thermodynamics? I can’t accept it. Flies, mice, and cockroaches have comparable physiology and genetics to ours, so why aren’t there one-in-a-billion Drosophila variants buzzing around zapping everything with laser beams? Why aren’t there mice levitating? Why no rare cockroaches punching through walls with their super-strength? It’s all nonsense***.

***Nonsense is OK in the movies. The problem is when it overwhelms the human story. I enjoy Spider-Man or Captain America**** because of the themes of responsibility and sacrifice that I can relate to.

****But not Batman or Iron Man. They’re just rich assholes.