Wait, wait, wait…there are people who protest against Juneteenth?

What do they want to do, repeal the emancipation of slaves?

I guess this is Trump’s America now.

As if we’ll now forget Galton and Pearson

Every year in my classes I’ll spend a little time talking about Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. It’s unavoidable. They were early pioneers in genetics and were extremely influential in their time, so I have been and will continue to bring up their contributions and their flaws. Galton was a wealthy guy who endowed a Chair in Eugenics at University College London, and Pearson was the first person appointed to it; just the strong association with eugenics ought to be enough to taint the history of the two men. I like to let my students know about how Galton, for a time, kept a device he called his ‘pricker’ in his pocket so he could surreptitiously score the attractiveness of women he met, which he later published as a list of the quality of women across the UK — the women of London were the most beautiful, while those in Scotland…weren’t. And you thought MRAs were a recent phenomenon!

We don’t need to bestow special honors on these harbingers of a century of racism and oppression, so UCL has decided to dename any buildings with their names on them.

In the meantime, the names have been changed to Lecture Theatre 115 (formerly the Galton Lecture Theatre), Lecture Theatre G22 (formerly the Pearson Lecture Theatre) and the North-West Wing (formerly the Pearson Building).

Not exactly poetic names, but better than trumpeting the names of racists.

Next up: all those corporations and rich alumni who buy the names of university buildings might want to consider the transitory nature of the honor, because when we start an accounting of the crimes of capitalism all those signs might come tumbling down. It’s always annoyed me that some rich dweeb with no real association with what goes on inside them gets to come along and have their name enshrined on the doors to a building.

Ooops, speaking of which, the Natural History Museum has decided that their new director will be the rich parasite who runs Amazon UK.

The new director has extensive experience of running online food businesses, and has also previously served on boards and acted as a trustee for high-profile museums. Gurr was the chair of the Science Museum’s board from 2010 to 2014, and was a trustee of the National Gallery.

He also acted as a non-executive director at the Department for Work and Pensions, which attracted criticism from the Labour MP and tax campaigner Margaret Hodge, who described his appointment as “disgusting” because Amazon was involved in a row over its taxes.

Oooh, “extensive experience of running online food businesses”. That doesn’t even make him qualified to run the museum cafeteria, but now he’s in charge of the whole show? This is a disaster in the making — rich executives are only good at figuring out how to loot and pillage, which, come to think of it, may be his best qualification to run a British museum.

We were not eaten by grues!

We spent a few hours at UMM’s EcoStation this morning. It’s out by the Grue Church, at the end of Grue Church Lane, just off of Grue Church Road. We made sure to visit in daylight — you wouldn’t want to be there after dark. You might get eaten.

Spoiler: We weren’t eaten. It was swarming with insects and spiders, though, which was the whole point — despite the ugly gray weather, we had a grand time lying in the muck and watching the spiders come out to play. And there weren’t too many ticks, and mosquitos didn’t bother us!

I put the rest of the story, including photos of some pretty spiders, in a public post on Patreon.

Our adventure today: the Ecostation

Mary and I are getting off our butts and committing to some regional day trips with the intent of doing some spider hunting, but also to get some exercise, take some pictures, explore glorious locations, and have some fun. Today, our goal is the UMM Ecostation.

Because we’re bad at planning, we don’t expect sun-dappled lakes, prairie grasses standing tall, and glorious webs of diverse spiders everywhere — we’re leaving on a day with predicted thunderstorms all day long. Also, the Ecostation is a plot of land donated to the university about an hour NNE of us, with grand plans to construct classrooms and research labs there in the future, but none of that has happened yet. So we’re visiting an undeveloped tract of 140 acres of Wild Minnesota to wander around in the rain on a thundery day, looking for spiders who will be sensibly hiding out of the wet. It’s going to be more of a scouting trip than a great day of arachnology, but that’s OK. The way the weather has been lately, we might have to wait for August to see sunshine again, and even then it’s uncertain.

Both of us are products of the Pacific Northwest, so a little rain leaves us undaunted. The spiders might know better. We might also be surprised, which is usually good.

Look for the helpers: Hsu has some peculiar friends

Yesterday, I told you that Stephen Hsu had gotten a bunch of signatures supporting his work, the effect of which was rather blunted by the fact that a lot of them were from racists. You’d think such a smart guy would have figured out that if you’re trying to argue that you aren’t an asshole, getting testimonials from other assholes doesn’t help. Well, now he’s got another major endorsement: Quillette and Claire Lehmann are backing him 100%. Oy. I guess he’s having his friends help dig his grave.

Lehmann’s defense is a real piece of work. She compares Hsu to Vavilov, and damns one person who criticizes him as…a democratic socialist.

Wow. So much wrong.

  • Vavilov was the victim of a Stalinist purge. No one is planning to send Hsu to a gulag.
  • Vavilov was a respected early Mendelian who was doing research within a theoretical framework that was well-respected in the world outside the USSR. Hsu is not a geneticist, he’s a loon promoting discredited ideas outside his expertise.
  • Lysenko was a political creature who exploited the wishful thinking of an ideology to claim facts that were not in evidence, or that had been disproven. That’s Hsu, too. He knows nothing of genetics, but he’s making absurd claims to prop up support for eugenics.
  • Lehmann caricatures ideas about genetics and the environment. Lysenko was a horrible fraud, therefore acknowledging any contribution of environment to the expression of genes makes you a modern Lysenko. Being a pure Mendelian who believes genes are fixed and invariant in their effects makes you a noble martyr to truth. It’s all bullshit.
  • Hsu is not being targeted “for his research and writing”. I haven’t seen anyone even mention his research in theoretical physics as a problem. It’s his dilettantish dabbling in fields outside his experience and playing on his authority in physics to justify his claims about biology that are a problem.
  • Hsu is not being misrepresented as a racist and sexist. He advocates for racism and sexism, he has a following of racist, sexist friends, and he publicly endorses racist, sexist ideas. His version of condemnation is to say, ‘I am not a racist, but hey, how about them differences in IQ scores?’
  • Hsu is not at risk of losing his livelihood. He may be asked to resign his title as Vice President for Research and Innovation (he may lose a bit of salary for that, but also gets out of some administrative duties). He’ll still get paid as a high-ranking professor, not to mention that he has made millions founding and selling a couple of Silicon Valley companies. He’s not at the slightest risk of starving to death in a prison camp.
  • I’m with Kevin Bird. Seeing the oppressive capitalist foundations of American wealth inequality getting shaken up is a good start. It’s not quite the change we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, though — we’re going to need to see Wall Street dethroned from its power and influence on government to be comparable.
  • Having the craniometry cabal at Quillette backing him is not evidence that he’s not a racist. Quite the contrary.

I’m hoping that the activists in Michigan can just point to the dishonest support of Quillette as confirmation that Hsu is a goddamned racist who has no right to be leading anything at MSU.

Dave Rubin is a first class twit

Here’s another thing conservatives fear: children’s programs against racism.

I have two grandkids who are two and under, who both love Elmo. I’m happy to have them learn that racism is bad.

(I know, Rubin will deny that he’s a conservative — he’s a “classical liberal”, don’t you know. But really, he’s a right-leaning conservative who only approves of liberal ideas that benefit him directly, like all conservatives.)

Officer Karen was victimized by the Hamburglar

Oh, dear. I read the intro to this video and was concerned about what horrific abuse this officer of the law experienced.

Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds
She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop. Come on America. We are better than this.

Given that cops have been pepper spraying and shooting rubber bullets with wild abandon, and have been murdering black people for years, I braced myself for some terrible and nearly equivalent atrocity experienced by this woman.

It’s a bit of a letdown.

She breaks down in tears because her Egg McMuffin was late! They didn’t get part of her order to her in a timely fashion! OH THE HUMANITY!

Conservative wackaloons are all over this example of gross injustice. “We are better than this”, sure…then have some sympathy for the minimum wage, stressed out service worker who didn’t get a McMuffin to a cop fast enough.

By the way, you always pay for it in advance. That’s the way the drive up window works at McDonalds: first you pay at one window, then you drive up to a second window to get your food. If there’s a delay in your order they send you to a spot to park for a bit so you don’t hold up the line. That’s not a special punishment for cops only.

Snowflakes. They’re all snowflakes.

Stephen Hsu strikes back!

Since Hsu is getting pestered by these accusations of scientific racism and demands that he be dismissed from his administrative (not academic) role, he has decided to refute those claims with a letter and petition of his own. Curiously, he isn’t able to deny the accusations with evidence, which doesn’t stop him from simply asserting his denial, and has decided instead to respond with signatures from his scientifically authoritative friends in his support.

What’s amusing is that those signatures are from a bunch of known scientific racists. It’s like getting a bunch of Aryan Nation skinheads to testify that no, he ain’t racist, nosir, not racist at all. Very convincing!

As Kevin Bird says,

To be clear, all these academics are free to research, write, speak, and publish as they wish. However, in the context of defending a colleague against accusations of scientific racism, a more strategic decision may have been to not sign at all. Furthermore, a concern for MSU is that many academics of questionable reputation and/or people who have been misled about the campaign and charges against Hsu are jumping to defend freedom of inquiry despite it’s inappropriateness in this case. The inability of counter-campaign proponents to distinguish academic freedom from the powers and privileges of university leadership is a substantial shortcoming of the counter campaign.

Hsu is free to do all the physics he wants, that is what he was hired for. His extra-curricular ravings about biology can be dismissed out of hand, and really, he shouldn’t be rewarded with a high position in the administration where it looks like he’s representing Michigan State.