There goes Andrew Sullivan again

I’ve been living in Academyville most of my life, which means I’ve met some of the villainous ogres the right-wingers hate: Marxists and Post-Modernists. I’ve never met two of them at the same time, though. I’ve also met Fanatical Capitalists. It’s a real slumgullion in here, but that’s part of the charm.

Enter Andrew Sullivan. Or rather, exit Andrew Sullivan, who has left his comfortable paying job slinging dull resentment of things he doesn’t understand to put on rusty armor, climb aboard a tired donkey, and begin a crusade against…critical theory? Which again, he doesn’t understand, but is absolutely sure it is about destroying the very fabric of society.

I’m no expert in this stuff — I tinker with spiders — so I tend to defer to the experts on the other side of campus, you know, the social scientists and humanities people. Unlike the Sullivans of the world, I’ve mingled enough with them to respect their intelligence and knowledge, and to know that they are as sincere in their use of intellectual tools as I am in trying to understand the genes and processes behind spider development and behavior.

So I listen when someone like Asad Haider analyzes Sullivan’s claims.

After a grandiose announcement that he was leaving New York Magazine due to a stifling political atmosphere, Andrew Sullivan has now launched a comedy career. In a post of his new “non-conformist” newsletter, Sullivan announces that he will present an analysis of contemporary “social justice” politics. This politics, he says, is the development of “an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades.” Critical theory, he says with what can only be dry sarcasm, is so powerful and omnipresent that it is “changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.”

Sullivan’s account is full of falsehoods and misinterpretations so drastic that they could only be the product of a refined wit. The neologisms he attributes to the tradition founded by thinkers like Theodor Adorno are: “non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining.” One can only hope that Sullivan branches into sketch comedy, so we might see a dramatization of Adorno’s reaction to such terms. “The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest,” reads Sullivan’s deadpan conclusion. “Let’s do this.”

To appreciate this joke you have to understand that there’s a second, “meta” level to it, which is that Sullivan claims to be defending principles of ethical journalism, rationality, objective truth, and informed debate, but he never refers to a single primary text of what he calls critical theory. Twice as funny.

That’s what gets me. These bozos are dead set on the idea that critical theory is evil, but over and over again they reveal that they haven’t actually read anything in the field, and don’t even have a grasp of critical theory 101. I say “they” because it’s not just Sullivan — he has a whole clown car of buffoons joining him in the same futile enterprise.

In the midst of this comic tour de force we’re introduced to other characters, who give Sullivan a run for his money: James Lindsay, better known on Twitter as Conceptual James, and Helen Pluckrose, authors of Cynical Theories. Lindsay should be recognized for one of the most audacious comic bits of this whole contemporary discourse: in an ornate blog post which claims to clarify the distinctions between categories while actually muddling them beyond recognition, he writes that postmodernists “drew heavily off the successes of Mao in his Cultural Revolution and used them to inspire Pol-Pot, who studied alongside them at the Sorbonne in Paris at the time, to go after a deconstructive Year-Zero campaign of his own.”

He links to a blog post by Lindsay which is amazing. Lindsay throws out a dense cloud of terms that he misuses, revealing that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but apparently thinks vomiting up noise makes him sound informed. The closest thing I’ve seen to it are creationist posts that spew out a chaff of molecular biology to totally misrepresent what the papers actually say. Maybe he ought to read Haider’s article to clear up some of his misunderstandings.

It’s quite a long and thorough article that summarizes many of the terms they mess up. I’ll just quote the relevant bit about critical theory.

According to Sullivan, “postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture,” for which “the entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and ‘problematized’ reason [sic] whenever possible.”

But as Foucault clearly explains, critique is not a destruction of every form of reason but a putting into question of who we are, what we think, and what we do, by studying the histories that have produced us. It doesn’t simply mean finding fault with things, “criticizing” things. Though it may certainly involve that, this isn’t what the “critical” in critical theory or any kind of critical thinking refers to. The critical attitude continues, in fact, a certain attitude of the Enlightenment, while also situating the Enlightenment in the history which is to be approached with the critical attitude.

As Foucault traces in his 1978 lecture “What is Critique,” in Europe the critical attitude arises in the context of societies in which people and their thoughts are governed by religion, and it reflects the desire not to be governed — or at least, not to be governed quite like that. Critique is “the art of not being governed quite so much.” Hence the critical attitude of the Enlightenment is to not simply accept what an authority tells you is true, but to independently determine its validity; not to follow laws because they are dictated by power, but because you have determined them to be just. Critique, contrary to Sullivan’s paranoia, is an Enlightenment attitude.

That’s precisely what I don’t get. Skeptics ought to be enthusiastically embracing critical theory, and even post-modernism, because it does all the stuff skeptics claim to appreciate. Read that last paragraph again. Only a Status Quo Warrior would think that is undesirable. But instead they’ve only embraced the fringe abuses of theory, and have happily adopted only the practice of the worst writers to string gibberish into bad essays and books.

The spider struggle continues

13 days until classes begin, and this last batch of spiders are now about 13 days old. I took a few pictures (I stashed one on Patreon and Instagram) and had to struggle a bit with the photomicrography system, which I’ve mostly neglected this summer, on top of struggling with putting a lab demo together on video. Tomorrow is going to be busy feeding a few hundred spiders…well, maybe. Another thing I’ve noticed is that some of the babies have died, just out of natural mortality, I think, and tomorrow will involve counting the living and the dead, hoping the former outnumbers the latter.

Somewhere in here I’ve got to get my syllabi order, too.

North Paulding High is the epitome of professionalism!

North Paulding High in Georgia has opened, and there are swarms of students milling around maskless in crowded hallways. What to do about it? I know! Prohibit the publication of any photos that show how incompetently they’re managing the pandemic!

All those students ignoring the mask requirement? They’re fine. The student who posted that photo? Suspended! (It’s probably better for him, anyway). The administrators who permit that kind of crowding? Oh, they’re fine, no problem.

Would you believe there is already a COVID-19 outbreak among the football team, which held a practice the week before? You probably would. They opened anyway. The administration is incredibly slack.

Despite recommendations from CDC health officials, the district has called mask-wearing a “personal choice” and said that social distancing “will not be possible to enforce” in “most cases.” While the school provided teachers with face shields and masks and encouraged staff and students to wear them, they are not required and not all teachers have chosen to use them. One North Paulding teacher resigned last month over concerns about virus safety.

Jeeeezus. Just close all the schools already.

The Quack-in-Chief is dispensing dangerous medical advice again

When will Twitter and Facebook get around to banning this guy? Isn’t it bad enough that he has his sycophants at Fox News broadcasting his garbage everywhere?

Watch this excerpt (starting at around the 12 minute mark) in which Trump opines on why we need to open the schools, after a rant from one of the Fox & Friends morons declares that the threat of closing schools is political extortion.

Once again, we get Trump’s wishful thinking, this thing is going away it will go away like things go away, whatever that means. The numbers are going up, not down. He claimed that the virus would go away over the summer, because the sun would kill it; now he doesn’t seem to care that we’re heading into fall, and that we’re planning to pack people into classrooms again.

children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — almost immune from this disease…they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this…they don’t have a problem, they just don’t have a problem. Jebus. No. They’re also at risk, but also kids aren’t isolated. Even if he were correct (he isn’t), doesn’t he see the problem with hundreds of thousands of asymptomatic disease carriers scurrying about, infecting parents and grandparents and teachers and random people they bounce off of? (Grandparents and teachers…this is getting personal for me.)

He claims I’ve watched some doctors say they’re totally immune. Name them. They need to be censured as badly as the President of the United States. Also, his magaphone, Fox News, needs to be smashed.

Mighty Huntress

I learned something today! There is this spider I keep on my office desk. I’ve always wondered, since these spiders are so passive and patient, and I’m feeding them wingless Drosophila, do they just wait until one stumbles into their web, or do they ever actively hunt? The answer is…they’ll hunt when opportunity arises.

So this spider has webs strung across this wooden frame, and she tends to hang out near the top of one of the sticks.

This afternoon I watched her abruptly descend on a drag line from her perch to the gravelly scree directly below to drop on a fruit fly walking by, bite to kill, and wrap it in silk before hauling it right back to her starting point. It was spectacular!

In case you’re squeamish about this sort of thing, I’ve put a closeup of the proud hunter below the fold.

[Read more…]

Playing games, again

The minecraft server, Sitosis, has generated a brand-spanking new map, and is accepting membership requests, so it’s time to play again this weekend, only this time with friends. Log in on Sunday, 9 August at noon Central time.

Let’s do a livestream while playing as a group on Sitosis! Follow the instructions here if you aren’t already signed up: http://mc.sitosis.com/#join.

We’ll just jump on the map, everyone meet at spawn, and we’ll figure out what to do next. Go exploring? Help someone build? Monster hunting? Sit around and eat cake? Talk about the science of Minecraft genetics and spiders?

We’ll all fumble about for the entertainment of any watchers!

People have asked about voice chat. Yes, Freethoughtblogs has a discord server! We can use that for voice chat during the session.

This is why I don’t talk to mammals anymore

It’s also why I avoid grocery stores. Jon Rosenberg recounts a perfectly ordinary encounter at the supermarket.

I am not a talking asparagus, but this kind of thing is going on all over the place.

By the way, another reason I shun the local grocery store is because, despite the state-wide mask mandate, the management of that filthy pesthole still allows customers to stroll around maskless. And they do.

The Great Filter of American media

It is the 5th of August, and I have noticed that I’ve already run out of access to ‘free’ articles on various newspapers around the country. I like to check in on the Seattle Times now and then, since that’s my hometown paper, but I’m remote enough that I don’t think it’s worth subscribing…which means that if something happens there at any time in the month other than the first few days of the first week, I’m not getting it from a local source. I think I almost certainly have a few free articles left in the NY Times, but that’s because I despise that paper and only get anything from them when I am surprised by an unlabeled link.

I’m in a privileged position with respect to science articles, since I have access to institutional subscriptions through my university, but even there there are a lot of journals I can’t read. We’ve also got the Elsevier problem, where one greedy publisher buys up rights to a few essential journals and then only lets libraries subscribe if they buy a package that includes a lot of drecky bad journals.

Nathan Robinson has seen the situation clearly: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

Then we wonder why the public is so poorly educated on current events and science. I am particularly appalled that we tax everyone twice on science: once to do the state funded research, which we then immediately turn over to for-profit publishers, who then demand that the public pay them, the middlemen, to read the results. They’ve even got scientists hoodwinked into doing all the reviewing of papers for free, and often into paying to have their own work published.

Siblings wrecked my sleep last night

I had an intense dream where I was at a family reunion, and everyone was there, including my dead father and dead sister, and weirdly, they’d aged an additional 20 or 30 years as if I’d been totally mistaken about attending their funerals, and they’d been just living their lives while I was oblivious and unaware. Then my baby sister Lisa, who died in her 30s but was now a gray-haired and healthy 52, took offense at my joy at seeing her again and started punching me, battered me to the ground, and was kicking me to death. My father, who was also looking strong, glanced my way and said, “You deserve it”, and then all my brothers and sisters joined in.

That’s when I woke up, totally bewildered by what is going on in my brain. I got to lie there for a few hours wondering what sick guilt was lurking deep in the rotting core of my mind, and what it was trying to tell me, and wondering why I was such a horrible person. Now I’ve got a lot of work to do today, and this worry is going to prey on me all day long. Is there an oneirologist in the house?

It’s strange to be living on an alien planet

At least, that’s how I feel when I read an article on Midwestern politics in Harper’s.

In January, I sublet my studio apartment in Los Angeles, flew to O’Hare, rented a purring silver Audi A4 from an unmarked garage miles from the airport (this was somehow the cheapest option), and headed north to begin my winter in a little lakefront house. The night after the Packers game the weather warmed up slightly, and I went for a long walk along the crashing shore.

We are so barbarous that the big national publications need to fly in a journalist to cover the exotic perspectives of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Put him in a comfortable lake house with a nice car and let him make forays into wilderness of bars and cafes, like an anthropologist among the cheeseheads, and have him take notes on his interactions, which he then synthesizes into a grand thesis on why the middle class of the Midwest voted for Donald Trump.

You will be happy to know his answer fits comfortably into the extant ethnographic literature — it’s all about economic anxiety, you know, and the word “race” is only used in the context of the Democratic vs. Republican horserace, and there are more quotes from Grover Norquist than there are from black folk. The only black person mentioned, we are told, was a former drug dealer, while the author seems more interested in a cranky old white man who drives away customers in a bar by insisting that the television be tuned to Tucker Carlson. When you focus on the stuff you’re comfortable with, that you understand will fit your narrative best, it’s no wonder the story you send back is so lacking in insight. It’s not that I disagree with his conclusion, but that he could have sat in his office, enjoying his view of a tangle of freeways, and written it without making the dangerous voyage to a savage Wisconsin winter wilderness.

Still, the Democrats’ strategy might work out this November. Trump’s response to the pandemic and the protests has been so wanton and self-serving that enough Americans might be convinced to vote for a candidate offering steadiness. But tacking toward the middle will do nothing to sway the Kenoshans I met, among the many Americans who have decided that voting changes very little, and that both parties are more beholden to the elite than to ordinary citizens.

In the long run, a Democratic Party that wants to govern is going to have to respond to this feeling, not by offering incremental reforms in policing, or tweaks to existing health care laws, but by beginning a real transformation. It will require new structures—we have not yet tried to govern a metropolis without a police force, but we soon might—as well as a recommitment to things that the Democrats have abandoned, like organized labor. It will take admitting that the morass we’ve ended up in was not created by accident. It will take naming the people who brought us to this point, and it will take a willingness to confront them and to make enemies—something Republicans have long been happy to do. It will, finally, take a political project that can match the feeling of participation and excitement that the Trump movement has offered. Democrats picked a candidate who has promised to return the country to normal. That may end up being the most dangerous choice of all.

Yes? The Democrats will have to gather their courage and actually fight for things that matter to people in Wisconsin — and California and New York — in order to earn their votes and get them involved. But, you know, the lesson here is that the Trump campaign didn’t do any of that, yet somehow got the people of our benighted hinterlands, as well as Orange County, to vote for him. I still don’t know how to combat outrageous demagoguery with the bland vaguenesses that Harper’s offers us.