But I love history and craftsmanship and art. It is a great loss to humanity that Notre Dame is burning.
A majestic work of art begun in 1160 — about 850 years of history — in flames and collapsing. No matter what else happens, 2019 sucks.
There’s a newspaper in Alabama that has a reputation for promoting some incredibly racist garbage, the Democrat-Reporter, which was run by a good ol’ boy named Goodloe Sutton. “Was”. It’s been sold.
Maybe.
The new owners are CT Harless and Sabrina McMahan, nominally. The story has to be read to be believed. They are incapable of saying any word of truth, and lead a reporter who asked a few simple questions about their background on an amazing runaround. “Are you the CT Harless who said he was an Imperial Wizard of the American White Knights?” “No, that was my brother.” “Your name is Chuck Harless?” “No, Chris, my brother is Chuck, we were both called CT.” (sounds confusing.) “But you bought the paper?” “No, I don’t own it. I’m just helping out the owner.”
It goes around and around, and there’s a transparent charade where CT has a friend call up the reporter posing as “Chuck” of the KKK to disavow any connection. It’s so stupid, with constantly changing excuses, that it’s hilarious. And of course CT/Chuck/Chris/Sabrina are threatening to sue the reporter if he publishes any of it. I still don’t understand why they’re being so evasive, unless it’s just that they have the habit of lying.
I don’t think the KKK/American White Knights are recruiting the very best.
That’s really all they’ve got in their big building clumsily laid out to look like a boat, anyway, just lots of didactic signage nailed up on walls.
I especially like the last panel.
Then you’re in luck! Carl Benjamin, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union, anti-feminist, all-around bigot, is running for a seat in the European parliament, on a platform of undermining the European Union. It’s a bit like those tea party fanatics who want to eliminate the federal government running for congress all the time, so it’s not that crazy.
Oh, wait…yes it is.
Anyway, his argument for why he should be elected is that he’s extremely popular with alt-right trolls on YouTube, so he has already succeeded in cultivating an electorate, which is, I guess, true.
He’s better known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, for reasons unknown. I asked around about why he uses that moniker, since he never talks about the ancient history of Mesopotamia, doesn’t have any credentials in history, and doesn’t even seem to like people from the Middle East, and no one gave me an answer. I think I’ve figured it out, though. There are a great many people with largely right-wing views who got their start on YouTube hiding behind cartoon avatars: a knight in a tuxedo, an angry kangaroo, etc., and pretending to be an Akkadian king fits right in, and also has a bit of pretension. I think it’s like the masks of television wrestling. They’re all playing a simple-to-understand cartoon persona. They think they’re all luchadors.
Which, they think, is another reason to vote for them.
Speaking of the privileged professoriate, here’s another example, David Yesner, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska.
Yesner has been accused by nine women of sexual misconduct that spanned decades during his time at UAA. The accusations include keeping pornography on his work computer and assaulting a woman during a research outing. According to KTVA, which obtained a report of an investigation into Yesner’s actions that UAA had commissioned, the women’s accounts were credible.
On Monday (April 8), UAA prohibited Yesner from entering the campus and attending any school events. “If you see him or become aware of his presence in any such location please inform the . . . person in charge of that location and contact the UAA Police Department at xxx-xxx-xxxx or other law enforcement personnel without delay,” the school alerted students in an email, according to KTVA.
Whoa, he’s been banned from campus and you’re supposed to report him to the police if you spot him? Sounds serious. So why is he hanging around the Society for American Archaeology meetings this week? A journalist, Michael Balter, who was supposed to speak on a panel on #metoo in archaeology, saw him, reported him to the conference leadership, and confronted him.
So it was with shock that Balter heard of Yesner showing up at the SAA conference this week. Balter took to Twitter yesterday morning to alert conference goers and track Yesner’s movements throughout the building. Within a few hours, he encountered Yesner himself and told him to leave. Balter says he immediately informed SAA’s communication officer, Amy Rutledge, of what transpired and repeatedly called and emailed her afterward to follow up and see if SAA would boot Yesner from the meeting.
But it was Balter who got kicked out.
Yes, you read that right. Balter was evicted from the meeting and missed his panel. Yesner is still prowling about the conference. Several of the victims of his harassment are presenting at the meeting, and @SAAorg is busily tweeting about how “SAA has been in the forefront in creating an anti-harrassment policy that is designed to make the meeting a safe space for all attendees, which includes SAA staff”. They acted swiftly, don’t you know, to take action against the wrong person.
I mean, really, when his own university does this…
The University of Alaska Anchorage police department sent an email to students, faculty and staff Monday evening alerting them that David Yesner had been banned from “participation, affiliation or association of any kind with the University of Alaska,” including public and private events. He is also banned and trespassed from all property owned, controlled or used by UA, including the Anchorage campus.
“If you see him or become aware of his presence in any such location please inform the UA person in charge of that location and contact the UAA Police Department at xxx-xxx-xxxx or other law enforcement personnel without delay,” the email said.
…why is the national organization failing to recognize a serious problem?
This also looks familiar.
During that period of time, UAA [University of Alaska at Anchorage] received 86 Title IX reports. Not a single report resulted in disciplinary action.
Do it now, before 2021, because they have plans to pollute the sky.
A Russian company called StartRocket says it’s going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an “orbital billboard,” projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo — which will use the system to promote a “campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers” on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush.
Yet another “energy drink”, a campaign to support that <sarcasm>horribly oppressed group</sarcasm>, gamers, and they’re going to do it by putting unwanted glare in the night sky? I already hate Pepsi’s existence. Smart advertising.
Ibram X. Kendi
It goes without saying that #IStandWithIlhanOmar. And anyone who does not stands with Congresswoman Omar stands with Islamophobia, with racism, with politicians deploying lies to inflame racial and religious terror in the country. There is no middle ground in the struggle against bigotry. The sideline is behind the lines of bigots. The bigots have cast themselves as striving against bigotry, while they have cast those striving against bigotry as the bigots. The bigots have cast themselves as the victims and cast the victims as the bigots. But nothing new there: that is the history of bigotry. Congresswoman Omar is not perfect. I’m not. I’ve expressed bigotry. Confessed my mistakes. None of us are perfect. But many of us act as if we are. What are we striving against, and for? Her record makes clear she is striving against bigotry, striving for a world of equity. Finally, it is a fact that Congresswoman Omar was not talking about 9/11 in the way Trump cast her. But bigots hate the truth as much as they hate people.
I’m a tenured college professor. It took hard work to get here (and hard work to do the job!), but sometimes I’m reminded of how many advantages I have. Look at how one of my peers in geology acted in his job!
The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.
The second complainant, Deborah Doe (a pseudonym), who was in Antarctica for two austral summers during this era, reports that Marchant called her a “c–t” and a “bitch” repeatedly. She alleges that he promised to block her access to research funding should she earn a Ph.D. She abandoned her career dreams and left academe.
A third woman, Hillary Tulley, a Skokie, Illinois, high school teacher, describes her experience in a supporting letter filed with BU investigators. “His taunts, degrading comments about my body, brain, and general inadequacies never ended,” she writes. She claims Marchant tried to exhaust her into leaving Antarctica. “Every day was terrifying,” she says in an interview with Science.
That’s from a year and a half ago. At that time, after years of harassing students, he was the chair of his department at Boston University and was about to be honored by the GSA for his work. It’s amazing what we professors can get away with.
That’s changing though. Marchant has been fired, finally. He denies ever harassing anyone, which is part of the problem — he probably didn’t think his behavior was harassing at all. And he’s not alone.
Student journalists have been investigating professors of ill repute on the Columbia University campus. They found all kinds of interesting problems.
English professor Michael Golston was found responsible for sexually assaulting and harassing a student, according to documents from an investigation conducted by Columbia’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action.
However, months later, he still retained access to campus and his Columbia-owned faculty apartment. Over a year later, the University has given no official update regarding his teaching status or access to campus to either the complainant or the chair of his department.
Business school professor Geert Bekaert was convicted in federal court for retaliating against Enrichetta Ravina, former assistant professor of finance, after she reported him to the University for sexual harassment.
Today, Bekaert continues to oversee research projects and teach classes on campus.
According to a lawsuit filed by Jane Doe, former history and classics professor William Harris repeatedly sexually harassed her, then disparaged her to their colleagues when she refused him.
Although he retired as a part of a settlement with the University nearly two years ago, Harris still frequents campus, particularly reading rooms in Butler Library where classics students perform research. He also still lives in his Columbia-owned faculty apartment.
“It makes my skin crawl, and I basically can’t even bring myself to look at him or in his direction,” said one classics student on running into Harris in the library.
After prominent neuroscientist and Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute Co-Director Thomas Jessell was found guilty of sexual misconduct by the University, Columbia announced he would be removed from all administrative posts.
But eight months later, Jessell remained on campus, continuing to work with students and use research facilities.
Columbia has never formally dismissed a tenured faculty member who has been convicted of sexual misconduct, assault, or harassment, University President Lee Bollinger told Spectator in an interview last October.
Wow. So the “punishment” for sexually harassing students is not having to do any committee work anymore? These guys are still getting paid by the university?
Note that at the same time, these universities have an army of serfs, the adjuncts.
To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.
That’s from a story about Thea Hunter, a black woman historian who was basically worked to death as an adjunct.
She had a number of ailments that bothered her—her asthma, her heart—and the rigors of being an adjunct added to them. Had she been tenured, she would have experienced a sort of security that tenure is designed to provide: a campus office of her own, health insurance, authority and respect with which to navigate campus bureaucracy, greater financial stability. Without tenure, she was unprotected, at the whim of her body’s failings, working long hours for little pay, teaching large survey classes outside of her area of special expertise. As Terry McGlynn, a biology professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Full professors benefit from the exploitation of non-tenure-track instructors.” Adjuncts often do the work that other professors don’t want.
There really is a deep rich/poor divide in academia. We have a moral obligation to end it.
I don’t like reading articles where the story is entirely buried between the lines — if you’re a journalist, plain-spoken brevity is a virtue. That’s why this article in The Atlantic about Ivanka Trump is agonizing. It’s long, and all you’re going to glean from it is that Ivanka is a cipher who takes great pains in maintaining a poised appearance, and is careful to avoid any conflict with her asshole father. The author is equally careful to avoid criticizing Ivanka, who, characteristically, refuses to go on the record anywhere in the story, and clearly got the access to write the story by a history of pandering to the Trump family. Like the first time she met Ivanka:
Ivanka was hard to miss—taller and prettier than everyone else. I was a fan, as were most girls I knew. We thought she had it all—her own company, a pretty family, a pretty apartment. When I saw an opening, I told her as much. She thanked me and told me she liked my dress. We took a photo together, which I posted on Instagram.
Wait. A “fan” of Ivanka, along with most of her friends? Until she got elevated to an unearned position of power, I and most of the people I know had no idea who this pampered rich girl was. What kind of person did you have to be to be aware of Ivanka Trump?
Then, even as the author is trying to be inoffensive, she succeeds in revealing through what she doesn’t say how empty Ivanka is.
It’s a great boring slog of an article, but I did run across one interesting comment. It’s Donald Trump once again attributing a virtue to … fucking genetics.
The president went on: “She’s got a great calmness … I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless.” He added: “She’s got a tremendous presence when she walks into the room.”
Calmness is usually a genetic thing? Then how did Ivanka inherit it, since her father is a temperamental histrionic toad?
It’s kind of an irresistible target.
A few things that I mention:
The evolutionary psychology FAQ at UCSB
(Warning: it’s a sad, ugly, long document, but worth perusing if you want ammunition against evolutionary psychology.)
Chapter 7 of Darwin’s Descent of Man
(Warning: it’ll be a shock if you haven’t read 19th century literature in scientific racism before. Darwin held all the biases of his time.)
The critical points:
Evolution is more than just selection, and includes mutation, recombination, and drift.
Natural selection has a cost; it puts an upper bound on the number of elements subject to selection.
Populations have a substantial amount of genetic variation.
Most of that variation is neutral, or nearly neutral.
Mutations that have a small effect are invisible to selection.
