So now Native Americans are “creepy kids”?

I can imagine how the faculty and staff at Colorado State are feeling about this PR disaster. The cops pulled two native American students out of a tour group because someone else in the group phoned in a complaint.

Police body camera footage and telephone recordings captured an incident in which two Native American teenagers were pulled from a Colorado college tour and questioned after another tour member reported “odd” behavior by “creepy kids.”

The accusation: “people were worried because you were real quiet”. Quiet. That’s a crime now? They behaved politely and didn’t cause any trouble…clearly a case for cops.

I blame the racist woman who called this in, but I also blame the police: they should have asked her what they were doing, and when she said they were “real quiet”, they should have said that that’s not a problem, and if you’re going to call up the cops with such bullshit complaints, she’s the one who ought to be pulled out of the tour group and questioned. But no, they take two quiet young men aside and frisk them and ask for proof that they’re actually invited members of the tour.

The CSU president has published a statement about the incident.

Two young men, through no fault of their own, wound up frightened and humiliated because another campus visitor was concerned about their clothes and overall demeanor, which appears to have simply been shyness. The very idea that someone – anyone – might “look” like they don’t belong on a CSU Admissions tour is anathema. People of all races, gender identities, orientations, cultures, religions, heritages, and appearances belong here. As long as you want to earn a great education surrounded by people with the same goal who come from every part of our state, our country, and our world, then you belong here. And if you’re uncomfortable with a diverse and inclusive academic environment, then you probably have a better fit elsewhere.

It would be unfair to penalize the child of the woman who made the baseless complaint, but I hope she at least feels unwelcome at CSU.

We are, in fact, in a battle with hate within our communities. While much of what we have been speaking about is born of ignorance, we can educate against ignorance. The hate that is in the hearts of white supremacists as they attempt to frighten and isolate people across this country is not ignorance. It’s a malignant choice. The increase in racist and anti-Semitic symbols and language and demonstrations across America’s college campuses has been well-documented. We at CSU have simply chosen to deal with these issues in a more open manner, and that comes at a potential reputational cost to CSU for being public when such things occur. But history has shown us that hate grows in the face of silence. Hate is not made uncomfortable. Hate does not shrink from fear. What affects hate is our willingness to shine a bright and unwavering light on it and to face it and confront it.

There is no place for hate at Colorado State University, and we will not be silent when we see it.

Now…chew out the cops, too. Don’t accept the excuse that they were just doing their jobs, because part of their job should be recognizing when exercising pointless authority causes more trouble than it solves.

The Clay Johnson saga

Clay Johnson is a man who gained a powerful reputation during the Howard Dean campaign as a smart guy who knew how to use the emerging internet technology as a tool for politics. He has since gone on to be an important tech guy in Democratic and progressive politics, rising ever upward.

He also has a powerful reputation as an abuser of women. But that doesn’t matter. It never seems to matter.

Let’s begin with his apology.

Johnson, in interviews with HuffPost, described his history in the workplace as “awful” and said it filled him with shame, hurt and regret, although he disputed the details of most of his accusers’ stories.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said when asked if he had sexually assaulted two women on the Dean campaign. “What I can tell you is, I had two women complain to management on the Dean campaign about sexual harassment, and I was given a warning.” Later, he said his memory of his encounter with Schacht didn’t include anything he would describe as “assault.”

“My entire career was littered with treating people very poorly,” he continued. “Whether that was the Sunlight Foundation, the Dean campaign, or anywhere else I worked. I did not behave appropriately. I was awful to people, to nearly every single person, and I really wish I hadn’t been.”

What an odd “apology”. There’s no word of apology to the people he hurt, but more of an admission that he was generally awful…but not as awful as his accusers say he was.

That’s kind of a mantra with him. Sure, he was rude and crude, but never as bad as the women he victimized say. Oh, yeah, there was one woman who has a grudge against him, but it’s just stale old personal drama.

…he emailed Miller in June 2008 to warn her that he and Schacht had a history from the Dean campaign. “She hates me,” he wrote, in an email he shared with HuffPost. “Absolutely despises me. Happy to talk to you about it in person, but it’s mainly gossip, innuendo, stale and old. It is weird, I’m happy to talk about it with you. But the short story is: It was a presidential campaign, it was Vermont. She was like 22, I was 26 and we were both shamefully less professional in the workplace. You can put the rest of that story together. I promise there’s not a long slough of disgruntled female campaign staffers in my closets. But there is one, and it is her.”

That woman, Schacht, is someone he attempted to rape. The full, explicit details are in the article. I’ll pass on repeating it here, since, after all, it’s just “gossip, innuendo”. And it didn’t matter at all. Two women accused him of assault in the Dean campaign, but that didn’t check his career in the slightest.

During Johnson’s first job in politics, on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Schacht and a fellow campaign worker separately accused Johnson of sexual assault. Word of both women’s complaints reached several of Dean’s top deputies. But Johnson kept his job, and his work on the campaign became his ticket to a high-profile career.

He went on to co-found a pathbreaking political consulting firm. Powerful groups and people sought his thoughts on the future of tech in politics; his Twitter banner shows him cracking a joke to a roomful of government officials including President Barack Obama. Despite Schacht’s warning about his behavior, the Sunlight Foundation chose him to head its flagship technology division. He left amid a staff insurrection over his lewd and menacing behavior. And still, he rose higher.

I guess it’s just a fact of life in politics, even progressive politics.

“We just pass creeps from campaign to campaign,” said Meg Reilly, vice president of the Campaign Workers Guild, a new union seeking to organize political workers across the country. “The excuse becomes, ‘We’ll deal with this once the candidate gets elected.’ People tell themselves that if they’re working for this candidate who’s really fantastic, who opposes sexism and racism, then everyone on the campaign is immune from committing the same sins.” Once the election ends, little prevents abusive employees from starting a second act in government, political advocacy or nonprofits.

Responses to his increasingly egregious behavior were ineffective. Johnson himself dismissed them.

Johnson couldn’t recall anyone asking him questions about his behavior. But there had been one repercussion, he said: Rogan, in the presence of his co-deputy campaign manager, Tom McMahon, gave Johnson a warning. “They were like, ‘This complaint has come in, so like, cool it,’” Johnson said. “I would say it made me more defensive. I’m not sure I would say it altered my behavior.”

Then there’s this weird defensive behavior from his employers, even the ones who kicked him to the curb.

At the end of 2007, Blue State Digital forced Johnson out. “Clay was asked to leave the company because his partners didn’t want to work with him anymore, not because of any allegations of inappropriate behavior,” the firm said in a statement. “Clay would not be hired today, we’re glad we fired him over a decade ago and we regret he was ever associated with the company.” The firm wouldn’t provide further details.

Wait, wait, wait. They don’t want to work with him, they wouldn’t hire him again, they regret ever hiring him…but they won’t give details? They say it wasn’t because of inappropriate behavior? This is insane. This is how abusers can keep going from prestigious job to prestigious job. This is how a pattern of bad behavior perpetuates itself.

Other companies give a few details.

Many of Sunlight’s staff members would come to have issues with Johnson as well. Johnson routinely made obscene comments toward his co-workers, according to multiple former Sunlight employees. Nisha Thompson, one former employee, described him as “leery” and “a bully.” Once, she ran into him at a bar outside of work. As soon as she said hello, she claims, Johnson replied, “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.” He sought her out at work the next day to say he’d been blackout drunk, Thompson said.

Johnson’s most frequent target was a young digital designer who reported directly to him. Her desk was next to Johnson’s, and other members of the labs team said she was the butt of all his lewdest comments. In summer 2010, he said something so inappropriate that the team, in dramatic fashion, dragged her desk away from his and surrounded her with their own desks. No one could recall the exact comment. But both the designer and a former Sunlight employee, Hafeezah Abdullah, said the incident involved Johnson spraying the designer in the face with a can of compressed air used for dusting keyboards. The designer and at least one other team member told HuffPost they complained to the head of operations, who was Sunlight’s de facto HR rep.

I’m trying to imagine a workplace so dysfunctional that people rearrange the furniture to block a sociopath’s access to a colleague; where one of the workers gets blackout drunk (and admits it), and makes obscene suggestions to a coworker. I can’t. I guess I’ve been fortunate, or possibly, oblivious. It sounds to me, though, that Clay Johnson has been disruptive everywhere he works, leaving a trail of chaos through every organization he’s been associated with, and nothing he’s done has substantially harmed his career. Every setback is an opportunity for him to move upwards.

The rape story was appalling. It’s this little incident that tells you something about his destructive personality.

All this time, “his party trick was bringing women down a notch,” said Erie Meyer, the tech worker. At Personal Democracy Forum in 2013, Johnson humiliated her by saying to a group of CEOs she was meeting for the first time, “This is Erie Meyer. She’s Gray Brooks’ fiancée and she has herpes.” She was neither engaged nor did she have a sexually transmitted infection, but “this was Clay’s way of letting people know that I was a plus-one — I was not a person of note.” Meyer sobbed in a stairwell and skipped the rest of the conference.

A year later, Johnson became a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

That’s why I started with his “apology”. I can believe he knows he has been awful to people. I don’t believe he cares, except when it might interfere with his career — it’s total selfishness.

If you’ve never cared about other human beings all of your life, if you’ve treated your peers as garbage, why should I believe you’ve suddenly discovered empathy now?

We’re in bigger trouble than I thought

I got spammed by Big Think, which tags itself as “your daily microdose of genius”, with a link to a listicle titled 7 myths you learned in biology class that you probably still believe. It annoyed me. Sure, it’s trying to correct misconceptions, but the misconceptions given are generally rather pathetic, and I rather doubt that any of them are taught in any biology class. Or maybe they are, and I’ve got an unrealistic understanding of the quality of biology education.

Here are the 7 false things that are being taught in biology class, according to Big Think:

  1. Humans sit atop the food chain. Yeah, no. I don’t teach the ecology side of biology much, but I can’t imagine such a claim making it into any textbook.

  2. Respiration is synonymous with breathing. OK, I do teach this side of biology, and the vast majority of the organisms that respire don’t “breathe”. Easy and obvious. But then Big Think says this: “respiration is when muscles release glucose during physical activity”. Wha…? Wrong. Don’t try to correct misconceptions with more misconceptions.

  3. Cats and dogs are colorblind. Their answer is flat out wrong: they say dogs and cats aren’t colorblind, because “Shockingly, recent research finds both dogs and cats can see the colors green and blue”. That is not shocking, nor is it recent. Colorblindness is a poor choice of term because individuals with this trait typically have two kinds of cones, rather than three; it would be more accurate to call them dichromats, unlike trichromats, the individuals with full color vision. But dogs and cats are colorblind in the same way that colorblind humans are.

  4. Sugar is as addictive as cocaine. I have never, ever heard this. It turns out that the author got this claim out of a fad diet book. Those things are not synonymous with what you read in biology class, or at least, I hope not.

  5. Daughters inherit traits from their mothers and sons from their fathers. The article says, “Most people carry this misconception from when they learned how we inherit traits,” which might explain some of the test scores on the last exam in my intro course, but I certainly didn’t teach that. Worse, it then goes on: “Another common misconception is that we get half of our characteristics from each parent. The truth, all that matters is which alleles are dominant.” Holy crap, no. I don’t even know what they’re trying to say there.

  6. Sharks can smell one drop of blood in the water from a mile away. Not true, but I find it disturbing that anyone thinks biology class is where you drop anecdotes that can be used in your cheesy thriller novel.

  7. Humans evolved from chimps. This falsehood I know has wide currency — creationists keep making this mistake. But again, it is not taught in biology class, except maybe if your biology class is a homeschooled abomination taught out of books from Answers in Genesis. If the class is teaching any kind of general systematics at all, it’s going to be emphasizing evolutionary trees, not linearity.

I am not at all impressed. The article reads like something written by someone who has virtually no knowledge of biology at all, got a few shreds of factlets off the internet, and then cobbled together some mangled explanations just to make up some clickbait (he succeeded at that!).

I guess the emphasis in “microdose of genius” really belongs on the “micro”. Or maybe they should change it to “homeopathic dose of genius”.

The laziest professor in the world!

That’s me! Today was our last day of classes, and rather than me doing the work of teaching, I invited Ken Miller to do it for me over Google.

I should have thought of this months ago — let’s see, 15 weeks, 3 classes a week, I could probably find 45 friends willing to cover for me for a day each.

Has anyone ever seen a good science stock photo?

I was once drafted to be an extra in a commercial for the University of Oregon. First thing they did was hand me a white lab coat. Second thing was to complain that they’d looked around the lab they were filming in, and couldn’t find any colored solutions in the refrigerator — could I get them some? I at least managed to stop them before they started mixing up random reagents from the shelves.

Public misconceptions about how science is done are terrible. How terrible? Here’s a whole collection of terrible stock photos. This one was my favorite.

There are a lot of botanists in my department. I should ask them if they have a stethoscope.

Political ad goin’ viral!

Isn’t that what every politician wants? Maybe not if you’re a coal executive convicted for conspiracy to violate mandatory federal mine safety and health standards, conspiracy to impede federal mine safety officials, making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and securities fraud, or if you are a mannequin of a man carved out of marshmallows with a monotone.

He’s running for the senate representing West Virginia, against Manchin (a conservative Democrat who is no prize himself), and for some reason he thinks his opponent is Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky, who he’d have to work with if his charisma did somehow get him elected.

I’m sorry, West Virginia. Your politicians all suck.

Worst marketing of an identity ever

Incels. Jesus. This is how most of us see them: nasty little creeps who can’t imagine women as independent human beings, who see women as tools for their gratification.

Once upon a time, I would have assumed everyone would recoil in disgust at the murderous selfishness of incels, but I guess I was wrong. Here’s how Ross Douthat sees them:

One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.

What he’s setting up is the argument that maybe the incels are right, and that maybe everyone is owed sex to some degree, and he’s going to bring in an “authority”.

…it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?

After all, he wrote, “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”

Robin Hanson is also icky. He’s another example of how libertarianism is a corrupt ideology of greed that is destructive to the social contract. And he’s a tenured professor!

It’s a disquieting example of how what we might call hyper-misogyny has crept into academic discourse via sexually frustrated and clearly angry men who believe men are not only entitled to sex but entitled to sex with women they find attractive. It’s not lost on me by any means that the idea that women owe men sex is not at all new. But this is a new frontier in embedding these ideas into formal public policy proposals, particularly ones that ape the language of rights and equality in much the same way modern racists groups do.

That these people are making analogies to the redistribution of wealth is particularly odious. Such a comparison falls apart quickly, for a couple of reasons.

Wealth redistribution is about flaws in capitalism. The system encourages cheating: you can leverage inequities to cause undeserved gains to those individuals who have initial advantages in capital — it is not a system that rewards effort and skill, but one that gives the ones with the mostest more. If you want to talk about fairness, and fair distribution, and equality of opportunity, you’ve just removed yourself from any possibility of doing that within the context of capitalism (or its even more pathological brother, libertarianism), because those words don’t exist in that context. “We ought to share fairly, just like we do in capitalism” is a nonsense sentence.

Unlike money, you can’t accumulate sexual desirability by stealing it from others — it’s not something that can be gathered at the expense of others. And it can’t be redistributed. You can’t arrest Scarlett Johansson for hoarding sexiness, and fine her for 3.2 pounds of good looks, which are then to be given to PZ Myers, who was clearly a bit of a loser in the attractiveness sweepstakes. It just doesn’t work that way. So instead they want to think that sexual attention is something they can demand, that it would be “fair” to insist that attractive people and women in general be compelled to surrender their autonomy. Not just their money, or possessions, but their selves in involuntary service.

Isn’t it odd how a philosophy of individualism and worship of liberty has now come around to arguing for depriving individuals of their freedom…as long as they are young attractive women? The only way they can do that without their heads exploding over the conflict is by denying the humanity of women, which is apparently something conservatives are comfortable with. No surprises there, I guess.

Again, this is a consequence of the near-religious worship of dogmatic capitalism. Everything is viewed as a transaction, with profits and losses, with numerical values that can be auctioned off. Every time someone utters the evil phrase, “sexual market value”, you are hearing the canonization of a true perversion of human relationships. But this isn’t how sex works! It’s a gift of shared intimacy, voluntarily given, between two or more people. You can’t compel that (which is not to say that some generous people can’t give it in return for money — but even that is a willing exchange. Sex work isn’t rape. Rape isn’t sex work.)

That leads into the other problem with Douthat’s perspective. Incels aren’t just young men howling in frustration for more sex, because heck, that would be almost every human being going through puberty. These are people who want to punish and kill women for being objects of desirability, who have so twisted their idea of sex that it becomes nothing but a violent act in their minds. All the talk of impractical policies of sex redistribution is a smoke screen, irrelevant to the real issue: these are horrible damaged people who think murder for the sake of their penises is justifiable, and who have such a misbegotten idea of what sex is that they think hatred and violence will satisfy their sexual urges.

Of course, Douthat is just using this as a stalking horse for his own brand of sexual perversity.

There is an alternative, conservative response, of course — namely, that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.

Those “older ideas” also involved demanding the submission of women and denying them autonomy, it was just a more genteel version of the same resolution, where a wealthy gentleman with an income above £10,000 a year could purchase a young lady of good breeding to be his kept spouse, once again reducing everything to a simple quantifiable transaction, where the women are kept in line with an absence of capital.

Do I even need to touch that Catholic nonsense of special respect owed to the celibate? Why? What does celibacy add to the virtue of a person…especially when so often it was only the appearance of abstinence?