Everyone should know by now that Twitter is a bad company

From an inside look at Twitter’s problems with management, technology, and trolls:

At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, “you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.” Instead of building a product that could scale alongside the platform, former employees say, Twitter papered over its problems by hiring more moderators. “Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem.”

Calls to rethink that approach were ignored by senior executives, according to people familiar with the situation. “There was no real sense of urgency,” the former executive explained, pointing the finger at Harvey’s superiors, including current C.E.O. Jack Dorsey. “It’s a technology company with crappy technologists, a revolving door of product heads and C.E.O.s, and no real core of technological innovation. You had Del saying, ‘Trolls are going to be a problem. We will need a technological solution for this.’” But Twitter never developed a product sophisticated enough to automatically deal with with bots, spam, or abuse. “You had this unsophisticated human army with no real scalable platform to plug into. You fast forward, and it was like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we just have basic rules in place where if the suggestion is to suspend an account of a verified person, there should be a process in place to have a flag for additional review, or something?’ You’d think it would take, like, one line of code to fix that problem. And the classic response is, ‘That’s on our product road map two quarters from now.’”

None of this means that Twitter is going to vanish soon — after all, COBOL is still around, and software legacies just hang around, decaying slowly, like an assortment of pseudogenes. But still, maybe you should consider jumping ship, since the one way to kill it is to erode its user base. Mastodon is out there, waiting for you with open arms.

Normalizing the intolerable

Here is an article about the Virginia Tech shootings, over a decade ago. It’s remarkable how little has changed, how little has been done.

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said, “People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it’s about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”

You remember Tim Kaine, right? Democrat? Failed vice presidential candidate? It’s not just Republicans with their heads in the sand. Guess what? I’ve got nothing but loathing for politicians who see their constituents murdered, and who do nothing but kowtow before the NRA. (Kaine does have an “F” rating from the NRA, which just shows how little resistance you have to exhibit to get dinged by those ghouls).

Here’s another dismaying story from 2016. A woman is in an abusive relationship; the guy is good looking and intelligent, but becomes progressively more possessive and controlling. It just gets worse and worse, but she’s in denial and tries to see the man she loves in this domineering, temperamental monster. The relationship doesn’t end until he shoots her in the face.

It’s a metaphor for America. We’re also in a terrible, abusive relationship, where any outsider looking in would say it’s obvious, you’ve got to break it up, you know this is bad for you, why are you tolerating this impossible, self-destructive affair? Get out! Get out now!

Only it’s worse, because in this metaphor, he shoots us in the face, and we don’t leave. He shoots us in the face again, we don’t leave. He shoots us in the face every few days, and we say, “This is not the time to dissolve our relationship, he just shot me in the face. I need time to heal!” And he shoots us again.

We’ve always got an excuse. It’s way past time that we stopped rationalizing this deadly relationship and ended it.

How can you screw up an appeal to the alt-right?

One of the dismaying things about the world right now is that being an alt-right/Nazi/”centrist” is so darned easy: they’re fanatically dominating YouTube*, they’re raking in the Patreon bucks, it’s almost as if mindlessly shouting “MAGA” and “WHITE GENOCIDE” is the magic cheat code for immense popularity. So when I see someone fail, it’s a bit jarring.

Look at Jon del Arroz, the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction, as he’s fond of claiming. He’s got the MAGA hat. He’s fond of Trumpian hyperbole and raging at liberals and SJWs. He got banned from WorldCon for his troubles, so he’s busy waving his martyr’s flag. And then he announced that he was going to sue WorldCon, and started a fundraiser to scrape up $10,000 for a lawyer.

He’s raised nothing. He’s a total failure. Maybe it’s because he compared his persecution to that of the entire gay community, which isn’t going to gather much sympathy from the usual gang of racist homophobes. Anyway, it’s nice to see a right-winger fall flat on his face.

*Since I’m trying to participate more in YouTube lately, I’m seeing signs that this may not be entirely true. I’ve encountered a few people who’ve been haranguing me with multiple sock puppets — one guy is up to about 20 pseudonyms — and I’m beginning to suspect that the right-wing success story on that medium is more about fanaticism, misrepresentation, and persistence. Maybe if YouTube were to tighten up their rules on handing out new accounts freely there’d be a change, because jeez, a lot of the problems in their comment threads are due to the deniability and meaninglessness of their contributors.

The Dora Milaje had an actual historical inspiration

It’s not exactly a pretty story, saturated as it is with slavery, colonialism and war, but it turns out that the Kingdom of Dahomey maintained an elite force of warrior women, the N’Nonmiton, in the 19th century. The comic book linked above tells their story, and these were definitely not put on for show — they were an active fighting force.

The Dahomey Warriors were known to be especially skillful, competitive, and brave. Their drills and military parades were always performed to dancing, music, and songs and their weapons were sometimes used as choreographic props. As expressed in their songs, their goal was to outshine men in every respect, and European travelers observed that they were better organized, swifter and much braver than male soldiers. As such, the King would send them to war as opposed to their male counterparts and European soldiers would also hesitate to kill them as they were often young women.

More details at the Smithsonian.

I don’t even want to imagine

But we have to imagine, don’t we? It’s the only way we can get change done.

I recently stumbled across a cell phone video made by a student at Parkland as they were fleeing their classroom. The teacher was dead in a pool of blood. Another student was dead. Yet another student was moaning in pain, wounded. They fled through a hallway with more students lying dead. It was so horrific that I could not in good conscience repost it, out of respect for the dead and the families who have lost people they loved. I closed my eyes and shut that window, unwilling to look at it again. It’s no wonder that those students are being so articulate in speaking out against this ongoing nightmare.

We are allowing kids to be slaughtered and traumatized so the gun industry can make more profits and so the NRA can prosper. When will we wake up and shut those ghouls down?

How come when Republicans talk about free speech it’s always about silencing me?

Minnesota Republicans are pushing a bill they say defends free speech on campus.

Introduced last week by State Sen. Carla Nelson (R-Rochester) and State Rep. Bud Nornes (R-Fergus Falls) at a press conference alongside members of the University of Minnesota College Republicans, the bill would make state-funded universities adopt policies that place a higher emphasis on free speech.

You will not be surprised to learn that the actual text of the bill does the opposite of that.

although faculty are free in the classroom to discuss subjects within areas of their competence, faculty shall be cautious in expressing personal views in the classroom and shall be careful not to introduce controversial matters that have no relationship to the subject taught, especially matters in which they have no special competence or training and in which, therefore, faculty’s views cannot claim the authority accorded statements they make about subjects within areas of their competence, provided that no faculty will face adverse employment action for classroom speech, unless it is not reasonably germane to the subject matter of the class as broadly construed, and comprises a substantial portion of classroom instruction.

So, placing a “higher emphasis on free speech” is to be accomplished by gagging college professors. That doesn’t sound like free speech to me. As usual, right-wingers use “free speech” as a code for limiting speech they don’t like.

This is also a bill that demonstrates a deep ignorance about how universities work. I am part of a team of faculty who have the mission of helping students acquire basic knowledge about a rich, complex subject. That knowledge is not imparted in a single class (why, not even my class); I rely on students learning preliminary information in the prerequisites to my courses, and my colleagues expect that students will emerge from my classes with knowledge they can build on. There is a tremendous amount of peer pressure to keep class content focused and substantial. I don’t need a law saying that I can’t spend hours and hours of class time talking about, oh I don’t know, Trump, atheism, lobsters, or feminism.

I really don’t need a bluenosed ideologue hovering over my should to police my class time in order to teach well, and in fact, that would be one other factor that would compromise my effectiveness.

Poor James Damore — losing again

Some good news, at least: James Damore had charged that Google violated labor laws by firing him, claiming that he was merely providing useful internal criticism of Google’s procedures, and you can’t fire someone for that. His claim has been thrown out. It seems Google was very careful to clearly state its reasons for the firing, and it wasn’t because he was trying to improve their training methods: it was because he was bigoted and promoting discrimination. Oops.

The NLRB memo includes talking points that Google prepared and read over the phone to Damore when he was fired. “I want to make clear that our decision is based solely on the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men,” Google’s talking points stated. “I also want to be clear that this is not about you expressing yourself on political issues or having political views that are different than others at the company. Having a different political view is absolutely fine. Advancing gender stereotypes is not.”

Now Damore still pursues “a class action lawsuit in which he accuses Google of discriminating against its white, male, and conservative employees.” You might think that maybe that has a better chance of success, since he’s arguing that he’s opposing discrimination against men, but look at what Google said. They’re against “stereotypes about women versus men”. Those hurt men as well as women, so they were also careful to insulate themselves against the charge that they were favoring one sex over another.

Some anniversary

Would you believe it’s been 20 years since Andrew Wakefield published his disgraceful paper? It was retracted for undisclosed conflicts of interest, unethical treatment of children, and dishonest data manipulation. So Wakefield ought to be commemorating the destruction of his career from a nice ditch somewhere with a bottle of Thunderbird, right?

Wrong.

Wakefield got to celebrate the death by neglect of children with celebrity appearances on a tour for an anti-vaccination movie, the spawn of his bad study, and he attended an inaugural ball for Donald Trump. Last year, he was invited back for another round of talks in Europe.

Last week, Wakefield did not speak at a working men’s club, but at the supposedly reputable Regent’s University in London. To top that, he was invited to the European parliament, not by a neofascist know-nothing, but by an MEP from a Green party, which readers who have not been paying attention may think is filled with decent people.

And now he lives in a nice house near Austin, Texas, profiting off the conspiracy theory he instigated.

There is no justice in the world.

Garbage in, garbage out: Foerster misinterprets the Paracas skulls, again

The paranormalists are all a-buzz right now because Brien Foerster has announced the results of a DNA analysis of the Paracas skulls — the extraordinarily deformed skulls of high caste Peruvians from several thousand years ago. The skulls look weird, warped into conical shapes, so they’ve long been the focus of people like Lloyd Pye, who wants to argue that they’re the remains of extraterrestrials. Or Nephilim, fallen angels. Or ancient hominids from a completely different lineage than Homo sapiens. They aren’t very consistent in their explanations.

Anyway, here’s Foerster announcing the ‘intriguing’ results of having sent off samples from Peruvian skulls to various commercial labs.

I can tell you what part has the fringe groups most excited: Foerster explains that all native american peoples…are of haplogroup A, B, C, and D, but in this set of skulls, the most common haplogroups that showed up were U2, E, and also H, H1a and 2. If you look at where the most prevalent percentage of U2 and the H1s are, it is in between the Black and Caspian seas, as in, the Caucasus Mountains. These people weren’t aliens, or supernatural beings, they were…WHITE PEOPLE. Ta-daa! As we all should know, brown people in South America, or Egypt, or the Mississippi river valley, or anywhere for that matter, could not possibly have developed sophisticated cultures, and white people, or Jews, must have traveled there in ancient times and taught them everything they know.

Man, it’s not surprising at all to discover racism rotting deep in the heart of the ancient astronaut community. He also seems oblivious to the fact that identifying human haplogroups in these skulls tells us that they were fully…human. Not angels, not aliens.

Foerster has a long history of obsession with these skulls.

Brien Foerster managed to persuade Juan Navarro Hierro, director (and owner) of the Paracas History Museum (sic: on the sign outside the museum, the name is given first in English, then, smaller, in Spanish) to part with some tissue samples. He claims that he did this because “[t]he only way to establish the actual age, and possible genetic origins of the Paracas people is through DNA analysis of the skulls themselves”. Dating human tissue by means of DNA analysis is such a new technique that I can find no other use of this remarkable development in any other archaeological investigation. Of course, there is no such dating technique: this is Brien Foerster displaying his ignorance of archaeological dating techniques!

Where did he choose to send the samples? To some prestigious university department, well known for its work on ancient DNA? No. Instead, he chose to send them to Lloyd Pye (1946-2013), a crank who believed in ancient astronauts, the extraterrestrial origins of humanity and, worst of all, touted the “Starchild Skull” as an alien/human hybrid. Why? This suggests that, far from being a dispassionate researcher, Brien Foerster has a preconceived agenda and it’s one that involves aliens. Although his original Academia.edu page lists his affiliation as “University of Victoria, Biological Sciences, Department Member”, his association with the university is as a graduate, not a member of faculty. [Update 11 April 2015: he has a new page that more honestly describes him as an undergraduate.]

That’s from a few years ago. I guess the accusation that his DNA analysis was done by a crank stung a bit, because these latest results were obtained by sending samples to professional, commercial labs. He mentions that one lab refused to send him results, which he attributes to malign motivations, but more than likely it’s because his samples were crap.

In 2016, Jennifer Raff gave a talk on the sloppy methodology of these pseudogenetics researchers, and specifically discussed the poor technique used by these cranks.

As you can see from the image, the individuals attempting to sample DNA from this mummy made some attempt to cover themselves, but it’s entirely inadequate for ancient DNA work. There is exposed skin on every individual in the room, the gentleman’s beard and hair are uncovered, and at one point they start squirting water all over the mummy, claiming that because it’s distilled, it won’t introduce contamination. Wrong. All water used in ancient DNA work has to be purchased from vendors who guarantee that it’s certified DNA free. Distilled water has lots of DNA present in it. Any one of these things could have (and probably did) introduced contamination to the sample they tested.

Yeah, so Foerster’s results are meaningless garbage, tainted with contamination from, no doubt, “Caucasian” investigators who slobbered all over the skulls. None of that will stop Foerster, or his ignorant followers. He promises to publish the results in a book with none other than LA Marzulli, another notorious crackpot. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this on the History Channel in the near future.