Praying for a resurrection

I don’t want Jesus to come back, I’d much prefer to see Mars Rover Opportunity rise from the dead. It’s been silent for almost 3 months as a massive dust storm prevented its solar panels from charging, but that storm is finally subsiding, so there’s hope it will recharge and start transmitting again.

It’s been working for 14 years, which is amazing. I’ve had cars that lasted that long, but we brought them in for tune-ups every year. It’s sister robot, Spirit, went dead in 2010. Mars Rover Curiosity landed in 2012 and is still cruising around. These robots are a pretty good deal — I don’t think an astronaut would last anywhere near as long, and he’d be too busy growing poop potatoes to get much science done.

Iowans with better food

Rob Tibbetts, father of a young woman who was murdered by a criminal man, spoke out on his appreciation of the Hispanic community.

Speaking Sunday afternoon to more than 1,000 people at a ceremony at his daughter’s former high school, Rob Tibbetts didn’t directly respond to comments by President Donald Trump and others who quickly seized upon the suspect’s citizenship to argue for changes in immigration laws. Rob Tibbetts has not publicly commented on the issue. But in his eulogy, he highlighted how the local Hispanic community had embraced him as he searched for his daughter in recent weeks. While in Iowa for nearly six weeks, Hotel Grinnell put him up for free. During that time, he said he ate at a number of Mexican restaurants, where employees were sensitive and kind. They knew when he needed space or when he needed to joke, he said.

“The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans,” he said, including an emphasis on family. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.”

Exactly. As the Hispanic community here in Minnesota has grown, we’ve also seen more and more tasty food, so I’m not complaining.

Meanwhile, over in Wingnuttia…

Who is the better human being, Rob Tibbetts or Tomi Lahren?

Trick question. Tomi Lahren is soft white cotton bag filled with cockroaches.

I think one important role of the federal government is to shut down the NRA

A core function of government is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens, according to the NRA. The NRA does not make me feel safe, therefore the organization ought to be dismantled.

Especially when they’ve got loons saying nonsense like this:

Texas is asking to spend federal Department of Education grant money to buy firearms for teachers that have gone through the states school marshal program. Teachers trained to carry firearms in school, in firearms, and the state needs permission to use federal money to do that. As you can imagine, the left is melting down. Anti-gunner’s outrage that the government would soon be funding firearms to put in the hands of educators. I would argue — of all the things schools use federal grant money for, this may be the most legitimate. It falls into the core functions of the federal government, provide for the safety and security of its citizens. In fact, using federal tax dollars to buy guns for teachers is more in line, and more in the boundaries of what the federal money should be used for than even textbooks or after-school programs. Guns in the hands of good guys has a direct impact on our safety, a core function of government.

Although he does have one point: education is not one of the core rights granted in the bill of rights. That’s more of a failure of the Constitution than an excuse to shut down education, and it’s certainly not a justification for arguing that educators ought to be supplied with guns before books.

Better than syrup of ipecac!

Just in case you were looking for a reason to vomit today, here’s Dinesh D’Souza interviewing Richard Spencer.

What’s so great, I asked him, about the white race? Spencer spoke of what he termed its “Faustian spirit. The white race is expansive whether in terms of conquering, in terms of exploration of the seas or space, or scholarship and analysis of science. We possess something that’s peculiar to use, and it makes us special.” And was that something, I inquired, in the genes? “It is,” Spencer replied. “No question. Everything is in the genes.”

Everything? So, for instance, language is genetic? I guess that explains how all those English-speaking parents have children who speak English, and Spanish-speaking parents produce little kids fluent in Spanish. It’s all in the genes.

D’Souza is rather primly disapproving of Spencer throughout the interview, but he doesn’t object to the racism, strictly speaking, but because he declares that Spencer is actually a Democrat, and we know how much he hates Democrats.

In a purely logical sense, Spencer should be a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats invented the ideology he espouses, and even today the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic identity politics. Spencer’s problem, however, is that the Democrats mobilize black, Latino and Asian identity politics against that of whites. Since whites are now the all-round bad guy, Spencer’s brand of progressivism is no longer welcome at the multicultural picnic.

…

Why, then, did Spencer vote for Trump? Why does he consider himself on the right? The simple answer is that Spencer has no place else to go, so he is trying to carve out a niche for himself in the only party where he can find some measure of agreement, however small. Trump isn’t embracing Spencer’s agenda; rather, Spencer is embracing Trump’s agenda because his own is politically irrelevant.

Note the cunning trick, there. He is logically a Democrat, in D’Souza’s mind, but then the convicted felon declares that Spencer can only find a small measure of agreement with the Republicans. D’Souza can simultaneously think he ought to be aligned with Democrats, while also saying he has no point of agreement with Democrats. Alrighty then.

Why were nuns assumed to be good caretakers for children?

Just because they were female? Maybe that was a bad assumption, because the stories coming out of the Catholic orphanage system are horrific. One example:

Sally had been caught running and giggling in the dormitory. The nun, Sister Jane of the Rosary, was known for her constant companion: a thick razor strap that the girls called “the green pill,” bitter medicine for any child who came near it.

Sister Jane of the Rosary took Sally to the little bedroom off the sewing room and made her lie facedown, dress yanked up, panties pulled down. Then the nun sent in Eva, a seamstress, who along with another lay employee, Irene, was one of the only two people that Sally felt safe with.

Eva came into the little room, looked at Sally — face down, dress up, defenseless — and stood frozen for a few long moments. The strap lay beside her on the bed. Then she left. Irene came in next, but she couldn’t do anything, either. Even Sister Jane of the Rosary, usually so quick to punish, came in but did nothing.

At last Sally heard Sister James Mary announce that she had “no problem” performing the task. Entering the room, she brought the strap down hard on Sally, from the back of her neck all the way down to her ankles. Once, twice. Ten times. Too many times to count.

Sally recoiled with each downstroke, but she tried her best to hold back the tears. The silence only enraged Sister James Mary, who kept hitting her. On and on, the blows kept coming. “You will cry!” the nun insisted.

Eventually Sally did. She began to weep.

Sally couldn’t twist around far enough to see the damage. But when Irene looked, she gasped.

“How many times do we have to tell you?” Sister Jane of the Rosary demanded from above. “If you cry, you cry alone. If you smile, the whole world smiles with you.”

Irene brought Sally across the long hallway, down the marble stairs, past the foyer, and into the office of the mother superior herself. Irene showed her Sally’s wounds. It wasn’t right to do that to a little girl.

Mother Superior replied that Sally was going to end up in reform school anyway.

The next time Sally was sent to Irene and Eva for a beating, Irene said she would deal with the child herself.

Irene hit her, but only on her bottom. Sally was so overwhelmed with gratitude that the next day, she told Irene that she loved her.

Wow — that’s a clever use of psychology. You’ve got two torturers, and the victim learns to love the one who tortures her a little less. But otherwise, you have to wonder about caregivers who are known for the instruments of abuse they carry with them everywhere — and this is one of the milder stories. Don’t read the whole thing unless you want nightmares.

As has been the case in recent years, there have been attempts to bring legal redress to the Catholic church. I was interested to see the defense strategies described. It’s all about denial.

One of the rewards for being good at the orphanage was an activity that the sisters had called “serving God.” God, at least for those purposes, turned out to be Father Devoy, the resident chaplain.

Devoy had his own rooms and dining table, at which he was often joined by seminarians. Sally told Sartore that when she was quite little, she had done her very best to be good for a whole week, and for once it had worked. At the end of the week, Sally got to go into God’s rooms. She set his table and took in his food and placed it on the table before him.

She managed to put God’s plate down without spilling anything, but when she turned to walk away, Father Devoy put his hand under her skirt. He yanked down her panties, touched her backside, and told her that she had cute buns. The next time he tried it, the headstrong girl spilled the soup in his lap.

Sartore sounded outraged at Sally’s inference. “Will you agree with me that a grown man, an elderly man, a priest, could pinch the behind of a little girl without it constituting, quote, sexual abuse?”

Sally declined his invitation to undermine herself. “I can’t answer it,” she said. “Because I thought if you swore, okay, it is like a form of sexual harassment…”

Sartore wouldn’t let go. “What was there if anything about the way Father Devoy grabbed your behind that constituted sexual abuse?”

“Because he used to say how cute they were,” Sally explained. “You have cute little buns,” she recalled him saying.

“And so for a 60- or 70-year-old man to pinch a little girl’s bottom and say you have cute buns, you now consider that sexual abuse?” Sartore asked.

“I don’t know as I say sexual abuse,” Sally said. “I just don’t see it was right, whether it was an old man, young man, to do that to a child.”

If an old man pulls down a little girl’s panties and fondles her, YES THAT IS SEXUAL ABUSE. Why is this even a question?

The boys were also abused. Here’s a tactic that would make me hate lawyers.

Greene told the attorneys that a counselor assaulted him in his bed in the boys dorm at St. Joseph’s probably 10 or 20 times. Over what period of time? he was asked. Greene found it hard to say.

“Did this happen once a week to you?” they asked.

“To me,” said Greene, “I’d say it was more than once a week.”

“Was it twice a week?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you think it was more than once a week?”

“Yeah,” said Greene.

“At least once a week he’d come in to you and want this done?”

“Yeah,” said Greene. The defense paused, lingered over another detail, and then returned to the counting.

“So you think he came in once a week and tried something with you. Might have happened 10 or 20 times to you; is that accurate? Is that your best recollection today?”

“Yeah, he came in at least once a week, probably more,” said Greene.

“So if he did it 10 or 20 times, this would have lasted 10 or 20 weeks, is that right?”

“It lasted for a year or two,” said Greene.

“Then why only 10 or 20 times if he came in every week?” defense asked.

“Because — it might have been more.”

“Well I’m just trying to—”

Greene became exasperated.

“I’m not sure how many times it was,” he said. “I know that it went on for a few years. As far as a count goes, I’m not sure. I have no idea. I mean, all I remember is he would abuse us, he’d abuse somebody every night, every single night that he worked.” Greene added, “And as far as how often, I don’t know. But it went on for years.”

“Do you think,” defense replied, “it was for you personally a weekly event?”

The defense attorneys asked plaintiffs to estimate the frequency of their rape or molestation by day, by week, by year, and then overall. Then they would get the plaintiff to compare the estimates and to count — so if it was x times a week, that would be y times in total, right? Inevitably the figures didn’t quite add up.

I can appreciate that a defense lawyer must give a strong, vigorous defense, but this is outright lying — on the one hand, they insist that the accusers can’t possibly have accurate recollections of their maltreatment decades after the fact and imply that everything was a confabulation, but on the other hand, they’ll demand that a young man who was raped decades before must have a precise tally of every single instance.

How about ONCE. He was raped once. Isn’t that enough to condemn the system? Then he was raped again and again. Do we care whether the number was 10 or 20, isn’t 1 enough?

Go ahead, read the whole thing if you want to start your day with a good head of rage. It’s just appalling to me that anyone ever figured that celibate old men and childless nuns were automatically qualified to take care of children. These are people who consciously rejected the roles of father, mother, (although, weirdly, they insist on the titles) and parent, and are the least suited to have responsibility for the young, lacking the temperament or experience, and yet, there they are, handed babies.

It’s unsurprising that they failed so horribly.

Appropriate academic relationships are possible — ignore the lech in the corner

Since I’m on sabbatical this year, I guess I’m going to miss out on my chance to hit on hot young coeds…wait a minute. I never do that. I’ve been missing out all these years?

This is a good article on professors who abuse the system, but I find myself having reservations, because most professors would be horrified at the behavior described there.

Splinter spoke to 11 current and former students about his behavior. A number of them identified a pattern: He’d tell a female grad student that he liked her writing, encourage her to meet with him to discuss it, and then begin making sexual advances.

These students often described his behavior as “creepy,” even as it was discussed among faculty and students alike that he was being groomed to eventually become chair of the department. He served as graduate adviser beginning in the 2016 school year, which meant that every graduate student—whether or not they had been on the receiving end of these flirty emails, been desired by Hutchison enough to be pursued by him, or had reciprocated his interest—was obligated to talk to him each semester about their courses, their timeline to completion, their funding, and which classes they would teach.

I’m not some weird outlier, either: I can’t imagine any of my colleagues doing that kind of stunt, and there is a culture in academia of respecting the students, and we’re supposed to be savvy enough to recognize the exploitation evident in that behavior. But at the same time, I recognize that there is another problem that many of us do exhibit, a defensiveness of the system that allows predators to persist.

The town hall meeting quickly turned contentious. Almost 50 people were in attendance when department chair Elizabeth Cullingford and professor Gretchen Murphy started by telling the assembly not to “panic” over the allegations. They declined to name names, and insisted that the accusations against the unnamed professor in Shapland’s essay occurred under a previous policy—but Cullingford also described the new policy, which went into effect in 2017, as “draconian” due to its prohibition on certain kinds of faculty-student relationships. Cullingford urged students to keep the specifics of the meeting to themselves. When students asked questions, Murphy told them to address those questions specifically to the people involved—including Hutchison, who wasn’t in attendance.

The professoriate is really good at the wagon-circling maneuver, and academic freedom is used as a catch-all excuse for anything. But these excuses are inexcusable.

This is academia, “A place where deep and lasting collegial bonds are formed, where mentors and protégés can become close friends and where young lives are transformed by a galvanic encounter with knowledge and their own latent capabilities,” as Laura Miller wrote in a 2015 essay for the New Republic, which questioned if “erotic longing between professors and students” was “unavoidable.”

No, it’s avoidable. It’s pretty easily avoidable. Or do you think heterosexual male professors are all experiencing fierce erotic tensions with their male students? The idea that intellectual relationships between two people will inevitably lead to some steamy smoldering is entirely a product of masculine privilege, used as a rationalization when someone in a position of power uses that to take advantage in a way that is irrelevant to scholarship.

In 2001, Harper’s published an essay by Cristina Nehring called “The Higher Yearning: Bringing Eros Back to Academe,” in which she argued that “teacher-student chemistry is what sparks much of the best work that goes on at universities, today as always,” and “the university campus on which the erotic impulse between teachers and students is criminalized is the campus on which the pedagogical enterprise is deflated.” Six years later, UCLA professor Paul R. Abramson published a book called Romance in the Ivory Tower: The Rights and Liberty of Conscience, arguing within its pages that a university policy that prohibits professors from dating their students “tramples the very nature of freedom itself.”

Oh, really?

In 1910, a 19 year old undergraduate began working with Thomas Hunt Morgan. This student, inspired and guided by Morgan’s mentorship, would do a series of experiments in recombination that would work out the principles of genetic mapping. These two would both have long careers of productive, influential research and would be recognized as pioneers in their discipline. It was a great example of a mutually rewarding teacher-student relationship.

I had no idea until now that the erotic impulse between TH Morgan and Alfred Sturtevant is what sparked their best work. Or that the freedom to indulge their passionate desires was necessary to achieve their accomplishments. Maybe if Tom hadn’t been so smitten with Alfred’s hot young body, he wouldn’t have been such a dick to Nettie Stevens, and she would have flourished under his tender, loving tutelage.

That is all nonsense, of course. It’s entirely possible and common to have a professional, productive relationship with other human beings without a sexual element. Most of our interactions are literally asexual…unless you’re going to tell me you can’t visit your pharmacist or buy groceries or go for a walk in the park or pick up a book at the library without banging everyone you meet. All of us, even the most horndoggy among us, know more people that we would not have sex with than those we would. The fact that there are 7.6 billion people I will not and would not have sex with on the planet right now does not imply that I cannot interact with them in other ways.

It is not draconian or repressive for an institution to inform its employees that they are not allowed to fuck the people over whom they have power and a responsibility to help; nor does it limit their ability to perform their duties well.

There will always be a few people who whine that they need sexual access to students to empower their best work. Just tell ’em to sit down and shut up, or fire them.

I thought physicists were required to know math?

I guess not. Although maybe it’s only a requirement if you’re not a creationist physicist, as Jeffrey Shallit describes.

But wait — Shallit is all cranky about the math, but I had to look at the original post, and there’s more. He’s complaining about species boundaries!

“Species” are not very well defined. Paleontologists work from bones, naturalists work with dead specimens, geneticists work with DNA, and ecologists work with living communities. Each group has its own definition, and very often they are in conflict with the others.

This one always gets me. So the creationist is saying, ‘species boundaries are fuzzy and ill-defined, therefore my claim that species are fixed and unchanging is validated, and evolution is false’. Yeah no.

Boy, I haven’t looked at Uncommon Descent in ages. It’s still a clueless loon factory.