Children in cages, and now…mass graves

Down in Texas, they’re digging up mass graves of immigrants.

LORI BAKER: They’re unmarked, they’re unidentifiable, and there’s no information on these individuals. We anticipate at least several hundred may still be buried within the cemetery.

JOHN CARLOS FREY: As I investigate why so many lost migrants are dying in Brooks County, I hear about forensic teams from Baylor and Indianapolis universities, who have spent the past two years exhuming migrant bodies.

KRISTA LATHAM: I just feel like everybody deserves to be mourned properly. They still have parents or siblings or spouses or children that are wondering what happened to them. So we’re doing this for the families.

JOHN CARLOS FREY: For years, the previous sheriff would give the bodies to a funeral home, that charged taxpayers over a thousand dollars per body, then buried them, anonymously, in a corner of this cemetery.

Can you describe what kinds of bags the individuals were buried in?

LORI BAKER: They’re biohazard bags, trash bags. One was—

JOHN CARLOS FREY: Just regular trash bags?

LORI BAKER: Trash bags. What we found last year, there were coffins that were right next to each other on all four sides, because there were so many people buried in that area. We took one of them down, and we found skulls in between the burials. And so, we just can’t leave any dirt unturned, or we might miss somebody.

JOHN CARLOS FREY: Wait, you have coffin, coffin, coffin, and then, in between coffins, you have skulls.

LORI BAKER: Skull, sometimes.

JOHN CARLOS FREY: These are mass graves.

LORI BAKER: These are mass graves. They’re commingled. Every one is different.

JOHN CARLOS FREY: So you shouldn’t just dump a bag into a hole in the ground.

LORI BAKER: You know, would you want your son buried that way? Or your mom? Or your sister? Or your brother? I mean, this isn’t how you want someone you love to be buried.

We’re supposed to be reassured, though.

Texas says there is “no evidence” of wrongdoing after mass graves filled with bodies of immigrants were found miles inland from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Hang on. You’ve got hundreds of unidentified bodies in a mass grave in a single town, with people buried in garbage bags, and yet somehow they don’t think this is indicative of any wrongdoing.

People dying in such numbers at the border that they’ve resorted to mass graves is telling us there is something seriously wrong.

Let’s all hope the Ark eventually sinks

Yet another video on the Ark Park:

I agree completely with Matt Dillahunty’s impression of the Ark: it’s not that impressive. It’s filled with pointless bric-a-brac — wooden box after wooden box filled with nothing, or filled with a static model of an ancient organisms. The “information” inside consists of wall after wall of posters. I’ve said it before: they were so focused on building a great big boat-like object, they put little effort into what goes inside.

I also agree that the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was a bad idea. I think Nye pulled it off, because Ham was such an obtuse twit that he gave away the show. Nye got the basics right, but there thousands of people who’d have been just as competent at the debate side, and wouldn’t have granted Ham the prestige of a famous opponent.

In other news, the latest assessment of the attendance figures show that Ham has been…exaggerating. He’s been claiming to have had a million visitors in the last year, but the tax payments say that they’ve had 750,000 visitors in the last 11 months, and it’s unlikely that they had one quarter of their entire yearly attendance in one month. Either Ham is lying about his attendance, or he’s been shortchanging the county tax assessors. Either one is possible, I suppose, but neither are particularly ethical.

Congratulations to Ben & Abi!

One of the major reasons I’m out here on the West coast is for the wedding of my nephew, Ben, to Abi (here with her mother).

Wedding accomplished!

Now I get to tell a story. Many years ago, when I would walk home from school back in junior high and high school, I would sometimes walk with a girl who lived a few blocks from me. My little sister Lisa (Ben’s mother), who was then around 5 to 7 years old, would sit on the front step of our house, and when she would see us, she would sing out, “Paa-aul’s got a girrrl frieeend!” and then run inside giggling. Her magic chant apparently was effective since I later married that girl and am still happily married these many years later.

So I’ll return the enchantment, since Lisa is no longer around to do it for him. “Be-een’s got a girrrl frieeend!”

Now he’ll have many decades of happiness. Guaranteed.

Something in our culture is creating a lot of naive biological determinists

Here we go again. The Guardian has a profile of a guy who claims to be able to tell your sexual orientation from a photograph. It’s all bullshit, reminiscent of that Faception nonsense.

But his audience would also have been intrigued by his work on the use of AI to detect psychological traits. Weeks after his trip to Moscow, Kosinski published a controversial paper in which he showed how face-analysing algorithms could distinguish between photographs of gay and straight people. As well as sexuality, he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes. Kosinski has also used algorithms to distinguish between the faces of Republicans and Democrats, in an unpublished experiment he says was successful – although he admits the results can change “depending on whether I include beards or not”.

He’s a psychologist. Everyone who has taken a psychology course must have heard of Clever Hans, the counting horse. You would say a number to Clever Hans, and he would pound his hoof on the ground the right number of times. He must know how to count! But no, it turns out that Clever Hans just knew to watch his owner, who was the one who could count, and who would change his posture or signal his relief when the horse reached the desired number. The whole point of that story was a lesson in interpreting your observations: you may think the subject is doing one thing, but he or she is actually doing something entirely different.

For a wonderfully thorough take down of Kosinski, read this article which exposes the flaws in his work. Kosinski claims he’s detecting a biological difference, that physiognomy and genes are somehow connected to psychology and behavior, so you can scan one and get an accurate assessment of the other. But he’s really pulling a Clever Hans, making a faulty association between the variables he wants to link, and ignoring a host of other variables where the real connection is being made. And those other variables are all culture, not biology.

In summary, we have shown how the obvious differences between lesbian or gay and straight faces in selfies relate to grooming, presentation, and lifestyle — that is, differences in culture, not in facial structure. These differences include:

  • Makeup
  • Eyeshadow
  • Facial hair
  • Glasses
  • Selfie angle
  • Amount of sun exposure.

We’ve demonstrated that just a handful of yes/no questions about these variables can do nearly as good a job at guessing orientation as supposedly sophisticated facial recognition AI. Further, the current generation of facial recognition remains sensitive to head pose and facial expression. Therefore — at least at this point — it’s hard to credit the notion that this AI is in some way superhuman at “outing” us based on subtle but unalterable details of our facial structure.

The Guardian article also points out another weird bias in Kosinski’s work.

This is where Kosinski’s work strays into biological determinism. While he does not deny the influence of social and environmental factors on our personalities, he plays them down. At times, what he says seems eerily reminiscent of Lombroso, who was critical of the idea that criminals had “free will”: they should be pitied rather than punished, the Italian argued, because – like monkeys, cats and cuckoos – they were “programmed to do harm”.

“I don’t believe in guilt, because I don’t believe in free will,” Kosinski tells me, explaining that a person’s thoughts and behaviour “are fully biological, because they originate in the biological computer that you have in your head”. On another occasion he tells me, “If you basically accept that we’re just computers, then computers are not guilty of crime. Computers can malfunction. But then you shouldn’t blame them for it.” The professor adds: “Very much like: you don’t, generally, blame dogs for misbehaving.”

I don’t believe in free will either, but for completely different reasons: I see it as a malformed question built on a foundation of dualism, a delusion that “you” are something independent of the physical, biological “you”. But I don’t flop down into the lazy thinking of biological determinism; that “I” am a construct of a meat computer does not imply that I am robotically fixed and incapable of change and growth, or cannot make decisions based on rational forethought or emotional desire. The real “I” is the whole, inseparable from glands and experience and calculation.

Likewise, biological determinism is bunk. Who we are is not simply a product of built-in genetic factors — genes respond to environment. It’s all one inseparable gemisch, and anyone who tries to argue that genes drive behavior is a fool. It’s always genes entangled in history and environment.

That was a bar so low I thought they couldn’t possibly limbo under it

Some right-wingers are making a low-budget anti-choice movie titled Roe v. Wade, which features the usual looney-tunes suspects, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Tomi Lahren and Jon Voight and Corbin Bernsen, and if you follow the link you’ll find lots of clues that this is going to be a flaming shitshow. But one simple point is a truly damning indictment.

Conservative actors Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo were initially cast as Supreme Court justices but left upon receiving the script. “That’s where it started as far as not sending out full scripts to actors, because they backed out and then it was a mad rush to find people to be the Supreme Court justices, and when they got on set they had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t get their lines until they got on set. They were kept in the dark,” according to a crew member.

The script is so bad that Kevin Sorbo and Stephen Baldwin refused a pay day? Holy crap. I’ve seen some of their previous movies, and I have a hard time imagining a movie that’s even worse.

Be worse for greater justice!

I’m immediately put on my guard when someone starts using the old zero-sum argument against acknowledging someone’s rights: “Giving them the same rights I have means my rights are diminished!” This is not a good argument. Granting someone else rights does not shrink the pool of possible rights we can allow. But this is exactly the argument Sarah Ditum makes, and she even says it right in the title: Trans rights should not come at the cost of women’s fragile gains.

With a lead like that, you might expect that she’d then give lots of substantial examples of “unavoidable conflicts between women’s rights and the current trans-activist agenda”, because otherwise, I’m not going to believe it. But here’s her case: “born women” have had to acknowledge the existence of trans women.

In June Cancer Research UK, a charity, tweeted: “Cervical screening (or the smear test) is relevant for everyone aged 25-64 with a cervix.” The odd phrasing—“everyone with a cervix” rather than “women”—was not accidental. The charity explained that it had deliberately chosen to use what it described as “inclusive language”. Similarly, the campaign Bloody Good Period, which donates tampons and sanitary towels to asylum-seekers, uses the word “menstruators” rather than “women”. And Green Party Women, an internal campaign group of the British Green Party, confirmed last year that its preferred designation for the constituency it represented was not, in fact, “women” but “non-men”.

OK, but if you’re a trans man with a cervix, shouldn’t you get cervical screening? And aren’t there plenty of women who do not menstruate for one reason or another, not just because they might be a trans woman but because they’re menopausal or taking pills? This is a rather odd complaint.

Ah, but you see, the problem is that these trends for accurate language are applied unequally. So clearly the trans activists are only targeting women’s causes for change.

It is notable that Cancer Research UK did not test its “inclusive” approach with a male-specific cancer. Its campaign messages about prostate and testicular cancer address “men”, rather than “everyone with a prostate” or “everyone with testicles”. (Addressing “people with a cervix” is, of course, only inclusive of people who know they have a cervix. Many women do not have that detailed knowledge of their internal anatomy. And those who speak English as a second language may well not know the word.) While organisations in the women’s sector have revised their language to avoid the word “women”, male-specific charities such as CALM (the Campaign against Living Miserably, a movement against male suicide) continue to refer uncomplicatedly to “men”. Women’s groups are aggressively picketed for being exclusionary; men’s clubs are left unmolested.

All right, that’s a good argument. She’s right that this asymmetry is a problem. It seems to me, though, that the problem is that trans activism hasn’t gone far enough — that we should be objecting to prostate and testicular screening campaigns that only address “men”, rather than “people with testicles and/or prostates”, and that we should aspire to greater inclusivity. It is particularly ironic that CALM doesn’t seem to recognize that discrimination against trans men and trans women increases their suicide rate. So shouldn’t Ditum be concerned about this habit of “uncomplicatedly” referring to “men” and “women”?

But no. She’s instead arguing that we should return to the lack of complicatedness of just ignoring the existence of trans individuals. It’s really weird. Her entire essay should be read as an argument for the importance of using inclusive language for all, and that society has fallen short in many instances, but her conclusion is that we should fall even shorter, to make things fair.

I don’t get it. Be worse for greater justice! It’s not a very appealing slogan.