Hold the presses! Maybe Americans aren’t so cruel after all!

Some of them exhibit extreme Christian kindness and charity.

“You don’t believe that gay people should be stoned to death, do you?” Skylar asked.

“I believe the Bible puts the death penalty on it,” Powell replied. “Obviously, not by me or anybody in a regular society, obviously. I believe it’s the government’s job to execute criminals. I believe that the Bible says clearly that homosexuality is a criminal crime. It’s a crime. It’s one of the worst crimes ever.”

“Is that what you’re advocating for?” Skylar pressed. “That our government should stone gays to death to execute them?”

Powell took the opportunity to state that he believes in humane executions when it comes to gay people.

“By whatever means they execute people. And obviously, I believe in humane, you know, putting to death,” Powell replied.

Yeah. In ‘Murica, we don’t stone gays to death.

But wait! After we dehumanize them enough to plan to murder them, what’s the point of this “humane” nonsense? Won’t that get in the way of efficiency? I don’t think Powell has thought this through.

All I see is that you think America is special and exceptional

How else can you interpret an article with the title, The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty. We are unique! We are spectacular! We are #1!

Unfortunately, we seem to be specializing in all the wrong things.

But by now, American cruelty is both legendary — and one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Just why would people in a rich country leave their neighbours to die for a lack of basic medicine, their young without good jobs or retirements, make their elderly work until their dying day, cripple students with lifelong debt, charge new mothers half of average income just to have a baby — not to mention shrug when their kids begin massacring each other at school? What motivates the kind of spectacular, unique, unimaginable, and gruesome cruelty that we see in America, which exists nowhere else in the world?

I can agree that the cruelty of our culture is obvious and manifested everywhere, but I hate to deflate our sense of exceptionalism, but we aren’t alone. Look at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how the United Kingdom and other European states are responding to immigration, how every human society reacts to the Other, how even a civilized nation like Germany could be stirred up by a demagogue to willingly commit atrocities, how Belgium afflicted criminal abuse on the people of the Congo. Our difference seems to be our willingness to perpetrate these torments on ourselves.

The author’s speculation about what causes us to be so horrible tends to fall flat, unfortunately.

My answer goes something like this. Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.

I disagree. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in this archetypical American society, and it’s not true that we “grew up in the shadow of endless war”, unless you take “shadow” literally. We didn’t experience war. Wars were something that happened elsewhere, to which we supplied cannon fodder. Wars were not something we suffered under, and while there was the ominous terror of nuclear war, we were also blithely confident that we’d win, no matter what. Wolverines! The American character was one of irrational optimism. The history we were taught was all about Manifest Destiny, the near-divinity of the Founding Fathers, our role as the Leaders of the Free World. We are always the winners, and the losers are always the worst people who fully deserved their fate.

The extreme capitalism part I agree with. To me, the best interpretation of the American spirit in literature is personified by Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch 22: irrepressibly cheerful, blind to the harm he does to others, willing to bomb his friends if it increases the value of his shares, and relentlessly sailing through a war that is nothing but a business opportunity to him. We are a people untouched by fear and unable to imagine the consequences.

The rest of the world has good reason to be terrified. Their only consolation ought to be that we’re probably going to wreck ourselves before we can exercise our full capacity for destruction on others.

Flattered, then humbled

Today I read an article that listed a few of the colossal errors of Jordan Peterson, and I was flattered to be cited by the author.

However, using the coincidence of serotonin as the supposed basis for behavioural parallels between lobsters and humans – trumpeted during the Channel 4 interview, again to give off the impression of scientific authority – has been expertly dismantled by the biologist PZ Myers. Evidently irked by Peterson’s intellectual overreaching, Myers claims that Peterson has “built a case on false facts and distortions of general observations from the scientific literature. He has not demonstrated anything about socio-cultural constructions. Not only does he get the evidence wrong, he can’t construct any kind of logical argument…”

Worse still, Myers argues, there is an ideological motive for all this: “Peterson is distorting the evidence to fit an agenda… It’s appalling the degree to which this man is asserting nonsense with such smug confidence. This man is lying to you.”

Oh, “expertly dismantled”…thank you, thank you, I wave to the audience and blush charmingly. I am gratified to be appreciated. But then…Google throws a bucket of ice-cold humility in my face and suggests that I go read this excellent article in the Washington Post by Bailey Steinworth.

Oh, man, it is so good. She points out that “in asking us to consider the lobster, he’s cherry-picking one model of social behavior when there’s a whole ocean full of equally relevant examples”, and then…she gives several examples. It’s beautiful.

As a psychologist, Peterson understandably seems to favor lobsters because of their well-characterized behavioral repertoire, citing among other things research on the neurotransmitter and antidepressant target serotonin. But they’re not the only inhabitant of the ocean that’s been studied in this way. He might also be interested in Aplysia. Like lobsters, sea hares of the genus Aplysia — sea slugs named for sensory structures that resemble rabbit ears — have been used extensively in serotonin studies. Behaviorally, however, lobsters and sea slugs could hardly be more different: While a lobster rarely wants to see another lobster, a sea hare placed on its own will crawl toward chemical cues indicating the presence of other sea hares. In fact, being with other members of its species improves a sea hare’s ability to learn and remember. Peterson’s opening chapter emphasizes that male lobsters compete for the best territory to win access to the most females. By contrast, in sea hare sex, everyone gets a turn. They’re hermaphrodites that mate in groups, alternating between the “male” and “female” roles.

Now that’s an expert dismantling. Go read the whole thing. Of of the dismaying truths of our woefully inadequately educated public, which includes a certain pretentious professor of psychology, is how unaware they may be of the diversity of biological strategies. Nature ain’t respectin’ your Biblical mores, people.

The message of feminism is WHAT??!?

I finally got around to reading that Cathy Young op-ed about Jordan Peterson — I’ve been distracted, and the names “Cathy Young” and “Jordan Peterson” do not inspire enthusiasm. It was rather awful.

The whole thing can be summarized briefly as, “Gosh, Jordan Peterson is kinda goofy on some stuff, but he is exactly right when he bashes on feminism”. It’s about what you’d expect from Young, who is an anti-feminist in the same vein as Christina Hoff Sommers. There are lots of moments where I’m just flabbergasted at her biases.

For all his flaws, Peterson is tapping into a very real frustration: More than half a century after the modern feminist revolution began in the 1960s, we have yet to figure out new rules for partnership between men and women.

No, we’ve got no problems figuring out the rules, they’re easy. Treat women with the same respect you would men. She also glosses over the real problem, that women in the workplace are not there to form a “partnership”, especially not a sexual partnership, with their male colleagues. That’s the real problem, that some men are incapable of relating to women without assuming that their role as women is to be sexual…when it’s not. We don’t have an issue with men flirting with their male colleagues, yet for some reason it’s not possible for women to be present without sexual banter flying about, and when it happens, it’s all the woman’s fault.

Although Peterson can sound like a chauvinistic crank when he seems to suggest that women incite sexual harassment by wearing makeup to the office, his larger points — that evolving norms are generating confusion and mixed signals, and that women play a role in sexualizing work environments — are far from absurd.

Young is incorrect. They are totally absurd. He claims that women wear red lipstick because they turn red during sexual arousal. No, that’s not it. It’s because we have social conventions of attractiveness that differ for men and women, and we all heed them out of a general interest in fitting in, and in being presentable in the workplace. Why do men shave their faces, wear neckties, and shun wearing skirts? I’m sure you can invent a biological rationale for all of that, but that doesn’t make it true. A woman accepting the social standards for appearance of her peers and community is no more flaunting her sexual availability than is a man doing likewise — she is trying to generally look good, just like every other person on the job.

I mean, otherwise, look at the man in that interview, wearing a long tie to boast about his possession of a penis. Disgusting. Maybe we need workplace regulations that prohibit ties, pants, and stereotypically masculine hair styles in the office.

Consider: We have rejected traditional sexist proprieties that forbade coarse language in front of “the ladies,” yet a man can now be fired for telling a crude joke that offends a female co-worker. Calling women “the weaker sex” would be considered shockingly retrograde, yet ambivalent sexual encounters are easily recast as violations of women, with men presumed entirely responsible for ensuring consent. Workplace romances abound, yet flirting could be one step away from someone’s idea of sexual harassment.

I thought this was enlightening, although perhaps not in the way Young intended. Go ahead, take a look at the link she gives for some radio hosts getting fired for telling a crude joke that offends a woman. The story actually says there were “multiple complaints against both hosts over the course of more than a dozen years” and that there were many “allegations of inappropriate comments and bullying”.

This kind of minimizing is a common strategy by the anti-feminists. A pattern of frequent abuse and belittling behavior is recast as a one-off incident, and a man is being punished for a brief mistake. But that’s not the case. In her example, these men had multiple warnings and explicit prior actions to change their behaviors. One was given “one-on-one anti-harassment training for him and a warning…that he was creating an uncomfortable work environment”, which is a darned serious step to take prior to their firing. These were apparently popular radio hosts, so the station wasn’t going to fire them on a whim — there was sustained provocation.

But sure, it was just a crude joke.

The conclusion of Young’s piece is blatantly dishonest, and I’m surprised no editor caught it and said they couldn’t possibly publish this lie.

For all its successes, contemporary feminism’s main message to men is not one of equal partnership. Rather, it’s: Repent, abase yourself, and be an obedient feminist ally — and we still won’t trust you. It’s no wonder that Peterson has found an eager audience in this climate. If feminists don’t like his message, they should offer a better one.

Wow. First she says the message of feminism is Repent, abase yourself, and be an obedient feminist ally — it isn’t, by the way, and it’s nothing but the ridiculous faux feminism Young always bashes — and then she blames feminism for having a poor message, when the message is purely hers.

How about if we ask a real feminist, someone like bell hooks, for instance, what the real message of feminism is?

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

But maybe she thinks men are supposed to abase themselves and be obedient?

When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.

It seems to me that feminism already has a better message than that bullshit Cathy Young makes up. It’s definitely a lot better than the nonsense Jordan Peterson peddles.

What makes for a good homage?

The versions of Donald Glover’s “This is America” are coming fast and furious. The first one I saw was Nicole Arbour’s — she turned it into a song about the oppression of women, a cause to which I am sympathetic, but I detested her video. It had way too much Nicole Arbour in it, and seemed to be mainly about her, and it was musically flat and dull. Coming from someone who has a history of punching down, it felt more like an appropriation.

But this one is much more interesting: it’s “This is Nigeria”, by Nigerian rapper Falz The Bahd Guy.

I came away from that more aware of the problems in Nigerian culture than of how pretty the rapper is (and he’s pretty good, too). I guess my feeling is that if you’re going to steal from an instant classic like “This is America”, you’d better bring some real talent and authenticity to the table, because you’re going to always be compared to the original.

The laws of karma and retributive justice aren’t actually laws, you know

I’ve been lucky to have never received a chastising letter from an administrator like the one below. A former professor at San Diego State University made a suggestion that a university provost receive an accelerated review — that is not a condemnation, but a recommendation that an impartial committee evaluate his performance — and the provost was a mite bit upset. He responded by asking Jesus to shower him with an unending curse.

I’m thinking that the suggestion for an accelerated review was wise and justified, and maybe there is more to the story than the former professor has made public. The provost has resigned from his position.

When the mask slips…

“Free speech” is a favored cause for the right wing, but they don’t really believe in it: it’s a sound bite, a meme, a tool they can use to silence others. The latest example comes from Niall Ferguson, you know, this Niall Ferguson, the well known academic whose views are so totally suppressed by PC culture:

Ferguson himself is well-known for his conservative views. He made headlines in March for organizing a conference of 30 white male historians.

…

In 2013, for instance, he stated that acclaimed economist John Maynard Keynes did not care to consider future generations when discussing current affairs because he was gay. Ferguson later apologized for the statement.

He has also been criticized for his outspoken support of colonialism and the British empire.

We must have missed him in the bloody purge of right-wing assholes from university campuses. That happened, right? Anyway, he was an advisor to some abomination called the Hoover Institute, the conservative think-tank with an endowment of almost half a billion dollars and the mission of spreading capitalist propaganda on college campuses; he also has connections to Turning Point USA, which has the same mission, buckets of money, and a reputation for brain-dead stupidity that ought to persuade any kind of respectable academic to avoid them.

But not Niall Ferguson!

Even worse, some of his private emails were leaked — they were accidentally forwarded to someone not in his trusted circle of wingnut associates — and it’s been revealed that he and various organizations on the Stanford campus weren’t really interested in promoting the free discussion of controversial ideas. It was all about baiting their ideological opposition and crushing their left-wing critics.

As The Stanford Daily reported on Thursday, newly public emails show that Ferguson’s eagerness to fight off what he saw as encroaching political correctness led the historian to some bizarre extracurricular activity. Ferguson teamed up with a group of student Republicans, led by John Rice-Cameron, to wage a covert political battle against Michael Ocon, a student they viewed as excessively left-wing. In the e-mails they refer to Ocon as “Mr. O” and talk about ways to discredit him. “Some opposition research on Mr. O might also be worthwhile,” Ferguson wrote. Ferguson’s research assistant Max Minshull was tasked with the job of collecting the dirt on Ocon.

“Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” Ferguson wrote in another email. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Rice-Cameron, the son of Barack Obama’s former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, was equally grandiose. “Slowly, we will continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure,” Rice-Cameron crowed in an email, showing he has a great future ahead of him doing Darth Vader cosplay.

Further, it was clear that they brought in the repulsive Charles Murray simply to piss off the campus left. The whole charade is an exercise in antagonism — this is why the Murrays and the Dinesh D’Souzas and the Ann Coulters still thrive on the right. It’s not because they bring in fresh insights and challenge conventional ideas — they are the tired old hatreds of the status quo — but because they are good at inflaming and posturing and aggravating with lies. We should be aware of exactly what they are doing.

It’s a kind of power game. The goal isn’t to vindicate the abstract right to free speech but to assert the right’s power and influence over campus discourse — to force the campus mainstream into a choice between allowing vile ideas to spread or looking hostile to free speech.

The Ferguson emails are an unusually clear admission that this is what’s going on. Digging up dirt on a student in an attempt to silence their activism isn’t about “free speech” — it’s about suppressing left-wing speech. The entire framing of the Cardinal Conversations in the emails positions the initiative, which Ferguson ran, as part of a broader war on “the Left” and “SJWs.”

You know, I’ve been part of many conversations over the years about who should be invited to give campus talks — I’ve never heard anyone suggest that we ought to bring in X because they’d set the College Republicans on fire, or crush the Right. We invest in speakers who have stimulating ideas and good stories to tell. When we factor in the response of the reactionary right at all, it’s to suggest that Speaker X might help them learn.

I can’t imagine suggesting that we need to do “opposition research” on individual students at the university. There are some terrible people enrolled at any school, but all we have to do is wait for them to do something stupid in public (although we’d rather they didn’t, and just wised up). But I guess if you’re a professor with appointments at Stanford and Oxford you don’t have to be a responsible educator anymore.