What our students are learning

Atrios describes it perfectly.

Some Powerless College Students Are The Greatest Threat To Free Speech The World Has Ever Known

Anyone who has spent a bit of time around especially elite college campuses knows that while, yes, sometimes students protest right wing speakers – sometimes this is perfectly right and good and sometimes you can argue that they go too far and the heckler’s veto is rarely if ever appropriate but these things are always a bit more complicated than people make them out to be – it’s pressure from the top that tends to discourage left wing speakers from coming to campus. There are academics and activists on the campus circuit who every knows are “controversial,” quite often because of rather strong left wing views on things like war, carceral state, economics, racial issues, etc. Black “radicals,” commies, Palestinian activists, etc. Watch those pots of money mysteriously disappear if you try to put your hands in them to fund a visit by one of these speakers. To put it simply, it’s not controversial at all to advocate invading a country for lies, and then profiting handsomely off of that, but it is controversial to suggest that maybe, just maybe, when police are executing people in your communities that something more than accepting it quietly is necessary. Military and cops are good, the poor and the marginalized are suspect. And these are our liberal institutions!

Anyway, the administration and money have the power and more importantly the need to cater to power. The kids have protest. People get very upset about the kids. It’s always revealing.

We see it all the time. Armed Nazis chant racist slogans and threaten millions with death and deportation, and kill people; the police are on their side. Young people with a better sense of morality than our national leaders protest because they must, and the New York Times and other organs of the status quo get the vapors about antifa. It plays out like that over and over again. The only criticism I have of that summary is that it isn’t just the elite colleges — it goes on at state and community colleges, too.

But it is true that the richer the university, the more conservative its administration. Look at Harvard; it’s prestigious, that is so, but it’s also run by people who have been promoted for their zealotry in defending the endowment and propping up the richest people in the country. See the ethical blindness they proudly exhibit in the dismissal of Chelsea Manning:

A member of Manning’s support team challenged Elmendorf to explain why Harvard was so anxious about giving her the title of “visiting fellow” when in the same roster of this year’s fellows they had included Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary, and Trump’s former presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with assaulting a reporter during the 2016 race.

They noted what they suggested was the absurdity of honouring two prominent members of a presidential campaign notorious for its bending of the truth and controversial stances on race issues in America.

Elmendorf further alienated the Manning team by responding that Spicer and Lewandowski “brought something to the table” and could teach the Harvard audience something. That, for the recipients of the phone conversation, implied that the whistleblower by contrast had nothing to contribute.

That she was regarded as less useful to educating the Harvard audience than two corrupt frauds is not surprising; what was surprising is that she got an invitation in the first place. The corrupt frauds represent Harvard values better than someone who exposed corruption in the execution of the war in Afghanistan. The crime isn’t murdering civilians, in Harvard’s eyes, it’s revealing those murders to the world.

OMG! More deplatforming!

Online critics complained about the lineup at a conference. They couldn’t believe who had been taken seriously and invited to give a talk. And they managed to get the organizers to disinvite someone. Fie, you shout. For shame! What about open discussion and debate about the ideas? Unbelievable. How could they defile the principles of free speech and freedom of thought to reject Rock Star and Indiana Jones of the superfood universe?

That’s right. They disinvited David Avocado Wolfe.

Following an online backlash for hosting alternative health guru David “Avocado” Wolfe as a speaker at the annual Biohacker Summit in October, held this year in Finland, organisers announced that Wolfe has been removed from the conference lineup.

What a crime. But is it possible that some people are so unqualified, so repugnant, so wrong that they don’t deserve a speaking slot at a conference? Say it ain’t so. I was going to suggest Ken Ham as the keynote speaker of the Society for the Study of Evolution meetings next year.

What about Free Speeeeeeeeach-eeach-eeach-eeach?

A wee happy omen of radicalization in the correct direction, for a change

People are always complaining about those danged liberal universities, especially places like mine where we even have “liberal” in the category label. But I always wonder where they get these ideas, because in general students are here to learn, rather than push an agenda, and we keep them busy with things like math. The only exception is, that if you’d been here last year, you would have noticed our bulletin boards were flooded with student-selected Libertarian crapola…”Taxation is Theft” posters, and paeans to capitalism generously provided by right-wing think tanks. It was weird, because it wasn’t at all representative of overall campus sentiment, but was what our tiny minority of raving right-wingers were promoting (see also the Morris North Star, which seems to be happily defunct now).

This year, though, it’s a little different. I was brought up short when I passed a bulletin board and saw this posted:

Awww. The little leftist ragamuffins are getting emboldened. This makes me so happy.

It comes from an organization called crimethinc.

CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age. We strive to reinvent our lives and our world according to the principles of self-determination and mutual aid.

We believe that you should be free to dispose of your limitless potential on your own terms: that no government, market, or ideology should be able to dictate what your life can be. If you agree, let’s do something about it.

Honestly, most of the noise on campuses gets made by the radical right — see also recent events at Berkeley — so it warms my heart to see that some of our students are finally waking up and making a few quiet protests. Bravo!

Say, isn’t this a prime example of “deplatforming”?

The Harvard Institute of Politics invited a number of people to be Fellows. It was the usual Wingnut Welfare event, where a collection of unqualified nincompoops who’s only reason for existence is to promote far right inanity were invited. Sean Spicer will be there. As will Joe Scarborough. And…

The roster of IOP fellows in 2017 includes Benghazi faker Jason Chaffetz, professional political thug Corey Lewandowski, professional bad liar Sean Spicer, and run-of-the-mill wingnuts Mary Katherine Ham and Guy Benson. (You should keep all these names in mind the next time you read conservative whinging about how oppressed they are. This is a nice gig here.) And, while I was contemplating what Lewandowski could possibly “impact” on students other than a seminar on how to go goon on female reporters, the really heavy shoe dropped.

The surprise was that they also invited…Chelsea Manning.

Which immediately prompted screeching from the conservatives.

Which was — unsurprisingly — effective.

“We are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow — and the perceived honor that it implies to some people — while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.

“I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation.”

Cowardly fuckers.

So…everyone, even the right wing, alt-right, Nazi centrist atheists, are all going to complain and denounce this decision?

Just remember, an invitation from the Kennedy School, which thinks Spicer, Lewandowski, and Chaffetz are worthy recipients of the ‘honor’, isn’t really an honor.

Seeing through all the noise

I’ve mentioned this odd duck conference sponsored by Mythicist Milwaukee before…now Martin Hughes clarifies what bugs him about it, too. The meeting has been doing some unusual things. They’ve been advertising some well-known attendees — not speakers, just popular atheists who will be doing the hard work of showing up — which is the first time I’ve seen that.

On Saturday, September 30th, 2017, several atheist celebrities will be at the fourth annual Mythicist Milwaukee Mythinformation Conference. The more well-known names include Matt Dillahunty, Richard Carrier [Wait! I thought we destroyed his reputation and his career! At least, he claims we did that, and is suing us for one million dollars for it], Aron Ra [edit: Aron Ra has recently decided not to attend. His wife cited the reasons here), and Seth Andrews. Their presence at this conference is being well-publicized.

But the people coming to hear these people speak are going to be disappointed. Because none of them are giving a talk.

Which is…weird. I mean, Matt Dillahunty, the one exception, will only serve as a moderator for a debate; he’s not speaking.

Some of them, like Seth Andrews, have been awfully defensive (and offensive) about it, too. I’m curious about a couple of things.

  • Are you being paid, or at least having your travel costs covered, to be an attendee and to promote the meeting?

  • Are you comfortable being window-dressing?

No condemnation if they were to answer yes to either of those questions — it’s just that it would make me a little uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t accept an invitation to a conference on those terms.

But then the next question is, when you’ve got Dillahunty and Andrews and briefly, Aron Ra, why are they being sidelined? Who are the even more brilliant speakers being showcased at this meeting?

Why, in a conference attended by so many shining stars of the atheist movement, aren’t any of the celebrities speaking?

It’s a simple mystery. Here’s the clue: All the speakers at this skeptic conference are anti-SJWs who, for the most part, haven’t had a prominent voice on the atheist conference scene before.

A bit of background: See, the three YouTubers speaking were not given opportunities to speak at VidCon 2017, the major YouTube conference. In spite of the fact that they are fairly popular on YouTube, they have been unable to cross over into a legitimate, respectable level of status…possibly because their views were considered disrespectful to marginalized groups, and the organizers of the conference didn’t want to give those views a platform.

Now that anti-SJW YouTubers have failed to gain legitimacy in the arena of YouTube, it seems they need a stepping stone. Enter the much smaller American atheist community.

And honestly…the conference seems to be a way to give their views legitimacy in the atheist community. I mean, why else would you have these anti-SJWs (who aren’t known as much, these days, for criticizing religion) speak, and have atheist “celebrities” merely come to watch, acting as window-dressing, than to give their more sidelined views legitimacy?

That sounds a little too conspiracy-theorish for me — I don’t think it was a conscious plan by these rather unpleasant youtubers, but more of a conference organizer with anti-SJW leanings seeing an opportunity to both promote their personal ideas, stir up some publicity for their organization, and cheer on a couple of haters they like. That’s it. I suspect the rot is imbedded in Mythicist Milwaukee.

In spite of the well-publicized phenomenon of the atheist celebrities showing up, this is not your average atheism conference. These celebrities, it seems, are there as window dressing — a way to give additional prestige to these voices in a way that seems engineered to give anti-SJW thought greater legitimacy in American atheism, and to show that social justice ideals might be as ill-placed and mythical as religion. Perhaps this anti-SJW perspective failed when it came to the more respectable, “legitimate” corners of YouTube, but if its representatives can get a respectable, influential platform in the much smaller atheism community…maybe they can build on it.

And, so far as I can see, this conference is less about criticizing religion, and more about giving anti-SJW views that platform.

Which, admittedly, may make the atheist community more uncomfortable for me, but there’s no sense in denying the obvious…

Oh, gosh, suddenly a couple of more questions suddenly arise for the window-dressing.

  • Why are you willing to prop up an openly anti-social justice conference of the type that makes many women and minorities “uncomfortable” (to put it mildly) with atheism?

  • If your defense is Free Speech! and that you’re all about the open discussion of ideas,
    why is this conference so one-sidedly promoting anti-humanism? I mean, here’s Martin Hughes speaking about social justice and atheism — the kind of talk not represented in Milwaukee.

Again, for the Free Speech! dogmatists, this isn’t saying that Mythicist Milwaukee can’t hold a Nazi rally if they want, but it’s clear that they are trying to legitimize blatant anti-feminist, racist views as a respectable part of atheism. Why would anyone support that? Unless they’re sympathetic, of course.

But that looks awesome!

Superman is being a good guy again. Apparently, in the latest issue, he intervenes to stop a white nationalist shooter from killing immigrants.

And then he collars the wanna-be murderer and shames him. Superman is a real Social Justice Warrior!
Or maybe just an everyday decent human being with magic powers.

Yes! That looks like a good story with a good message.

Except…I got that story from Breitbart. They think it’s deplorable. Apparently, preventing the murder of innocents is un-American and socialism.

In an act of Super socialism, once police arrive, our Social Justice Supes orders them to protect the illegal aliens to make sure they are “safe and cared for.”

This latest episode should not surprise anyone.

DC Comics long ago declared that Superman is no longer American. Where once the hero touted the ideals of “truth, justice, and the American way,” like a good leftist, Superman is now a “citizen of the world.”

In a story from 2011, Superman proclaimed that he could no longer be an American citizen because “the world’s too small, too connected” to work just with the U.S.A.

So a true hero would defend American capitalistic values only, and if a few brown people get gunned down, that’s just the price of doing business? I simply do not understand how these people could look at that simple fantasy story and think Superman should be supporting the Nazi. Except maybe if you’re a Nazi.

Mary Schweitzer and the mysterious dinosaur soft tissue

Science has an overview of Schweitzer’s work. You may recall that she published descriptions of cells and soft tissue imbedded deep in fossilized dinosaur bone. That work is much beloved by creationists (it means those bones must be young, they say), but despite starting out as a creationist, she does not support that claim of a young age. She’s a theistic evolutionist.

She went back to school at Montana State University in Bozeman for an education degree, planning to become a high school science teacher. But then she sat in on a dinosaur lecture given by Jack Horner, now retired from the university, who was the model for the paleontologist in the original Jurassic Park movie. After the talk, Schweitzer went up to Horner to ask whether she could audit his class.

“Hi Jack, I’m Mary,” Schweitzer recalls telling him. “I’m a young Earth creationist. I’m going to show you that you are wrong about evolution.”

“Hi Mary, I’m Jack. I’m an atheist,” he told her. Then he agreed to let her sit in on the course.

Over the next 6 months, Horner opened Schweitzer’s eyes to the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution and Earth’s antiquity. “He didn’t try to convince me,” Schweitzer says. “He just laid out the evidence.”

She rejected many fundamentalist views, a painful conversion. “It cost me a lot: my friends, my church, my husband.” But it didn’t destroy her faith. She felt that she saw God’s handiwork in setting evolution in motion. “It made God bigger,” she says.

I’ve read her papers, and they’re real head-scratchers. She seems to do good work; she documents everything carefully; she interprets the results cautiously. They don’t jibe well with expectations — chemistry ought to show more decay — but heck, data is data, if there are sound observations we’ve got to conform the theory to the evidence, not the other way around. She is reporting stuff that seems colossally unlikely, though.

Schweitzer’s most explosive claim came 2 years later in two papers in Science. In samples from their 68-million-year-old T. rex, Schweitzer and colleagues spotted microstructures commonly seen in modern collagen, such as periodic bands every 65 nanometers, which reflect how the fibers assemble. In another line of evidence, the team found that anticollagen antibodies bound to those purported fibers. Finally, they analyzed those same regions with Harvard University mass spectrometry specialist John Asara, who got the weights of six collagen fragments, and so worked out their amino acid sequences. The sequences resembled those of today’s birds, supporting the wealth of fossil evidence that birds descend from extinct dinosaurs.

It’s difficult to believe, but then there’s another dilemma: we expect extraordinarily strong evidence before it should be accepted, but how strong does it have to be? Is this too nitpicky?

She needs more fossils to quiet a continuing drumbeat of criticism. In addition to raising the specter of contamination, Buckley and others have argued that antibodies often bind nonspecifically and yield false-positive results. Critics also noted that one of the six amino acid sequences reported in the 2007 paper was misassigned and is likely incorrect. Asara later agreed and retracted that particular sequence.

“That’s worrying,” says Maria McNamara, a paleontologist at University College Cork in Ireland. “If you are going to make claims for preservation, you really need to have tight arguments. At this point I don’t think we are quite there.”

The biggest problem, though, is this one: all these results come from one and only one lab.

But no one except Schweitzer and her collaborators has been able to replicate their work. Although the study of ancient proteins, or paleoproteomics, is taking off, with provocative new results announced every few weeks, most findings come from samples thousands or hundreds of thousands of years old—orders of magnitude younger than Schweitzer’s dinosaurs.

“I want them to be right,” says Matthew Collins, a leading paleoproteomics researcher at the University of York in the United Kingdom. “It’s great work. I just can’t replicate it.”

That’s something I wish the creationists who bring up her work could understand: we want her to be right. I want to be able to go to a databank and download protein sequences from T. rex. I want to see a molecular phylogenetics comparison of Stegosaurus and Hadrosaurus osteocyte proteins. I think it would be awesome to compare sequences from different ceratopsians and assemble a family tree.

What I want and what we’ve got are two different things, though, and if only Schweitzer has the magic hands to extract this information, I’m not going to trust it. I don’t reject it out of hand, but damn,
it really needs more replication. At this point I don’t want to see another paper from her — I want to see it coming from another, unaffiliated lab. That would be better confirmation.