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An anonymous author (presumably Canadian) has written this piece for Times Higher Education, and it’s clear why he or she doesn’t want their name given. If that was publicized, the person would never be able to get any academic job in Canada.  Below are the two job ads from the University of Waterloo to which the anonymous author objects (click to find them). Note that there are two positions in computer science, but both reserved for those who self-identify as “minoritized” people, including Two-spirit people. What are those? The U.S. Indian Health Service defines them this way:

Traditionally, Native American two-spirit people were male, female, and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two-spirit people. In most tribes, they were considered neither men nor women; they occupied a distinct, alternative gender status.

I had thought these were simply indigenous people, but they seem to be non-binary indigenous people. So the first position is for people whose sexual identity doesn’t conform to their natal sex (I assumed that “identify as women” meant transwomen, but since “trangender” follows that, it could mean natal females as well. And the other job is for a minority, but a “racialized” minority, which means “not women”and nobody white”. I’m not sure whether Asians count as “members of a racialized minority.”  They are in a minority, and they are thought of as a race, so perhaps they would be. Canadians can weigh in here.

Regardless of how you interpret the requirements, it’s clear that these ads are targeted only for “minoritized” individuals. (Women in computer science stubbornly remain a minority, perhaps not because of structural sexism).

 

And here’s the anonymous article (click to read):

The author wants to apply for these jobs but since he or she (I’m guessing it’s a “he” since women could apply for the first job) simply isn’t qualified.  Excerpts:

The intention behind these postings is not malicious; rather, it aims to correct historical injustices. The attempted correction, however, only adds to the injustice of discrimination.

Why is academia so equivocal about making a universal condemnation of discrimination?

The author gives three reasons. First, the ad implicitly aims to correct bias, but underrepresentation of groups in a field, as you should know well know by now, need not automatically imply systemic bias. As the author says, it could reflect “differences in sex or culture” that “influence interests, behaviours or priorities.” I am pretty sure this plays a role in the underrepresentaiton of women in computer science.

Second, such ads, by assuming that the oppression reflects a hierarchy of bigotry, “perpetuates the false and dangerous idea that scars are passed down through generations, as if modern-day French children should cultivate hatred towards Germans because of the world wars.” He/she believes that the ads perpetrate a view of society as an eternal power struggle à la postmodernism. Well, that may be partly correct if underrepresentation reflects lower qualifications based on historical discrimination, but one can still wonder whether that should be rectified by ads like these, which list identity as the first criterion for application (presumably merit will be considered later).

Third, the author claims that “debate is stifled.”  I’m not sure what that means, but presumably the mere appearance of these ads justifies discriminatory hiring. As the author notes,

While intellectual and cultural diversity enriches humanity, equality in dignity unites us in a spirit of fraternity. Discrimination violates this moral equality, fosters resentment, undermines social cohesion, instrumentalises individuals and conveys the fatalistic and wrong idea that one’s path is determined by one’s ethnicity or gender. These severe consequences are wishfully thought to be dodged when discrimination is given a different name. But they are not.

Finally, the author tacks on another problem: those who are hired may be under the self-stigma of realizing that they got their job because of racial or sexual identity, not because of merit. This fact is of course the case for many minority hires, but I’m not sure if those hires are constantly tormented with this kind of self-doubt, though I know from testimony that some are. The author favors a “colorblind” approach to hiring, i.e., prize merit over identity.

I agree that the ads are objectionable, and they’d be illegal in the United States. Still, I favor a form of affirmative action, which is gradually taking shape as a belief that when candidates are pretty equally qualified, you can hire (or admit) the minority candidate more than half the time.  But even that is now illegal in the U.S., though of course schools will practice it anyway by getting around the “tick a box” prohibition. But no, there should not be jobs completely reserved for people who have a certain race of gender identity

I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.

In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.

And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”)  Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.

The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.

I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.

The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.

First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:

Excerpts:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!

Excerpts:

What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.

. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.

. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.

. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”

. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.

From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”.  Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”.  Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:

Excerpts:

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

. . . Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.

From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:

An excerpt from the above:

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!

Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)

Excerpts:

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:

Excerpts:

In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.

The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.

. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.

Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.

Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other.  He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling.  The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”

The latest strip from Jesus and Mo, called “nerds”, came with the email note, “Don’t take the red pill! Or is it the blue one? I can never remember.”

To Mo, it’s “Allah all the way down”:

Today’s photos are black-and-whites sent in by Jim Blilie. His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Another set here of black and white images.  Some are scans of color images, and are noted.  I am continuing to enjoy reimagining some of my color images in black and white.

First, a shot of Summit Lake in Jasper National Park, Canada, September 1981.  A figure in a landscape.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a December 1988 shot of skiing in the Cascade Range (back when my knees would do that).  These places are all now grown over with trees and no longer really skiable.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot taken in Lincoln Park in Seattle in March 1990 after a rare sea-level snow fall.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot of the Mount Saint Helens crater, 10 years after the eruption, in March 1990.  Taken the old-fashioned way, from a Cessna 172 that a friend was piloting.  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot of Nilgiri North in Nepal, taken in the summer of 1991.  Taken with my old Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens at 200mm, f/5.6 and 1/500s (I remember the entire sequence of choices leading up to this photo as ai watched the clouds drift into place).  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot from along the Seine in Paris in May 1992.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is another shot from May 1992 in France:  Sully sur-Loire chateau.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Another shot from France; but much more recent:  Paris in 2010.  I call this, “Before the Rush”.  Waiters relaxing before the dinner opening.  (Pentax K-5 and a telephoto lens, not sure which one.)

Figures under Double Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, June 2013.  (Pentax K-5 and almost certainly the same telephoto lens as the above photo):

Next is a shot from Badlands National Park in South Dakota from July 2013:

Finally, an image of a sunflower from Shawano County, Wisconsin, August 2023.  (Olympus m4/3 camera):

Some of these photos were taken during my bicycle tour around the world in 1990-92.

Equipment:

Pentax K-1000, ME Super, and LX cameras
Various Pentax M series and A series lenses
Pentax K-5 digital camera and various Pentax D lenses
Olympus OM-D E-M5 mirrorless M4/3 camera and various Olympus and Lumix lenses
Epson V500 Perfection scanner and its software
Lightroom 5 photo software

The Oxford English Dictionary, my go-to source for definitions, has this one for “consciousness”:

But there are other definitions, including sensing “qualia” (subjective conscious experience like pleasure or pain), or “having an inner life” involving self-awareness.  But it’s hard to determine under any of these definitions whether an individual of another species—indeed, even an individual of our own species—is conscious.  We think that other humans are conscious because we’re all built the same way, and we’re pretty sure that other mammals are conscious because they appear to feel pain or pleasure, and are built in a mammalian ground plan. But when an earthworm reacts when you poke it, is it feeling pain and having a subjective experience, or is that an automatic, built-in response to being poked that is adaptive but isn’t mediated through conscious experience?

I’m not going to get into the thorny topic of consciousness here, but I do feel that the more an animal is conscious (whatever that means), the more we should take care of it and avoid hurting it. (This of course is a subjective decision on my part.) It’s probably okay to swat mosquitoes, but not to kill a lizard, a duck, or a cat. (I tend to err on the “assume consciousness” side, and am loath to even swat mosquitoes.)

Researchers themselves have arrived at similar conclusions, for there are increasingly stringent regulations for taking care of lab animals. If you work on primates or rats, you have to ensure your university or granting agency that your research subjects will be properly treated, but those regulations don’t apply to fruit flies. But whether members of another species are conscious in the way that we are (well, the way I am, as I can’t be sure about you!), is something very hard to determine. The “mirror test“, in which you put a mark on an animal’s forehead, put it in front of a mirror and see if it touches its own forehead, is another test used to determine self awareness. The article below describes several other ways scientists have approached the question.

At any rate, according to Nature, a group of scientists have signed short joint declaration (second link below) saying that we need more research on consciousness and that the phenomenon may be present “in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”  They add that knowing whether an animal is conscious should affect how we consider its welfare, which seems correct. The letter (or petition) doesn’t really define “consciousness”, but the Nature blurb about it does. Click the link below to read that blurb:

An excerpt:

Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies.

Armed with such research, a coalition of scientists is calling for a rethink in the animal–human relationship. If there’s “a realistic possibility” of “conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal”, the researchers write in a document they call The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. Issued today during a meeting in New York City, the declaration also says that there is a “realistic possibility of conscious experience” in reptiles, fish, insects and other animals that have not always been considered to have inner lives, and “strong scientific support” for aspects of consciousness in birds and mammals.

As the evidence has accumulated, scientists are “taking the topic seriously, not dismissing it out of hand as a crazy idea in the way they might have in the past,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and one of the authors of the declaration.

The document, which had around 40 signatories early today, doesn’t state that there are definitive answers about which species are conscious. “What it says is there is sufficient evidence out there such that there’s a realistic possibility of some kinds of conscious experiences in species even quite distinct from humans,” says Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, and one of the signatories. The authors hope that others will sign the declaration and that it will stimulate both more research into animal consciousness and more funding for the field.

And Nature says that the group has a definition of consciousness, though I can’t find it in the short declaration:

The definition of consciousness is complex, but the group focuses on an aspect of consciousness called sentience, often defined as the capacity to have subjective experiences, says Birch. For an animal, such experiences would include smelling, tasting, hearing or touching the world around itself, as well as feeling fear, pleasure or pain — in essence, what it is like to be that animal. But subjective experience does not require the capacity to think about one’s experiences.

This is as good a definition as any, I think, but determining whether another animal is even sentient is nearly impossible; all we can do is look for signs of sentience, like a dog howling if you kick it.  But if a protozoan heads for a source of food, is it having a subjective experience of “here’s food”?  Unlikely; protozoans don’t have brains and this is probably an inbuilt adaptive reflex. But there are tons of species intermediate in potential sentience between protozoans and mammals, and how do we decide whether, say, a fish is sentient? (I’ll tell you that scientists have ways of approaching this, but no time to go into it now. But the article has some interesting descriptions of these tests.) And of course most people think that octopuses are sentient.  Some even think that fruit flies are sentient!:

Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences,” says Bruno van Swinderen, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who studies fruit flies’ behaviour and who also signed the declaration.

Some suggest that dreams are key components of being conscious, he notes. If flies and other invertebrates have active sleep, “then maybe this is as good a clue as any that they are perhaps conscious”.

Well that’s stretching it a bit, but who knows? And some people weigh in with the caveat I mentioned above: acting as if you’re conscious may not mean that you’re conscious, for consciousness produces adaptive behavior, but so does natural selection, which has the ability produce adaptive reflexes not mediated by consciousness but look like consciousness.

We have a hard problem, then, and that’s reflected in the declaration itself, which is below. You can see the whole thing as well as its signers by clicking on the screenshot:

And the text of the document:

Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

I don’t recognize many of the signers, and I’m surprised that Peter Singer, who surely agrees with the declaration, didn’t sign it. But I think more signers are being added.

At any rate, I can’t disagree with what the document says, but the interesting problems are both philosophical (on the ethical side) and scientific: what do we mean by consciousness, and, once that’s agreed on, how do we determine if a member of another species is conscious? Or, upon rethinking what I just wrote, perhaps we don’t need a definition of consciousness, but simply a set of empirical observations that we think are signs that animals are suffering. But that itself involves some philosophical input. It’s all a mess, but one thing is for sure, we should avoid causing unneeded suffering to animals, and we shouldn’t kill them just because we don’t like them. Even a lowly ant has evolved to preserve its own existence, and to what extent can our selfish desires override that consideration?

As the classic ending of many scientific papers goes, “More work needs to be done.”

h/t: Phil

Well, you can write off yet another organization dedicated to promoting free expression. First the ACLU went down the tubes, followed by the SPLC, and now PEN America, a group of American writers dedicated to promoting free expression, has canceled a ceremony because the writers want PEN to take a stand on an ideological issue: Israel, say many of its members, is committing genocide, and they are demanding that PEN America take that position. And PEN America crumpled, canceling an upcoming event.

No matter that the issue is debatable, and no matter that the real committers of genocide, those absolutely dedicated to destroying a people, are Hamas, which has sworn to kill all Jews and eliminate Israel. Now that is genocide. But PEN members don’t care what Hamas is doing.  The claim of Israeli genocide is not a “truth”, and many of us (including me) disagree, as do many PEN members. But a vocal group of these “free expression” writers insist that their organization call for a cease fire and accuse Israel of genocide.  Doesn’t that count as something that chills free expression, and associates an organization for such expression with a specific ideology?

You may recall that a similar dubious position was taken by some PEN members in 2015, when six members refused to attend a banquet—and 145 writers signed a protest letter—all because PEN America was going to give a “freedom of expression award” to Charlie Hebdo after many of the magazine’s writers and artists were killed.  That’s even more of a no-brainer, because, yes, Charlie Hebdo, in the face of threats, continued to mock everything, including all religions. But it was their liberal satire of Islam that did them in, with 12 Charlie Hebdo employees shot by Muslim terrorists. Protesting a “courage” award for Charlie Hebdo is ridiculous.  But such is PEN  America.

Here’s the group’s mission as stated on their “about us” page:

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

Are they protecting free expression by canceling a ceremony because of a misguided assertion about Israel? And what they say is laughable (read below):

Click the headline to read, or find it archived here:

A few excerpts:

The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel and led nearly half of the prize nominees to withdraw.

The event was set to take place on April 29 at Town Hall in Manhattan. But in a news release on Monday, the group announced that although the prizes would still be conferred, the ceremony would not take place.

“We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,” the group’s chief officer for literary programming, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, said in the release.

“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”

In recent months, PEN America has faced intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 people dead, according to health officials there.

In a series of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America support an immediate cease-fire, as its global parent organization, PEN International, and other national chapters have done.

In other words, the writers have demanded (using Hamas statistics, of course) that PEN America take a political position. They are demanding that a group dedicated to free expression take an “official” position that would tend to chill expression and associate PEN with an ideological stand.  And if PEN doesn’t, then the writers are going to take their ball and go home.  They are demanding, in other words, that the group broach any kind of institutional neutrality that it may have—and it should have some since it’s dedicated to free expression.

More:

In March, a group of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar, announced that they were pulling out of next month’s World Voices Festival, one of PEN America’s signature events. And over the past several weeks, growing numbers of nominees for the literary awards, including Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe and Esther Allen, announced that they were withdrawing their books from consideration.

In a letter that PEN America leadership received last week, 30 of the 87 nominated writers and translators (including nine of the 10 nominees for one prize) criticized the group’s “disgraceful inaction” on the situation in Gaza, accusing it of “clinging to a disingenuous facade of neutrality while parroting” what the letter characterized as Israeli government propaganda. The letter also called for the resignation of the group’s longtime chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, and its president, the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, along with that of the group’s executive committee.

And here’s the dumbest statement of all:

“PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree,’” the nominees stated. “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Well that’s just wrong. I bet I could find many “writers of conscience” who do disagree on the “fact” that “Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people”.  If Israel was, all Gazans would have been dead for a long time, but the population of Gaza has grown like gangbusters. And we know that Israel doesn’t just go into Gaza for no reason and kill civilians. It responds only when it’s attacked, and tries to limit damage to Hamas terrorists or their military assets.  It’s clear that the IDF wants to eliminate not Palestinians, but members of Hamas. Has any other country sent truckloads of humanitarian assistance, like food and medicine, to an enemy state? Or warned people where and when it was going to attack? Those are real “facts”! But they don’t matter, for these PEN morons claim that they already know the truth.

The reader who sent me this article added the following:

I chortled to myself. It would be funny that fiction writers so self-confidently assert a fiction to be a “fact” if it wasn’t sad that they’re likely driven by anti-Israel animus to do so. Anyway, while PEN tried to push back in its own statement upholding free expression, their awards ceremony has now been derailed by self-righteous nominees who want free expression shut down in service of propagating grotesque lies.

And yes, PEN America did push back, but it still truckled to the ideologues. From the NYT:

That letter [from the 30 nominees] drew a brief but forceful response last week in which the organization described the war in Gaza as “horrific” but challenged what it said was the letter’s “alarming language and characterizations.”

“The perspective that ‘there is no disagreement’ and that there are among us final arbiters of ‘fact and fiction’ reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Charter and what we stand for as an organization,” the organization said in a statement.

The second paragraph is spot on, and admirable. So why did PEN cancel the ceremony? Maybe some of the nominees won’t show up, but either they can get their award in absentia or they can be dropped because they don’t favor free expression.  I really don’t care. What I do care about is that yet another one of America’s bastions of free expression has turned cowardly, violating its own charter in the face of loud and misguided ideological demands from writers.

If the PEN Charter really does stand for institutional neutrality, then the organization should conform to it. Writers are of course welcome to express their own views, but the organization itself should not be the arbiter or promoter of those views.

If you got ’em, send ’em in, please!

Today we have photos by Dean Graetz of Australia. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Aussie backyards have some cool stuff, especially the birds!

A Southern Hemisphere Backyard

Here is a sample of the inhabitants of our backyard in Canberra, Australia.  Mid-March, at latitude 35°S, is a time of rapidly shortening daylength, and of harvesting the fruits of a coolish Summer.  Our non-native garden shrubs (Buddleia davidii, aka ‘Butterfly Bush’) are popular attracting this new and hard to identify, visitor.  We think it is a ‘Brown’, or Heteronympha species:

A large butterfly with a 10 cm wingspan, this female Orchard Swallowtail (Papilio aegeus), is always eye-catching, and always harassed by ever-present Cabbage White butterflies:

The common Meadow Argus (Junonia villida) which, after enjoying a nectar feed, often unhurriedly suns itself on our warm garden pathways, adding colour in two places:

The also common, and charmingly named, an Australian Painted Lady (Vanessa kershawi) choosing feed on a desert wildflower (Xerochrysum sp.) which we also grow as another inducement for butterflies.  All the butterfly photos were shot from a 3-5m distance with zoom lenses:

A pair of aged adult Crimson Rosellas (Platycercus elegans) feeding on our neighbour’s tall shrub.  These parrots are everyday sightings in Canberra gardens that are not far from surrounding native woodlands where they breed as hollow nesters:

A juvenile Crimson Rosella in the process of changing its dull green plumage to the bright reds and blues of the sexually mature adult.  The coloured feather contrasting patches are so sharp that these birds enjoy the common name of ‘Patchworks’:

An adult Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhyncus violaceus), sex not obvious, having enjoyed a vigorous bath now eyeing the photographer.  At age 7 years, a male bird will change from this khaki plumage to a brilliant blue-black glossy version, build a bower in a grassy woodland, decorate it with blue objects (same colour as its eyes), such as flowers, clothes pegs, bottle tops.  The purpose is to attract, court and mate with numerous females.  Hard to believe?  Go here to watch:

A juvenile Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) now regularly arrives and sits patiently surveying our back yard for any living food items, such as lizards, mice, or snakes.  These birds readily habituate to hand feeding by the lonely to become a mendicant friend for life:

An adult male Australian King Parrot (Alisterus scapularis) enjoying the last of an unripe pomegranate in a neighbour’s tree.  The dark lower beak is staining.  These are frequent visitors to Canberra at this time of the year.  Being predominantly fruit eaters – their favourite is cherries – has required nearby fruit growers to cover their entire orchards with parrot (and hail) proof tents:

Close by, and part of a family flock, was this juvenile female King-Parrot, elegantly holding an unripe olive with toe and beak.  They skillfully rotate each olive with their blunt tongue to flense off all the edible flesh.  To us, hard green olives are unappealing, but this female ate steadily for about 15 minutes before flying off with a noticeably full crop:

The college protest post has exhausted me for today, not only because reading this stuff is psychologically debilitating, but also because I’m preparing my talks for Amsterdam. Tomorrow I’ll try to resume regular posting, but for now you get a penguin video as lagniappe.

These happen to be Emperor Penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri), which live on sea ice, so I never saw them on my jaunts to Antarctica.  When they’re six to seven months old, after parental feeding has ceased, they trek en masse to the ocean to begin feeding and starting their life as free-living animals.  This National Geographic video shows them making an unusual jump into the sea from fifty-foot ice cliffs.

This reminds me of the mallards at Botany Pond who build their nests two or three stories off the ground. In that case, when the chicks hatch they have to make a perilous leap to the ground below (next to the water), egged on by the quacking mother who has flown to the ground. They are naturally apprehensive, but one chick is brave enough to jump and the others follow. (I’ve never seen a duckling injured in the leap.) These penguins seem to make successful leaps, too, and once one has made it the others follow. They’re like the proverbial lemmings! I hope they don’t land on each other.

The photography is marvelous.

In his latest Real Time monologue, Bill Maher discusses pedophilia, how it’s exacerbated by the media (including Disney), celebrated by parents who dress up little kids as adults, and even excused by progressives. His take on “Drag Queen Story Hour” is pretty funny.

Money quote: “I’ve said it before wokeness is not an extension of liberalism any more it’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite.”

He then goes on to gender, suggesting that teaching six-year-old kids about gender is a form of “entrapment,” making them do something they otherwise wouldn’t. He’s gonna get in big trouble for that one!

This has its funny bits, but it’s one of Maher’s more serious pieces, bearing on the possible indoctrination of kids into “nonbinary” roles by peers and teachers.

A while back I posted about my cinemaphilic nephew Steven’s nominees for the “Golden Steves,” which he humbly presents as a better alternative to the Oscars. As he says,

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:

1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.

2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.

3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.’

Click to read and see all the winners.

The nominees for the “big” categories are below, and I’ve put in bold the winners. Remember that there are eight categories below but 12 on the original list, so I’ll put the four extra winners at the bottom.

Best Picture

Afire
All of Us Strangers
Anatomy of a Fall
Killers of the Flower Moon
May December
Trenque Lauquen

Best Director

Laura Citarella, Trenque Lauquen
Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers
Todd Haynes, May December
Christian Petzold, Afire
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall

Best Actor

Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Benoit Magimel, Pacifiction
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Franz Rogowski, Passages
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Michael Thomas, Rimini

Best Actress

Jodie Comer, The End We Start From
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall
Natalie Portman, May December
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One

Best Supporting Actor

Jamie Bell, All of Us Strangers
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Charles Melton, May December
Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actress

Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Merve Dizdar, About Dry Grasses
Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers
Anne Hathaway, Eileen
Rachel McAdams, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Non-Fiction Film

Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob)
Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin)
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)
Our Body (Claire Simon)
To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja)

Best Foreign Language Film

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

And the other winners:

Best Screenplay–Adapted: All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)

Best Screenplay–Original: Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)

Best Animated Feature:  Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)

Best Original Song: “Live That Way Forever,” The Iron Claw (Richard Reed Parry, Laurel Sprengelmeyer)

Here’s that best original song:

I guess I’ll have to see “May December” as it took home three Golden Steves. My moviegoing has been thin in the past year, and I know nothing about this movie save that it got a 91% Critics Rating (but only a 65% Viewers Rating) on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s the trailer, showing the costars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

 

A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

You can read several of my posts on this issue here, but this one details the changes.  I believe they’re not yet finalized, but are nearing completion. It’s not yet clear whether this document, which is heavy on “gender identity”, will permit transgender females to compete athletically against natal females. The rules don’t seem to be finalized, but I’ve heard that Biden is holding off until after the election before allowing the athletic thing, since trans “inclusion” in women’s sports is opposed by most Americans.

You might also want to read Emily Yoffe’s Free Press piece criticizing Biden’s proposals (which are now law), as well as her other pieces on the issue cited at the bottom of her article.

If FIRE opposes something, I’m usually on their side, and I certainly am this time. These changes in regulations, as you’ll see below, are part of Biden’s increasing wokeness, and deny those accused of sexual misconduct of a fair hearing.  Biden will have the accused lose their right to contest the allegations against them in a live hearing, to cross-examine those who accuse him (yes, it’s usually men), and will allow a single person to be the original investigator of the charges, the adjudicator of the charges, and the jury who gives a decision. How fair is that? There are other changes, too, and if you have the time you can read all the rules here in a 1577-page document.

Here’s the FIRE summary:

Today the Department of Education released troubling new rules on how colleges investigate campus sexual misconduct allegations. The bottom line: Students who find themselves in a campus hearing are now less likely to receive a fair shake.

If reading this feels like déjà vu, you’re not alone.

For years the government has politicized college students’ rights under Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Bureaucrats play political games, taking away student free speech and due process rights during one presidential administration, then restoring them in the next.

Fairness shouldn’t be politicized. Campus hearings should be fair for every single student — accused and accuser alike. But these new rules deprive students of fundamental rights that help investigators uncover the truth in the most serious types of campus misconduct cases, including those that concern sexual misconduct.

The rules:

• Eliminate the right to a live hearing to contest the allegations.
• Eliminate the right to cross-examine one’s accuser and witnesses.
• Weaken the right to be represented by lawyers in campus sexual misconduct expulsion proceedings.
• Require colleges to adopt a definition of sexual harassment which will inevitably be used to censor constitutionally protected speech.
• Allow for the return of the “single-investigator” model, in which a single administrator serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury.

“Justice is only possible when hearings are fair for everyone,” said FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley. “Rather than playing political ping-pong with student rights, the Department of Education should recognize that removing procedural protections for students is the exact opposite of fairness.”

Colleges and the government should not team up to deprive students of their rights. And no one should implement policies that make uncovering the truth in cases of serious misconduct even more difficult.

Riley Gaines has been an outspoken advocate of allowing only natal women to compete in women’s athletics. Here’s her take on the new rules, though, as I have no energy to plow through 1577 pages, I haven’t checked her assertsions:

The Biden Admin has just officially abolished Title IX as we knew it. Now, sex = gender identity.

In a nutshell, the new rewrite means:
– men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women
– men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc
– men could be… pic.twitter.com/JfQVI9Yfph

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) April 19, 2024

I’ll still vote for Biden, but he’s making it harder and harder. But even with this change that makes adjudication of sexual misconduct an unfair process, he’s still miles and miles ahead of Trump. If I get too fed up, I simply won’t vote for President, which in this Democratic state won’t affect the presidential results at all.

h/t: Luana

I suppose this counts as Readers’ wildlife today, as we’re dealing with the primate H. sapiens.  We have videos and photographs from a demonstration in Chicago.

Yesterday my colleague Peggy Mason (like me, an atheistic Jew) went downtown to get pick up her repaired watch, and ran smack into a huge pro-Palestinian demonstration around Michigan Avenue. These protests occurred widely across America yesterday, perhaps in solidarity with the entitled demonstrators squatting, snacking, and shouting on the campus of Columbia University (see this morning’s Hili Dialogue and the tweets below). I’ll first show two videos taken by Peggy and then add a group of her photos. First, her words:

This is just beyond anything I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.  I was downtown today and there was a huge pro-Palestinian march on Michigan Avenue.  Also huge police presence walling them in.   Signs included anti-Zionism≠Anti-semitism, which is obviously not true here or in London or anywhere.  Next to that sign was a throwback to the Elders of Zion – “Their god is CAPITAL and God is our Witness.”

The people in the march appeared to be quite pleased with themselves.  There was no opposition to them.  Tourists ignored them.  I had no clue what I could do as a single person.  I did nothing but take pictures for Jerry.  I just don’t see how we return to comity and civility.

And two videos.  First, the cops keep the demonstrators in tight order.

More shouts. I can’t make out the words beyond “Genocide Joe”, but readers can help with that and other chants.

 

And some photos. Note in the first one the claim that anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism, which of course is an excuse to be anti-Semitic. I disagree with the slogan anyway, as to oppose an established country now, formed as a homeland for Jews expelled or demonized elsewhere, and long after the Holocaust made its existence necessary, is to say that you don’t think the country should exist—that it should be eliminated (and perhaps merged with Palestine, with dire results), or the Jews should be deported from Israel. Either way it’s anti-Semitic, so these protestors are flatly making a false statement.

Notice the blood libel here: the sign that says “Their God is Capital, and God is our witness.”  That’s simply the old claim that Jews worship money, and it’s a poster I hadn’t seen. This is the kind of stuff, in conjunction with things like the London police driving away people who look “openly Jewish” (see this morning’s Hili Dialogue), that makes me believe that the protests are moving from being anti-Israel to being anti-semitic.  Note also the “From the River to the Sea” poster.

Sundry other photos by Peggy:

This kid is doomed to being propagandized:

Of course I don’t deny these people the right to demonstrate and say whatever they want. (I’m pretty sure they had a permit.) What I am saying is that their speech is both hateful and scary, and not a good portent for Jews.

Truly, these people want to see Israel gone, wiped off the map—by “any means necessary.”  And the nature of chants and slogans is changing. As I said this morning, at Columbia you can hear stuff like, ““Remember the 7th of October” (and they’re happy about that), followed by “Ten thousand times”.  They are happy about the 7th of October attack, and they want it to happen again and again! It’s no coincidence that this is precisely what Hamas says. I can’t help feeling, and it chills me to the marrow, that many of these protestors think that Hamas did a good thing on October 7th.  After all, they say, they are no real “civilians’ in Israel, and that apparently includes babies, who are just infant colonizers.

You will not convince me that all these people want is a peaceful and terror-free coexistence between Israelis and Arabs.  They are in favor of getting rid of Israel, and you know what that means.  Meanwhile, things at Columbia are heating up last night and this morning, and the slogans appear to be in Arabic. Some tweets:

I am not sure, as the tweet below avers, that all the people in the video are “terrorists or “openly supporting terror,” which seems very hyperbolic.  I am putting up the first tweet just to show you how academia has become ideology.

This is the Chabbad Rabbi (!) and a group of Jewish students being scared off of @Columbia's campus. pic.twitter.com/VdAlJ5G3V1

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) April 21, 2024

Look at the epithets hurled at the rabbi and the Jewish students as they’re followed off campus. Click the button but read the epithets at the bottom of the screen. They’re clearly anti-Semitic, e.g. “Go back to Poland.” And the second tweet points out Jews as “targets”.  What else could that mean?

Here's a terrorist directing the Hamas' military wing al-Qassam Brigades to target and kill Jewish students at @Columbia.

(ironically, she misspelled "al-Qassam". Do your homework) pic.twitter.com/cLMAUyhGMj

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) April 21, 2024

You can read about Nerdeen Kiswani at the Anti-Defamation League.

Here's another one of their leaders, praising the October 7th massacre ("the Al-Aqsa Flood") and lauding
Hamas terrorists who raped, tortured, murdered, and kidnapped thousdans of civlians as "the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every… pic.twitter.com/OznpFA5YZQ

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) April 21, 2024

From Andrew Sullivan’s new Weekly Dish piece, “Katherine Maher is not a liberal“, criticizing the new CEO of National Public Radio:

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Dan Dennett died yesterday, and I still can’t believe he’s gone, though he’d used up a good portion of his nine lives in a series of cardiac events.  His NYT obituary can be read by clicking the screenshot below, or you can find it archived here.

The subheading seems to me a bit inaccurate. For one thing Dennett certainly did not think religion was an illusion, though he’s quoted saying that below. Perhaps he thought it was a delusion, but he certainly took it seriously as a human behavioral phenomenon, even though he was an atheist. What the subheading means is that he thought the idea of god and its concomitants were an illusion, but that is not all that religion comprises.

More important, Dan certainly did NOT believe that free will was a fantasy: Dan was a compatibilist who didn’t believe in libertarian free will, but wrote two books and several other papers and half of another book defending the idea that free will was not a fantasy, but that we did indeed have it: it was, he said, simply different from what most people thought.

Dan and I disagreed strongly on Dan’s compatibilism (Sam Harris disagreed as well), but free will being a fantasy? Nope.

Finally, yes, Dan concentrated on natural selection as the only process that could produce the appearance of adaptation, but didn’t deny, as I recall, the fact that genetic drift could cause some evolutionary change. (For a rather critical review of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by my ex-student Allen Orr, go here.) But Dan concentrated on adaptations, including human behaviors, because the appearance of design, for centuries imputed to God, is what really demands explanation.

(*Note the misplacement of “only” in the subheading; it should appear after “explained,” not after “could”. Where are the proofreaders?)

At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the NYT that is more accurate than the subheading:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

And on free will:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

First of all, the notion of a separation between mind and body is not “outdated”: a huge number of people believe in libertarian free will: that your mind alone can, at any given moment, allow you to make any one of two or more choices. It’s outdated among scientists and philosophers, but not among the general public, as surveys have shown.

Further, “random decisions” aren’t really random to either libertarians or determinists. Even Libet-like experiments show that what you do is to some degree predictable using fMRI, and is probably entirely predictable if we had a complete understanding of the brain. No determinist argues that decisions are “random”, as they’re based on the pattern of your neurons produced by your genes and your environment. And libertarians would argue that decisions aren’t random, for if we were we’d have no ability to predict what anybody we know does. Finanly, determinists don’t claim that individuals aren’t liable for their actions. They are liable, but not in the way that most people think. If somebody murders someone else, we don’t just let him go and say, “well, he wasn’t responsible for the killing.”

Do note that Dennett is credited with believing something that I always maintained: he favored compatibilism, at least in part, because of “belief in belief”: without belief in some kind of free will, he said, society would fall apart (he said that at least twice):

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

But if religion is also thought necessary by some (not Dennett) as necessary to maintain a stable, society, then why is free will TRULY necessary to maintain a stable, functioning society? Perhaps our feeling of free will is necessary for that, but, like religion, that’s a delusion that we simply can’t avoid feeling. I function very well even though I’m a hard determinist, even though I feel like I have a choice. And, in the last sentence, I don’t think one can characterize Dan’s view of free will as an “illusion”. He argued strenuously for a form of free will that was not an illusion.

But I digress. Dan was an important figure in bringing philosophy and Darwinism to educated readers. How often do philosophers produce bestselling popular works?  Yes, he could be wrong, and the force of his personality led some to adopt what I thought were erroneous ideas (like “we have the kind of free will worth wanting”), but more often his arguments were cogent, important, and vividly expressed.

And Dan was a nice guy, one who befriended me when I was just a stripling. One thing missing from the NYT piece—and something I hope they’ll add—are quotations from Dennett’s friends and colleagues. Where, for instance, is an assessment by Richard Dawkins? I expect that will appear on Richard’s Substack site, but we needed some quotes for the NYT obit. Here’s Richard’s tweet about Dan’s death:

Dan Dennett was a great philosopher, skilled with words, images, thought experiments & intuition pumps. But unlike many clever philosophers (to borrow from PB Medawar) he had something important to be clever ABOUT, namely science. Much more yet, he was a dear friend. So very sad.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 19, 2024

You can find other obituaries at the Torygraph, at Ars Technica, and at the Daily Nous, which is short but has a recent video interview, which I put below. And I’d recommend reading his recent autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking.

 

There will be more obituaries to come.

Here from the WaPo we hear about a special area (not really an island) near Shanghai where stray cats are sequestered. If you see the video below, you’ll see they’re better off there–people come to feed them amd adopt them–than roaming the streets. Click to read (archived free here, or go to a shorter article here).

An excerpt:

The happiest place on Earth for cats might just be here, on Cat Island, a feline playground just a few miles from Shanghai Disneyland. While humans whoop and whirl at the latter, the 400-plus kitties who call Cat Island home rest in the shade of specially constructed grass-covered play tunnels or loll about in pagodas. They cross a wooden bridge to stalk through pear orchards, the intrepid among them even venturing into the horse stable.

The pampered residents here were once strays in downtown Shanghai, a city of 25 million people and somewhere between 400,000 and 1.5 million stray cats. But efforts are underway to stem the exploding feral population in the metropolis and find homes for at least some of the newly neutered cats

Cat Island’s entire population is up for adoption. Many at “cat cafes” in the city do a similar thing: Provide a space where people can befriend and potentially take home a neutered, if shy, kitty.

There’s no equivalent of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in China. Instead, it’s left to grass-roots organizations like these to step in to save cats — from the streets, or from people who think they’re better off culled.

“Cat adoption has become quite popular in recent years, especially among the younger generation,” said Erica Guo, owner of all-rescue cat cafe More Meow Garden.

. . . and you can adopt the island’s cats, as (according to the article) cats are becoming more and more popular as pets in China:

At the end of 2022, a few months after Shanghai’s longest lockdown ended, a government-affiliated nonprofit foundation opened the 130-acre Shanghai Pet Base facility, which encompasses Cat Island.

It is concentrating on trapping and neutering strays, then returning them to the communities where they were found. When that’s not possible, they’re rehomed to Cat Island.

“This is what we are able to do, here and now,” said Zha Zhenliang, the foundation official responsible for Cat Island and the Pet Base. “We hope every [apartment] compound can have their own ‘cat island’ of a safe place for the cats to be,” and their feeders can operate openly, he said. Feeding strays can be a controversial activity, resulting in conflict between cat lovers and neighbors who just want them culled.

To adopt a Cat Island cat, people must first trek to the remote, grassy site outside Shanghai — a semirural location chosen to avoid angering neighbors — then complete a pet-care course and have their home inspected by video call for suitability. The precautions mean adoption numbers are barely denting the problem: In 18 months, only 130 cats have moved to new homes.

Here’s a 4½-minute video showing what the “island” is like. The cats seem pretty well taken care of.

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From Bored Panda we find a selection of fifty cat memes. Click below to read; I’ve selected a few for your delectation:

From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek

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Here’s a heartening tale from MPR News of a lost cat found after going missing for more than a month. Click below to read or click the link in the first sentence:

The story:

“Lost trucker cat. Help me get home, call my team. Leave tuna for me,” reads a poster with a white and gray cat posted around St. Cloud.

At 2 a.m. on Jan. 17, “Tom the lost trucker cat” jumped out of his owner’s semi truck at the Pilot/Flying J truck stop off exit 171.

“He took a few steps, turned back and gave me one last look,” Owner Angel Anthony Garcia said. Tom was gone.

Garcia and his wife, Tom’s other owner Marie Sanchez, searched for him as long as they could without success. Garcia had to deliver a truck full of apples to Virginia and the deadline was approaching.

They made the difficult decision to leave and hoped that someone would find him. Garcia posted about him in a local Facebook page.

Oh, man, I wouldn’t have abandoned that cat. But here’s the poster, labeled as a “courtesy photo”; I like the “please feed” bit:

But he was found!

Jan Peterson was scrolling Facebook and saw Garcia’s post about Tom. She reached out to Garcia and Sanchez and told them she wanted to help. This isn’t her first time looking for a lost pet, she has helped many families through Facebook find lost animals.

She contacted her community and set up a Facebook group for Tom asking for tips. She put up signs, posted on social media and wished for the best.

Forty days had passed with no sign of Tom. At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, Peterson’s husband woke her up.

“I think somebody found Tom!” he said.

She ran out of bed to find the Facebook post and there he was. A sweet, slightly dirty, gray and white cat.

When Garcia and Sanchez got the call he was okay, they were speechless.

“It was devastating to me because he is the light of my life,” Sanchez said. “Knowing he survived, knowing that he was found, oh my gosh, I can’t even tell you, I am so overwhelmed with joy. I can’t wait to get to him.”

Tom was found by Jeremiah Moe at a metalworking shop in Sauk Rapids, 9 miles from where he went missing.

Here’s the FB post asking if this was the right cat. He looks as if he had a rough time:

The end of the tail. But if the owners truly love Tom, why haven’t they gotten him yet?

Peterson retrieved him and brought him to Rice Vet Clinic where Dr. Kayla Schmitz took over. He had lost about half his weight, was dehydrated and a little roughed up. He was given fluids and cleaned. After being missing for more than a month, he showed little impact of the Minnesota climate.

On his journey it is likely he ran into wildlife, including predators, and the Mississippi River. While we may never know what Tom did for all those days, it is clear he was determined to survive.

Now he is staying with a foster home until his owners can come retrieve him. Funds are tight for Garcia and Sanchez. They are trying to get a truck load they can drive that will run through Minnesota so they can get Tom, but they haven’t heard about any opportunities yet. They said they will get to him as soon as they are able to.

“Get to him as soon as they are able to”? Is that love?

A bit more:

Peterson credits the community in his rescuing.

“It was the whole community … they really went out of their way to watch for him at night. They would check and say, ‘I went here today, I didn’t see him, but I look for him every night before I go to bed.’ It was that kind of dedication.”

Sanchez said Tom never would have been found without the residents of St. Cloud.

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Lagniappe: A music-loving moggie perched on the piano, soothed by a lullaby.

h/t: Barry, Ginger K.

Today we have some noshing birds by reader Thomas Stringfellow. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

The photos were taken in July 2011 below the dam at Lake Barkley in Kentucky, and feature our old friend the Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax mycticorax) having lunch at the all-you-can-eat buffet. This is a remarkable place for many species of birds, and photographing them is made easier because they are largely habituated to humans.

The order obviously tells a story; I especially like the drink at the end to help wash down the fish.

Camera details: Nikon D3 camera shot in aperture priority mode, Nikkor 400 mm f/2.8 telephoto lens with a Nikon 1.4x teleconverter.

Two obituaries in one day. . .

Dicky Betts, one of my favorite rock guitarists of all time, died in Florida last Thursday. He was 80, and had been plagued by illness (exacerbated by drugs, drinking, and smoking) for some time. When he was at his height with the Allman Brothers, especially when playing with Duane Allman before Duane’s untimely death, he was incomparable, and had a sound that could be identified immediately.  You can read the NYT obituary by clicking below, but I’d to memorialize him with his music rather than with words. From what I hear, he was probably somewhat of a jerk, and often didn’t get along well with his bandmates, but of course many great artists, musical or otherwise, weren’t exemplary people. I know virtually nothing about Betts as a person (look him up on Wikipedia if you want information), but I know his music, and I’ve put four great examples below.

You can read the NYT obit—in line with house style, they call him “Mr. Betts”—by clicking on the headline below, or see it archived here.

An excerpt:

Despite not being an actual Allman brother — the band, founded in 1969, was led by Duane Allman, who achieved guitar-god status before he died in a motorcycle accident at 24, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who got an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding force in the group for decades and central to the sound that came to define Southern rock.

Although pigeonholed by some fans in the band’s early days as its “other” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos seemed at times to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, proved a worthy sparring partner to Duane Allman, serving as a co-lead guitarist, rather than as a sidekick.

With his chiseled features, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts certainly looked the part of the star. And he played like one. Nowhere was that more apparent than on the band’s landmark 1971 live double album, “At Fillmore East,” which was filled with expansive jams and showcased the intricate interplay between Mr. Betts and Mr. Allman. It sold more than a million copies.

“The second half of ‘At Fillmore East’ is as vivid and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been,” Grayson Haver Currin of Pitchfork wrote in a 2022 appraisal.

A centerpiece of the album was “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a haunting, jazz-influenced instrumental written by Mr. Betts whose title was taken from a headstone at a graveyard in the band’s hometown, Macon, Ga. That track’s “textural interplay,” Mr. Currin continued, “resembles Miles Davis’s then-new electric bands, organ and guitar oozing into one another like melting butter and chocolate.”

“Duane and I had an understanding, like an old soul kind of understanding of let’s play together,” Mr. Betts said in a 2020 interview with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida. “Duane would say, ‘Man, I get so jealous of you sometimes when you burn off and I have to follow it,’ and we would joke about it. So that’s kind of Duane and mine’s relationship. It was a real understanding. Like, ‘Come on, this is a hell of a band, let’s not hot dog it up.’”

Mr. Allman made his feelings about his bandmate clear. “I’m the famous guitar player,” he once said, “but Dickey is the good one.”

Note that last sentence.  Yet on Rolling Stone‘s bizarre list of “The 250 greatest guitarists of all time,” Betts ranks at only #145 (sandwiched between Mike Bloomfield and Odetta), while Duane Allman comes in at a respectable #10. (#1 is Jimi Hendrix, while Eric Clapton is only #35.) That list is just wonky. Hendrix’s position makes sense, but to put Clapton at #35 and Betts at #145 is insane. Best to ignore that list!

Although the NYT and others name “Ramblin’ Man” as Betts’s biggest success, I still find”Blue Sky” preferable, and it’s my favorite song of his (he wrote it, sang it, and played it, alternating with Duane Allman). Here is “southern rock”—I’ve never been sure what that is—at its finest. I heard the Allman Brothers, sans Duane, play this song live, and was only about 10 feet from the stage in a standing crowd. After playing “Blue Sky,” Betts threw his pick into the audience, and I’m sad that I didn’t catch it.

The solo on this piece is incomparable, and you can hear the original recording here. Warren Haynes alternates with Betts, but Betts outshines him. (Dickie is, of course, the one with the cowboy hat and boots.)

Another favorite of mine, the instrumental “Jessica“.  This was also written by Betts, who does a great job playing it live in 1982. I love Betts’s great solo that starts with a big guitar whine at 3:39, slows and then speeds up at 4:51. The original is here.

This song, “Whipping Post,” was written by Greg Allman, but it’s one of the few examples on video of Betts playing with Duane Allman. Duane is the star here, but Betts gets his licks in starting about 5:40.  You judge who’s best. This is the full original band, and the original recording is here.

I’m throwing in this version of Gregg’s song “Melissa‘ because it’s all-acoustic performance and shows Betts’s skill on acoustic guitar, especially in the final solo with Haynes. Greg wrote this song out of frustration, feeling unable to write any good songs. He finally succeeded with this one, despite the lameness of some of the words. The original recording is here.

Well, this is unexpected, and details will be forthcoming. He was 82.

Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett has died https://t.co/Dbk0VgBZnY pic.twitter.com/q22ug7sYSv

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) April 19, 2024

I have lots of stories about Dan, and found him amiable and charitable, though sometimes he could be domineering, especially when I professed a lack of belief in free will. But I once jumped in his lap and asked for a hug after I was attacked by Robert Wright at a conference lunch. Being enfolded by a replica of Santa was the best thing I could think of.

There will be a lot of obituaries, I’m sure, and if you want to read about his life he wrote an autobiography called I’ve Been Thinking.  I’ve read it, and you can see that he was far more talented and into far more things than you could ever imagine.

RIP, big guy!

Some photos from 2012 and 2019 (this is Rockwell’s original “Freedom of Speech” painting:

Perplexed at a symposium with Reza Aslan. Dan was NOT happy here!

Going to the Moving Naturalism Forward conference at Stockbridge, MA.

I hope John McWhorter’s latest column, which I see as misguided, doesn’t show that he’s running out of gas. His point is to show that substantial progress in racial relations between blacks and whites has occurred over the years. But who could deny that? African-Americans are represented far more in the media than they were when I was a kid, they are beneficiaries of Civil Rights Acts passed in the Sixties, there is affirmative action so that universities and businesses are far more integrated, and one sees and hears far less bigotry than was evident to me as a kid. Do we need more evidence.

McWhorter has given ample evidence of this progress before, and gives more in this column, including a bit on how Mother Jefferson (Zara Cully, a black woman), despite being a better actress on television than was Mother Dexter (Judith Lowry, a white actress) on “Phyllis”, was given short shrift. That wouldn’t happen today, and black actors are getting far more roles, and good ones, than they used to.

Despite this palpable progress in racial relations—progress that, if you listen to some black activists, is illusory—McWhorter says, correctly, that overall black people are treated worse than white people by the police, and have been for years:

For Black people in Los Angeles recalling how the L.A.P.D. had treated them for decades, for Black people in Philadelphia not long past the all but open racism of the police force there under Mayor Frank Rizzo, for Black people in Chicago remembering the racist profiling and abuse by the cops called the Flying Squad, the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

For all the statistical discrepancies between Black and white Americans, interactions with the police may be the central driver of how many Black people experience racism. I noted this in my research and conversations in preparation for my book “Losing the Race” in the late 1990s, when I was sincerely trying to figure out why so many Black people spoke of racism almost as if it were the 1890s rather than the 1990s. There is a reason that the main focus of the Black Panthers was combating police brutality, that anti-cop animus was central to gangsta rap and that today Black Lives Matter may be more influential than the N.A.A.C.P.

Well, I won’t comment on whether the differential influence in the last sentence is true, or, if true, is a good thing; but differential police treatment of races surely accounts for the different reactions of blacks and whites to O. J. Simpson’s acquittal of murder in 1995. And to McWhorter, that difference would be reduced today. McWhorter calls this “progress in race relations”. I think that, if it were true, it would be progress in performative antiracism, but not genuine progress.  But read his column by clicking on the headline, or find the article archived here:

 

First, McWhorter makes it clear, as it is be to anyone with neurons, that O. J. was guilty as hell of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. McWhorter makes that view clear several times, including in the first paragraph, where he describes the racial differences in reaction to Simpson’s acquittal (all bolding is mine):

Among the signature images of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend was the contrasting tableaus of Black people grouping in front of television screens applauding while white people watching it were shaking their heads — appalled, perplexed and even disgusted by a verdict that flew in the face of obvious fact. Those contrasting perspectives have gone down as demonstrating a gulf of understanding between the races.

That gulf persists, but it narrows apace, and if the verdict came down today, it would be a lot less perplexing to many white people than it was back then. Many would understand why the jury acted as it did. We might even see some of them applauding along with Black people.

To McWhorter, that last sentence instantiates racial progress, but more on that later.  More on his opinion of Simpson’s guilt:

The evidence of Simpson’s deed was overwhelming despite the ineptitude of the prosecution team. The verdict and the response to it among the Black community weren’t signs of support for Simpson; they were protests against a long legacy of mistreatment and even murder at the hands of the police.

. . . the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

I agree with McWhorter. I was on Simpson’s defense team, and the DNA material I got must be kept confidential. But I will say that it’s my personal opinion, from all the evidence that came out during the trial and thereafter, that Simpson was guilty as hell. But the prosecution apparently could not convince the jury that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, so he walked. (DNA evidence, for one thing, seemed to only confuse the jury. And then there was the glove and the racism of Mark Furman.)

So a black man, in the face of all the evidence (and yes, the prosecution was inept) was acquitted of murder. Black people applauded because, though perhaps many thought him guilty, his acquittal represented a black man beating a racist system. White people groaned because many also thought him guilty, and there may also have been some racism in that reaction.

I can fully understand these reactions. But understanding them doesn’t mean I approve of them.. A man was on trial for his life, yet he was apparently being judged by the public on his pigmentation and historical racism by cops. If you thought he was guilty but applauded the verdict because Simpson was black, you’ve judged the system, not the man.

And now McWhorter avers that if the trial took place today, it’s likely that, because of improved racial relations, many white people would also judge the system and join blacks in applauding the verdict:

Today I see white people far more aware. That’s why when I fast-forward the Simpson verdict to 2024, I picture some white people getting the news on their phones and doing high-fives and group hugs, some of them in tears. They would be no more likely to see Simpson himself as a hero than were the jurors of 1995, especially given that modern America is more sensitized not only to racism but also to abuse of women. But they would be more likely to see the acquittal as a kind of payback for all of the white cops who have been exonerated for murdering Black people. It would be processed, I imagine, as a teaching moment of sorts.

This smacks strongly of Robin DiAngelo. High-fiving and group hugs as a reaction to Simpson’s acquittal is a performative act: it’s saying, “Look, I understand that black people are mistreated by the cops! I’m not a racist!”  But if you’re celebrating and still thought Simpson did the crimes, then you’re happy because a guilty man went free—and only because that guilty man was black. To me, that’s making Simpson stand for all blacks, though, as McWhorter notes, Simpson really wasn’t considered part of the black community,and was not an activist. A verdict should be judged on the content of the man’s crime, not on the color of his skin.

Others may agree with McWhorter, but I think this hypothetical scenario, if it occurred, would be evidence not of real racial progress, but of performative antiracism by whites. If you see that as progress, so be it. I can give a lot of harder evidence that there’s been racial progress in the past three decades, and especially in the past six decades. You don’t need to make up some dumb scenario to show this, just as a way to mark Simpson’s death.

As for me, I am a white man who always thought Simpson guilty. His acquittal was bad for society (look what happened to him afterwards), and that was the last trial in which I acted as an expert witness for DNA.  I didn’t see the acquittal as a sign of improved racial relations, but as a miscarriage of justice largely due to the incompetence of the prosecution. I ran out of gas at the moment he was acquitted, and from then on turned down all requests by defense lawyers to use me as an expert witness.

If the acquittal happened today, I would not be high-fiving others, crying, or engaging in group hugs. That doesn’t prove that I’m a racist, because I agree that cops treat blacks worse than whites. But I also believe in evidence, and the evidence adduced in the Simpson case, and revealed soon after by reporters, is not a reason to celebrate his acquittal.

And I’m wondering why McWhorter had to confect this hypothetical, performative scenario to demonstrate that racial relations have improved in America.

McWhorter:

All that leads me to think that America has a problem with police violence in general. But here’s the thing: I am accustomed to vigorous resistance to that argument from not only Black but white people, too.

It is in this context that the stark racial divide in the reception of the Simpson verdict three decades ago seems rather antique. There has been, regardless of the disagreements that inevitably persist, progress.

There are, I’m sure, better ways to show progress.

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“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”:

 

 

Today’s photos come from reader Bill Dickens, whose notes and IDs are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them, and don’t miss the eclipse photo at the bottom.

I’ve been camping at Flamingo, Florida in the Everglades National Park. April is a good time of year to visit with warm temperatures and before the rains arrive and turn much of the coastal prairie into mud. (The mosquitoes though are a constant.)

Here are some wildlife shots taken along the Coastal Prairie Trail – a 13-mile round-trip along a historical trail once used by local cottonpickers and fishermen. It’s now a part of the Everglades National Park. The trail winds through an open prairie of succulents and buttonwoods both leaved and dead, presumably from constant inundation by flooding.

It was the dragonflies that are the real star at this time of year. Swarms of them.

Plus a bonus shot taken of the eclipse. I drove from my home in Florida to the Texas Hill Country to view it from Tow, Texas. The weather was cloudy most of the morning leading up to the eclipse. Then the cirrus clouds were headed one way, lower-level clouds the other and five minutes before the eclipse it cleared and stayed clear.

The Wildflowers were out in the Hill Country and this makes it a pretty time of year to visit.

Coastal Prairie Trail:

Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) – there are actually two in the frame:

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus),:

Osprey with Fish tail:

Halloween Pennant Dragonfly (Celithemis eponina):

Blue Bonnets, the official flower of the Lone Star State, at Lake Buchanan in Tow, Texas  (there are 5 different species of Blue Bonnet. I’m not going to guess):

The 2024 eclipse viewed from The Texas Hill Country: