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Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
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Faith versus Fact audiobook for 75% off: only $4.25

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 11:17am

My audiobook publisher is running a special deal until March 15: my audio book Faith versus Fact: The Incompatibility Between Science and Religion, for a pittance: $4.25. It’s not available on Amazon, so I’d say this is a good deal.  To get it, click on the icon below, and, if you don’t want to buy into a continuing deal, click the blue “get discount” button and then check out.  If you click the orange button, you’ll buy into a continuing series and will keep getting other books.

The blurb:

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion-including faith, dogma, and revelation-leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Coyne is responding to a national climate in which over half of Americans don’t believe in evolution (and congressmen deny global warming), and warns that religious prejudices and strictures in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable ‘truth’ by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science.

Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm-to individuals and to our planet-in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in.

Look at it this way: it’s cheaper than a Starbuck’s latte. And, as with all my books, if you send them to me with a postpaid return envelope, I’ll autograph them and even draw a cat inside.

Categories: Science

The myth of the two-state solution

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 7:30am

The only people seriously suggesting that the Israel/Hamas war can be peaceably resolved by the existence of two states—Israel and a new Palestinian state— are so desperate for a solution that they’ll suggest one that’s completely impractical. (I would say “dumb”, but I’m trying to be kind here.) But Israel is out for victory this time, and won’t let the U.S., or anyone else, impose a cease-fire—which is the same thing as asking Israel to surrender.

I used to favor the two-state solution on this site, but realize now that it simply won’t work, and for a number of reasons. First, almost no Israeli would countenance it. Such a state would presumably include Gaza, not ruled by Hamas, and the entire West Bank, from which rockets and terror attacks could easily be launched over most of Israel. Nobody has suggested a credible leadership for such a state, but it can’t be either Hamas or the corrupt and terror-promoting Palestinian authority. Nor would Netanyahu, who, though despised, is not stupid, accept this solution.

And the Palestinians don’t want this solution, either. What they want is the elimination of Israel, which could occur by the totally off-the-table “one-state” solution. As the Tablet article below notes, and something that all sentient people know well, the Palestinians have, time after time, rejected the offer of their own state.  Now it is too late. If such a state is ever to arise, it will, I think, take at least two generations—the time it takes for Palestinian children to stop learning in school to kill Jews and become martyrs.

The complete ignorance in which people suggest that a two-state solution will end the enmity between Jews and Muslims makes me almost laugh. And yet most of the West, including Biden and his administration, are trying to force this solution on Israel.

The best argument against this “solution” I’ve read appears in the new Tablet, and it’s by Israeli historian, author, and teacher Gadi Taub.  From Wikipedia:

[Taub] is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Communications at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Taub is also an internationally recognized voice in the discourse on Zionism and illiberalism.

If you want to be up on discourse about the war, this is something that you must read. Click on the headline to do so:

Some quotes (indented). First, the Israeli view, including the depredations of UNRWA, which must be abolished:

By now most of us in Israel understand this dreadful math. If there was still a substantial minority among us who clung to the two-state promise against the evidence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, that minority has shrunk considerably since Oct. 7.

We now know exactly what our would-be neighbors have in mind for us. We see that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and are well pleased by its massacres. Most of us therefore believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents? If one is determined to feel overwhelming sympathy for one of the many stateless peoples of the world, why not start with the Kurds, or the Catalans, or the Basques, or the Rohingya, or the Baluchis, or any of one of dozens of subnational groups—none of whom seem likely to attain their longed-for goals of statehood anytime soon. After all, it took nearly 2,000 years for the Jews to succeed in refounding their state. If the Palestinians are determined to kill us on the road to replacing us, then presumably they can wait, too.

. . .To be sure, the two-state solution was a noble dream. But it turns out it always was just that—a dream. What enabled those who clung to it long enough to continue sleepwalking through the wrecks of exploding buses, the bodies of slain civilians, the constant wild calls for violence against us, the massive efforts to build terror infrastructures under our noses and on our borders, was our own tendency to imagine Palestinians in our own image. For all the fashionable talk of diversity, we too find it hard to imagine a people that is not like ourselves. Knowing our own striving for self-determination, we assumed that the Palestinians, too, want above all to be masters of their own fate in their own sovereign state.

But that is not what they want. The huge amount of international aid Palestinians have received since 1948 was never used for nation-building. It wasn’t used for building houses and roads or for planting orange groves. It was harnessed to one overarching cause: the destruction of the Jewish state. This is what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) does: subsidize and shield Palestinian terror infrastructure. This is what the PA does with its pay-for-slay salaries—underwritten by the U.S.—to the families of terrorists. And this is what Hamas was able to do as a result of the billions invested in Gaza: It bought weapons, trained terrorists, and built a sprawling network of terror tunnels—and not one bomb shelter for civilians.

What kind of chowderhead would think that the PA would be a credible peace partner given that it still espouses terrorism and, in fact, pays off those terrorists who kill Jews—the more Jews you kill, the more pay you get? (If you’re incarcerated, your family gets the dosh.) Granted, Netanyahu is not a credible partner to confect such a solution, but given the feelings of Israelis and the terroristic bent and sympathy for Hamas of many Palestinians, the whole idea is a nonstarter no matter who’s in charge of Israel. Further, the “right of return”—invariably something that Palestinians demand in a settlement—is both risible and unprecedented:

As Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz demonstrate in their bestselling book The War of Return, the Palestinian national movement has built its ethos and identity around the so-called “right of return” of the Palestinian “refugees”—by which they mean the destruction of Israel through the resettlement of the Palestinian diaspora, the so-called refugees that UNRWA numbers at 5.9 million, within Israel’s borders. But there’s no such thing as the right of return: First, it is not an internationally recognized right; second, if implemented it would not be a return, since almost all of those who demand it have never been to Israel themselves. And finally, of those who fled or were expelled from the land of Israel in 1948, only an estimated 30,000 are still alive today.

No other group of people on Earth is considered to be refugees decades after so many of its members have resettled as passport-holding citizens of other countries. No other group has its refugee status conferred automatically on its offspring. And no group of actual refugees is excluded from the purview of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), entrusted instead to the care of a special agency, UNRWA, whose mandate is to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it. UNRWA cultivates Palestinian hopes for a “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea,” allows for weapons to be stored inside its facilities and schools, and for a Hamas intelligence and communications center to be built under its headquarters, indoctrinates children to glorify terrorists—whom it also employs—and disseminates wild antisemitism, while still steering clear of what it should have been doing all along: resettling those who were, or still are, actual refugees.

What the centrality of the “right of return” to the Palestinian ethos means, of course, is that Palestinian identity itself is structured as a rejection of the two-state solution, and denies the legitimacy of any form of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel.

The Palestionian rejection of “two states”:

There never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict. The Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders, including the Camp David 2000 offer, in which Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the partition of Jerusalem, and the further concessions offered later by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. All have crashed on the nonnegotiable demand for the right of return. Even Salam Fayyad, the technocrat former Palestinian prime minister, a figurehead with no popular support at home but beloved by Western peace processors—and who’s receiving renewed attention in administration-friendly media—insisted on the right of return in an article he wrote mere days after the Oct. 7 pogrom.

Luckily, the Palestinians were never patient enough to even temporarily put a stop to terrorism or defer their demand for return until they could muster better-organized forces. It seems that the cult of death and the worship of martyrs make for an addiction to terror, and a need for violent venting. If you bring your children from kindergarten to stage plays where they pretend to kill Jews, you cannot also tell them to hold back forever on acting them out once they’ve grown up. The tree of Palestinian identity, it seems, must be constantly watered with the blood of Jews to sustain it through the many sacrifices required for a nonproductive life of permanent victimhood.

And the Biden Delusion:

The Biden administration, as well as the mainstream American media, may be seduced by Israel’s Bibi-hating press into believing that it’s Netanyahu who stands in the way of an agreement establishing a Palestinian state. But it is not Netanyahu who is the obstacle on the Israeli side. It is the vast majority of Israelis, who may or may not vote for Netanyahu but will certainly never again vote for anyone who admits to favoring a two-state solution. The allegedly moderate Benny Gantz retains his high polling numbers only because he avoids any talk of two states. He knows that if he mentioned the two-state solution, he’d sink in the polls faster than he can say “Palestinian state.”

But if the Biden team can be forgiven for misunderstanding the Israeli mood, it cannot be forgiven for imagining it can make Palestinian recalcitrance and violent intentions disappear by papering over their national ethos with fake Western jargon. There is no such thing as a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to “revitalize” it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch. Even for a group of progressive wishful-thinkers, this silly coinage is a new low in the language of political narcissism.

Israel is a strong country, but it is also a small country surrounded by enemies. It is important for Israel to mark the difference between embracing folly and being polite. It is time that Israel and her leaders be more vocal about the folly of America’s misguided Middle East policy. We can afford to continue limping along with the burdens of the occupation for another generation or two, by which point many unforeseen things will have come to pass that may make a solution either more or less obvious. But we will not live that long if we are once again seduced by the two-state siren song.

Frankly, I’m tired of the U.S. trying to tell Israel how to run the war and, more recently, how to lose the war. Granted, the U.S. can withhold ammunition and money from Israel, but they are now voting on a bill to give it (and Ukraine) a lot of dosh. In the end, only those who don’t know the mood and situation of the Israeli people—and are familiar with the failed history of attempts to confect a two-state solution—could now think that such a solution is viable.

The latest delusional aspiration (in the Times of Israel). Click to read:

Categories: Science

Yet another version of “Layla”

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 11:45am

This is to cheer me up as much as the audience, as all the news today is dire.

I present yet another version of what I think is the best rock song of all time (not including the second slow part): “Layla” by Eric Clapton. (Jim Gordon, who died in prison, wrote that piano coda.) This version was presented at the Royal Albert Hall 33 years ago (!), and Slowhand is all decked out in a tux (sans cravat). He also has a cigarette burning on the fretboard. But it’s a great version, backed by an orchestra.

There are many reasons why I love this song, even though I think that, as a group, the Beatles were the best. The opening riff is both original and unmistakable, the real-life tale behind the song is heartbreaking, the words are comprehensible and tell the story, and the solo (here at 2:19) shows Clapton at his best.

Categories: Science

Princeton’s President makes bogus arguments that diversity and academic excellence are compatible

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 9:30am

The article below, by the President of Princeton, just appeared in the Atlantic.  (Christopher Eisgruber has been Princeton’s President for 11 years.)  The title clearly implies that college diversity (and the implication is “racial diversity”) is not at all in conflict with excellence.

This is a message that, of course, the Progressive Left wants to hear, but when I read the article, I found it deeply misleading. It turns out that excellence at Princeton has not been maintained by admitting more racial minorities, but by allowing certain barred classes, like Asians, Jews, and the impecunious, into the school.  As far as the evidence goes for racial groups, yes, there is a tradeoff between excellence and diversity, and we know that for several reasons that I’ll mention below. One that we know well that colleges are omitting indices of merit, like SAT and ACT scores, as ways to increase equity, for racial minorities (save Asians) don’t do as well as whites (including Jews, which are seen as “white adjacent”).

This does not mean that colleges shouldn’t strive for more racial diversity, but I think they shouldn’t do it by substantially lowering the merit bar of admissions. There are other ways, like casting a wider net among prospective students, or, for equally qualified students, give the edge to minorities. But to imply that there’s no tradeoff between academic excellence and ethnic diversity (not including, of course, Jews and Asians, known to be overachievers) is to purvey a lie. But it is of course a lie in the service of “progressivism”.

It’s hard to imagine how the Atlantic could accept an article whose arguments are explained by the conflation of causation with correlation, as well as with cherry-picked examples or recent trends in grade inflation and selectivity. But let’s look at the argument.

You can click on the headline below, or find it archived here.

First, many American colleges either implicitly or explicitly have eliminated standardized tests (or made them optional) as criteria for admission, and yet, as I’ve written several times (e.g., here and here), SAT scores correlate better than anything else, including high school grade-point averages) with academic success in college. The reason they have done away with the tests, or made them optional, is to increase racial diversity, concentrating on blacks and Hispanics, who do worse on these tests.  Increasingly, medical schools are also ditching the once-required MCAT admissions tests for the same reasons, and Graduate Record Examinations, or GREs for graduate schools, are being deep-sixed for the same reasons.

But of course this isn’t mentioned by Eisgruber, nor the fact that Princeton itself did away with required SAT and ACT tests; apparently they’re now optional in the school’s “holistic admissions” process. And, as I’ve posted before, making them optional, or omitting them, actually hurts diversity! But misguided colleges don’t seem to realize that.

But here are the four main arguments Eisgruber giv; I’ve characterized them and put them in bold. First, though, his thesis:

A noxious and surprisingly commonplace myth has taken hold in recent years, alleging that elite universities have pursued diversity at the expense of scholarly excellence. Much the reverse is true: Efforts to grow and embrace diversity at America’s great research universities have made them better than ever. If you want excellence, you need to find, attract, and support talent from every sector of society, not just from privileged groups and social classes.

He’s right about how to achieve excellence—finding talent where you can—but this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no tradeoff between excellence and (ethnic) diversity and that you must reduce merit-based admissions if you want to increase diveristy. What the above says is that the more widely you look around, the more likely you are to find talented people. But again, that’s not people will read this article. Now, on to Eisgruber’s arguments:

He points to a few examples of ethnic minorities at Princeton who have been successful.

Not surprisingly, the first example is a Chinese-American, Fei-Fei Li.  But Asians, like Jews, are overachievers for what I think are largely cultural reasons, and that’s why Ivy League schools used to have Jewish quotas and why Harvard, until recently, had “Asian-American” quotas.

He then names one black person, one poor person, and one white but economically deprived person (Mark Milley) who became successes after attending Princeton.  Again, this proves nothing, for Eisgruber is making a general statement, and picking out one example from each of three minority groups proves nothing.

Princeton is academically better than it was in the middle of the last century because it began admitting public-school students and women.

But again, this proves nothing other than widening the pool of applicants that might contain meritorious students will allow more of those students to enrich Princeton. Once you begin at least considering public-school students and women, you suddenly have a whole large group of people from which to pluck the talented. But again, this says nothing about Eisgruber’s implied thesis: that admitting more minority students in general will not reduce “excellence” (presumably construed, though not defined, as graduation rates, grades in college, and success after college).

. . . Princeton’s history is illustrative, not because it is special but because—in this respect, at least—it isn’t. At the beginning of the 20th century, Princeton had a reputation as “the finest country club in America”—a place where privileged young men loafed rather than studied. When asked early in his Princeton presidency about the number of students there, Woodrow Wilson reportedly quipped, “about 10 percent.” Half a century later, when the university began admitting public-high-school graduates in significant numbers, it sought to reassure alumni that the newcomers would not displace more privileged but marginally qualified children. The Alumni Council published a booklet declaring that Princeton would admit any alumni child likely to graduate. As evidence, it boasted that the sons of Princetonians were overrepresented not only in the bottom quartile of the class but among those who flunked out. The Alumni Council’s brochure spoke about Princeton’s sons because, of course, the university did not admit women to the undergraduate program until 1969, thereby turning away roughly half the world’s excellence. That was only one of many unfair and discriminatory distinctions that American universities embraced at the expense of excellence.

Eisgruber also maintains that concerted efforts to obtain black students didn’t occur until the 1960s, but of course he doesn’t tell us how they fare at Princeton relative to Asian, white, or Jewish students (I guess the latter are counted as “white”). He also notes that Princeton had Jewish quoteas untyil the 1950s:

People who accuse universities of “social engineering” today seem to forget the social engineering that they did in the past—social engineering that was designed to protect class privilege rather than disrupt it. At Princeton and other Ivy League universities, anti-Semitic quotas persisted into the 1950s. Asian and Asian American students, who now form such an impressive part of the student body at Princeton and its peers, were virtually absent.

So now that there’s more “diversity” of Jewish and Asian-American students at Princeton, and the classes are doing better, does that prove that diversity is compatible with excellence? I don’t think that’s what Eisgruber means in his title. As New York Magazine says, and Harvard admitted, accepting Asians only by merit would result in “too many Asians”:

Harvard itself found in a 2013 internal study that, if it admitted applicants solely on the basis of academic merit, its share of Asian American students would explode from 19 percent to 43 percent.

No, no, we mustn’t have that! This is why, of course, Harvard discriminated against Asians by lowering their “personality scores,” and this is what the Supreme Court found when it banned race-based admissions. And, of course, blacks and Hispanics with the same indices of merit as Asians or whites are admitted much more often via affirmative action.  Again, this shows the conflict between merit and ethnic diversity.

Opening up admissions to poorer students increased excellence. 

With help from charitable endowments funded by grateful alumni and friends, Princeton and other leading research universities have also dismantled financial barriers that in the past discouraged brilliant students from attending. Contrary to what readers might infer from the endless stream of articles about debt-ridden college grads who become baristas, America’s elite research universities now offer financial-aid packages that make them among the country’s most affordable colleges. At Princeton, the percentage of students on aid has risen from about 40 percent in 2000 to 67 percent in the most recent entering class, covering low-, middle-, and even some upper-middle-income students. The average scholarship exceeds the tuition price.

The elimination of barriers to entry coincided with two other changes: students’ increased willingness to travel for an outstanding education and improved informational tools that colleges could use to assess the quality of students (and vice versa). The result, as documented by the Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby in 2009, is that student bodies at America’s best colleges and universities are significantly stronger academically in the 21st century than they were in the 1980s or ’90s. By 2007, she reports, America’s leading colleges were “up against the ceiling of selectivity” defined in terms of academic credentials, not acceptance rate: Further improvements to the quality of the student body would be so refined as to be invisible.

Again, all that’s happening here is the advent of “need-blind admissions,” which we practice at the University of Chicago. If you don’t prevent impecunious students from attending Princeton—I was one of those, by the way; I couldn’t apply to Princeton, my first-choice school, because my family couldn’t afford it—then of course you increase the chances of finding students with good grades and high SAT scores.

Finally, over time, the degree of “excellence” of Princeton students has increased. This correlates, says Eisgruber, with an increase in diversity. 

Princeton’s internal data show striking changes consistent with Hoxby’s more general findings.  Princeton’s undergraduate-admission office has long assigned academic ratings to all applicants based on their scholarly accomplishments in high school, with 1 being the strongest and 5 being the weakest. In the late 1980s, Academic 1s made up less than 10 percent of the university’s applicant pool and less than 20 percent of our matriculated class. Indeed, if you plucked a student at random from the Princeton University student body in 1990, the student was as likely to be an Academic 4 as an Academic 1 (but unlikely to be either: Academic 2s and 3s made up half the class).

 

In recent years, by contrast, Academic 1s have constituted roughly 30 percent of the applicant pool and about 50 percent of the matriculated class. Princeton’s academic excellence has increased substantially across every segment of its undergraduate population.

Here we have the classic example of confusing correlation with causation. And there’s a double causation: standards for admissions have increased overall, which has raised the “rank” of admitted students, and the grade-point averages of students in college (presumably one index of “academic excellence” of Princeton students) has ballooned due to grade inflation.  At the same time, Princeton increased its ethnic diversity.  This is no evidence that the latter caused the former.

So there we have it, a pastiche of misguided or erroneous arguments, made by a guy who is a President of an academic powerhouse, to “prove” that you needn’t sacrifice academic merit for diversity. It’s all wrong, and it’s embarrassing—embarrassing for both the Atlantic and the hapless Eisgruber.

So how do we test whether diversity really is compatible with excellence?  There are two ways, and I’ve already mentioned them both:

  1. See if lowering the bar for merit of admissions (i.e., eliminating SAT scores) affects academic excellence and achievement. We already know it does because of the correlation of SAT scores and other standardized tests with academic achievement.  If Eisgruber were right, why are schools like Princeton getting rid of mandatory test scores, or making them optional? There’s only one reason, and it shows that Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.
  2. Follow students of black or Hispanic ethnicity through college and see if their achievement (or post-college success) is negatively correlated with their minority status. I believe this is also the case, though I don’t have the data at hand. (I believe this is true for medical schools as well.) But if it is the case, it shows that there is a tradeoff between merit and diversity.  That is surely the case, and it’s one of the Great Lies of Wokism.

All the evidence I know of goes against Eisgruber’s contention. Why didn’t the Atlantic editors point out these simple problems? Because, of course, Eisgruber’s flawed conclusion happens to comport with the dominant narrative of “progressive” liberalism.

Two final points. I’m saying nothing about genetics or inherent abilities here, for I think that differences in achievement between racial/ethnic groups is cultural. (The genetic data simply aren’t in.) All I’m saying is that, given differences in qualifications and achievement among groups, Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.

Second, I’m not saying that colleges should give merit 100% priority over diversity. That is a judgment call about whether, as Jon Haidt puts it, you want “Social Justice University” or “Truth-Finding University.”  But Haidt also notes that you can’t have both, and in this abysmal piece of analysis, Eisgruber takes issue with that. I have always said that I prefer some form of affirmative action, and I stick by that, but I’m not pretending that substantial increases in equity can be achieved without lowering overall “excellence.” There are other ways, though they’re slower. One of them is giving children from different groups equal opportunity at the outset. American doesn’t seem to have the dosh or the will to do that, but that’s what it will ultimately take to comport merit with diversity.

Categories: Science

Glenn Loury (and, to some extent, John McWhorter) backpedal about the death of George Floyd

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 7:15am

The death of George Floyd, and his presumed murder by Derek Chauvin with the complicity of several Minneapolis policemen, was an iconic moment in today’s race relations, the most important event leading to the “racial reckoning” of the last few years.  In late December of last year, I posted a movie, “The Fall of Minneapolis” (watch it here), and, after watching it and the included bodycam videos from cops that weren’t allowed into Chauvin’s trial, concluded that there was substantial doubt that Floyd had been murdered murdered, or that Chauvin had intended to do him in.

On December 28, after watching the film, I wrote this:

A few weeks ago I discussed the movie “The fall of Minneapolis”, which you can watch free here. The movie maintains that George Floyd was not murdered by racist cops, but died after he was arrested due to a combination of stress, use of dangerous drugs, and heart and lung problems. Here’s how I summarized the movie at the time:

  1. Floyd was not murdered by the police: he had serious heart problems, hypertension, artherosclerosis, COVID, and was high on near-lethal doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine during his arrest. He was also complaining about not being able to breathe well before he was brought to the ground by the police. Difficulty in breathing could easily be explained by both his heath condition and ingestion of serious drugs.
  2. The official autopsy found drugs in Floyd’s system, confirms the health problems mentioned above, and found no evidence from examining his neck that he died from asphyxiation.
  3. The [police] bodycam videos were not allowed to be shown to jurors by the judge. They show that Floyd might have been restrained simply by having a knee on his shoulder, not on his neck. This method of restraint, called “MRT” (maximal restraint technique) is taught to all Minneapolis police recruits as a way to subdue resisting suspects. (There is no doubt from the bodycam videos that Floyd insistently resisted arrest and fought the officers.)
  4. The judge did not allow mention or a photo of MRT in the Minneapolis police manual to be shown to the jury. Further, the police captain, lying, denied that MRT was taught to all police officers.
  5. The police called for medical assistance within minutes of Floyd having a medical emergency when he was on the ground. They also tried to resuscitate him via CPR. This is inconsistent with the narrative that the officers were trying to kill Floyd.
  6. The judge, mayor, city council and police hierarchy all “conspired” to convict Chauvin and the other officers, buttressing into an official narrative that was likely wrong.

Earlier I put up a discussion between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, both of whom had watched the film and were not only impressed with it but agreed with my take that the “Chauvin murdered Floyd” scenario was likely a distortion. (See also this post by Loury.) It was after this discussion that the movie went public and I watched it.

Now, in the video below, Loury backtracks in his opinion, and several readers have called this backtracking to my attention (including some uncivil ones who basically accused me of being credulous and daring me to post what’s below). But of course if I put out my opinion, and it’s shown to be subsantially weaker than I thought, of course I’m going to post the countervailing arguments.

First, excerpts from Loury’s new Substack post, “We were too quick to praise ‘The Fall of Minneapolis“.  It’s accompanied by a short video (below) which will later be posted in full. When that happens, and the critic, Radley Balko, publishes all of his three-part critique, I’ll weigh in myself. For the time being, let’s withhold any judgment that Floyd was or wasn’t murdered by Derek Chauvin with complicity of other cops. Let’s wait for the evidence. But do watch the film; the links is above.

From Loury:

John and I helped bring a lot of attention to the The Fall of Minneapolis, a documentary by Liz Collin and JC Chaix which argues that Derek Chauvin is not responsible for the death of George Floyd and that Chauvin’s trial was tainted by perjury and manipulation of evidence. We discussed the film on one episode and brought the filmmakers on for a second episode. John and I both came away convinced that Derek Chauvin hadn’t gotten a fair trial and that he may well be innocent. But a couple weeks ago, the journalist Radley Balko published part one of what he says will be a three-part series debunking The Fall of Minneapolis. It was an unsettling read, one that I found so convincing that it’s led me to question my own earlier support of the film.

It was not wrong to call attention to the documentary, nor was it wrong to talk to the filmmakers. But I do wish I had not been so eager to accept their conclusions. I’ve spent years decrying the outsized reaction to the death of George Floyd, the riots and the antiractist mania that followed, and the superficial moralism of progressives who claim to find white supremacy at the root of even the most minuscule social infractions. When I saw a documentary that claimed to locate real, empirical corruption at the heart of the George Floyd case itself, I was primed to believe it.

I’ve had to take stock of my reasons for going all-in on The Fall of Minneapolis without subjecting it to scrutiny befitting the magnitude of its claims. Certainly I was ready to accept those claims, but at some level, did I want to accept them as well? I cannot be certain that my desire to strengthen my argument against George Floyd’s canonization did not neutralize the skepticism that should kick in whenever a shocking claim is made, no matter its ideological implications. The documentary’s counter-narrative fit neatly with my own, which should have moved me to seek further verification rather than accepting it at face value.

As you’ll see in this week’s clip, John doesn’t think we erred all that egregiously. But I do. I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true. I think I’ve succeeded in that where Balko’s critique is concerned, but only to the end of correcting an earlier failure. I sometimes describe myself as “heterodox.” That means looking on all orthodoxies with a critical eye, including the personal orthodoxies we develop over time. Without self-reflection and introspection, heterodoxy risks becoming orthodoxy by another name, a shallow rebrand that betrays its own purpose. As John is fond of saying, that won’t do. I may have fallen short this time. But, as I’m fond of saying, God’s not finished with me yet.

And a bit from the first installment of Balko’s debunking of the film. I’ll read all three parts and weigh in then. But again, realize that the film might have been edited to buttress an ideologue position: Floyd wasn’t murdered. Here’s Balko’s main conclusion in part one:

The documentary makes a lot of outlandish claims, but I want to focus mostly on the two that I’ve seen most often. These are also the two claims that [Coleman] Hughes spends most of his piece promoting.

The first claim is that when Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s back and neck for nine minutes, it could not have been criminal assault because the Minneapolis Police Department has trained its officers — including Chauvin — to use that very technique.

The second claim is that Floyd’s official autopsy found that he died of a heart attack brought on by cardiovascular disease and drug use. Therefore, Chauvin could not have been responsible for Floyd’s death.

Both of these claims are false. The first claim is not only incorrect, the documentary engages in deceptive editing and convenient omissions to push it. In other words, the documentary is lying. The second claim is also incorrect, but the explanation is a bit more complicated.

The new (and truncated) 14-minute discussion between Loury and McWhorter is below.  Both agree that the filmmakers were “dishonest in their depiction” of how Chauvin restrained Floyd. McWhorter asseverates that he and Loury were nevertheless within their rights to call attention to the original documentary, for to ignore it simply because the filmmakers were conservatives would be a mistake. The question was whether these filmmaker/conservatives were not honest actors. McWhorter, while not as convinced as is Loury that the documentary was dishonest and misleading, welcomes the controversy and, like me, will wait until the to-and-fro is over before issuing a conclusion. (Loury seems more worried about being thought of as “too credulous” and for having confirmation bias because he was too woke to be objective.)  I suspect that the two filmmakers will themselves issue a critique of Balko’s critique.

To be fair, Balko is expert in investigating police issues, so I don’t feel as guilty as does Loury for taking the film’s assertions at face value.  But this is how the truth comes out: evidence is presented on both sides, even if one or both sides are ideologically motivated, and then one can try to adjudicate the evidence without being tained by one’s own ideology.

My stand is closer to McWhorter’s. I assumed the filmmakers were working in good faith, and I didn’t have the expertise to judge all the claims. If those claims are shown to be bogus, I’ll retract at least some of my conclusions I gave above. For now, it’s appropriate to withhold judgment on the conclusion that Chauvin, in doing a “neck restraint” of Floyd, was acting according to Minneapolis police instructions, in which case Floyd was the victim of either homicide or murder. I still think people need to watch the film to see what the officers were dealing with: an uncooperative, doped-up individual who resisted following police orders and was taken to the ground because of that. But what follows after Floyd was on the ground is the major issue.

Categories: Science

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ trust

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 7:00am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “cynical”, has a sociological bent, coming with the link below:

Professor Al to you, sonny. Comic inspired by the 1st 9 minutes of this video.

“Cynicism is basically an evolutionary heuristic to save people from having to think.”  I believe the paper is this one from 2018, which you can download for free.

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 6:15am

Today we have part 2 of Robert Lang’s seven-part series of his trip to Antarctica in a small boat (part 1 is here). And today the PENGUINS make their appearance, including two videos. Robert’s captions are indented, and you can click the photos to enlarge them.

Antarctica Part 2: Gentoo Penguins

We saw three types of penguins along the Antarctic Peninsula: Adélies (Pygoscelis adeliae), Chinstraps (Pygoscelis antarcticus), and Gentoos (Pygoscelis papua). The most common were Gentoos, which will be the topic of this collection.

All three are so-called “brush-tailed” penguins, with short, stiff tails that they use like the third leg of a stool when standing and use like a rudder when swimming. Gentoos are distinguished by their orange bill and white patches just above the eyes:

Their colonies are cacophonous, as pairs call with a gurgling “haw-hee-haw” call that, when massed, sounds like a herd of donkeys:

They also have long orange toes, that look to me like a bundle of black-tipped carrots.

Although we often saw them nesting near the shore, we also saw rookeries hundreds of feet up the cliffs. Hard to imagine having to climb up and down every time they go out for food or return to the nest:

To get to and from their rookeries, they follow well-trammeled pathways across snow and rocks. In the snowfields, their paths get beaten down into troughs, which are colored by their guano, pink from the diet of krill:

While their waddles on land are almost comical, once in the water, they are graceful and agile. Here’s a group of them “porpoising,” leaping out of the water as they travel:

And to get a sense of their speed under (and over) water, here’s a short video of a group feeding near our two zodiacs:

They are devoted parents. The parents alternate tending the egg(s) and feeding. Here’s one sitting on its egg while it tends the pebbles that make up the nest. If you turn up the sound, you can hear their calls:

Here’s a gentoo feeding its chick:

And one feeding two chicks:

A close-up of a chick. Note the fringed tongue:

Gentoos come ashore to molt and molt all at once. Not many people know (*) that when a gentoo molts its head like this, it takes about 3 weeks to grow a new one:

(*) “Not many people know” because of course that’s not true. (They do molt their feathers over the course of a few weeks.) They also have very flexible necks, as that photo shows.

One of the islands we visited, Deception Island, is an active volcano and had steam vents along the shore. They made for some eerie photos and videos: “Gentoos in the Mist,” as we visited these gentle not-quite-giants:

Next: More penguins: Adélies and Chinstraps!

Categories: Science

Bari Weiss interviews Lucy Aharish, the first Arab Muslim presenter on mainstream Israeli t.v.

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 10:30am

Lucy Aharish is the first Arab Muslim television presenter on mainstream Israeli t.v.  Here’s a video, highly touted on the Free Press site, in which Bari Weiss interviews Aharish for an hour: “This Muslim Israeli woman is the hope of the Middle East“.

I’m not sure what the title means by “hope of the Middle East,” unless it buttresses Aharish’s claim that Muslims who commit or even approve of terrorism are not “real Muslims”, and thus there is hope for peace and comity between Israelis and “real” Muslims in Palestine.

A bit about Aharish from Wikipedia:

As of 2018, Aharish serves as a news anchor for Reshet 13. She was previously a morning anchor on a current-affairs show for its predecessor Channel 2, a presenter of the Evening Edition for i24NEWS, a news presenter and reporter for Channel 10, a co-host for Radio 99, a late-night co-host for Channel 1, as well as a co-host for Kan 11.

The interview has its ups and downs, but I think it’s worth watching for two reasons. First, it shows how even Israeli Arabs are subject to racism (Aharish tells several stories, including her failure to get paid for a speaking engagement simply because of her religion and ethnicity).  But she also claims that Israel is not an “apartheid” state, citing those Israeli Arab Muslims who have risen to high places (both of her sisters have good jobs, and of course Israeli Arabs do occupy high places, including the Knesset and the Supreme Court). So apparently Aharish believes that although there’s residual racism in Israel, it doesn’t affect Israeli Muslims’ opportunities or life prospects. (I’m not quite sure how, if there’s racism, it can NOT play out in differential treatment!) But it’s certainly true that Israel is a ton less racist than Palestine or other Arab countries—places where Jews often can’t even live, much less rise to decent positions.

At many points Aharish is moved to tears, especially when saying things like, “Hamas murdered in the sense of compassion in me, the humanity in me.” She argues that after the October 7 attacks she had lost empathy for the Palestinians, but now is realizing that  “Israel cannot afford to lose its humanity” and emphasizes the need to make the next generation of inhabitants of Gaza and West Bank become neighbors to the extent that they could forge a peace with Israel.

As I said, I find the most dubious claim to be Aharish’s insistence that terrorists, as well as those Arab Muslims in Palestine and other Arab countries who sympathize with terrorists, are not genuine Muslims. She argues that this extremism “is not Islam.  This is not being a Muslim. This is being a monster.” But the polls taken in Palestine and other Arab countries show the contrary: a huge proportion of inhabitants, if not most of them, approved of the October 7 massacre and don’t want Israel to exist. And, of course, Sam Harris has argued that this form of extremism is really inherent in Islam. All you have to do is to read the Qur’an to see its emphasis on killing apostates, infidels and Jews. To be sure, the Bible is pretty genocidal, too, but the difference is that Christianity has now largely been stripped of its homicidal dicta while Islam has not.

It is, I think, a debatable matter of whether most Muslims fall into Aharish’s definition of “extremists.” Sometimes it sounds as if she’s making a virtue of necessity.

But, as I said, this is worth listening to. For a shorter take on her views, also showing her emotionality (a good thing, one rarely seen in an anchorperson), see this CNN video.

Here’s the intro to the interview at the Free Press.

Lucy Aharish is one of the most prominent television broadcasters in Israel. But that’s not the thing that makes her exceptional. The thing that makes Lucy stand out is that she is the first Arab Muslim news presenter on mainstream, Hebrew-language Israeli television.

Born and raised in a small Jewish town in Israel’s Negev desert as one of the only Arab Muslim families there, Lucy often says that she sees herself as sitting on a fence. By that she doesn’t mean she’s unwilling to take a side—as you’ll see, she is a woman of strong convictions, bravery, and moral backbone. What she means is that she has a unique lens through which to view the divisions in Israeli society, the complexity of the country’s national identity, and the Middle East more generally.

That complexity was on display in 2018 when Lucy’s marriage to a Jewish Israeli actor (Tsahi Halevi of Fauda fame) sparked a nasty backlash from the country’s religious far-right.

Lucy has long been a vocal critic of those peripheral far-right voices—the ones who are inclined to oppose her marriage. She’s also long been critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But she is equally critical of her fellow Arab Israelis, particularly of Arab violence and of the Arab leadership that she says condones it.

An Arab. A proud Israeli. A Muslim married to a Jew. In short, Lucy Aharish is an iconoclast.

I sat down with Lucy recently in Tel Aviv. We talked about the October 7 massacre and its impact on the country and her family—her husband put on his uniform and headed to the south within hours of Hamas’s invasion of the country. Left alone with her son, she contemplated “hiding him in the washing machine,” should terrorists arrive at her doorstep.

And the video:

Categories: Science

Critic of “Woke Kindergarten” suspended

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 8:30am

Remember “Woke Kindergarten”, a lesson plan for teachers to use in instructing propagandizing students in Hayward, California (see posts here and here)?  The program was designed by an extreme “progressive” named Akiea “Ki” Gross, who was given $250,000 in taxpayer money by the school.  And, lo and behold, performance in English and math actually dropped after the wokeness was sprayed on the students. (To see how completely bonkers this program is, go here or to the program’s website here.)  All power to the little people! Sadly, the program appears to be designed for black students and the students are 80% Hispanic.

After an article was published in the San Francisco Chronicle describing the program, there was a huge backlash from people who, properly, thought it was bonkers.  So what did the school district do? Did they drop the program? There’s no indication of that. Instead, they did what defies common sense:  they put one of the teachers who criticized the program in the article on leave (with pay) for unknown violations. They are actually defending Woke Kindergarten when they should be defunding it. I suspect, however, that we’ll see no more of the program. It’s simply too stupid, woke, and embarrassing.

At any rate, the Chronicle has a new article (click headline below, or find it archived here), discussing the firing and giving the school’s defense.

First, though, this is how the teacher critic was quoted in the first Chronicle article:

 Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

And from the new piece, his punishment for such heresy:

The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle. Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.

 

They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.

District officials declined to comment on his status or any allegations, saying it was a personnel matter.

A defense of Woke Kindergarten from the original article:

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Defenses in the second article. Yep, they refuse to say that adopting it was a bad move:

District officials declined to comment on their social media posts, given Gross was paid using taxpayer-funded federal dollars.

“We cannot comment on her personal political or social views,” Bazeley said.

Some teachers have defended the Woke Kindergarten program, saying that after years of low test scores and academic intervention, they believed in a fresh approach. The training was selected by the school community, with parents and teachers involved in the decision.

“We need to try something else,” said Christina Aguilera, a bilingual kindergarten teacher. “If we just focus on academics, it’s not working. There is no one magic pill that will raise test scores.

“I’m really proud of Glassbrook to have the guts to say this is what our students need,” Aguilera said. “We didn’t just do what everybody expected us to do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Sixth-grade teacher Michele Mason said the Woke Kindergarten training sessions “have been a positive experience” for most of the staff, humanizing the students’ experiences and giving them a voice in their own education.

These are clearly teachers who want to keep their jobs.  Finally, a bit about how Craven-Neeley was treated by his colleagues:

The Wednesday staff meeting, however, was tense, Craven-Neeley said, as he tried to explain that before going to the Chronicle, he approached school and district staff as well as the school board to raise questions about the program and the expense, with no response.

“There was so much anger toward me,” he said. “I was explaining my point of view. They were talking over me.”

. . . . Craven-Neeley said the meeting grew tense about an hour in, when another teacher stood up, pointed a finger in his face and said, “ ‘You are a danger to the school or the community,’ and then she walked out of the room.”

Not long after, a district administrator asked him to leave the meeting.

“I was shocked. This is my school. I didn’t do anything inappropriate,” he said. “I left. I was very shaky.”

Another Glassbrook teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions at the school, confirmed that a staff member put a hand in Craven-Neeley’s face and called him a disgrace and a threat to the school.

Craven-Neeley then had a video meeting with school officials and was told he’d be placed on paid leave pending an “investigation”. The university also “denied the district’s actions were related to Craven-Neeley’s participation in the story or his complaints about the program. The district spokesperson added, ‘We would not put any employee on leave as any sort of retaliation or squelch anyone’s free speech rights,” [Michael Bazeley] said’.”

Well that sounds like a flat-out lie to me. What Craven-Neeley said to the Chronicle was indeed free speech, and there’s no other indication of anything else for which he’d be punished.  All I can say is that it looks as if Woke Kindergarten affected the teachers (if not the students). They’re all censorious and defensive!

Remember the “woke wonderings” that were part of the program? Here’s one:

The answer, of course, is “not much!”

Categories: Science

FIRE gives awards for the Ten Worst Censors of 2024; Harvard gets sixth Lifetime Censorship Award

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 7:00am

At midnight last night, FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) put up its list of the “10 Worst Censors of 2024”.

Part of the intro:

Each year, FIRE names and shames the worst-of-the-worst silencers, bowdlerizers, and steamrollers of free speech.

This year, we’ve included five free speech villains whose chilling misdeeds happened off of  college campuses. Thelist belowincludes people guilty of many forms of censorship  including raiding a small-town newspaper, punishing a middle schooler for wearing eye black at a football game, canceling students and professors for their views on the Israel-Hamas war, and retroactively censoring famous authors without their consent. The 13th annual Lifetime Censorship Award went to Harvard University, a university as censorial as it is famous.

Previous lists were limited to campuses, but no longer: off-campus censors were also in the running.  The list below is in no particular order, and there’s a longer explanation of each ranking at the website given at the top.

I was particularly interested in the Razzies given to the California Community Colleges (for requiring faculty to pledge allegiance to DEI) and Texas A&M (a state school) for its pattern of firing, deplatforming, and censorship.

Last but not least, Harvard University will receive FIRE’s sixth Lifetime Censorship Award, reserved for those colleges that deserve special recognition for their commitment to censorship. The school earned the award for landing at the bottom of FIRE’s annual free speech rankings, threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuitdriving out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real, and rescinding a fellowship for form

I wanted to show you why Harvard got the lowest ranking; and the ranking was assigned well before Claudine Gay and the Presidents of MIT and Penn were excoriated for their testimony before a House committee:

Harvard University came in dead last on this year’s College Free Speech Rankings — achieving a worst-ever score. When asked about Harvard’s abysmal ranking during her congressional testimony in December, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay said she didn’t think the ranking was “an accurate representation” of Harvard’s respect for free speech. But all one needs to do to understand Harvard’s disrespect for free speech is look at its record of censorship.

Only a few weeks before Gay’s testimony, Harvard hired self-advertised “media assassins” to threaten the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit and “immense” damages if the paper published a story alleging Gay plagiarized some of her scholarship. So much for placing “a high priority on freedom of speech” — or freedom of the press for that matter. Gay resigned on Jan. 2, after more than 40 allegations of plagiarism came to light.

Long before Harvard threatened news outlets with litigation for their reporting, it punished faculty and students for their speech. School administrators drove out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real. It rescinded a fellowship for former Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth over his purported “anti-Israel bias.” It effectively fired an economics professor for an op-ed he published in India. It canceled a professor’s course on policing following student uproar. It fired professor Ronald Sullivan from his deanship after students protested his role on Harvey Weinstein’s criminal defense team. It bizarrely demanded students take down a Nicki Minaj flag because the community could find it “offensive.” And the list goes on.

Even outside speakers invited to campus aren’t safe from Harvard’s censorial glare. In 2022, feminist philosopher Devin Buckley was disinvited from an English department colloquium because of her views on sex and gender. Her talk was supposed to be on the separate topic of British romanticism.

Harvard students clearly feel the chill. Students report low administrative support for free speech and low comfort expressing ideas, placing the school near the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings in both individual categories. Unfortunately, Harvard students themselves may also contribute to the problem. If the efforts to oust Sullivan and cancel the policing class aren’t evidence enough, an alarming 30% of Harvard students think using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in at least some circumstances.

For its long track record of censorship, Harvard is receiving FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award. It joins Georgetown University, Yale University, Syracuse University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and DePaul University in receiving this “honor.” It’s past time Harvard truly commits to its ostensible truth-seeking mission and the principles of free speech and academic freedom that make it possible. But that may be wishful thinking, the triumph of hope over experience.

The new President of Harvard hasn’t yet been chosen, but I suspect it will have to be another black woman lest Harvard be criticized for, well, Sarah Haider talks about this in her nice new analysis of DEI, including a tweet:

This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.

The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) January 2, 2024

Hill is a professor of CUNY and a “television personality”.

Categories: Science

“Punishment” for protestors who break University of Chicago regulations: a light tap on the wrist at best

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 10:00am

A while back, 26 pro-Palestinian protestors at the University of Chicago, along with two faculty members, were arrested and booked for holding an illegal sit-in in the admissions office.  Later on, the city of Chicago dropped the charges of criminal trespass (I don’t know why this happened), and up to now I haven’t been able to find out if the miscreant students were receiving any discipline from the University.

Now, according to the Chicago Maroon (our student newspaper), it seems that the protestors have not even been slapped on the wrist, but only lightly tapped on the scaphoid. For it appears that the students were simply assigned by the University to write an essay on their sit-in experience. They were not required to show contrition or to promise they wouldn’t violate campus rules again. Instead, they were allowed to reiterate their support for Palestine and their accusation that the University engages in genocide. They also complained that their speech was being suppressed, which of course is not true. Their speech wasn’t suppressed; what was suppressed was performing that speech in a place where it obstructed campus access.

The student newspaper, which I now think is deeply biased towards the pro-Palestinian side (they have about ten pro-Palestinian articles and op-eds for every pro-Israel piece), produced not a news article about this, but rather a piece written by some of the protestors in UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP)—a consortium of like-minded groups that loves to violate university regulations and, most of the time, goes unpunished.

Read their “essays” by clicking on the link below. Remember, this story is not news, but a political screed disguised as news (it is labeled “letters” and “viewpoints”, but those labels often are used for very long political diatribes). For some reason the paper gives huge amounts of space to UCUP and the Students of Justice in Palestine to publish “letters” that can be over 4,000 words long. The only op-ed opposing their disruption was mine, and although the paper promised several months ago to put up a long pro-Israeli piece, for some reason it hasn’t appeared.  From the Nov. 28 issue:

Editor’s note: As The Maroon’s long-form and narrative features section, Grey City seeks to produce coverage that gives students a direct voice in reporting. As a separate report, Grey City will soon be publishing a story written by pro-Israel student organizer who has been active in recent campus demonstrations.

So far, bupkes.  I’d like to see the Maroon publish something beyond my letter showing that it is reporting objectively in this kerfuffle. They claim to be, but I don’t believe them.

Click to read.

 

Here’s part of the UCUP intro in which they whine about having their speech suppressed:

On November 9, 26 students and two faculty were arrested by the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) during a sit-in at Rosenwald Hall in protest of the University’s investments in institutions complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Though legal charges have been dropped, the University’s disciplinary process is ongoing. Gathered here are excerpts from statements sent by student arrestees to Associate Dean of Students Jeremy Inabinet of the Center for Student Integrity, which we were required to submit in order to address charges brought against us by another associate dean of students through the University’s “disruptive conduct” disciplinary process. Administrators have repeatedly tried to push pro-Palestine narratives into the shadows, away from the public eye, including by weaponizing UCPD and the Dean-on-Call program against student protestors, processing our arrests inside a university building to avoid the large crowd outside, and subjecting us to an internal disciplinary process under the dean of students—the very university structure that filed the disciplinary complaint against us and that likely authorized our arrest.

. . . . We share the following letter excerpts to expose and condemn the University’s failure to protect our rights to free expression, as well as its bad faith promise to uphold “political neutrality” on our campus. Despite all of our efforts, the administration has never agreed to meet with us. Instead, President Alivisatos has since met publicly with the Israeli Consul General to strengthen ties to Israeli institutions in the middle of a genocide, while disciplining Palestinian students and their allies. In such a climate of blatant non-neutrality and suppression, we come forward openly and share our statements, which would otherwise be arbitrated behind closed doors.

The University has bent over backwards to protect their rights to free expression, and meeting with the Israeli Consul is not violating official University policy. These students are angry and entitled, and the university repeatedly lets them get away with violating the rules. (A recent illegal “lie in” in a campus restaurant went completely unpunished despite the presence of a Dean and three campus cops.)

A few excerpts from the “my sit-in experience” essays. Names are given where they’re reported, though some students wanted to remain anonymous, and of course I’ve preserved that anonymity.

“I am disturbed to have to write this letter to explain my presence at a peaceful, anti-genocide action that took place in Rosenwald Hall on November 9. The University’s response to this action reflects a highly securitized and carceral approach that actively chills student voices and directly contradicts its “commitment to free speech.”  (from an anonymous student)

***************

A coalition of Palestinian higher education institutions has issued a call for international academic institutions to:

  1. Call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, guaranteed by the UN.
  2. Urge immediate entry into Gaza of sufficient amounts of life-saving humanitarian needs (including water, food, fuel, medicine), equitably distributed throughout the whole territory of Gaza Strip.
  3. Demand UN protection for the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians trapped under siege in Gaza.
  4. Issue clear positions rejecting any ethnic cleansing.
  5. To support in dismantling the settler colonial and apartheid system and to achieve a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace.

In response, major U.S. academic institutions like UChicago have silently continued to profit from the destruction of civilian infrastructure like universities and the slaughter of innocent Palestinians…”

Sammy Aiko Zimmerman, Class of 2024

***************

We have all heard numerous times that the University of Chicago has articulated principles on political neutrality in its Kalven Report, discouraging administrators from taking a stance on socio-political issues outside of the University in the name of preserving free expression. The University’s stance on institutional political neutrality, said to preserve the principle and practice of free inquiry and critique at the departmental, faculty, and student level is admirable at first sight. But the further I have inspected it and observed its consequences, the more it seems to mask a refusal to challenge status-quo power relations which are destroying free expression, and the possibility of education itself. How can UChicago administrators claim to uphold core values and principles of free expression by ignoring the student body’s calls for a meeting, mechanically citing the Kalven Report to the media, and passively watching Israel systematically target journalists, drop bombs on university buildings in the Gaza Strip, and brutally incarcerate our fellow students at Birzeit University without charge? Is the appropriate ethical attitude to wait until after the genocide is consummated and only then hold an intellectually challenging history seminar about it?…”

Hassan Doostdar, Class of 2025

****************

Seriously, in what way are these students having their right of free speech abrogated? They’re engaging in civil disobedience, which is fine, but that gives them no right to beef, as some have done, for getting arrested. And pardon me if I don’t think that accusations of campus complicity in genocide are the moral equivalent of the civil rights protestors of the Sixties.

The administration here seems to have decided to let protestors either get away with violating campus regulations or giving them only very light punishment. This, of course, is not deterrence, and I hope that Jewish parents aren’t themselves deterred from sending their kids here.

Categories: Science

Brown University Hillel received antisemitic emails, including some threatening violence

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 8:45am

The hunger strike by pro-Palestinian students at Brown University—students aiming to get their school to divest from companies “associated with human rights abuses in Palestine”—didn’t work. It lasted just eight days, and then the students abandoned their fast unto death because their demands were deemed “obsolete”.  But now, it appears, the anti-Israel faction, likely to be students have adopted a new stratagem: issuing vile and violent threats against the campus Jewish organization of Hillel. This is of course part of the antisemitism fulminating on American college campuses.

Note: I’ve received an email from a Brown Vice-President, who, eager to protect his school’s reputation, admonished me that we don’t know if the hate emails originated from the campus. That’s indeed true, but I think that’s the most likely source, and I’m using Bayes’ Theorem here.

Here’s the letter that the President of Brown sent yesterday to the University community.

From: President Christina H. Paxson Date: Sun, Feb 11, 2024 at 9:49 PMSubject: Threats to the Brown-RISD community

Dear Members of the Brown and RISD Communities,We are writing to address the terrible threats against the Brown-RISD Hillel Weiner Center that our campuses were notified about this morning. Employees there received deeply disturbing antisemitic emails that included threats of violence against them personally and Brown-RISD Hillel.Our primary concern is for the safety and security of members of the Brown and RISD communities, including the Brown-RISD Hillel community. Threats of violence against anyone on our campuses are completely unacceptable, and we are committed to working with law enforcement to do everything possible to help identify and prosecute the perpetrator(s).This comes at an especially difficult time of distress on our campuses. Our students, faculty and staff continue to grapple with the deaths of Israelis, Palestinians and others in the wake of the October 7 attacks, as well as a despicable act of violence against a member of the Brown community here in the United States last November, and increases in reports of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate targeting national origin and identity both nationally and on our campuses.This is a time to reflect on who we are as educational communities that value human dignity and reject violence, racism, discrimination and intimidation. Our fervent hope is that, in this difficult time, each of us in the Brown and RISD communities renews our commitment to eschew all forms of hatred and work toward mutual understanding.Our ongoing focus is making sure that members of our communities are protected and feel safe. As shared in campus safety alerts sent earlier today, the departments of public safety for both Brown and RISD continue to work with the Providence Police Department to investigate the source of the threats and ensure the ongoing safety and security of Brown-RISD Hillel. Part of their swift and immediate response was to reach out to federal, state and local law enforcement authorities, and to coordinate with the Rhode Island State Fusion Center, which gathers and shares information about threats between law enforcement agencies.While we have been assured that, given the nature of the emailed threats, there is no evidence of ongoing concern for personal safety (and operations in the building can continue), robust security plans are in place to ensure the security of the building and the operations that take place there. Safety plans are also in place for the individuals who received the threats.If at any time you learn about threats to yourself or others, please contact the Providence police, as well as public safety at your respective campus — NUMBER REDACTED for Brown community members and NUMBER REDACTED for RISD community members.Sincerely, Christina H. PaxsonPresident, Brown UniversityCrystal WilliamsPresident, Rhode Island School of Design

I don’t see this as a violation of institutional neutrality so much as an attempt to quell disturbances and calm people on campus. And, as if to avoid taking a stand, Paxson and Williams include the obligatory denunciations of “Islamophobia” in their letter.  But one thing is certain: those who favor the Palestinian side of the conflict are far more hateful and violent than those favoring the Israeli side.

Note: The “despicable act of violence against a member of the Brown community here in the United States last November” refers to the shooting of three Palestinian college students who were walking in Vermont, an unconscionable act that left the Brown student, Hisham Awartani, paralyzed from the chest down. That’s a terrible fate and I wish him well. But as far as I know, there’s no evidence that this was an “Islamophobic” shooting, and the accused perp, 48-year-old Jason J. Eaton, remains in custody pending trial.

Categories: Science

Yet another misguided attempt to revise evolution

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 7:30am

What we have below (click on headline for free access) is a review in Nature by Denis Noble of a new book by Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biologywhich has garnered good reviews and is currently #1 in rankings of books on developmental biology.  The Amazon summary promises that the book will revise our view of life:

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that will revise our concept of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.. . .

I haven’t read it yet, though I will (I have several books ahead of it, including the galleys of Richard Dawkins’s new book, for which I’m to provide a blurb). Instead, I will review a review: Denis Noble’s review published a few days ago. (That’s the screenshot below.) Admittedly, it’s a review of a review, but Noble gives his take on the book’s importance, and in so doing reveals his own idea that neo-Darwinism is not only impoverished, but misguided in important ways.  And, as usual, Noble proves himself misguided.

In some ways it’s unfortunate that Noble was chosen as a reviewer, as the man, while having a sterling reputation in physiology and systems biology, is largely ignorant of neo-Darwinism, and yet has spent a lot of the last decade trying to claim that neo-Darwinism is grossly inadequate to explain the features and evolutionary changes of organisms. You can see all my critiques of Noble here, but I’ll just quote briefly from the latest to give you a flavor of how he attacks modern evolutionary theory:

In an earlier post I wrote, “Famous physiologist embarrasses himself by claiming that the modern theory of evolution is in tatters“, I emphasized five assertions Noble made in a 2013 paper in Experimental Physiology, and then I criticized them as being either deeply misguided or flat wrong. Noble’s claims:

  1. Mutations are not random
  2. Acquired characteristics can be inherited
  3. The gene-centered view of evolution is wrong [This is connected with #2.]
  4. Evolution is not a gradual gene-by-gene process but is macromutational.
  5. Scientists have not been able to create new species in the lab or greenhouse, and we haven’t seen speciation occurring in nature.

I then assessed each claim in order:

Wrong, partly right but irrelevant, wrong, almost completely wrong, and totally wrong (speciation is my own area).

And yet Noble continues to bang on about “the broken paradigm of Neo-Darwinism,” which happens to be the subtitle of his new article (below) in IAI News, usually a respectable website run by the Institute of Art and Ideas.

And yes, Noble’s banging persists in his review of Ball’s book. The criticisms I level will be against Noble’s claims, as I can’t verify whether he’s accurately characterizing Ball’s views or spouting his (Noble’s) own misguided views.

The problem with Noble;s review is twofold: the stuff he says is new and revolutionary is either old and well known, or it’s new and unsubstantiated.  Here are a few of his quotes (indented and in italics) and my take (flush left):

First, Noble’s introduction to the book, which is okay until Noble tries to explicate it:

So long as we insist that cells are computers and genes are their code,” writes Ball, life might as well be “sprinkled with invisible magic”. But, reality “is far more interesting and wonderful”, as he explains in this must-read user’s guide for biologists and non-biologists alike.

On to Noble’s asseverations:

When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence.

Well, the genome is more or less a blueprint for life, for it encodes for how an organism will develop when the products of its genome, during development, interact with the environment—both internal and external—to produce an organism.  Dawkins has emphasized, though, that the genome is better thought of as “recipe” or “program” for life, and his characterization is actually more accurate (you can “reverse engineer” a blueprint from a house and engineer a house from a blueprint—it works both ways—but you can’t reverse engineer a recipe from a cake or a DNA sequence from an organism.)  The DNA of a robin zygote in its egg will produce an organism that looks and behaves like a robin, while that of a starling will produce a starling.  You can’t change the environment to make one of them become the other. Yes, the external environment (food, temperature, and so on) can ultimately affect the traits of an organism, but it is the DNA itself, not the environment, that is the thing that changes via natural selection. It is the DNA itself that is passed on, and is potentially immortal. And the results of natural selection are coded in the genome. (Of course the “environment” of an organism can be internal, too, but much of the internal environment, including epigenetic changes that affect gene function are themselves coded by the DNA.)

As for genes not having a “pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence,” this is either wrong or old hat.  First, it is true that at this point we don’t always know how a gene functions from its DNA sequence alone, much less how it could change the organism if it mutates. This is a matter of ignorance that will eventually be solved. As for “pre-set function”, what does Noble mean by “pre-set”?  A single gene can participate in many developmental pathways, and if it mutates, it can change development in unpredictable ways, and in ways you couldn’t even predict from what that gene “normally” does. The gene causing Huntington’s chorea, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, has a function that’s largely unknown but is thought to affect neuron transport. But it also has repeated sections of the DNA (CAGCAGCAG. . . . .), and mutations that increase the number CAG repeats can cause the disease when they exceed a certain threshold.

But the “Huntington’s gene” is not there to cause disease, of course. It interacts with dozens or even hundreds of other genes in ways we don’t understand. What is its “pre-set” function? The question is meaningless. And was does “pre-set” mean, anyway?

The second sentence in the bit above is garbled and ambiguous, and at any rate doesn’t refute the notion that the genome is indeed the “instruction manual for life.”

But wait: there’s more!

Instead, genes’ activity — whether they are expressed or not, for instance, or the length of protein that they encode — depends on myriad external factors, from the diet to the environment in which the organism develops. And each trait can be influenced by many genes. For example, mutations in almost 300 genes have been identified as indicating a risk that a person will develop schizophrenia.

It’s therefore a huge oversimplification, notes Ball, to say that genes cause this trait or that disease. The reality is that organisms are extremely robust, and a particular function can often be performed even when key genes are removed. For instance, although the HCN4 gene encodes a protein that acts as the heart’s primary pacemaker, the heart retains its rhythm even if the gene is mutated.

“Polygeny,” or the view that traits can be affected by many genes, is something I learned in first-year genetics in 1968. But some “traits” or diseases are the product of single genes, like the trait of getting Huntington’s Chorea of sickle-cell disease.  But many diseases, like high blood pressure and heart disease, can be caused by many genes. And it’s not just diseases. Whether your earlobes are attached to your face or are free is based on a single gene, and eye color, to a large extent, is too (see this list for other single-gene alternative traits).

As far as the HCN4 gene goes, mutations may allow it to have a rhythm, but many mutations in that gene cause abnormal rhythms.and can even bring on death through heart attacks. No, the gene is not robust to mutations, and I can’t understand where Noble’s statement comes from. It appears to be wrong. (I am not attributing it to Ball here.)

More:

Classic views of evolution should also be questioned. Evolution is often regarded as “a slow affair of letting random mutations change one amino acid for another and seeing what effect it produces”. But in fact, proteins are typically made up of several sections called modules — reshuffling, duplicating and tinkering with these modules is a common way to produce a useful new protein.

This is not a revision of the “classic” view of evolution because we’ve known about domain-swapping for some time. For example, the “antifreeze” proteins of Arctic and Antarctic fish can involve changes in the number of repeats in the enzyme trypsinogen, which normally has nothing to do with preventing freezing. Or, antifreeze proteins can arise via the cobbling together of bits of different known genes, or from bits of the unknown genes, or even be transferred via horizontal acquisition from other species.  Yes, this happens, but it’s not the only way by a long shot that evolution occurs. In fact, now that we can sequence DNA, we’ve found that many adaptive changes in organisms are based in changes in single genes or their regulatory regions, and not swapping of modules. Here’s a figure from a short and nice summary by Sarah Tishkoff from 2015 showing single genes involved in various adaptations that have occurred in one species—our own. The traits are given at the top, and the genes involved are by the symbols. For example, though several genes can involve skin pigmentation, mutations in just one of them can make a detectable change.

 

Global distribution of locally adaptive traits. Adaptation to diverse environments during human evolution has resulted in phenotypes that are at the extremes of the global distribution. Fumagalli et al. have integrated scans of natural selection and GWAS to identify genetic loci associated with adaptation to an Arctic environment.ILLUSTRATION: A. CUADRA/SCIENCE AND MEAGAN RUBEL/UNIV. OF PENNSYLVANIA

At any rate, we can nevertheless regard shuffling of domains (or even horizontal gene transfer from other species) as mutations, and the new mutated gene then evolves according to its effect on the replication of the gene. No revision of neo-Darwinism or its mathematics is involved. New ways of changing genes haven’t really revised our view of how evolution works, even when we’re talking about the “neutral theory” instead of natural selection.

These mutations, by the way, contra Noble, are still “random”—that is, they occur irrespective of whether they’d be useful in the new environment—and although they can make big changes in the organism’s physiology or appearance, can nevertheless evolve slowly.  A gene with a big effect need not evolve quickly, for the rate of evolution depends not on the effect on the organism’s appearance, physiology, and so on, but on its effect on the organisms’s reproductive capacity. And these things need not be correlated.

Later in the book, Ball grapples with the philosophical question of what makes an organism alive. Agency — the ability of an organism to bring about change to itself or its environment to achieve a goal — is the author’s central focus. Such agency, he argues, is attributable to whole organisms, not just to their genomes. Genes, proteins and processes such as evolution don’t have goals, but a person certainly does. So, too, do plants and bacteria, on more-simple levels — a bacterium might avoid some stimuli and be drawn to others, for instance. Dethroning the genome in this way contests the current standard thinking about biology, and I think that such a challenge is sorely needed.

Ball is not alone in calling for a drastic rethink of how scientists discuss biology. There has been a flurry of publications in this vein in the past year, written by me and others24. All outline reasons to redefine what genes do. All highlight the physiological processes by which organisms control their genomes. And all argue that agency and purpose are definitive characteristics of life that have been overlooked in conventional, gene-centric views of biology.

This passage verges on the teleological.  For surely organisms don’t have “goals” when they evolve.  If a mutation arises that increases the rate of replication of a gene form (say one increasing tolerance to low oxygen in humans living in the Himalaya), it will sweep through the population via natural selection. If it reduces oxygen binding, it will be kicked out of the population. Can we say that increased oxygen usage is a “goal”? No, it’s simply what happens, and I suspect there are other ways to adapt to high altitude, like getting darker skin. To characterize organisms as evolving to meet goals, as Noble implies here, is a gross misunderstanding of the process.

Yes, the organism is the “interactor”, as Dawkins puts it: the object whose interaction with its environment determines what gene mutations will be useful. But without the “replicator”—the genes in the genome—evolution cannot occur.  The whole process of adaptation, involving the interaction of a “random” process (mutation) and a “deterministic” one (natural selection), is what produces the appearance of purpose. But that doesn’t mean, at least in any sense with which we use the word, that “purpose” is what makes organisms alive.

But the appearance of “purpose” as a result of natural selection brings up another point, one that Dawkins makes—or so I remember.  I believe that he once defined life as “those entities that evolve by natural selection.”  I can’t be sure of that, but it’s as good a definition of life as any, as it involves organisms having replicators, interacting “bodies”, and differential reproduction. (According to that definition, by the way, viruses are alive.)  So if you connect natural selection with purpose, one might say, “Life consists of those organisms who have evolved to look as if as if they had a purpose.”  But I prefer Dawkins’s definition because it’s more fundamental.

At the end, Noble says that this “new view of life” will help us cure diseases more readily:

This burst of activity represents a frustrated thought that “it is time to become impatient with the old view”, as Ball says. Genetics alone cannot help us to understand and treat many of the diseases that cause the biggest health-care burdens, such as schizophrenia, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. These conditions are physiological at their core, the author points out — despite having genetic components, they are nonetheless caused by cellular processes going awry. Those holistic processes are what we must understand, if we are to find cures.

I haven’t heard anybody say that “genetics alone can help us treat complex diseases”. You don’t treat heart disease by looking for genes (though you can with some cancers.) But genetics can surely help! For genetic engineering is on the way, and at least some diseases, like sickle-cell anemia, will soon be “curable” by detecting the mutated genes in embryos or eggs and then fixing the mutation with CRISPR. And advancesin genetics are surely helping us cure cancer—see this article.  But of course some diseases, even those with a genetic component, need environmental interventions: so called “holistic” cures. There may, for example, be a genetically-based propensity to get strep throat. But if you get it, you don’t worry about genes, you take some penicillin or other antibiotic. (Curiously, the form of Streptococcus that causes strep throat doesn’t seem to have evolved resistance to the drug!)

Overall, I don’t see much new in Noble’s take on evolution—just a bunch of puffery and regurgitation of what we already know. Perhaps people need to know about this stuff in a popular book, but, after all, Noble’s piece was written for scientists, for it appears in Nature.

Despite repeated claims in the last few years that neo-Darwinism is moribund or even dead, it still refuses to lie down. Happy Darwin Day!

Addendum by Greg Mayer: For those interested in the distinction between the blueprint (wrong) and recipe (on the right track) analogies for the genome, I wrote a post explicating the difference, citing and quoting Richard, here at WEIT; the post also explains why the Wikipedia article about “Epigenetics” is definitionally wrong; see especially the link to this paper by David Haig.

Development is epigenetic by Greg Mayer One of the points I stress to students in my evolution class is that development is epigenetic: organisms develop from a less differentiated state to a more differentiated state. In modern terms, genes, the intraembryonic environment, and the extraembryonic environment interact to produce the organism through a sequence of stages going from an undeveloped to a mature state. . .
Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 6:15am

Today we finish off Athayde Tonhasca Júnior’s recent trip to Venice (the first part is here). His notes are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

One of the history’s delights is the opportunity to pull a thread of successive events that help us understand better today’s world. These fabulous bronze horses inside St Mark’s Basilica (the ones on the facade are replicas) were pilfered from Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, when the city was sacked by Frank crusaders and Venetians in 1204. The Fourth Crusade was kicked off by Pope Innocent III – an ironic name if ever there was one – who had no idea of the shitstorm he was unleashing. Despite his angry threats of excommunication, the Crusaders, who were supposed to go to Jerusalem, stormed Constantinople and massacred their Christian brethren in an orgy of rape, disembowelments and decapitations. The city was razed to the ground and the Byzantine Empire never recovered, becoming easy pickings for the invading Ottomans in 1453. For a cut of the profits, the Venetians provided transport and gave all the logistical support to Innocent’s road trip from hell – so you could say they are largely responsible for Constantinople becoming Istanbul. Incidentally, the Venetians had the perfect leader for this rapacious adventure: the nonagenarian and blind Doge Enrico Dandolo (you can read the details in Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune, an excellent account of Venice’s history). To this day, the Fourth Crusade is a sore subject for Orthodox Christians:

Another souvenir pinched from Constantinople: The Four Tetrarchs, probably depicting the four rulers that took over the Roman Empire in 293 AD. The Byzantines considered themselves Greek-speaking Romans (Romaioi), so Rome’s past was their past. Notice the mismatched foot in one of the figures; the original bit broke off when the statue was hacked away. The heel of the missing foot was discovered in 1960, and it’s on display in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum:

Some armies would go to war with their dull and ugly artillery pieces. Not the dazzling Venetians, as attested by this 1643 culverin (an early type of cannon).

The End. These pens in the Naval Museum were used by Napoleon Bonaparte to sign the treaty of Campo Formio on 17 October 1797, thus ending five years of war between the French Republic and the First Coalition. France and Austria swapped several bits of territory, redrawing the map of Europe. In the process, Venice was swallowed by Austria. After 1,100 years, La Serenissima was no more:

Venice’s resident population dropped below 50,000 in 2022, down from 66,000 20 years ago and 175,000 in the 1950s. Locals are leaving, fed up with mass tourism and the cost of living. But there’s plenty of old Venice still left:

Rotund tourists may struggle in a calle stretta (a narrow alley; calle Varisco is 53 cm wide). These alleys branch out in every direction and don’t lead you to any specific place; they are used by residents to get home. Many of these thoroughfares are not on the maps and are beyond phone signal reach, so good luck finding your way. While you wander around baffled and disorientated, stay on good terms with the natives by keeping to the right and in a single queue:

A helpful but scarce street sign: ‘the whores’ gate’, where presumedly clients were serviced while standing up against the calle‘s walls:

Venice’s historic centre comprises 121 islands linked by 435 bridges. Shopping, public transport, ambulances, rubbish collection, home delivery, postal service and everything else depend on the canals network:

Having a go at describing our wine during a midday victualling: meandering, medium-bodied, bordering on the reckless at the quantum level. Hints of peach-pits, boysenberries and biodynamic hand-cultivated cacao from a coastal Tuscan villa; cleansing, metallic tannin waltzing with sweet-sour rosehip and balsamic vinegar; co-habiting with sumptuousness that does not bully a goat spleen escabeche. An approachable companion for self-medication any time of day (h/t many sources). Ok, I was a little off. Some wine people must have great fun composing these pretentious servings of tripe. In rural Italy, you can’t go wrong by ordering description-free vino della casa (house wine). It may come in a faceless bottle or jug but is invariably good. No respectable restaurant will risk its reputation with the locals – never mind tourists passing by – by offering plonk. That principle doesn’t apply to big cities:

  You can eat well and not be ripped off in Venice – or anywhere else. Stay clear of tourist hangouts, bypass the dreadful menù fisso (fixed price but little choice) and don’t trust reviews – most of them are written by people used to overcooked pasta and abominations such as pineapple pizzas and spaghetti Bolognese. Instead, follow the locals. We had two excellent meals in this unassuming osteria, which is patronised by neighbours and vaporetto (public waterbus) workers.

The superb Renaissance-kitsch Torre dell’Orologio (Clock Tower), built in 1496/1497. The two bronze figures on top are hinged at the waist to strike the bell on the hour. They are supposed to be shepherds, but are known colloquially and politically-incorrectly (Italians are not oversensitive about these matters) as ‘the Moors’ because of their dark patina. Below them is the winged lion of St. Mark, followed by Virgin Mary with her offspring flanked by two blue panels: the left shows the time in Roman numerals, while the right indicates 5-min intervals in Arabic numerals. Finally, the clock, displaying the time, the phase of the moon, and the dominant sign of the Zodiac. The clock’s mechanism beats any Casio: it has been working since 1753:

Categories: Science

Jon Haidt goes after DEI

Sat, 02/10/2024 - 9:00am

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  Jon Haidt has commented below (comment #19) and notes that the UnHerd characterization of his talk is incorrect; in particular he doesn’t oppose students chanting “Intifada” and  “From the River to the Sea,”  but (like me) deplores the hypocrisy of punishing some speech and not other speech. He also recommends that readers watch his video (here), and notes two time stamps for when he talks about telos and identitarianism.  I should have listened to his talk, but I couldn’t find it and I assumed that the UnHerd talk was correct. My apologies to Jon.

I should add that while discussing this correction, Jon noted that he does feel that a university should have policies against calling directly for violence, even if it those calls are protected by the First Amendment.  Here we differ, as I think calls for violence should be permissible except under the stipulations of the courts: they become impermissible if they are not likely to incite imminent lawless violence. If they aren’t likely to do this, I’d say to allow them; Jon would apparently disagree.

_____________________

A lot of academics who haven’t previously gone after DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the philosophy and actions of DEI.  New critics include Steve Pinker, who, in his Boston Globe article on how to fix the problems of Harvard, included “Disempowering DEI” as one of the five things that needed attention. To wit:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

I’ve always opposed DEI because, though its proponents may be well meaning, the acronym has now become synonymous with compelled speech, attacks on freedom of speech (via “hate speech”), authoritarianism, policing of speech, censorship, and racism. By the latter I don’t just mean racism against “majority” groups, but, recently, the anti-Semitism growing on college campuses. I’m convinced that hatred of Jews is somewhat egged on by DEIers, who, with their view that Jews are “privileged” and “white adjacent”, while their opponents are oppressed people of color, have promoted antisemitism on campus.  And schools like my own are reluctant to punish those who demonstrate against Israel even when those protestors violate college regulations. It doesn’t looks good to sanction people who demonstrate on behalf of “the oppressed.”

Now social psychologist Jon Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, has come out against DEI as well. Previously he kept pretty quiet on the issue, though he often spoke out favoring the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice as the mission of a university (see his famous talk at Duke here). But now he’s at bat against DEI in the UnHerd article below (click to read). Note the strong title: abolishing DEI will “save academia.” It’s a short piece, based on a talk at UNC, which I haven’t found.

Here are two excerpts, which are, in effect, most of the piece:

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom.

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated.

. . . He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities. He continued:

Privileged people have power. Power is evil. They use their power to oppress the good people. What a sick thing to teach 18-year-olds coming into college in a multi-ethnic democracy. But that’s what we’ve been doing, especially at elite college campuses since 2014-2015, since the DEI revolution… The inevitable outcome in terms of antisemitism is Jews are white, Jews are oppressors, it’s okay to kill Jews because that’s just resistance.

Haidt argued that things have gotten so bad they are beyond repair and need to be jettisoned. Since many universities are not likely to take those steps on their own, they may have to be pressured to do so. Haidt even suggested that Republican legislatures should intervene in running public US universities as a means of “counter-pressure” against universities.

“I think we’ve dug ourselves in a hole, especially with the studies departments, where there is no way to reform them [but] from the outside,” Haidt said.

There’s no doubt DEI is divisive, and I’ve often thought that the “D” really stood for “divisiveness” and the “E” for “exclusion”, for DEI encourages racial and gender animosity. It does not bring people together, but rather encourages people to not only see their gender or race as the most important part of their character but, importantly, sets up a hierarchy of oppression, which is inherently divisive.

It’s intriguing that Haidt’s mind seem to have been changed largely by “the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews.” In saying that, he’s also saying that universities shouldn’t have complete free speech—at least the kind that allows genocidal slogans against the Jews. (These would be chants like “Globalize the intifada” or “From the river to the sea, yadda, yadda.”) If he’s really saying that some kinds of speech are intolerable on campus, I wish he’d be clearer about what kind of speech he means, and who would police it.  After all, if Haidt really favors “Truth University” over “Social Justice University,” he must then feel that some kinds of speech are incompatible with seeking truth. My own view is that speech should be free, but the university has a right to set the times, places of speech, and to regulate rules of when speech violations university regulations by acting to actually harm the dissemination of knowledge. Finally universities must stipulate that permitted speakers can’t be deplatformed or shouted down.

But there remain good reasons to abolish DEI beyond the fact that it may encourage hatred of Jews (and the use of specified pronouns, which isn’t comparable at all).  Pinker gives some of them above.  If we want to get rid of illegal prejudice and bullying on campus, there can be an apparatus for doing that. But that’s not the same thing as DEI.

Given how deeply DEI has sunk its hooks into American universities, though, having huge budgets and armies of bureaucrats, fulfilling Pinker and Haidt’s call won’t be easy.

As for Republican legislatures helping run American universities, I know where Haidt’s coming from, but I’m not on board with that, either.

Categories: Science

Caturday felid trifecta: Cats who fetch; cat encounters a cake that looks like it; the Huddersfield Station cat dies; and lagniappe

Sat, 02/10/2024 - 7:30am

For some reason there’s been a spate of recent articles on why some cats fetch (I had one that did it, too). Click on the headlines below to read. I’ll give a short anser for each one.

From The Atlantic (link goes to archived version):

Their “byproduct” hypothesis:

Evolutionarily speaking, that sort of checks out. Fetching is just a sequence of four behaviors: looking, chasing, grab-biting, and returning. Versions of the first three are already built into predators’ classic hunting repertoire, says Kathryn Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute, who’s had her own fetching cat. Returning is perhaps the wild card. Christopher Dickman, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, told me that, as solitary creatures, cats have little natural incentive to share what they catch. He hasn’t spotted much retrieval behavior in the feline species he’s studied in nature—or in the half dozen house cats he’s had throughout his life

 

But cats already have some of the behavioral ingredients for carrying fetched cargo. As Sarah Ellis, the head of cat mental wellbeing and behavior at International Cat Care, points out, feline mothers bring live prey back to their kittens to teach them how to hunt, and cats of both sexes have been known to move their food to safer spots before chowing down. (Ellis has had multiple fetching cats.) Maybe, Dickman told me, as cats were repeatedly invited into human homes and praised for eliminating pests, some of their retrieval-esque behaviors were rewarded—and possibly amplified. House cats with access to the outdoors are sadly infamous for hauling home wild birds, rodents, amphibians, and reptiles. And for indoor-only cats, chasing a furry object, gnawing on it, and bringing it to a secure spot may playfully scratch a predatory itch that might otherwise go unsated.

From What Your Cat Wants:

They don’t know! But they also include a video of a fetching cat. Mine was like this: he never brought the fetched object all the way back to me.

So why do cats fetch? We don’t know! It is likely this behavior is part of the predatory sequence of behaviors. There are two parts to this behavior – the pursuit of the object when it is tossed, and the retrieval. Some cats seem to do both (the true fetchers), most cats will pursue moving objects (likely predatory behavior), and some cats will carry objects to home or their owner (including cats who like to bring home things like clothing and toys). As previously mentioned, bringing objects home could be related to bringing killed prey home for a safer place to consume it. However, in the case of fetching behavior, the retrieval seems more likely to be a “request” for the human to engage in more toy tossing! So perhaps this is a truly social play behavior rather than strictly predatory.

A pretty good fetch:

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A post shared by Mikel Delgado (@mikel.delgado)

From the BBC:

The research was first published in the science journal Scientific Reports.

Many cats instinctively like to play, the report says, and owners are being urged to think more about the types of activities they could do to keep their pets happy and active.

It found cats generally prefer to be in control of the game and do not require training to play.

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex School of Psychology, said: “Cats who initiated their fetching sessions played more enthusiastically with more retrievals and more fetching sessions per month.

“This perceived sense of control from the cat’s perspective may be beneficial for the cat’s welfare and the cat-owner relationship.

“I’d encourage owners to be receptive to the needs of their cat by responding to their preferences for play – not all cats will want to play fetch, but if they do, it’s likely that they will have their own particular way of doing so.”

The survey gathered information from 924 owners of 1,154 cats (994 mixed-breed and 160 purebred) that play fetch to better understand the behaviour.

The vast majority of cats (94.4%) showed an instinctive ability to play fetch from a young age, whether it was retrieving toys or common household items.

From Scientific American:

The fun hypothesis:

 In some instances, owners described a scenario in which they dropped or accidentally launched an object, and their cat spontaneously fetched it. In other accounts, domestic felines simply brought their owners a cat toy or other random item, which the human then tossed aside—and a throw-and-retrieve cycle began. “We had an overwhelming number of people say their cat was not trained to do this behavior,” says Jemma Forman, lead study researcher and a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex in England. “We even had some people say that their cats had trained them to play fetch.”

As a caveat, Serpell says humans are likely giving cats unconscious reinforcement by engaging with them in throwing an object in the first place, providing interaction and social reward. Contrary to popular sentiment, domestic cats are, in fact, very much attuned to their humans.

A good fetch of a tinfoil ball by a hairless cat (from the article above):

For your delectation, the Nature “Science Reports” story is here, and it’s also been covered by The Guardian, too.

Reader Jon Losos sent a photo of his own cat, Nelson, fetching a toy:

***************

This is bizarre but also funny. Someone had a cake made that looks just like their cat. Then they cut into its head in front of the moggy. . . . . .

Look at the cat’s expression!

******************

We met Felix, the Huddersfield Station Cat, in 2016. a moggy so famous that she has her own Wikipedia section along with another station cat, Bolt.   Here’s the short bit from Wikipedia:

The first station cat, Felix, joined the staff as a nine-week-old kitten in 2011. Since then she has patrolled the station to keep it free from rodents, and even has her own cat-flap to bypass the ticket barriers.  In 2016 Felix was promoted to Senior Pest Controller and local artist Rob Martin painted a portrait of her which now hangs in the station. In 2019 Transpennine Express named a Class 68 locomotive (68031) after Felix.

Felix was probably the most famous cat in Britain, and you can read the details about her in the sad article below announcing his death early last December:

A train station cat which became famous across the world has died.

Felix has been a pest controller at Huddersfield Station since 2011, but it was today confirmed that “she peacefully went to sleep” in the company of the station’s staff.

The moggy shot to fame after a Facebook page dedicated to her life was created by a commuter in 2015 and quickly attracted more than 170,000 followers.

She made several television appearances including on Good Morning Britain and her first biography for charity, Felix The Railway Cat, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Here’s the announcement of her death:

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved Felix.

On Sunday, she peacefully went to sleep, in the loving comfort of Angie Hunte (Station Manager) and Jacqui Cox (Station Team Leader).

We will miss her dearly pic.twitter.com/5ThAk5fzyW

— Felix and Bolt (@FelixhuddsCat) December 5, 2023

Here’s a video of the pre-mortem Felix:

You can find the Facebook page of Felix and Bolt here.

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Lagniappe: Reader Reese sent two photos of his cat Rocky:

Rocky likes to bathe while I fill the birdbath.

From Doc Bill: “Here’s a photo of Kink the Cat fetching “Mousie. 2007.”

h/t: Jon, Ginger K., Reeese, Pyers

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Sat, 02/10/2024 - 6:15am

Today we have some mountain photos (and a flower) by reader Jim Blilie. His narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here’s another set of my landscape photos for your consideration.

These are another set from Washington State, where I have lived most of my adult life. I moved here in 1984 to enjoy the outdoors and spent my 20s and 30s mountaineering, sea- and whitewater-kayaking, and back-country 3-pin skiing.  We still enjoy hiking; but my climbing and skiing days are long in the past. I have tried to make sure that none of these are repeats; but it’s possible one or two slipped through my review.

First, a summit shot, looking south, from Whitehorse Mountain, which is prominently visible from the northern Puget Sound area and looms above Darrington, Washington.  We made a winter ascent in February 1986.

Next is a shot of Mount Rainier from near Tacoma, Washington, taken in January 1990:

Also taken in January 1990, a shot of Lake Washington at sunset:

Climbers on the Easton Glacier on Mount Baker.  March 1990:

Aerial view of the crater of Mount Saint Helens, taken from a Cessna 72 (the old fashioned way), March 1990:

View of the rising moon and some islands from the top of Mount Constitution on Orcas Island, July 1990; Pentax A 400mm f/5.6 lens with matched 2X teleconverter:

View of the summit crest of Mount Rainier, taken on a climb in February 1988:

A view of Mount Adams, out current neighbor, from the north from the Goat Rocks Wilderness, October 1986:

Climbers on Desperation Peak in the eastern Olympic Mountains, July 1989:

Grass Widow flowers (Olsynium douglasii), taken on Mount Erie, near Anacortes, Washington, 1990:

Misty mountain ridges in the central Cascades, September 1990:

Finally, a ringer.  Me on the summit of Dome Peak, August 1986.  I did the Ptarmigan Traverse that month with a group of climbing friends, climbing seven peaks along the route:

All images are scanned Kodachrome 64 with minor global adjustments in Lightroom, except for the photo of Mount Rainier which is scanned Fujichrome.

Equipment:  Pentax ME Super and K-1000 camerasPentax M 20mm f/4 lens
Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens (this was a superb after-market lens)
Pentax A 400mm f/5.6 lens with matched 2X teleconverter
Pentax A 35-105mm f/3.5 lens
Could be one or two other Pentax M series lenses, not 100% sure

Categories: Science

Pinker on “What’s wrong with our universities”

Fri, 02/09/2024 - 10:45am

Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we’ll be discovering the challenges to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We’ll explore how questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit of truth within academic institutions. We’ll also uncover the story of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to combat these challenges.

Join us as we delve into policies protecting free speech, and the vital role of civil discourse in the academic community. Together, we’ll navigate the complex landscape of universities, grappling with the delicate balance between common knowledge and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The audio isn’t great, but you should be able to hear what’s said.

As background, you might first read Steve’s Boston Globe op-ed, “Steven Pinker’s five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” which is now free online (my take on it is here).  This was published before Claudine Gay was fired as President, and perhaps Harvard will now enact some of Pinker’s suggestions.  These include adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

I won’t summarize the video, as there’s a lot of stuff discussed here, and if you have a spare hour you can listen for yourself. In general, it deals with “cancel culture” and also goes through Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” and why he suggests a panoply of specific reforms.

h/t: Daniel

Categories: Science

Cornell University eliminates its Dean’s List of meritorious students

Fri, 02/09/2024 - 9:45am

If you’re not familiar with American colleges, the “dean’s list” is usually a list of all the students who get a high grade-point average during a year or a semester, an average above some cutoff that varies from school to school. You can tout “being on the Dean’s list” as an index of your academic merit, and it usually appears on your college transcript, something that you can show potential employers or graduate schools as a sign of your achievement.

But the creation of deans lists is waning for two reasons. First, with grade inflation, in many places the average grade is so high that nearly all students can get on the dean’s list. The average grade at Yale is an A, with the grade-point average being 3.7 out of 4. It’s 3.8 at Harvard—nearly everyone gets straight As.

The second reason is that ranking students in this way, by academic merit, is deemed to violate equity, as minority students (except for Asians) tend to get lower grades. The solution? Eliminate the rankings entirely, so that students who don’t do as well aren’t “stigmatized.” This is what just happened at Cornell, according to the student newspaper The Daily Sun. And the University explicitly gives “equity” as the rationale:

Click to read:

From the paper:

Starting Fall 2023, incoming Cornellians, including the Class of 2027, became ineligible to receive the Dean’s List distinction on their transcript.

The move away from the Dean’s List came after discussion within the Faculty Senate regarding equity concerns.

The Faculty Senate’s Resolution 182: Regarding the Award of Honors and Distinctions to Cornell’s Undergraduate Students, passed in May 2022, sought to create a more fair and equitable learning environment for students.

“[The proposal] is aimed at creating consistency across the undergraduate colleges and schools in the award of academic honors and distinctions and balancing recognition of high-achieving students against amelioration of an unhealthy level of competition at Cornell,” the Faculty Senate wrote in the resolution.

Cornell will officially stop listing the honor on student transcripts by Spring 2026, thereby leaving only two Ivy League universities — the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University — maintaining the tradition.

. . .Cornell’s seven undergraduate colleges each have their own set of requirements for students to earn a place on the Dean’s List, including different credit and GPA requirements. For example, The College of Architecture, Art and Planning requires a minimum GPA of 3.8, while the Nolan School of Hotel Administration requires only a 3.3. In the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, there are different GPA requirements for each class year, with first-year students needing a lower GPA than other students in the college.

When asked about the reasoning behind the Dean’s List requirements at each individual undergraduate college, Cornell and individual college administrations each declined to comment.

Note that the paper don’t mention grade inflation, nor does the University’s resolution to get rid of the dean’s list.

Oh, and there’s one more thing they’re eliminating, which I always thought was a good practice: listing the median grade (the grade that divides the students into two groups of equal size) on the transcript. This also helps graduate schools and potential employers deal with grade inflation, as they can see if a college is giving really high grades to everyone.

The removal of the Dean’s List comes in conjunction with Cornell’s decision to remove median grades from student transcripts, a similar measure previously used to show how well students performed in comparison with fellow students in each class.

“There’s a lot of pressure already on students, so this is just one less thing to worry about,” Tawfik said. “There are more important things to be focusing on.”

I can understand eliminating dean’s lists when they’re meaningless, as when grade inflation entitles every student to be on them (“all must have prizes”), but in general Cornell’s elimination simply reflects the trend in society to favor equity above meritocracy.  While I favor efforts to provide everyone with equal opportunity (a VERY hard task), the elimination of indices of merit will eventually trickle down to us all, making us unable to judge the qualifications of people whom we interact with: doctors, pilots, and so on.

Categories: Science

Columbia University rejects just one student group out of nine: the one opposing antisemitism

Fri, 02/09/2024 - 8:15am

Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people.  The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website.  Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).

Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:

Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.”  I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that.  But she grew up with Jews and with  knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:

Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.

The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”

She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.

Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.

On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.

But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.

What is that definition? Here it is from the IHRA, which also gives some examples:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”  

The Globe story continues:

Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks?  And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”?  You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive.  No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval.  The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.

Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”.  Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples).  And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did.  Click to read his site.

An excerpt:

Now, Columbia Law’s students are perfectly right to be vigilant about attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. Plenty of people of bad faith have been trying to disguise suppression of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian thought as concern about antisemitism. Colleges have been complicit and sometimes students are the ones advocating suppression.

But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.

I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.

So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clear before. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.

The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.

I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.

It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again.  Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?

Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):

Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.

We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.

Categories: Science

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