The Eichorn saga is sinking into the abyssal depths

Remember Justin Eichorn? The Minnesota Republican who was caught in a sting trying pick up 16 year old girls? This is what he looked like before his arrest.

Update: here’s his latest available photo:

Yikes. That man is not coping well. He’s also in even more trouble: he tried to get an accomplice to go to his apartment before the police, in order to get a gun he lied about, and to get rid of a laptop. They failed. The police haven’t yet said what was on the laptop, but I think the fact that he would try to hide the evidence is incriminating in itself.

You know, I don’t feel any need to erase my browser history if I’m ever arrested — it might be weird, and it might trigger a few WTFs, but there’s nothing illegal on it.

Another twist of the knife: Eichorn’s wife has filed for divorce. This guy has ruined his life.

I think Blue is a she

Blue is the lab mascot, a Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens, and after their last molt, they’ve acquired the dark blue and blue-green colors of a mature greenbottle blue tarantula, and maybe reached sexual maturity. I’ve been checking out those palps, and they look very feminine to me.

Let me know what you think.

Fortunately, Blue is a perfectly good name for a female. Or male. Or immature juvenile.

Columbia University’s shame

They should be ashamed by their cowardice. Trump threatened and Columbia caved.

The US president has made no secret of his intent to control what is studied, thought, and debated. His administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding sweeping changes, including placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department under “academic receivership” for five years, abolishing the university judicial board, and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the office of the president. Such unprecedented intervention is blatantly illegal and a wholesale attack on academic freedom and free speech. On Friday, Columbia capitulated.

It is an embarrassment to Columbia, of course, but the embarrassment is not Columbia’s alone. The use of federal funding threats to control universities should be a five-alarm fire for the thousands of other universities, and yet the response from the majority of academic leadership has been silence.

It is, ultimately, about the money. Trump has destroyed the autonomy of federal research agencies, which is what allows him to hold research funds hostage and exercise that kind of leverage over the curriculum and control faculty and students. That’s why spineless Columbia surrendered.

The reasons are understandable. If any one university speaks out, they are scared Trump would pull funding. The president of that university will have to see the place they love and the people they are responsible for gutted by a $50 or $100 or $400 million cut, either to federal grants or scholarships. What if speaking out will change nothing? Why risk the all-critical research of their science faculty, important scholarships for their students, for a statement that might lead to naught?

It seems to me that one approach universities could take to this threat is to not stand alone. Shouldn’t we all be standing together to resist. After all, it is illegal, everyone says, why isn’t everyone responding with lawsuits and threats of legal action? Columbia’s actions are going to have repercussions for all of us, because it’s crippling research.

The reason this is different is because the government is attacking free speech and free inquiry itself. The current collective cowardice is self-defeating. Their refusal to stand together now only makes them more vulnerable in the future, and less credible when they say they are privately resisting. How can we trust they aren’t complying in advance, reshaping their curriculum and research dollars to avoid retribution? We can’t.

If university leaders, some of the most privileged people in our society, allow themselves to be bullied and blackmailed, and refuse to coordinate with each other on courage, how do we expect any other institutions – law firms, non-profits, businesses – to stand up?

Personally, I find the silence of the University of Minnesota worrying. Maybe they’re busy building a case to defend against Trumpian attacks? Or maybe there are a bunch of lawyers on the board of regents holding everyone back.

I should acknowledge that one provost of Columbia has spoken out strongly against the assault on academic freedom — in the pages of the New York Times, no less. Usually the NYT is doing their best to provide cover, in the form of ambiguity and weasel wording, for Republicans, so this was a surprise.

The Trump administration has sought to impose its will on higher education by withdrawing more than a billion dollars of funding from some universities and threatening others with similar punishment. It has sought to deport student protesters who are legal residents. All this represents a fundamental assault on the values and functioning of our university system. Columbia and Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 and America’s first true research university, may be only the first to feel the effects of this needless use of a sledgehammer.

Columbia’s capitulation last week to the Trump administration, in which it agreed to a number of demands in order to restore federal funding, obliterates its leadership in defending free inquiry. If Columbia allows authoritarian-minded leaders to dictate what we can teach, then the federal government will dictate what we can read, what books we may have in our libraries, what art we can display, what problems scientists can explore. Then, we are no longer a free university.

They don’t want a free university! Having a bunch of intelligent, articulate people who can criticize the dumbass-in-chief and his wicked, self-destructive policies is not desirable. He loves the uneducated, remember!

Today, the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means, and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.

Collective resistance sounds like a good plan. Who is organizing it? Not the Democratic party, that’s for sure.

Is this too much of an inside joke?

This little meme was posted by Will Stancil. I’m wondering if I’m just too online, because I got the joke immediately.

In case you haven’t heard of him (you live a blessed life), Steve Sailer is a notorious and ubiquitous racist and far right pundit who haunts many comment sections. Well, he would be ubiquitous, if reasonable people didn’t insta-block him as soon as he tries to intrude on a conversation. All you really need to know about him is this bit from his wikipedia page.

Sailer, along with Charles Murray and John McGinnis, was described as an “evolutionary conservative” in a 1999 National Review cover story by John O’Sullivan. Sailer’s work has frequently appeared at Taki’s Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review. He used the phrase “Invade the World, Invite the World” in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.

Sailer’s January 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum”, published in The American Conservative, argued that nation building in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker.

He’s not an “evolutionary conservative”: although he likes to claim the authority of biology and evolution in his pronouncements about race, he’s really just a guy with an MBA in marketing. He knows nothing about science.

Anyway, what made me laugh about the little cartoon is that I’ve been using the fact of finding Sailer babbling in a thread as analogous to the site flying the black death quarantine flag — back away quickly and never return. There’s something wrong with a site that tolerates his disease. It’s why I shun Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen and Razib Khan, and that Steven Pinker would actually publish his poison is another nail in his coffin.

The fascist wrecking ball is here

The historians all saw this coming. In a prophetic post from long long ago (2023), Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains the authoritarian playbook, and it all starts with stifling the universities.

As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it’s worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don’t only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.

She then reviews the strategies used by tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, César Ruiz Danyau, and Ron DeSantis, who all cracked down hard on the universities. Their usual approach is to declare themselves the guardians of public morality, while deploring the licentiousness and depravity going on with young people in college (an idea that can only be fostered if you’re totally ignorant of what’s going on in college — most of my students are more worried about grades, social rank, and what they’re going to do after they graduate.) Of course LGBTQ students are great scapegoats, but only if your imagination is unfettered by reality.

Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of “public trusts” run by Orbán cronies.

LGBTQ students are even more worried about the future than our cis-het students. The authoritarian impulse is always to find the most threatened minority and bully them as an example to everyone else. They must destroy anyone who deviates from the mandatory, uniform pattern of behavior that the dictator demands…which means they must accuse both variations from the required breeder lifestyle and those who think seriously about the cultural consequences of our actions of being agents of chaos.

Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly targeted as agents of the destruction of family, decency, and nation as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán.

Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.

This was all written before the presidential election, at a time when many of us were pretty confident that the electorate couldn’t possibly put a criminal grifter in charge. Ha ha ha, we were so innocent.

New Mastodon server!

For those who care, I’ve switched my Mastodon server. I’m now @pzmyers@freethought.online.

HJ Hornbeck set this up for us a few years ago, but I didn’t bother to move at the time, but now I’ve made the shift. This server has been open for business for a while now, and is currently kind of empty (it’s me and HJ), but if anyone else is looking for a Mastodon instance to try out, come on over.

Don’t visit America

Warning: cancel your travel plans. The US is not a viable destination anymore.

Read this account by a Canadian professor who was trying to give a lecture in this country.

So much bureaucracy. So much confusion. So many intrusions into privacy. He didn’t make it to his talk, and had to struggle to get out of the us.

Stay home. Don’t come here. Maybe if we overcome these horrible people and make some steps to recover, then we’ll deserve your company.

They hate libraries, too

If this weren’t so horrifying, it would be ridiculous. Trump & Co. want to eliminate federal support for libraries.

When President Trump recently proposed eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), librarians and educators voiced outrage, confusion and fear. Soon afterward, the appointment of Keith E Sonderling as acting director of IMLS highlighted the administration’s intention to reshape the agency’s priorities toward “promoting American exceptionalism” and cultivating “patriotism”.

This is where Moms for Liberty and all those reactionary assholes who get worked up about drag queen story hour have gotten us. They’ve long wanted to police the content of libraries, so why not go all the way and get rid of them altogether? Especially since librarians tend to be sticklers for the free dissemination of knowledge.

They’re trying to close the Department of Education, too. So their vision of the future is no schools, no libraries, and every woman staying home and homeschooling their swarm of kids using conservatively approved materials. I guess they’ll plan on recruiting the scientists and engineers and medical professionals society needs from abroad…except that they hate immigrants, too.

What libraries we have left will be propaganda outlets. This whole insane notion of “American exceptionalism” has poisoned our country and wrecked our ability to cooperate and collaborate with everyone else in the world, and now it’s official American policy.

I’m not at all happy to be finding myself living in one of those dystopian YA novels.