Race-baiting is alive and well at UMM

The University of Minnesota Morris is a liberal arts university — that means that we teach a wide curriculum in which students are expected to graduate with a broad background. Our science students are expected to also get at least an introduction to the humanities and social sciences, and even within biology, we expect that our graduates will get training in both molecular biology and ecology (which is, of course, not as much of a reach as you might think). Our student body also tends to be rather more politically liberal and progressive than the community we’re imbedded within, although that is not a prerequisite for the liberal arts. We do have conservative students here — I expect that the majority are more conservative than I am — but they also trend towards being more the reasonable, rational, educated sort of conservative. Not the kind you’ll see on Fox News, and most unfortunately, not the kind who are likely to get elected to the Republican party.

This is not a story about any of those students. This is about our wingnutty embarrassments. We do have a few of them.

The embarrassments have a weekly student paper of their own, The North Star. We also have a regular campus weekly, the University Register. The Register is the paper we groan over; it’s student run, it’s sometimes terrible, but at least it is representative and sometimes does a good job. The North Star is a disgrace — its one virtue is that it makes the Register look professional. We’ve tolerated the North Star despite its inanity because hey, at least it’s sucking in money from external conservative organizations, and it does a fabulous job of demonstrating the ethical bankruptcy of movement conservativism. But now they’ve stepped way over the line. Their latest crusade is basically promoting racial hatred and discrimination, and I’m ashamed to see their drivel distributed on campus.

Their “new” game — it’s actually old and tired, so add total lack of originality to their sins — is “satirizing” racism. You’d think students at a liberal arts university would understand the actual meaning of satire, but they don’t, despite writing a sloppy disclaimer in their latest issue pronouncing everything they do as satire.

Here’s their most recent exercise in creativity: selling “Affirmative Action cookies,” that old game. White people are offered cookies for $5, while minority students get a discount or are even given money to take a cookie. One incident with John Geiger, the right-wing genius in charge of this demonstration, was described in today’s Register.

Mr Geiger assured me ever so sweetly that an undisclosed portion of all proceeds would go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr Geiger pointed to my Native/female/LGBT friend and roommate standing next to me, she’s probably struggled so much, she could really use a cookie. He then proceeded to giver the cookie, and pay her $2.50, stating, though you’re taking proceeds from the NAACP, you probably struggled $2.50 more than them. How benevolent.

Nauseatingly patronizing, more like.

We are a university in the middle of a very white, very rural part of the country. We have been working hard to open the doors to a more diverse student body; we waive tuition to American Indian students, we want a more representative sampling of what America actually looks like, so we actively recruit students from underserved populations, so we have a large proportion of first generation college students and students on financial aid. We have had disgraceful racial incidents in the past — the Halloween practical “joke” in 1993 by our former wrestling coach Frank Pelegri is still a mark of shame — and we struggle to make this a more inclusive place. Having a group of young Republican assholes-in-training mocking our minority students is not a step forward.

Worse, they have a “satirical” series in their paper in which they call out various faculty and administrators for not doing enough to promote equality and combat racism. These are known progressive workers at our university, and are actually already working hard to create a more inclusive space — so apparently, if this is satire, they’re trying to mock leaders of our non-discriminatory policies, and are apparently opposing the encouragement and acceptance of minority students on campus. And this has taken a particularly vile turn.

On page 9 of the latest issue, they have…

Jesus, it disgusts me to even say it.

…a crime scene photo of Trayvon Martin’s dead face, with the caption Trayvon Martin, victim of racism and fascism, and what does [administrator] have to say about it? Nothing. Not a single thing.

And with that, they have crossed a line. Free speech is one thing, making light of murder and claiming that our chancellor of student affairs excuses it is another. Using dead black boys to “satirize” equality is contemptible. I would advocate the disposal of their flyers if the Ku Klux Klan started papering our campus, and likewise, the North Star has worn out its welcome and must go. Treat their scattered papers as hate-filled trash and dispose of it appropriately.

Not that it will help much. I’ve been told by one of our students that they’ve made arrangements with our town newspaper, the Sun Tribune, to have their evil rag distributed with that paper every week. I guess I won’t be reading that paper anymore, either, if they’re endorsing this kind of racism. And I guess the community will now get the idea that our university endorses racism, thanks to the racist idiots publishing the North Star.

This is currently our university’s shame. The measure of our commitment to equality will be determined by how we deal with it.

Time for the professional societies to take a stand on Burzynski

The 4th Quadrennial Meeting of the World Federation of Neuro-Oncology is meeting right now in San Francisco, and guess who is presenting there? There are four papers being presented by those criminal frauds of the Burzynski Clinic.

They sure can talk the science talk, can’t they? And they go through all the motions of attending and presenting at meetings of the Society for Neuro-Oncology, which I’m sure looks formidable to the rubes, but when you look at the results of recent reviews of their facilities and protocols (or read the summary in USA Today), they don’t walk the science walk. Read about the patients, or the story of the Burzynski scam. For over thirty years, he has been skating at the edge of credibility by carrying out the rituals of science without going the next step and actually testing his claims, getting rich off desperate people and killing them with bad therapies and sloppy protocols.

I know what these meetings are like. They will be full of professionals in nice dresses and conservative ties, and they will be talking shop and taking notes on the interesting presentations, and I know exactly how they will respond to Burzynskiites: they are beneath them, they will roll their eyes as they skip their talks, and they might grumble a bit at the bar afterwards. And that’s about it. I’ve seen it when creationists get their work into poster sessions at non-peer-reviewed science meetings.

But these guys are worse than creationists. These are con artists giving false hope to dangerously ill patients, using organizations like the SNO as a façade to bilk people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and skirting on the proper protocols to give the illusion that they’re doing legitimate science.

It is a huge ethical problem for these societies to provide cover for quacks. I would hope that, at the very least, attendees take time to read the facts about Burzynski and give these con artists a hard time in public; but more significantly, I think the only appropriate thing for the Society for Neuro-Oncology to do is to kick the bastards out. Don’t let them take shelter under your wing any more.

Sexy T-rex meets lecherous creationist

Charlie Stross has written a story, A Bird in Hand, which rather pushes a few boundaries. It’s about dinosaurs and sodomy, as the author’s backstory explains. And as everyone knows, every story is improved by adding one or the other of dinosaurs and sodomy, so it can’t help but be even better if you add both.

A note of caution, though: Charlie is really, really good at spinning out all the latest scientific buzzwords and deep molecular biological concepts into an extraordinarily plausible-sounding mechanism for rapidly recreating a dinosaur — it’s much, much better than Crichton’s painfully silly and superficial dino-blood-from-mosquitoes-spliced-with-frog-DNA BS — but I was a bit hung up on poking holes in it. It won’t be quite that easy, and it rather glibly elides all the trans-acting variations that have arisen in 70 million years and the magnitude of the developmental changes. But still, if we ever do manage to rebuild a quasi-dinosaur from avian stock, that’ll be sort of the approach that will be taken, I suspect. Just amplify the difficulty a few thousand fold.

Also, it’s way too technical to survive in the movie treatment.

MOOCs don’t work?

But don’t worry! It’s not the fault of the visionaries, like Sebastian Thrum, who have been promoting the use of Massive Open Online Courses. No, we know where the problem lies: in those darn students.

After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption.  Thrun told Fast Company that the experiment failed because the students were not “ideal”.  The “godfather of free online education” says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU,“were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit.” It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing. Thrun has the right to fail. That’s just business. But he shouldn’t have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business.

The article makes two major points: that MOOCs neglect issues of class and race and therefore are poor educational tools for precisely the people who would benefit most from free education resources, and we’ve been experimenting on poor and diverse students with these machine-based cheap teaching methods.

Man, I wish all of my classes were stocked with nothing but ideal students.

That’s not very friendly

Hemant is off taking care of personal business, so I guess he didn’t notice this rather unpleasant guest post that is celebrating a decapitation. Islamists in Syria killed the wrong person, one of their own allies…so now we’re supposed to celebrate brutal murder and bloody mutilation, as long as the right guy was murdered and mutilated.

Indiscriminate cruelty and slaughter has long been a way of life for these types. I guess I’m supposed to be sad when it becomes a way of death for them too, but for once I’ll nod along in agreement with Jesus, who is said to have stated the inevitability of violence begetting violence pretty succinctly: “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”

Mohammed Fares was another Islamist boil on the ass of humanity. It’s an unpleasant procedure, but boils need to be lanced. Or beheaded — same thing.

No. The dead man might have been the most evil creature on the planet, a terrible, awful person who would have spread more terror if he’d lived, but let’s not dehumanize people by calling them diseases and asking for more death and using the Bible to justify violence. You know who else does that, right? Hint: it shouldn’t be atheists.

Wait. Sometimes Christians get it right, too.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Step back, and look at this violent planet

My last article triggered a great deal of furious response. Some of it was outrageously stupid: this one, in particular, is the frontrunner for blithering idiocy.

Sometimes I wonder if PZ Myers is capable of empathy at all. This anti-war message, coming ironically from someone who has essentially declared war on others to promote his own values, is more insulting to veterans than to decision-makers, all the while dressing itself as morally righteous.

You don’t need to be pro-war to be pro-veterans, but it is especially abhorrent to chastise others for fighting for what they value when you insist that anyone who doesn’t fight for what YOU value is the enemy.

Right. Because what I do when I disagree with someone is conscript an army of riflemen and shoot them, followed by blowing up their house and bankrupting their country. But let me ignore the truly stupid comments, of which there were so many, and talk a bit about the one rather more intelligent rebuttal.

This is the argument of the form, “What about Nazi Germany, and the atrocities they were committing?” Another good example is “What about the Confederate States and slavery?” And I have to agree — the world is an uncoordinated, tragically short-sighted mess, and all too often we let horrendous circumstances accumulate until suddenly we’re confronted with a situation so dire that only violence can resolve it. We could not let genocide continue or slavery to persist, and we let the problems smolder until we reached a breaking point. My argument is not that we should have laid down our arms and let Jews be murdered or blacks languish in servitude, but that in every case war is a belated and expensive solution, and always a mistake. Sometimes we’re stuck with going to war, because we are stupid. Because we often lack the international tools to stop destructive behavior any other way.

Another point: it’s easy to damn the CSA and the Nazis. Are Americans as willing to recognize the evil violence we perpetrate? If we agree that it was acceptable for us to use violence to stop the Holocaust or slavery, are we also willing to concede that therefore it is acceptable for others to use violence against us, to stop the drones, to end our nuclear threat, to stop our meddling in other countries? I don’t think so, and at least I’m consistent in saying that violence doesn’t solve the problem. How are you going to justify other wars, where good and evil are not so clear? Was the Vietnam War a just war? The Franco-Prussian War? The Thirty Years War? The Peloponnesian War?

And finally, step back and back and back. Take a human perspective for a change, rather than a nationalistic one.

We sent young men, little more than boys, to slaughter other young men in Europe and in the South. Did the German soldiers have mothers? Did the Southerners? Did most of them go to war telling themselves they must preserve the right to murder Jews or blacks? Most of them, on both sides, were doing what they thought they must to defend the homeland, to promote their way of life, and to be men of honor. On both sides. Both sides were absolutely convinced that they were in the right, and so we had two large masses of people flailing viciously at each other until one side or the other collapsed in submission, and I’m sorry, victory was not determined by who was right, who was fairer to humanity, who had the most noble values. It was a contest where right was determined by bloody, brutal might.

How can you say that the soldiers of one side deserve honor and the other does not? And if you’re going to claim that both deserve respect, than what a bloody stupid flailing exercise in futility war is.

You can obviously state that there is a difference in cause: fighting for the right to enslave or kill some of your own citizens, or to enslave or kill your neighbors, is clearly an unethical, even evil, goal. But you do not persuade people to live ethical lives by killing them, or shooting their neighbors. We do not seek to convince people at gunpoint, but only to stop them from carrying out criminal action. And unless you are prepared to police the planet with a gun, that is not a satisfactory solution — a lasting peace can only come from a long-term effort at education and equality, not a burst of gunfire.

But if you’re going to equate education and argument with gunfire and militarism, well then, we’re back to the idiot I quoted at the beginning.

Other good perspectives: Ta-Nehisi Coates pointing out the Civil War was just one flash point in a long smoldering human failure. And good god, read about the Battle of the Somme. There is no moral justification for that slaughter.

Who deserves honor?

Today is the day when nations around the world pause to celebrate their most colossal failures, the events that killed the greatest numbers of their citizens, that broke and crippled their men after they’d been intentionally trained to dehumanize other human beings. We love to take our young people, especially our young men and boys, and grind them up in bloody battles, and then once a year we remind ourselves of what we do, and we congratulate people for it. Dulce et decorum est pro fucking patria mori and all that.

Meanwhile, our veterans hospitals are crumbling (and desperately needed) and we talk about more wars with Iran or whoever crossed us most recently, and doesn’t have nuclear weapons with which to smack us back. But we’ll go to all the effort of saying “Thanks, gramps” to people who suffered in terror and terrified other sufferers right back. All so a few people can get richer, and so politicians can thump their chests and claim to be braver than other politicians.

I think the only way to honor veterans of war is to make sure there are no more veterans. They are not heroes, but victims. There is nothing brave or heroic about picking up a gun and threatening to kill someone for a matter of principle, or even worse, because someone else is ordering you to do so — and the repercussions of celebrating violence tear our society apart.

For example, four women in Dallas met for their state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America — a quiet lunch in a local restaurant. Texas gun advocates got word of the meeting, and gathered in the parking lot outside.

violentmen

Brave heroes, all. In what world could such a gathering, intending to intimidate unarmed mothers, occur without the men involved withering in shame and guilt? Our world, obviously, where righteous terror with weapons in hand is celebrated. Perhaps these men will meet again in years to come, to remember the honor of being among the heroes who drew their weapons in the parking lot of the Blue Mesa Grill in 2013.

Just like right now, we honor those who carried arms against the young men of other countries, where right now, citizens honor those who carried arms to resist our young men. When are we going to wake up and realize that this is all madness, that it’s not a point of pride to be trained to kill, that we gain nothing and lose all when we settle disagreements with threats of lethal force.

How can we stop? Perhaps it would help to celebrate the right heroes.

I was horrified by this story of the Nazi scientific enterprise. The Nazi regime killed millions, members of despised ethnic groups, gays, and political dissidents, and some of their bodies were appropriated by the science establishment for medical studies. As the article reveals, sometimes scientists would go out to the prisons and mark certain individuals as desirable for their research; one, for instance, wanted to study the effects of stress on the menstrual cycle, so young women in a state of terror for their lives were particularly desirable (these are the studies our Republicans now cite when they want to claim that raped women don’t get pregnant!). It’s a terrible tale of scientists closing their eyes to the consequences of their work, and worse, actively participating in murder.

It tells of a young couple, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, who worked for the resistance against the Nazis, were caught and executed, he by hanging, she by the guillotine, and their bodies ended up on the anatomy table. Charlotte Pommer, a medical school graduate working as an assistant in the Institute of Anatomy, walked in to the lab to work and recognized the bodies waiting for her.

“I was paralyzed,” Pommer later wrote of the sight of the bodies. “I could hardly perform my task as an assistant to Professor Stieve, who did his scientific study as always with the greatest diligence. I could barely follow.”

Pommer was 28. Libertas Schulze-Boysen was 29 when she died. In her last letter to her mother, she said she’d asked for her body to go to her family. “Don’t fret about things that possibly could have been done, this or the other,” she wrote. “If you can, bury me in a beautiful place amid sunny nature.”

Pommer stopped working for Stieve—and left the field of anatomy—because of what she saw that day in his laboratory. She went on to help resist the Nazis herself, by hiding the child of a man who participated in the “July Plot” to assassinate Hitler in 1944. In the spring of 1945, just before the war’s end, Pommer was herself sent to prison.

So on this Veterans Day, I choose to honor the conscientious objectors and the Charlotte Pommers of the world, rather than the participants in war. They are the real heroes, the ones who made the greatest sacrifices to better humanity.

Meanwhile, look at what the media find important today: the poppy on Google UK’s search page isn’t big enough. But Bing puts a big photo of a poppy on their search page. Jesus fuck, millions dead in wasteful war and the big issue today is whether a photo of a flower is big enough to honor them properly.

I’ll tell you the answer: no, it isn’t.

I think I’ve forgotten how to play air guitar

The 1970s. Hanging out with my buddies after school. Driving around, trying to look grown up. This song comes on, we immediately turn up the radio to the loudest volume, and we’re all playing air guitar. Now it’s being played in a concert hall, for President Obama, with Heart doing the honors? (They rock it well, but I missed the rawness of Robert Plant’s voice.) I’m feeling old.

That song came out when Richard Nixon was president. I hope his corpse is crying bloody tears as the vibrations shake his tomb.

(via 3 Quarks Daily)

It’s the silences, the neglect, the moving on to more important matters

What if the National Association of Science Writers convened a panel on sexual harassment and discrimination, and no one cared? This report on sexual harassment and science writing at NASW is strangely, delicately neglectful, from the beginning where it irrelevantly claims that the Bora Zivkovic story no longer dominates science blogs (So has sexual harassment vanished? Or should we be asking where it will rise up again?), to the bizarrely abrupt segue in which they “Return You to Our Regularly Scheduled Program”, which is all about calculating the number of habitable worlds in the galaxy and more self-promoting fluff from SETI. Apparently, the concerns of women in science is of dwindling concern and a distraction from the Important Subjects of Speculative Astronomy.

The middle is equally weird. It has two sections: Hearing from Women, a two paragraph summary of what the women on the panel said, followed by Hearing from Men, with four paragraphs dedicated to the reactions (admittedly sympathetic) of the men in the audience, which are described as “some of the most powerful and significant statements”. At least the women’s section closed with an ironic comment: “The medical profession is now also heavily female, she [Ginger Campbell] said, but there, too, invisibility is everywhere.” How true that is.

I would like to have read more about “Hearing from Women”, but not only could the writer not be troubled to include more of the women’s statements, but she didn’t even bother to link to any of the panelists. I can correct that, at least: Christie Aschwanden, Deborah Blum, Florence Williams, Kate Prengaman, Kathleen Raven, Maryn McKenna, and Emily Willingham. Isn’t that odd that an article purportedly about this panel didn’t even link to the panelists’ professional pages, neglected to even name one of them, yet still made that special effort to capture men’s opinions on it?

You should read Emily Willingham’s assessment of the article. It’s not at all flattering.

Start looking for the invisible women, and it’s amazing how often you can find these curious omissions. Here, for instance, is a student at Michigan State plugging the virtues of social media for advancing your career in science (and I agree with him!), but he’s especially promoting reddit as a tool…which is problematic if you’re a woman, or have a reputation as a feminist. He touts reddit as the “best bang for the buck” for “thousands of young men and women” and obliviously shows this graph of internet readers who use reddit, titled “Young males are especially likely to use reddit.”

Chart showing that many more men than women use reddit

Apparently we can just ignore the pale blue bars that show that women represent somewhere less than a third of the audience you’ll reach on reddit. We’re not even going to notice the discrepancy, even if it leaps out at you as the most significant factor illustrated by the chart, and even if the title itself calls attention to it. The sexism problem on reddit isn’t even worth mentioning in an article about promoting science.

But that’s the big question that ought to be asked. Why isn’t it? Because invisible people aren’t as important.

Finally, here’s something that’s at least stirring and loud. It’s from a television show (as we all know, fictitious politicians are far more honest and bold than the real ones) in which a woman points out all the subtle signifiers the media and other politicians use to put her in her place.

Are you saying that Governor Reston is sexist?

Yes. I am. And it’s not just Governor Reston speaking in code about gender. It’s everyone, yourself included. The only reason we’re doing this interview in my house is because you requested it. This was your idea. And yet here you are, thanking me for inviting me into my “lovely home.” That’s what you say to the neighbor lady who baked you chocolate chip cookies. This pitcher of iced tea isn’t even mine. It’s what your producers set here. Why? Same reason you called me a “real live Cinderella story.” It reminds people that I’m a woman without using the word.

For you it’s an angle, and I get that, and I’m sure you think it’s innocuous, but guess what? It’s not. Don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking. You’re promoting stereotypes, James. You’re advancing this idea that women are weaker than men. You’re playing right into the hands of Reston and into the hands of every other imbecile who thinks a woman isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief.

Don’t you ever forget, ladies, that the most important parameter of your existence is how well you fit your stereotyped role. But don’t worry, no one will ever let you forget it.