Happy Darwin Day!

Charles_and_Catherine_Darwin,_1816,_by_Sharples

I thought I’d include a picture of the young Charles Darwin, since we are celebrating his birthday today. That’s him in 1816, when he was 6 or 7 years old, with his younger sister, Emily Catherine Darwin. And then I started wondering about that other person in the picture. Darwin’s sisters were an extremely important influence on his life, and I don’t know a heck of a lot about her; Darwin had four sisters and one brother, Erasmus, and most of the biographies say quite a bit about the older brother who preceded him to university, but the sisters seem to be background noise. It seems Catherine’s life was mainly about caring for her father’s household, and she married late in life, at age 53, only to die a few years later. You can read some of Catherine’s correspondence, and she seems to have been a lively and intelligent person.

According to Darwin’s autobiography, she was also the smart one.

I have been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. Caroline was extremely kind, clever and zealous; but she was too zealous in trying to improve me; for I clearly remember after this long interval of years, saying to myself when about to enter a room where she was-“What will she blame me for now?” and I made myself dogged so as not to care what she might say.

Roughly the same age, roughly the same intelligence, but Catherine Darwin didn’t have the opportunity to go to college or to sail on the Beagle. It makes the picture even more interesting: foreground and background, different fates, different choices, different chances. We know what will happen to those two children — Darwin will die in 1882, Catherine in 1866 — history does this odd thing of telescoping complex lives into just a few events, and I don’t know, but it makes me sad.

I am now resisting the temptation to pull out the old photos of my kids from that box in the closet.

My wife has enslaved me! She wants sex without babies!

The best part of this interview with James Taranto is watching the expressions of the women doing the interviewing. You can tell they’re struggling to maintain a professional attitude while dealing with this lunatic hunk of slime.

The social purpose of marriage is to control men.

I’m actually quite fond of women. You can call me Tarantosaurus sex.

Women can have sex without the fear of pregnancy, just like men can. And this is a bad thing?

Excuse me. I have to go drink a quart of epicac right now. I could just go read the Wall Street Journal, I suppose, but guzzling a potent emetic would have the same effect, and be less painful to my brain.

(via TBogg.)

Enid, Oklahoma: Where the Great Whites Gather

Gary’s Chicaro, a restaurant in Enid, is a Nigger-Free Zone — it says so right on their official t-shirt. It also prohibits faggots and welfare queens.

It’s been in business for 44 years.

It’s finally making the news because a white guy, Matt Gard, was denied service — he’s in a wheelchair. See, they also hate the handicapped! I am cynically amused, though, by the fact that the white-guy whistleblower was a regular at the restaurant for years, and only woke up to the nastiness of the place when it finally affected him directly.

The article on the Daily Kos about Gary’s Chicaro also sets up another contrast: it quotes from libertarians who argue that we don’t need civil rights laws imposing the heavy hand of the government, because the Magic Power of the Marketplace would shut down racist establishments that exclude a significant fraction of their customer base.

Still in business after 44 years, while serving only healthy heterosexual white men with jobs — good ol’ boys. In this way is libertarianism refuted.

Academic Mansplaining

Paige West has some excellent examples of mansplaining in 2013. She’s an expert in New Guinea culture, and it’s amazing how many men take the time to explain to her how New Guinea works.

But the best part, I think, is that the very first comment, from someone signing himself “Male Academic”, takes pains to explain at length that maybe this isn’t actually sexism. He’s obliviously mansplaining!

Let me just say that I, a man, have given a great many lectures in the past year, and I have had people disagree with me, sometimes vigorously, and I have had people add informed perspectives from their own expertise, but I have never had anyone treat me as a callow, infantile know-nothing who needed remedial instruction in my own field of expertise.

That would only happen if I had breasts sucking all the intelligence out of my skull, apparently.

Blow it out your ass, Sam Zell

That title is the mildest phrase that ran through my mind listening to billionaire real estate investor whining about how the rich are so fucking persecuted.

The one percent work harder, the one percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society

Good god. I’d like to introduce Sam Zell to my father, who spent most of his life living well below the poverty line, working overtime just to bring in enough money to feed his kids. He spent his years working with heavy machinery all day long (or sometime all night long, when he was stuck on a night shift); he would come home with hands caked with grease and oil, his back aching, often barely able to move until he had to rise for the next shift. He didn’t have a nice suit. He didn’t get to go out to expensive restaurants for over-priced meals. He didn’t fly first class everywhere — he didn’t fly anywhere, period.

And this smug asshole declares that he works so much harder than everyone else; that my father earned $10,000/year while Sam Zell gets billions because that’s what they deserve.

I’d like to introduce him to my father, but I can’t, because years of hard labor as a blue-collar grunt had their toll, and he’s dead.

Keep opening your mouths, you privileged coddled rich fuckwads. Marie Antoinette had nothing on the American upper class. If there is a revolution, what’s going to drive it is the arrogance of these parasites.

Another fine American export

The Olympics have always been political, always been tied to the nationalist aspirations of the host country. Always. Even when they are hosted in relatively benign countries, we should be wary of this attempt to hijack what ought to be simply an international athletic event into propaganda. (It’s not just the Olympics, either; what is it with people that they have to turn every sport into a municipal or regional battle, even when the athletes are basically mercenaries hired to represent Seattle or Detroit or Green Bay?)

But these Russian Olympics are something special. What if a country decided to show off by hosting an international event, and then all they managed to show off was incompetence, corruption, and hatred? Because, man, the Sochi Olympics are going to go down in the history books. Maybe they’ll pull out all the stops and get the hotels built in time; maybe they’ll be able to paper over the graft that’s used to get things done; but one thing they will not be able to hide, because they’re trying so hard to make it official policy, is their persecution of gay people.

Jeff Sharlet visited Russia, and came back with harrowing first-person accounts of assault and torture and abuse, as well as a description of how the apparatus of the state is being used to implement oppression.

The Russian closet has always been deep, but since last June, when the Duma began passing laws designed to shove Russia’s tiny out population back into it, the closet has been getting darker. The first law banned gay "propaganda," but it was written so as to leave the definition vague. It’s a mechanism of thought control, its target not so much gays as anybody the state declares gay; a virtual resurrection of Article 70 from the old Soviet system, forbidding "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Then, as now, nobody knew exactly what "propaganda" was. The new law explicitly forbids any suggestion that queer love is equal to that of heterosexuals, but what constitutes such a suggestion? One man was charged for holding up a sign that said being gay is ok. Pride parades are out of the question, a pink triangle enough to get you arrested, if not beaten. A couple holding hands could be accused of propaganda if they do so where a minor might see them; the law, as framed, is all about protecting the children. Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children’s Affairs and the author of the bill, says that it’s too late to save adult "homosexualists," as they’re called, but Russia still has a chance to raise a pure generation.

Meanwhile, something strange is happening in the US, that bastion of Cold War virtue. Our right wing, which used to hate all things Russian as a matter of reflex, has begun to warm to them: they’ve found common ground at last. I’d say it was kind of sweet, except that that common ground seems to be built on the desire to dig mass graves for gay people. Bryan Fischer, for instance, praises Russia for ahead of us on recognizing that it’s a moral evil to propagandize this lifestyle among teenagers..

We don’t get to stand and wag fingers at Russia, though, because they’re actually just holding up a mirror to us. As Sharlet continues, it’s American Christian Evangelicals who have been fanning the flames around the world.

Mizulina’s dream isn’t old-fashioned; it is, as one fascist supporter told me, "utopian." He meant that as praise. And the Russian dream is not alone. Liberal Americans imagine LGBT rights as slowly but surely marching forward. But queer rights don’t advance along a straight line. In Russia and throughout Eastern Europe—and in India and in Australia, in a belt across Central Africa—anti-gay crusaders are developing new laws and sharpening old ones. The ideas, meanwhile, are American: the rhetoric of "family values" churned out by right-wing American think tanks, bizarre statistics to prove that evil is a fact, its face a gay one. This hatred is old venom, but its weaponization by nations as a means with which to fight "globalization"—not the economic kind, the human-rights kind—is a new terror.

“Family values.” I think families are great, I think we don’t pay enough attention to values or ideals — these are the conceptual tools human beings used to set aspirations, and they’re important. But probably the most effective hijacking ever done in my lifetime was this cunning subordination of “family” to be a synonym for intolerance, hyper-masculinity, and sexual oppression of all kinds. It’s impressive how the right wing has taken a word so fundamental to healthy human living, “family”, and managed to poison it so thoroughly.

And here it is, exposed for all to see in Sochi. The country has been infiltrated by American “Family Values” warriors, and what we’re going to see in the Olympics (if you bother to watch them) is our right wing American utopia.

These pernicious strategies are personified by one man, Scott Lively (but let’s not make the mistake of thinking he’s the source — he’s just one eruption our of a whole pimply infection of swarms of conservative evangelicals). Lively’s mission in life has been to spread his homophobia world-wide. He’s been an inspiration for anti-gay legislation in both Africa and Eastern Europe, and he’s proud of it.

He’s currently been targeted for criminal prosecution in the US under the Alien Tort Statute — it turns out that foreign victims of American abuse actually do have legal recourse here, and there are a lot of dead and maimed bodies that can be laid on Lively’s doorstep. We can only hope that justice is done.

Meanwhile, about that mirror reflecting America’s role in spreading hate…Scott Lively is running for governor of Massachusetts as a candidate who can clearly and unapologetically articulate Biblical values without fear or compromise. Remember that when you scorn Russia.

Who you believe says a lot about who you are

Stephen King really put his foot in it. Commenting on Dylan Farrow’s revelation that she’d been sexually abused by Woody Allen at the age of 7, he wrote:



I don’t like to think it’s true, and there’s an element of palpable bitchery there, but…

Everyone is focused on the “bitchery” comment — you know, outspoken women are “bitches” while outspoken men are “Brave Heroes” — and I agree, that was an awful choice of words. But it’s the first part that bothers me: the “I don’t like to think it’s true”. In a trivial sense, none of us like to think about bad things happening in the world. I don’t like to think that we’re bombing people in drone strikes, I don’t like to think that children are going hungry in America, I don’t like to think that it’s uncomfortably cold outside right now. But what we would like and what is real are two different things.

He doesn’t like to think that Woody Allen has done awful things to kids and is getting off scot-free because he’s rich and influential. But the alternative is to think that Dylan Farrow is a lying fabulist; does he like to think that? Or not? Because that’s really the situation here, either Allen or Farrow are lying, and it always seems to be that we’re made more uncomfortable by the thought that a popular film-making man might be lying, than that a woman might be.

Read this essay, Woody Allen’s Good Name. It makes the excellent point that in all of this tut-tutting about Allen, nobody seems to be considering Dylan Farrow’s good name.

What is the burden of proof for assuming that a person is lying? If you are a famous film director, it turns out to be quite high. You don’t have to say a word in your defense, in fact, and people who have directed documentaries about you will write lengthy essays in the Daily Beast tearing down the testimony of your accusers. You can just go about your life making movie after movie, and it’s fine. But if you are a woman who has accused a great film director of molesting you when you were seven, the starting point is the presumption that, without real evidence, you are not telling the truth. In the court of public opinion, a woman accusing a great film director of raping her has no credibility which his fans are bound to respect. He has something to lose, his good name. She does not, because she does not have a good name. She is living in hiding, under an assumed name. And when she is silent, the Daily Beast does not rise to her defense.

In a rape culture, there is no burden on us to presume that she is not a liar, no necessary imperative to treat her like a person whose account of herself can be taken seriously. It is important that we presume he is innocent. It is not important that we presume she is not making it all up out of female malice. In a rape culture, you can say things like “We can’t really know what really happened, so let’s all act as if Woody Allen is innocent (and she is lying).” In a rape culture, you can use your ignorance to cast doubt on her knowledge; you can admit that you have no basis for casting doubt on Dylan’s statement, and then you can ignore her account of herself. A famous man is not speaking, so her testimony is not admissible evidence. His name is Woody Allen, and in a rape culture, that good name must be shielded and protected. What is her name?

Which happens more often? That men unchecked will take sexual advantage of young women? Or that women will lie about being abused? Those Bayesian priors ought to be considered when evaluating a claim like this.

The CU-Boulder philosophy department gets failing marks

This is the school where my daughter has just started graduate work, and now a scathing review of the philosophy departments’ practices has been released. Turns out it was a nest of snakes. (Fortunately, my daughter is in the computer science department, and believe me, she’d be speaking out if things were this bad there).

…it is our strong conclusion that the Department maintains an environment with unacceptable sexual harassment, inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior, and divisive uncivil behavior. Members of most groups we talked to report directly observing inappropriate behavior. This behavior has harmed men and women members of every stakeholder group in the Department.

Some assistant and full professors (both male and female) report responding to this situation by working from home, dropping out of departmental life, and avoiding socializing with colleagues. Several faculty members’ reputations for bad behavior place a higher service work burden on colleagues. Women are leaving or trying to leave in disproportionate numbers. [note: the report does not name names or describe specific incidents. –pzm]

The female graduate students report being anxious, demoralized, and depressed. Some female students report that they avoid working with some faculty members because of things that they have heard about those faculty members. Some female students report avoiding working with faculty members because they directly witnessed or were subjected to this harassment and inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior. There was and is a lack of support for students who lost their advisors or instructors due to sanctions. The female graduate students would like more women in the department but they cannot recommend this department as a good place to come.

In addition, male graduate students report being extremely worried about the climate of harassment. They are worried that they will be tainted by the national reputation of the department as being hostile to women. They are worried about getting a job letter from someone who has a bad reputation when the student does not know exactly who has a bad reputation. They are concerned that the lack of administrative support for the Department resulting from the climate of harassment [i.e. “provost saying, ‘no more departmental support until the department shapes up’”] will negatively affect their abilities to succeed. They avoid some faculty because they do not want to have a reputation that might come with being advised by a harasser (a problem exacerbated by lack of certainty about who the harassers are). And some are angry in discovering the severe problems in the department that they didn’t know about before they arrived.

It’s good to see that they point out that an epidemic of sexism is bad for the men as well as the women.

Man, I hear this kind of thing all the time about philosophy departments — philosophy and engineering seem to be the major repositories of sexist behavior in academe. You’d think philosophy would enable a rational perspective, and it’s a mystery to me why so many suddenly go so stupid on sexual harassment.

Although this paragraph suggests a possible reason.

The Department uses pseudo-philosophical analyses to avoid directly addressing the situation. Their faculty discussions revolve around the letter rather than the spirit of proposed regulations and standards. They spend too much time articulating (or trying to articulate) the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior instead of instilling higher expectations for professional behavior. They spend significant time debating footnotes and “what if” scenarios instead of discussing what they want their department to look and feel like. In other words, they spend time figuring out how to get around regulations rather than focusing on how to make the department supportive of women and family-friendly.

Ah, that’s how the power of philosophy can be corrupted to do great evil: it’s a whole mob of people trained in the virtues of reflexive devil’s advocacy.

When the revolution comes…

You know, I’ve been keeping a list of those who need to take a ride in the tumbrels, but all the challenge and fun is going out of it. The scoundrels keep standing up and proudly volunteering! Take Peter Schiff, please — he just blithely walked into an interview for the Daily Show and started talking out of his ass — what fun is it to get a confession out of the parasites when they think they’re gloating?

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