A wee happy omen of radicalization in the correct direction, for a change

People are always complaining about those danged liberal universities, especially places like mine where we even have “liberal” in the category label. But I always wonder where they get these ideas, because in general students are here to learn, rather than push an agenda, and we keep them busy with things like math. The only exception is, that if you’d been here last year, you would have noticed our bulletin boards were flooded with student-selected Libertarian crapola…”Taxation is Theft” posters, and paeans to capitalism generously provided by right-wing think tanks. It was weird, because it wasn’t at all representative of overall campus sentiment, but was what our tiny minority of raving right-wingers were promoting (see also the Morris North Star, which seems to be happily defunct now).

This year, though, it’s a little different. I was brought up short when I passed a bulletin board and saw this posted:

Awww. The little leftist ragamuffins are getting emboldened. This makes me so happy.

It comes from an organization called crimethinc.

CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age. We strive to reinvent our lives and our world according to the principles of self-determination and mutual aid.

We believe that you should be free to dispose of your limitless potential on your own terms: that no government, market, or ideology should be able to dictate what your life can be. If you agree, let’s do something about it.

Honestly, most of the noise on campuses gets made by the radical right — see also recent events at Berkeley — so it warms my heart to see that some of our students are finally waking up and making a few quiet protests. Bravo!

Say, isn’t this a prime example of “deplatforming”?

The Harvard Institute of Politics invited a number of people to be Fellows. It was the usual Wingnut Welfare event, where a collection of unqualified nincompoops who’s only reason for existence is to promote far right inanity were invited. Sean Spicer will be there. As will Joe Scarborough. And…

The roster of IOP fellows in 2017 includes Benghazi faker Jason Chaffetz, professional political thug Corey Lewandowski, professional bad liar Sean Spicer, and run-of-the-mill wingnuts Mary Katherine Ham and Guy Benson. (You should keep all these names in mind the next time you read conservative whinging about how oppressed they are. This is a nice gig here.) And, while I was contemplating what Lewandowski could possibly “impact” on students other than a seminar on how to go goon on female reporters, the really heavy shoe dropped.

The surprise was that they also invited…Chelsea Manning.

Which immediately prompted screeching from the conservatives.

Which was — unsurprisingly — effective.

“We are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow — and the perceived honor that it implies to some people — while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.

“I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation.”

Cowardly fuckers.

So…everyone, even the right wing, alt-right, Nazi centrist atheists, are all going to complain and denounce this decision?

Just remember, an invitation from the Kennedy School, which thinks Spicer, Lewandowski, and Chaffetz are worthy recipients of the ‘honor’, isn’t really an honor.

Humans are already a little bit porny

The internet has a lot of pornography, because human beings are fascinated by sex. How much, though? If you try to google the stats, unfortunately, mostly what you get is horrified anti-porn crusaders who are prone to inflating the numbers and calling it an epidemic, or a plague, or a perverted nightmare of hellish hedonism. But here’s one estimate that seems sober and reasonable:

● In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.

● From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.

That sounds right: common, easily found when you look for it (and many people are looking for it!), but not exactly flooding your browser at the instant you turn it on. I know about the big name porn sites, like PornHub, and I’ve even seen them a few times, but that kind of content is also easily avoided…well, except for when some asshole gets the clever idea to email me piles of gay porn, but that’s what the delete key is for, and gmail filters.

I didn’t even know there were Twitter accounts that distribute pornography freely, until now. Now I know. Because Ted Cruz’s twitter account favorited a tweet by @SexuallPosts, and that’s all the internet is babbling about this morning.

OK, I know that the hypocrisy is delicious, but I just wish that we could get half as much mocking, laughing, smirking finger-pointing over Cruz’s sanctimonious public prudery that we get over his closet prurience. This is a man who tried to ban sex toys, who wants to control what people are allowed to do in the privacy of their bedrooms, and wants to oppress LGBT people. We ridicule when he’s caught watching a porn clip, which I’d guess nearly everyone reading this has done at some point in their life, and we call down a greater firestorm of scorn over that than we do his attempts at anti-human, anti-woman legislation, which I hope most of us deplore.

The difference is that you can get elected on a platform of denying abortion, hating gays, and suppressing sexuality, while the ‘revelation’ that you have seen moving pictures of naked people having sex, and maybe even liked it, can kill your political career. That seems backwards to me.

Moose and squirrel better than Boris and Natasha at undermining patriotism

Suddenly, I am reminded of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose, from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. It’s become history.

Mr. Chairman, I am against all foreign aid, especially to places like Hawaii and Alaska,” says Senator Fussmussen from the floor of a cartoon Senate in 1962. In the visitors’ gallery, Russian agents Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale are deciding whether to use their secret “Goof Gas” gun to turn the Congress stupid, as they did to all the rocket scientists and professors in the last episode of “Bullwinkle.”

Another senator wants to raise taxes on everyone under the age of 67. He, of course, is 68. Yet a third stands up to demand, “We’ve got to get the government out of government!” The Pottsylvanian spies decide their weapon is unnecessary: Congress is already ignorant, corrupt and feckless.

Hahahahaha. Oh, Washington.

That joke was a wheeze half a century ago, a cornball classic that demonstrates the essential charm of the “Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends,” the cartoon show that originally aired between 1959 and 1964 about a moose and a squirrel navigating Cold War politics.

I’ve seen every episode of the show, although it’s so long ago I’ve almost forgotten every episode of the show. The reason is ritual.

In the 1960s, I was going to Sunday School almost every week. I didn’t mind, because I had friends there, I liked the teachers, and the “teaching” was trivially easy. I remember felt boards, crafts, and memorizing Bible verses, which I usually did on the walk over to the church. But mostly what I remember was Sunday mornings at my grandmother’s house, where Grandma would make French toast and we’d watch cartoons.

Sunday morning in 1963 did not provide a great variety of cartoons. We only received four channels, you know, and the TV was a black & white set, and the convention was that cartoons were for Saturday morning, so the stations only served up left-overs and oddballs. There was Davey and Goliath, a stop-motion series about a boy and his talking dog. It was moralistic pablum with a Christian message, which was probably why it was stuffed into Sunday. I hated it. There was Beany and Cecil, about a boy and his sea serpent. I liked that one, but it aired only sporadically, and it seemed they only showed about 3 episodes in random rotation. Sunday morning was really the dregs of programming, and I don’t think the stations cared what dumb thing they stuffed in there.

And then there was Rocky and Bullwinkle. You had to have been there. The animation was crude, the art work childish, and you could tell it was made on a shoestring — so it relied on the words. It improved my vocabulary far more than the Bible did. It was subversive; the show casually mocked all the stuff Davey and Goliath treated as sacred. It was constantly breaking the fourth wall, never shy about telling the boys and girls that this was just a cartoon, and a badly drawn one at that.

That was my Sunday lesson. From church I learned how boring sanctity could be. From Rocky and Bullwinkle, I learned irreverence. From Grandma I learned to appreciate well-made French toast, with a little nutmeg and cinnamon and real butter and maple syrup. These were important lessons!

For you youngsters who’ve never seen Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Goof Gas episode is on YouTube (with an awful intro tacked on). Watch and be appalled, but enjoy the cunning undermining of Cold War American values.

Also remember an age when “We’ve got to get the government out of government!” was considered ridiculous over-the-top satire of our politics, rather than the actual raison d’etre of an entire political party.

Buddhist atrocities

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”.

The Burmese Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of the legendary liberation movement leader Aung San. Following studies abroad, she returned home in 1988. From then on, she led the opposition to the military junta that had ruled Burma since 1962. She was one of the founders of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and was elected secretary general of the party. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, she opposed all use of violence and called on the military leaders to hand over power to a civilian government. The aim was to establish a democratic society in which the country’s ethnic groups could cooperate in harmony.

In the election in 1990, the NLD won a clear victory, but the generals prevented the legislative assembly from convening. Instead they continued to arrest members of the opposition and refused to release Suu Kyi from house arrest.

The Peace Prize had a significant impact in mobilizing world opinion in favor of Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause. However, she remained under house arrest for almost 15 of the 21 years from her arrest in July 1989 until her release on 13 November 2010, whereupon she was able to resume her political career and put her mark on the rapid democratization of Myanmar.

She is currently the de facto leader of Myanmar (although trying to puzzle out the tangle of factions running that country is not trivial), and representative of the Buddhist majority. A Buddhist majority which is currently active in perpetrating genocide. A Muslim minority, the Rohingya, have been living in Myanmar, and right now they’re being rounded up by the military and murdered.

“They’re killing children,” Matthew Smith, the chief executive of a human rights group called Fortify Rights, told me after interviewing refugees on the Bangladesh border. “In the least, we’re talking about crimes against humanity.”

“My two nephews, their heads were cut off,” one Rohingya survivor told Smith. “One was 6 years old and the other was 9.”

Other accounts describe soldiers throwing infants into a river to drown, and decapitating a grandmother. Hannah Beech, my Times colleague who has provided outstanding coverage from the border, put it this way: “I’ve covered refugee crises before, and this was by far the worst thing that I’ve ever seen.”

Even Buddhists. We tend to think of Buddhism as the nice peaceful religion (we conveniently ignore their history and the oppressive nature of Tibet), but this just goes to show that people with power can be horrible no matter what philosophy they pretend to have.

“We applauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she received her Nobel Prize because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny,” noted Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Now that she’s in power, she symbolizes cowardly complicity in the deadly tyranny being visited on the Rohingya.”

InfoWars is afraid

That young lady who impudently scorned the InfoWars hack has done us a service. She’s shown us how to properly treat liars and nutjobs: cuss ’em out, flip ’em off, and walk away. They don’t deserve more.

Alex Jones brought on Owen Shryer, the hack, who whines about how he’s never been attacked so viciously, how he needs comforting because he’s so distressed…so he turns to reading scripture to console himself. Meanwhile, Jones is making funny voices to mock the girl, who is now, in his head, some kind of gun-running mobster leading an antifa army. It’s pathetic. It is pitiful hand-wringing. It shows how easy it is to make the InfoWars crew cry.

Make them cry more often.

A Viking woman!

This is a Viking grave from Sweden — a high status warrior buried with weapons and jewelry and two horses. It was assumed it had to be a man, but closer investigation revealed that the bones were those of a woman — and now genomics has confirmed it.

Do weapons necessarily determine a warrior? The interpretation of grave goods is not straight forward, but it must be stressed that the interpretation should be made in a similar manner regardless of the biological sex of the interred individual. Furthermore, the exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics. The skeletal remains in grave Bj 581 did not exhibit signs of antemortem or perimortem trauma which could support the notion that the individual had been a warrior. However, contrary to what could be expected, weapon related wounds (and trauma in general) are not common in the inhumation burials at Birka. A similarly low frequency is noted at contemporaneous cemeteries in Scandinavia. Traces of violent trauma are more common in Viking Age mass burials.

Although not possible to rule out, previous arguments have likely neglected intersectional perspectives where the social status of the individual was considered of greater importance than biological sex. This type of reasoning takes away the agency of the buried female. As long as the sex is male, the weaponry in the grave not only belong to the interred but also reflects his status as warrior, whereas a female sex has raised doubts, not only regarding her ascribed role but also in her association to the grave goods.

Grave Bj 581 is one of three known examples where the individual has been treated in accordance with prevailing warrior ideals lacking all associations with the female gender. Furthermore, the exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics. Our results caution against sweeping interpretations based on archaeological contexts and preconceptions. They provide a new understanding of the Viking society, the social constructions and also norms in the Viking Age. The genetic and strontium data also show that the female warrior was mobile, a pattern that is implied in the historical sources, especially when it comes to the extended households of the elite. The female Viking warrior was part of a society that dominated 8th to 10th century northern Europe. Our results—that the high-status grave Bj 581 on Birka was the burial of a high ranking female Viking warrior—suggest that women, indeed, were able to be full members of male dominated spheres. Questions of biological sex, gender and social roles are complex and were so also in the Viking Age. This study shows how the combination of ancient genomics, isotope analyses and archaeology can contribute to the rewriting of our understanding of social organization concerning gender, mobility and occupation patterns in past societies.

A lady Viking! Adjust your preconceptions, and your fantasy novels and movies, accordingly.

Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Anna Kjellström, Torun Zachrisson, Maja Krzewińska, Veronica Sobrado, Neil Price, Torsten Günther, Mattias Jakobsson, Anders Götherström, Jan Storå (2017) A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23308

Have you ever used the phrase “politically correct” unironically?

Don’t. I despise it, and it will cause me to re-evaluate your intelligence downward, drastically.

That probably doesn’t worry you at all, especially if you’re the kind of person who whines about political correctness. What ought to worry you more is that James O’Brien might hear you and grind you into a feeble slime for using it.

Man, that is beautiful. He just asks the guy what he means by it, and has him babbling after a few minutes.

Thoughtleaders are the salespeople of ideas

I also liked “Thoughtleaders are more of a marketing gimmick than a philosophy,” and generally enjoyed this video immensely, in part because I detest the horseshoe theory and think that centrists are just polite fascists with a faint sense of shame.

I did disagree with one comment, though: “Islamists” are a thing. It’s a term used by Muslims and ex-Muslims to describe extremist religious fanaticism; it’s intent is to distinguish general, ordinary, non-fanatical Muslims from the raving loonies who use their religion to excuse violent, abhorrent behavior, so it is a useful word, just as “Christianist” is handy to distinguish, say, Theocrat Mike Pence from the more casual and benign faith of my mother.

A very nice summary:

WTF is wrong with you, Nature?

Nature magazine has run a piece titled — brace yourself, it’s ridiculously bad — “Removing statues of historical figures risks whitewashing history”. It is subtitled “Science must acknowledge mistakes as it marks its past”, just to make it a little bit worse.

The objection is that people are clamoring to tear down a statue of a doctor and scientist, J. Marion Sims. How dare they question the honoring of a scientist?

The statues of explorer Christopher Columbus and gynaecologist J. Marion Sims stand at nearly opposite corners of New York City’s Central Park, but for how much longer? Both monuments have been dragged into a nationwide debate about memor­ials to historical figures who have questionable records on human rights. The arguments are long-standing, but were thrown onto the world’s front pages last month when protests against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, produced racially charged violence.

Last week, the Central Park Sims statue — one of many that stand in numerous US cities — was vandalized. The word ‘racist’ was spray-painted alongside his list of achievements, which include life-saving techniques he developed to help women recover from traumatic births. Yet many protest about the lionization of this ‘father of modern gynaecology’ because he performed his experiments on female slaves.

Yes, let us remember that Sims did save women’s lives. Sims pioneered a surgical treatment for vesico-vaginal fistulas (VVF), a common outcome of difficult labor that produced tears between the bladder and vagina and led to constant leakage of urine into the vagina. It was debilitating and shame-producing. Sims worked out a way to close off the fistulas. We don’t want to forget that!

Another thing we don’t want to forget is how it was worked out. That little line I highlighted up there, “because he performed his experiments on female slaves”, is minimizing what he did, and that also is a whitewashing of history, and failing to acknowledge a “mistake”, if we can call willful infliction of pain on unconsenting people a “mistake”. If we’re going to talk about the good that he accomplished, we also have to consider the evil of his method. I’ve read some justifications for his surgeries that say that because black slaves also suffered from VVF, it was legitimate that he experimented on them — they benefited too from his work! But let’s not forget that the reason he operated on these women is that he did not have to get their consent, and that part of his excuse is the belief that black people are less sensitive to pain.

And what he did was horrendous. Even acknowledging that all surgeries in the early 19th century were horrendous, he treated women like experimental animals. Here’s an account of his first experimental subject:

The enslaved women were not asked if they would agree to such an operation as they were totally without any claims to decision-making about their bodies or any other aspect of their lives. Sims used a total of seven enslaved women as experimental subjects; permission was obtained from their masters. They were in no way volunteers for Dr Sims’s research.

Nevertheless, Dr Sims was so positive that he was on the verge of making an astounding medical discovery that he invited local doctors to witness his first operation and what he thought would be a historical event. He performed his first operation on a slave-woman named Lucy.

Lucy was operated on without anaesthetics as Sims was unaware of the advances which had been made in this area of medicine. The surgery lasted for an hour and Lucy endured excruciating pain while positioned on her hands and knees. She must have felt extreme humiliation as twelve doctors observed the operation. Unfortunately, the operation failed as ‘two little openings in the line of union, across the vagina … remained although the larger fistula had been repaired’.

Lucy nearly lost her life, due to the experimental use by Sims of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, as she became extremely ill with fever resulting from blood-poisoning. In recounting the episode in his autobiography, Sims says, ‘I thought she was going to die . . . it took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation’.

Sims’ method belongs in the history books, and no one is proposing erasing this protocol from the annals of medicine. But ignoring the suffering and degradation of the women in this experiment, as we have to do to think Sims deserves the honor of a prominent monument, erases a shameful era in our history, all while Nature protests that those who understand the full range of Sims’ actions are the ones doing the erasure.

It’s embarrassing, too, because whoever wrote this ought to know that the work of scientists isn’t honored with statuary. It’s honored with the work of those who follow afterwards.