If the price of homogeneity is that we all have to look like Steve King, I’m not paying

Steve King, who is definitely one of the dumbest politicians in America, put his foot in his mouth once again. He is endorsing openly racist ideas, making David Duke happy, and confirming once again that the Republican party has become the shit-hole where we dump our very worst people.

King in a tweet praised Geert Wilders, including a cartoon depicting Wilders plugging a hole in a wall that reads Western civilization.

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies, the congressman wrote.

Actually, yes you can. In fact, you must. Our country alone contains over 300 million people, is Steve King planning to fill the nation with the fruit of his loins? Obviously not. When he says our civilization, he has a broader group of people in mind than just his immediate family. When he says somebody else’s babies, he’s explicitly making a division among the people living here to exclude a group. The question is, where is he drawing the line within our people?

I think we can all guess. And it’s understood that somebody else’s babies are quite simply the brown people who don’t look like him.

There’s a word I like: ecumene. It recognizes that there is a broader community of people living in a land, bound together by the ties of our culture, but still allowing for diversity. I don’t like people who want to shatter our ecumene.

It’s a clear message, King said on Monday. We need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed within a half century or a little more. And Geert Wilders knows that and that’s part of his campaign and part of his agenda.

Guess what, Steve King? Our countries are going to be transformed whether you like it or not, and whether one ethnic group or another has greater birth rates. People gripe about different generations within a population, and always have. Cultures change, always. It’s human nature. The concern is to shape those changes in positive directions. One example of that is public education, which Steve King’s party wants to destroy.

Also, our birth rates? Whose? Is Steve King a resident of the Netherlands? Perhaps he thinks he’s being inclusive. I warn you, though: allow Iowans to find commonality with the Nederlanders, and next thing you know, you’re going to have to let Belgians into the club. And if you let Belgians in, you’re going to have to recognize your affinity to the French. From there it’s a slippery slope to Iowans becoming cosmopolitan people of the world, and there goes your dream of redneck insularity.

King went on to criticize illegal immigration to the United States and immigrants who don’t assimilate into the American culture.

I’m in a state where you can buy lefse and lutefisk any day of the year, where communities celebrate Syttende Mai, where individuals proudly fly blue and yellow flags, where we tell Ole and Lena jokes. Is that OK, Steve King? I notice that you have a motley assortment of flags on your desk, including a Traitor’s Flag.

Steve-King-Confederate-Flag

I think that it is fine to be proud of your heritage, and people should celebrate the customs of their Latin American or African or European or Asian ancestors. It’s when it becomes exclusionary, and you try to shame people for their history, or you use your history to justify oppression, that it becomes a problem.

Living in enclaves, refusing to assimilate into the American culture and civilization. Some embrace it, yes. But many are two and three generations living in enclaves that are pushing back now and resisting against the assimilation, he said.

Like, say, Minnesota? My family came over from Sweden and Norway in the early 19th century, it’s been like five generations, and they haven’t forgotten old customs. My grandparents even moved again from Minnesota to Washington state and found communities of like-minded Scandinavians to live among! Yet somehow second-generation citizens who speak English at school and still speak Spanish to their abuelita are a problem?

How much assimilation do you want?

King also emphasized his view that western civilization is a superior civilization.

I like Western civilization, too, but I think its strengths are openness and willingness to share the benefits of society with all (which, come to think of it, was also true once upon a time of Islamic civilization and Roman civilization and Chinese civilizations, or at least, those civilizations that thrived and grew).

So why does Steve King want to make changes that turn us into an inferior civilization?

I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective, he said.

Oh, jebus. I just imagined an America populated exclusively by balding, potato-nosed, pop-eyed, pale-skinned, thin-lipped stupid people, and it was horrific.

There’s a reason the Tower is made of Ivory

I saw the problems emerging from the day the March for Science was announced — only it wasn’t weird outsiders who were dissenting, it was a small group of prominent white male scientists who immediately started griping about “identity politics”. There was also a tendency for people who had embraced certain myths about science to try to find shelter behind the idea that science, and the science march, would be “apolitical”. How naive can you be? You’re organizing a march on Washington, DC, in the long tradition of other marches for civil rights, and it was motived by the need to protest the destructive policies of a recently-elected politician? Give me a break. This is a political action, and what muddles it isn’t the multiplicity of causes that drive it, but the foolish people who try to pretend they can organize such an event without it being political.

Zuleyka Zevallos carries out a thorough analysis of the politics of the March for Science. It’s a mess.

Since the march was announced in January 2017, the organisers in the central committee of Washington DC have struggled to respond to issues of diversity. From inadequately addressing inclusion and accessibility, to reproducing discourses of inequality, March for Science has problematically promoted the idea that the march is not a political protest. (It has only been in recent days that the organisers have attempted to address this; but it had not happened at the time of the events with the Los Angeles march.)

The discourse that a march is “not political” is, in fact, very much the outcome of political dynamics. Only people from dominant groups, especially White people, can claim that science is free from politics. It isn’t – as I show with research, further below.

This narrative that science is not political has impacted dialogue about the march: what it stands for (interests of White, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied people); who it doesn’t stand for (everyone else, especially people of colour and disabled scientists); and who is erased from the conversation altogether (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual LGBTQIA people).

This should not have been allowed to build to this level of chaos and concern. There should have been a forthright declaration from the very beginning that this was a march by scientists to protest the anti-scientific bullshit coming out of the current administration, to show that scientists have a strong commitment to the truth. It should be about a great many causes driving us to speak out: the destruction of the environment, the need for better support to combat emerging diseases, the maintenance of safety standards for food and drugs, changes in energy to reduce CO2 emissions, keeping our oceans healthy, etc., etc., etc., a thousand factors that our government wants to ignore or oppose. But it must also include improving diversity in science, providing good education to all people, not just the wealthy ones, and breaking down barriers to women and minorities entering science…all those things that certain people call “identity politics” because it makes them uncomfortable.

The “alt-right” have had a presence in the American science establishment for a long, long time. Remember, the Nazis were inspired by American eugenics, which was not just grassroots racism, but endorsed at the highest levels of academe.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims.

Yet now some want to declare science “apolitical”, and it’s because they dislike the idea that the values of non-white people might taint the purity of their theories about race.

I’m planning to join in the march, but it sure as hell isn’t because I have deluded myself into thinking science is non-political.

The genocide continues

You need to read about the tiny town of Whiteclay, Nebraska. It’s a moral shithole.

Whiteclay, Nebraska. 12 people. Four liquor stores. More than 42 million cans of beer sold in the last 10 years.

I do wonder what those 12 people are like, that they can unconscionably exploit people as they do. The customers for their beer are the residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the descendants of Crazy Horse and Red Shirt and Sitting Bull now live. Well then, that must be the problem — don’t blame the good capitalists providing a service, it’s all the drunkards guzzling down that beer.

But this story explains why alcoholism rages through the Lakota.

On this South Dakota reservation, where the sale and consumption of alcohol has been illegal since 1889 (aside from a few months in the 1970s), the Oglala Lakota live in the poorest of America’s 3,144 counties, according to a 2014 U.S. Census Bureau report. In 2015, 55 percent of its roughly 30,000 residents were unemployed, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A decade before, the Department of the Interior put the number at 89 percent.

Here, men die on average at age 47, according to Rainey Enjady, former interim CEO of the Pine Ridge Hospital. That’s a shorter lifespan than any other country in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Its women fare better. On average, they live to 55—on par with Angola, Nigeria and Somalia.

On this sprawling reservation dotted with doublewide trailers, the infant mortality rate was three times the national average in 2007, according to Re-Member—about the same as modern day Syria, Honduras or the Gaza Strip.

It’s an American disgrace. Right here in the heart of our country, 8 hours from where I live, good people are destitute and living in despair, while merchants sell them poison.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

I have confused feelings about this story: an Australian writer, Mem Fox, was treated to American-style customs.

The room was like a waiting room in a hospital but a bit more grim than that. There was a notice on the wall that was far too small, saying no cellphones allowed, and anybody who did use a cellphone had someone stand in front of them and yell: “Don’t use that phone!” Everything was yelled, and everything was public, and this was the most awful thing, I heard things happening in that room happening to other people that made me ashamed to be human.

There was an Iranian woman in a wheelchair, she was about 80, wearing a little mauve cardigan, and they were yelling at her – “Arabic? Arabic?”. They screamed at her “ARABIC?” at the top of their voices, and finally she intuited what they wanted and I heard her say “Farsi”. And I thought heaven help her, she’s Iranian, what’s going to happen?

There was a woman from Taiwan, being yelled at about at about how she made her money, but she didn’t understand the question. The officer was yelling at her: “Where does your money come from, does it grow on trees? Does it fall from the sky?” It was awful.

There was no toilet, no water, and there was this woman with a baby. If I had been holed up in that room with a pouch on my chest, and a baby crying, or needing to be fed, oh God … the agony I was surrounded by in that room was like a razor blade across my heart.

There are some things I’m not confused about: that was criminal and horrific, and ought to bring deep shame to all Americans. What kind of stupid people are doing this job that they think YELLING at someone who doesn’t understand their language somehow makes them comprehensible?

But what bugs me is that this story becomes newsworthy only when it happens to a white woman — as if the injustice is amplified because the target is someone innocent of the crime of being brown. No criticism of Mem Fox intended, but of the media and the people who assume it isn’t news if it’s not happening to someone who looks like them.

Where is the story of the Iranian woman in a wheelchair, the Taiwanese woman, the woman with a baby? Is anyone following up with them, or is their story not as credible or sympathetic as that of a white woman?

And most importantly, where is the follow-up to expose the immigration thugs who are perpetrating these offenses?

Laurie Penny uses words real good

Not only that, she wades right into the muck to get a story. She’s been traveling with the Odious Yiannopoulos for the last few weeks, and has written up an account of what it’s like to hang out with the Lost Boys during his fall from grace.

It is horribly ironic that of all the disgusting nonsense Yiannopoulos has said — about women, about Muslims, about transgender people, about immigrants — it is only now that the moderate right appears to have reached the limits of what it will tolerate in the name of free speech. The hypocrisy is clarion-clear: This was never, in fact, about free speech at all. It was about making it OK to say racist, sexist, transphobic, and xenophobic things, about tolerating the public expression of those views right up to the point where it becomes financially unwise to do so. Those suddenly dropping Yiannopoulos are making a business decision, not a moral one — and yes, even in Donald Trump’s America, there’s still a difference. If that difference devours Yiannopoulos and his minions, they will find few mourners.

Those damned SJWs have been saying this for quite a long time. We’ve also noticed the extreme projection these guys exhibit.

It turns out that some words do hurt. You may have noticed that, in this piece, I have not explicitly described Yiannopoulos or the movement that has made him famous as white supremacist, Neo-Nazi, fascist, or racist. The main reason for that is that it has been made explicitly clear to me that, were I to write such a thing, a libel suit the size of Mar-A-Lago would drop on me, and Yiannopoulos would use every trick in his surprisingly defensive playbook to prize out an apology, because that’s what friends are for. He’s done it to other reporters. He’s not the only one. In fact, a defining feature of the new-right populists is their ability to build a reputation as rhino-hided truth-sayers while flailing their hands in panic if anyone uses whatever words happen to hit them where it hurts. So, for legal reasons, I must state that Milo Yiannopolous, possibly alone of all the smug white people in the world, is not a racist. For moral reasons, however, I must state that Yiannopoulos’ personal beliefs are irrelevant given that he’s built a career off peddling bigotry in public. What about sexism? “Sexism I don’t have the energy to wrestle with you over,” says Yiannopoulos, who, I can personally confirm, is the maple-cured bacon of misogynist piggery — oily and sweet and crass and, on a gut level, dreadful for your health.

Read the whole thing.

So much for the myth of the liberal professor

demetriouclaims

We’ve got a problem brewing here in idyllic Morris, Minnesota: one of our faculty, Dan Demetriou, has made racist comments that became widely known among everyone here, and are now getting aired on Inside Higher Ed.

In what seems like the latest installment of the academe edition of the post-Trump culture wars, students and faculty members at the University of Minnesota at Morris are planning a teach-in Monday, following a professor’s harsh criticism of immigrants and refugees on social media. The professor says he wrote about an issue of concern on a private Facebook page and is being punished for being out of step with the politics of his colleagues.

“Illegal immigrants lower the confidence in the rule of law and add people and workers and students we don’t need,” Dan Demetriou, associate professor of philosophy, recently wrote on Facebook, according to screenshots that have been made public. “They on average have IQs lower than natives and low skills. They are harmful to an economy about to automate, especially when it is a welfare state.”

Refugees, meanwhile, are “way worse,” Demetriou wrote, “as most adhere to a religious-political cult with repulsive values at war with the West from its inception. No country who has taken the current crop of refugees has made it work.”

He isn’t being “punished” in any way, as far as I can tell. He is being criticized in a far more civil way than he criticized a significant fraction of our student body. He’s currently on sabbatical in Sweden (!), which sounds like a pretty sweet ‘punishment’ to me, especially since next year was supposed to be my sabbatical year, and I’ve been asked to delay it.

He is no claiming that he is being persecuted by left-wing “feelings”.

Maybe you can imagine being me, hearing most of my colleagues advocate for policies that, as far as I can tell, are failing spectacularly overseas and in many communities at home. No one much cares for how their expressions may discourage, alienate, frustrate or sadden someone who, like me, sincerely believes that his children — our children — will be put in grave risk by leftist immigration policies. Nor should they care, because my feelings don’t determine facts. That someone is upset by a claim is wholly irrelevant to its truth.

Facts matter. What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is how badly out of alignment with the truth his original comments are. He’s being criticized, not because of his political alignment, but because he is wrong.

We teach young people who are immigrants, or children of immigrants, and several of our faculty are immigrants. They are just as intelligent as our white students whose families have been here for several generations. It’s also jarring to see a faculty member from a campus with a significant enrollment of Indian students to use the term “natives” — I don’t think he’s comparing our Somali students to our Lakota students. He’s got a peculiarly privileged understanding of “native”.

IQ is particularly problematic in this context. IQ scores were invented as a rationale for immigration quotas — they are inherently biased. To accuse someone who speaks a couple of languages, who had the ambition and strength to escaped an oppressive situation, and who is now working hard to establish themselves as citizens of a new country, of being unintelligent is simply absurd. People who can rise up out of such difficult circumstances should be welcomed and recognized for the contributions they can make. It’s easy to have the leisure to study and be comfortable in the conventions of the culture you’ve been brought up in, to do well on an IQ test; it’s remarkable when you’ve been on the run from tyrants who want to kill you, or from a rain of American-made bombs, that you can then adapt and thrive to new opportunities.

Of course, that’s what humans do.

I’d like to know where Dan thinks the cutoff for percentage of refugees enrolled makes for a bad school. Is UMM such a school? We tend to praise our university for its diversity relative to other Minnesota colleges (while also regretting that it isn’t higher). Does he think our “foreign” students degrade the quality of the education offered here?

As for failing to make absorption of refugees work in all countries…he’s in Sweden. Sweden is in the news because of similarly ignorant comments made by our president. There’s a lot of information available on immigrants to Sweden. It wrecks his claims.

In the past decade, there’s been a spike in immigration to Sweden. In 1990, 9.2 percent of Sweden’s population was foreign-born. That figure was 11.3 percent in 2000, and 15.4 percent in 2012.

Immigrant rates have grown even further in recent years, owing in large part to the global refugee crisis. In 2014, Sweden admitted more asylum seekers, per capita, than any other country on Earth. Many Swedish immigrants today hail from war-torn Muslim-majority countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

immigrationtosweden

Some people assumed this would produce a major uptick in the rates of violent crime in Sweden. Historically, immigrants to Sweden do commit crimes at higher rates than the native-born, though children of immigrants commit crimes at basically the same rate as children of native-born Swedes (controlling for income).

However, there’s no evidence of a massive crime wave. Here is an official Swedish government tally of the rates of six different types of crime directed at persons — fraud, assault, threats, harassment, sexual violence, and mugging. (Homicide is excluded because the rate is tiny; in 2014, there were 87 murders in the entire country of roughly 10 million.)

swedishcrime

As you can see, there is no significant uptick in any of the crime categories alongside the rise in immigration. The most recent official report available in English, covering 2015, is not incorporated into that chart — but it concludes that the rates of these crimes are at “approximately the same level as in 2005.” That’s a slight increase over the 2014 rate, but hardly evidence of a crime wave — let alone one committed by migrants or refugees.

Demetriou is a professor of philosophy. He doesn’t seem to know much at all about sociology or history or biology, but he’s quick to declare himself the victim of a political witch-hunt by people who don’t care for his ‘truth’. He’s the son of Greek immigrants, so maybe it’s a problem with his IQ?

I’m in agreement with our chancellor’s statement on this incident.

Colleagues,

It has recently come to my attention that messages have been circulating that include comments perceived of as disrespectful, disparaging, and directed at other community members. While democracy should and does rightfully tolerate expression of differences of opinion, some members of our community have found these communications both personally and professionally distressing.

I want to strongly reaffirm our mission and values as a University community and in particular, Morris’ campus vision that we celebrate and support the multicultural and international inclusiveness of our community. Differences are our strength, and our community values and respects diversity of all kinds.

We no doubt will continue to have differences of opinion and perspective. At the same time it is imperative that we all make every effort to express these differences in a respectful way.

As a model for civil discourse, I offer the University of Minnesota Board of Regents Guiding Principles which provide timely and sage advice whether members of our University community are acting as individuals or representatives of UMM:

“In all of its activities, the University strives to sustain an open exchange of ideas in an environment that:

• embodies the values of academic freedom, responsibility, integrity, and cooperation;
• provides an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice and intolerance;
• assists individuals, institutions, and communities in responding to a continuously changing world;
• is conscious of and responsive to the needs of the many communities it is committed to serving;
• creates and supports partnerships within the University, with other educational systems and institutions, and with communities to achieve common goals; and
• inspires, sets high expectations for, and empowers the individuals within its community.”

I look forward to working with you all as we productively and constructively address the issues of the day on our campus.

Michelle
Michelle Behr, Ph.D.

Now, though, is the time for Demetriou to strike back. I’m sure he’s going to be popular with reporters from Breitbart, InfoWars, and the Daily Mail. I wish him luck with his new celebrity.

Two birds, one stone

Yale is efficient. They’ve been debating whether to rename a building named after John Calhoun, the 19th century racist defender of slavery. Remember, this is the guy who said

I hold that the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good. A positive good.

One could reasonably make an argument that it is unfair to impose modern moral standards on a man dead for a hundred and sixty years, and I’d agree that yes, John C. Calhoun was a product of his time and place, the antebellum South. However it is also unfair to expect that antebellum Southern standards be respected in 21st century America — it works both ways. Yale made the right decision to rename the building after Grace Hopper.

The debate might not have gone on so long if everyone had known that the decision would also drive Geraldo Riviera to sever ties with the university.

Resigned yesterday as Associate Fellow of Calhoun College at Yale. Been an honor but intolerant insistence on political correctness is lame.

Political correctness. There’s a phrase that has become a solid tell for reactionary idiocy. I’ve never seen the words used for anything but to complain about reasonable actions by people with some degree of empathy. I imagine Riviera, if he’d lived at the time, would have called the Emancipation Proclamation a politically correct document, as if there were no moral force behind the liberation of slave and that it was just Ol’ Abe virtue signaling.

At least Yale has managed to purge two assholes at once with one action.

Fake news

Here’s a story that got a lot of play in Germany:

On Feb. 6, Germany’s most-read newspaper reported that dozens of Arab men, presumed to be refugees, had rampaged through the city of Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve. The men were said to have sexually assaulted women as they went through the streets; the newspaper dubbed them the Fressgass “sex mob,” referring to an upmarket shopping street in the city.

Oh no! See, you just can’t trust those dirty refugees. It’s not bigotry if it’s true, right?

Except…we ought to always question stories like that that feed into stereotypes and biases, biases that are almost entirely unjustified.

Except…we ought to take note that crimes committed by white men are never reported as rampages committed by their race or gender. Funny, that. It creates a twisted perspective.

Except…this story was totally false.

Frankfurt police were taken aback by the article — they had not heard of any large-scale assaults taking place in the area on New Year’s Eve — but a number of news outlets published aggregated versions of the story, spreading it further.

When local newspapers tried to report more on the story, local business owners said they had never seen any kind of “sex mob” or mass sexual assault on New Year’s Eve. “It was absolutely peaceful,” one staff member at a Fressgass bar not far from Mai’s establishment told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

On Tuesday, police released a damning statement on the incident that suggested the reports published in Bild were without foundation. “The interrogations of the witnesses, guests, and staff have created considerable doubts about the portrayal of events,” the statement read, adding that “a person allegedly affected by the actions was not in the city at all when the crime occurred.”

There are people actively spreading lies to promote hatred and conflict, and these are the worst kinds of people: racists, bigots, neo-Nazis, the so-called “alt-right”. There are also so-called journalists who happily promote these kinds of lies without basic checking of the facts, because it sells newspapers and ads. And as neo-Nazis are given greater prominence (hey, we’ve got a crop of them running the USA!), they become even more effective at spreading those destructive lies. Und so weiter.

It’s going to get worse. Self-promoting death spirals always do.

All science is always political

I have been out of the loop for a few weeks — man, my workload spiked recently — but now that I’m catching up, I feel nothing but dismay at the ridiculous complaints from scientists about the March for Science. I could hardly believe that some oppose the idea of scientists expressing vigorous dissent.

Al Gore, bless his heart (as we say in the South), was well intentioned when he made “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. But he did us no favors. So many of the conservative Southerners whom I speak to about climate change see it as a partisan issue largely because of that high-profile salvo fired by the former vice president.

Scientists marching in opposition to a newly elected Republican president will only cement the divide. The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers.

I’ve heard that so often: don’t rock the boat. We’ve got ours, if you make waves you’re imperiling the precious position we are clinging to by our fingernails. It’s absurd, selfish, and futile. The situation for science has become increasingly dire, and instead of shaking up the situation, putting your position at risk, you want to make sure that scientists are more harmless/helpless, more innocuous, more inoff-fucking-ensive because conservatives who despise science already might use the support of a political movement they hate as more ammo against us?

We have a common word for that. It’s called cowardice.

Then he dares to lecture us on what would be effective science communication? I’ve been through that for years, too. There’s always someone who will lecture at others who are doing the work that they’re doing it wrong. And that someone doing the hectoring is usually terribly ineffective at communicating science, so they are reduced to pontificating about the proper way to do it to the science communicators.

When they tell people “we need storytellers” without recognizing that we already know that, and are doing it, it’s remarkably clueless. We just see the need for something more, that when we reach yet another period of peak crisis, it’s time to add another approach to the toolkit.

And hey, you want to tell stories? Go ahead. No one is stopping you. The only ones trying to suppress diverse methods of outreach to diverse communities are the ones saying there can be only one acceptable way of explaining science.

By the way, I know people who found “An Inconvenient Truth” useful and powerful. That it antagonized the assholes who have been subverting science for decades is a point in its favor.

I thought that op-ed was bad, but here’s a dude complaining that the March is too political…or worse, that it’s the wrong politics. Those damn SJWs! Ruining everything!

What does make me worry is the increasing politicization of the March, which is fast changing from a pro-science march to a pro-social justice march. Now there’s nothing wrong with marching in favor of minority rights and against oppression, but if you mix that stuff up with science, as the March organization seems to be doing, well, that is a recipe for ineffectiveness. What would be the point of a march if it’s about every social injustice, particularly when, as the organizers did, they indict science itself for its racism and support of discrimination? The statement of aims below from the March’s organizers has now disappeared, but the tweet below that is still there. (You can find the full statement archived here.)

We’ve seen this same crap recently from Steven Pinker. The March for Science declares that they are “committed to centralizing, highlighting, standing in solidarity with, and acting as accomplices with black, Latinx, API, indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, women, people with disabilities, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex scientists and science advocates,” and boom, the conservative science wing reacts in horror. I don’t get it. Encouraging diversity and new ideas and approaches is exactly what scientists should support — but I guess if you’re part of the establishment now, you’d rather not see the implicit policies that helped you get where you are change. It’s almost as if they’re willing to help others climb the ladder of scientific achievement, but only if they look like the people that are already there. Can’t clutter up the old boys’ club with disabled lesbians and transgender brown people and all that, because they wouldn’t be as committed to doing good science as…privileged white people?

But that would be racist/sexist.

There’s another distractor there, too: fighting oppression is a “recipe for ineffectiveness”. We must focus laser-like on ONE THING, even if we are a massive organization of hundreds of thousands or even millions of members — everyone must be in lockstep on the ONE THING or we won’t get the ONE THING, even if the one thing is so abstract and huge that it’s effectively indefensible. So Movement Atheism must focus on the ONE THING of ATHEISM, which is fiercely defended as the sole principle that there is no god, never mind all the complex cultural baggage associated with that. Scientists must focus on the ONE THING of SCIENCE, a concept so complex that we have a name for the problem of trying to define its boundaries, the demarcation problem.

I have no idea how (or why) this dude plans to narrow the focus of the March. Is the March for Science to consist only of white men looking distracted as they concentrate on the scientific method? Wait — that would look just like a bunch of philosophers, and we can’t have that. A bunch of white men fiddling with telescopes and dissecting cats and punching numbers into their handheld computers as they march? That sounds like a recipe for effectiveness.

There’s another complaint. The organizers for the March for Science have criticized science. How dare they! Clearly, they don’t understand the True Purpose of Science, which is Good and Above Criticism. All Hail Science!

If a March has any chance of being effective, it can’t consist of a bunch of penitentes who flagellate themselves loudly and publicly for bad behavior. After all, stuff like “immigration policy”, “native rights”, and many other issues of social justice are not, as the organizers maintain, “scientific issues.” They are moral issues, which means they reflect worldviews and preferences that are not objective. Of course once you set your goals on immigration, pipeline locations and who should not be near them, and so on, then science can inform your actions. But to claim that all issues of social justice are “scientific issues” is palpably wrong.

This is just weird to the point of incomprehensibility to me. Science must have an objective purpose? But most of it doesn’t! Science is about curiosity and wonder and exploration. What objective purpose was Thomas Hunt Morgan pursuing when he was searching for sports in his fly colony? What was the objective purpose of Santiago Ramón y Cajal spending long nights drawing the beautiful filigree of Golgi-stained neurons, or writing lovely prose about the growth cone?

Please, do tell me how to define this criterion of “objectivity”. It seems to me that this arbitrary distinction would make postage stamp collecting, which has discrete, specific, measurable criteria, more scientific than launching a space probe to Pluto, where we had little idea what we’d find.

It is clearly not so much that some issues lack objectivity — once you recognize that native Americans are human beings, “native rights” becomes a rather clearly defined concern with measurable goals — but, as defined, that adding a moral component taints a subject, polluting the purity of Science, making it non-objective.

I’ve got news for him: everything has a moral component. Everything has a political component. If it’s a human activity, it is contaminated with moral and political ramifications, because that’s what humans do. Deciding that we have the economic surplus and the privilege of leisure to be able to support people who study fruit flies full time is a moral, social, and political act, for instance.

It becomes even more profoundly moral, social, and political when we make arbitrary decisions about which people will be permitted to have the privilege of spending their days studying fruit flies, or even which people will be granted the education that will allow them to appreciate the study of fruit flies. Until the day comes that AIs are doing all the science, discussing the science only among the other AIs, and doing all the work to benefit or harm only AIs, you cannot divorce the moral from the scientific. And even then I hope the AIs are smart enough to consider the impact of their pursuits on AI morality, because we feeble apes sure don’t seem to be able to comprehend that concept.

Just the idea that science ought not to criticize itself in public gives me the heebie-jeebies. Damn. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study? I guess that was scientifically objective, let’s not criticize it. Eugenics? All sciencey and shit. Bioethics is not a field that actually exists, or if it does, it’s not objective and Truly Scientific because it recognizes the impact of science on society.

It’s easy to find fun and exciting examples. How about this: An Adorable Swedish Tradition Has Its Roots in Human Experimentation. They fed institutionalized, mentally-ill people with massive doses of candy until their teeth rotted, to determine if sugar actually caused tooth decay. It was objectively done, of course. All Praise Science!

Or how about the whole issue of evolutionary psychology, which mainly seems to exist to rationalize traditional Western values as objective and scientific, perpetuating a whole vast collection of oppressive ideas.

Victorian social attitudes and science were closely intertwined. The common belief was that males and females were radically different. Moreover, attitudes about Victorian women influenced beliefs about nonhuman females. Males were considered to be active, combative, more variable, and more evolved and complex. Females were deemed to be passive, nurturing; less variable, with arrested development equivalent to that of a child. “True women” were expected to be pure, submissive to men, sexually restrained and uninterested in sex – and this representation was also seamlessly applied to female animals.

That sure sounds like Science with a capital “S” to me! Let’s get some grant money to prove the status quo and get it published in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Cosmpolitan, and The Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management! A three-fer, win-win, here comes tenure…and none of that has involved those damned “moral issues”, as long as you realize that white, conservative, capitalist, male biases are the gold standard of Truth, and it’s only those deviants who question the status quo who are bringing in that dirty word, “morality”, and making everything messily unscientific.

Oh, god, this thing gets even worse.

If we are to march, we should march in unity for truth, and against those who reject empirical truth. What unites all science—and makes it unique—is that it is a universal toolkit, used in the same way by members of all groups, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religion. That is what holds us together. If we start dragging in issues of social justice—and I’m not of course saying they should be ignored in other venues—then we divide not only ourselves, but separate ourselves from much of the electorate, who, as we’ve seen above, generally trust us.

Declaring that you’ll only be marching under the banner of TRUTH sounds awfully religious to me. Declaring that science always works the same way in everyone’s hands sounds awfully ahistorical to me. Declaring that what holds us together is a disregard of gender, ethnicity, or religion sounds awfully privileged to me — I have the luxury of being unaffected by my sex and race, but damn, if you listen with half an ear to everyone who isn’t a white man you can’t help but notice that that isn’t true for everyone.

Social justice isn’t something that we “drag in” when social injustice is the muck that hinders the participation of more than half the citizenry in science, when toxic nonsense about sex and race poison the whole discourse about science in our culture.

This whole argument that social justice must be actively excluded from the March for Science reminds me of another march: the suffrage parade of 1913, in which black women were asked to segregate themselves from the white women and march at the back of the parade, because the white ladies did not want their goals marred by that other issue of equality. If you’re worried that your cause might be tainted, that’s the example you should examine, because it was Ida Wells who emerges the hero and white feminists who damage their own reputation (and who still, all too often, kick their own butts when they ignore intersectionality).

And sweet jesus, the hypocrisy. Science is all about Truth and Objectivity, which is why we should bow to the biases of the electorate, who will be divided from us if we start dragging in issues of social justice, since they, after all, are assumed to not like it (and oh, the implicit bias in which part of the electorate we must listen to…I cringe). So much for the objectivity of science — it should say what the people desire, or it might erode their trust in us.

I presume Dr Coyne will now respect the wishes of all those faith-heads who want him to shut up about atheism. Might separate ourselves from much of the electorate, don’t you know.

Not my America

I hope your breakfast is settled now, because here’s a video of Jared Taylor being interviewed by Jorge Ramos. In case you don’t know who Taylor is, he’s an unpleasant and pretentious leader of white supremacists — if you’ll watch the video (I don’t blame you if you don’t), you’ll see an unctuous, smiling glad-hander trying to sell hate as if it is pancakes. He’s a slimy, smarmy, sneering snake of a man, a slithering sibilant walking among us with little humanity in his smirking skull. But hey, watch and learn.

I only made it a third of the way through; I applaude Ramos’ persistence. But I have to address a few of Taylor’s assumptions.

Homogeneous countries have less violence. That’s a weird claim, because even if it were true, I’d want to know why. He’s going to constantly harp on the idea that Mexico is homogenous, just to get a dig in at Ramos, but the thing is that Mexico’s violent crime rate is higher than that of the more ethnically diverse USA. A good part of that is the drug war that the US has fostered. Maybe it’s not race, or conflicts between races, that cause the major problems?

I’d also like to point out that the US has more right-wing terrorism — that the people we ought to fear are not our Hispanic neighbors, but the people who argue that we need to provoke violence with our Hispanic neighbors. People like Jared Taylor. The real problem isn’t diversity, but the minority who so hate others with different skin color that they think oppression, discrimination, and forcible ejection are calm, reasonable, rational responses.

Mexico is just as racist as we are. He tries hard to bait Ramos by claiming that he just wants the US to be like Mexico, which he tries to pretend is some kind of uniform brown skin tone with no racial differences. But that’s not true! Mexican internal race relations are complex — there are rankings based on skin color, and different attitudes towards people who look more “Indian” vs. “Spanish”. I don’t know if there are people like Taylor who would argue for the superiority of the population who look more European (there probably are, given human nature), but at least I’m unaware of any prominent figures arguing for expulsion of all mestizos. If there is less conflict, it seems to me it has to be because people are more aware the deep history and obvious diversity of the Mexican people, making a simple binary distinction that demonizes one group harder to do. The US has a long history of treating anyone with “one drop” of black heritage as inferior. We’ve taken a range and turned it into a black and white distinction.

“Us” and “Them”. Taylor often claims he just wants to make his country safe for “us” against the invading hordes of “them”, those immigrants. He mentions that his family came over to North America from England in the 18th century — hey, so did my paternal line! But here’s the deal: his “us” includes people with Northern European ancestry (like me!), but no one else. I just have to say that I feel no intellectual kinship with Jared Taylor. I do not want to be part of his “us”. Skin color is nothing but a granfalloon, and to automatically assume that people with a similar genetic lineage are closer to you than someone with shared ideals is a mistake. He is part of a “them” to me — the racist club that excludes others. I am part of an egalitarian club that is inclusive and open to everyone with similar ideals. Jared Taylor would probably call me a “race traitor” because I can find common cause with my fellow Americans without worrying about what color skin they have, or what language they spoke while growing up.

Diversity makes us weaker. Pure madness. I’m looking at the scientific enterprise in America, and here’s a curious fact for you: of the 6 American Nobelists in 2016, every single one of them was an immigrant. Stop by an “American” research lab sometime, and you’ll find it is well-stocked with people from all kinds of exotic places — often only the PI was born in this country, while all the grad students and post-docs and technicians are British, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Malaysian, Nigerian, Indian. And quite often the PI isn’t American-born, either. Science is international. It becomes strongest when we don’t impose artificial barriers of race.

I’m not exactly the world’s biggest fan of Michio Kaku, but here’s an antidote to Jared Taylor, and it’s something on which Kaku and I agree 100%. Diversity has been one of the strongest tools we have in building the American scientific enterprise. We have grown by being attractive to people all around the world, gathering together new ideas, combining them in novel arrangements, and taking advantage of the brightest brains, which, it turns out, are all the same color.

What scares me is that the American public school system is doing such a poor job of educating students — guaranteed to get worse as long as we consider people like Betsy DeVos to be tenable candidates for running it — and at the same time we are now driving away the intelligent people who would otherwise be happy to come here and learn and teach. I refuse to be grouped with an “us” that so ignorantly insists on a racist delusion that is entirely destructive to a reality that has benefited us so much over the decades.

When the Jared Taylors of the USA destroy an environment that has formed me and led to new ideas and new strengths, I won’t identify with it anymore. I’ll find a new “us”. Canada is looking more like my people than the theocratic, racist cult that’s taking over here.