I’m probably going to regret this

One result of my latest doctor’s visit is that I was told to stay off my cursed foot, at least until Wednesday, and to avoid much physical activity until everything heals up. This is not good! I’ve been imprisoned in my home for the last two and a half weeks — and I also got some new brain-fog medication (not that it treats the fog, it causes it.) I am going to go stir-crazy.

My daughter recommended that I pick up some new game, Baldur’s Gate 3, which is getting rave reviews, but of course it’s Skatje’s opinion that matters, so I did. It’s downloading now. Is my life over?

The horrible ghouls of 20th century anthropology

This is a photo of Mary Sara, an 18 year old Sami woman who traveled to Seattle in 1933, accompanying her mother, who was getting cataract surgery. While there, Mary died of tuberculosis, which is tragedy enough…but then the ghouls arrived.

The Smithsonian wanted her brain.

The young woman — whose family was Sami, or indigenous to areas that include northern Scandinavia — had traveled with her mother by ship from her Alaska hometown at the invitation of physician Charles Firestone, who had offered to treat the older woman for cataracts. Now, Firestone sought to take advantage of Sara’s death for a “racial brain collection” at the Smithsonian Institution. He contacted a museum official in May 1933 by telegram.

Ales Hrdlicka, the 64-year-old curator of the division of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum, was interested in Sara’s brain for his collection. But only if she was “full-blood,” he noted, using a racist term to question whether her parents were both Sami.

The Smithsonian houses over 30,000 body parts, including hundreds of brains.

Nearly 100 years later, Sara’s brain is still housed by the institution, wrapped in muslin and immersed in preservatives in a large metal container. It is stored in a museum facility in Maryland with 254 other brains, amassed mostly in the first half of the 20th century. Almost all of them were gathered at the behest of Hrdlicka, a prominent anthropologist who believed that White people were superior and collected body parts to further now-debunked theories about anatomical differences between races.

There they sit to this day, gathered by Ales Hrdlicka, who somehow became a curator at the Smithsonian and a prominent defender of racist pseudoscience.

Hrdlicka, who was born in what is now the Czech Republic, received medical training from the Eclectic Medical College of New York City and the New York Homeopathic Medical College in Manhattan before moving into the field of anthropology. He was seen as one of the country’s foremost authorities on race, sought by the government and members of the public to prove that people’s race determined physical characteristics and intelligence.

He was also a longtime member of the American Eugenics Society, an organization dedicated to racist practices designed to control human populations and “improve” the genetic pool, baseless theories that would be widely condemned after the Nazis used them to justify genocide and forced sterilization during the Holocaust. In speeches and personal correspondence, he spoke openly about his belief in the superiority of White people, once lamenting that Black people were “the real problem before the American people.”

“There are differences of importance between the brains of the negro and European, to the general disadvantage of the former,” he wrote in a 1926 letter to a University of Vermont professor. “Brains of individual negroes may come up to or near the standard of some individual whites; but such primitive brains as found in some negroes … would be hard to duplicate in normal whites.”

That is truly remarkable. The article focuses on the abuse of autonomy of so many people who had their brains scooped out and sent off to Washington DC, and that is definitely an important issue. But I was reading it and asking myself, “What science was done? What did we learn? What did he discover to justify calling the brains of black people ‘primitive’?” It turns out to have been nothing.

The extent of Hrdlicka’s own research on the brains is unclear. When a professor wrote to him and asked about the differences he found between the brains of people of different races, he replied that research studies showed the superiority of White brains, without citing any studies of his own. He published a 1906 study on brain preservatives, recording the weight of human and animal brains and comparing how they fared in a chemical solution. But The Post found no other research on the brains by Hrdlicka.

I know a bit about neuroscience, and I find the whole approach unproductive and baffling. Sure, you could do crude measurements, weighing brains and slicing them open to measure the gross morphology of regions and nuclei…but we know that all of that is so variable and often so irrelevant to the functioning of those brains that you can’t learn anything from it. We simply don’t know enough about the details of how brains work that, aside from major abnormalities, you can’t conclude anything about the minds housed in those lumps of meat by hacking them up, and you especially couldn’t do anything with the information in the early 20th century.

Basically, Hrdlicka was nothing but an obsessive and rather morbid collector. His ‘credibility’, what there was of it, rested entirely on accumulating the largest collection of brains, like bloody tragic Pokemon. He didn’t have to think. He didn’t have to study. He was just gathering gory fragments of human beings and parading them before other bad scientists who thought this was an accomplishment. The Smithsonian should be ashamed, we should all be ashamed that this charade of race ‘science’ was perpetrated for so long, and that people continue to think this was a useful approach to justify their bigotry to this day.

Hrdlicka really was a ghoul. When an exhibit of Filipino culture, represented by a large number of people from that country, was held at the World’s Fair, he had one thing on his mind: “That summer, Hrdlicka headed to St. Louis, hoping to take brains from Filipinos who died.” He collected four brains from the unfortunate people who died incidentally there (tuberculosis and pneumonia were Hrdlicka’s friends).

Ugh. The Smithsonian, and other museums around the country, need to address this ugly stain on their history, and make amends to the people they exploited for such stupid ends.

Aw, shucks, I missed it

The Iowa state fair happened this past weekend, and it was a disgusting spectacle. Iowa has an oversized political reputation, solely because it has the first primary in the presidential election, so every Republican candidate shows up to shake hands and kiss babies and pretend they care about a small farm state, rather than because they enjoy fried-cheese-onna-stick or want to weigh in on the qualities of prize pigs.

There were two spectacles worth noting. One was the way the press fawned over this event, comparing the size of the crowds for various candidates and acting as if this was meaningful. A good healthy journalism wouldn’t care about the opinions of a self-selected mob of yokels and how many corn dogs they ate, they’d be talking about policies and records and, in one case, criminal history. But no, this was a celebrity spectacle with no weight at all.

The second was…Trump is back to lying again and hyping the imaginary size of his crowds.

I don’t think I can take another year of this bullshit. Narcissistic serial liars are so 2020.

By the way, the Stevens County Fair took place here last week — I couldn’t go, I’m trapped in a small room in our house cultivating chronic pain, but Mary went, and she said there was less knee-jerk MAGA nonsense and fewer Trump flags waving than last year, so that’s a slightly positive development. Also, Trump didn’t show up.

Oh god no, not this question again

I unlimbered my rusty, drugged-up voice to answer a really simple question today. Unfortunately, it’s the same goddamn stupid question I get from Muslim apologists all the time, and they don’t listen to the answer anyway, but I’ve been practically voiceless for a few weeks, so this was an excuse to, you know, speak again.

I can’t believe I have to start lecturing again in a week and a half.

Transcript below:

[Read more…]

If you want to discourage teachers from entering the profession…

Here is the way. Abigail Zwerner is the first grade teacher who was shot by one of her students, and she is suing the school district for damages. The school’s lawyers have come up with an interesting defense.

The motion was filed last week by attorneys representing the School Board and argues that Zwerner, who was shot in her classroom at Richneck Elementary in January by a 6-year-old student, is only entitled to file a worker’s compensation claim because the injury she sustained from the shooting is a “workplace injury,” and that the shooting was a hazard of the job.

James Graves, the president of the Newport News teachers union, says that argument is “ridiculous.”

“This is not military, this is not the police department. This is an education system,” Graves said in an interview Wednesday.

In a Facebook statement posted Tuesday, Graves said, “These lawyers have started a significant hurricane in our district by saying that being shot is part of what teachers signed up for.”

If you’re a teacher, you should expect to be shot at now and then? What other professions in America should be taking gun violence for granted?

Lawyers, maybe? Maybe if some of these lawyers get shot, we should just shrug and say, “Well, that’s what their job entails, you know.”

Skepticon NOW!

I’m missing my first Skepticon, which is going on this weekend. Unfortunately, I can’t travel at all. My son has tickets and invited me to the Grand Funk Railroad & Jefferson Starship concert tomorrow, and I had to turn that down, too. This old age thing is really crimping my style.

Skepticon stuff is happening online, at least.

I guess I’m reduced to doing everything virtually for now. See you there!

Sherri Tenpenny is not a doctor

Finally, one quack goes down. The notorious anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny has had her medical license suspended, at long last. It should have been done long ago.

Two years ago, a Cleveland area physician strode into the House Health Committee room and told state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize their hosts and “interface” with cell towers.

Her comments, the subject of widespread ridicule, triggered a swarm of 350 complaints to the State Medical Board and a chain of events that led to the regulators indefinitely suspending the medical license Wednesday of anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny.

Oh, yeah, the magnetized people claim. It’s as stupid as it sounds.

It was June 2021, just as scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines began to wane and health officials focused on the yeoman’s work of convincing hundreds of millions of Americans to take up the novel products. However, many conservatives sought to undercut this campaign, often under arguments about “medical freedom.” Tenpenny, speaking before a crowd of anti-vaccine activists, warned of purported dangers of vaccines with a firehose of debunked and misleading statements.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny said to the panel of lawmakers.

“They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks … There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.”

Behold my magnetic powers!

Although…it’s true. I’ve received many vaccinations, and I just tested it, and look, I can make pennies stick to my forehead! I’ve been able to do this for my whole life, though, and I can’t say it’s particularly useful. I guess I could entertain my granddaughter for a minute and a half with that trick. Or drive an anti-vaxxer into a frothing fury for a couple of years.

Unfortunately, stripping Tenpenny of her medical license won’t slow her down in the slightest. It’s not as if she’s been practicing medicine all this time, she instead peddles “alternative” treatments to the gullible. Being denied a license by The Establishment will probably enhance her reputation among her clientele.

Her podcast is still squawking lies into the æther, and she has the ear of influential people — such as Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general of Florida.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo recently appeared on the podcast of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, where he continued to make claims about vaccines that are contradictory to widespread medical consensus.

Medical experts have said Ladapo’s claims are dangerous, and that his very presence on the podcast — and other recent appearances on shows promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories — gives credibility and support to anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Lapado’s latest comments are part of a litany of dubious claims that have alarmed public health officials in Florida and across the country since he got appointed surgeon general more than a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

This is a guy who says the risks of the COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits for most people, who has blocked the use of COVID vaccines in Florida, and refuses to use a mask — but he is a Harvard graduate, you know. He’s also blatantly ideological and conservative, making his comments to Tenpenny particularly ironic.

Despite being the head of Florida’s Department of Health, Ladapo bashed a majority of the nation’s physicians for their vaccine beliefs, saying they cannot separate themselves from their ideologies and politics.

“Our colleagues, for the most part, can’t be brought back into alignment with reality,” Ladapo said on the podcast. “I don’t have any faith that most of our physician colleagues, sadly, can be rehabilitated.”

Tenpenny went so far as to compare current doctors with those in Nazi Germany who participated in or didn’t oppose the mass killing of and experimentation on people, namely Jews, citing a passage written into the first page of the foreword of Ladapo’s own book, which he promoted on the podcast.

Kudos on getting a license suspended after years of talking, but Tenpenny isn’t going to hesitate and is going to continue to poison the discourse for many more years to come — and she’ll make bank off it, too.

Behold, Matt Walsh, nakedly Nazi

You knew this had to be coming. Matt Walsh, the know-nothing pundit who got mad attention for asking “what is a woman?” and insisting on a fundamental distinction between the sexes, all to justify his hatred of trans people, is airing a different idea now: white supremacy, white extinction theory, the whole kit-and-caboodle of racist Nazi dog whistles. He’s promoting Great Replacement Theory now.

There are really two parts of this story. The first is the story itself, which is the demographic trend where whites are trending towards extinction in the United States. Like, that’s the way it’s headed. And then the other part of the story is the veil of silence around this issue, the wall that is erected around it. And I know you’re gonna say, well, you just read a story about it. So it’s not a silence. They can report on it. So you report and you celebrate diversity, and then you just move on. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it, and that’s it. You aren’t allowed to talk much about it. You certainly – you certainly can’t be concerned about it. You’re not allowed to express any concern. That’s unthinkable. To hear that whites are on their way to minority status and the white population is declining, the worst that you could possibly do is – to talk about it at all is already a problem, but to suggest that there’s any reason at all to be concerned about that, or to be anything less than thrilled by that development is incredibly racist, we’re told.

Notice how the first two thirds of that paragraph are to set up the idea that he’s being persecuted, that no one is allowed to say these stupid words, and how society is policing your thoughts. That’s essential to his strategy, that you consider that his claim is so obvious and strong that people need to censor it even before he makes it. He’s not even going to consider that his great idea is so stupid and indefensible that intelligent people are already tired of hearing it.

People who identify as white are declining in proportion to those who identify with other ethnicities. That’s it. That’s all that is happening. There is no extinction. No one is being “replaced.” It’s how biology works — our species reproduces by mingling DNA between pairs of individuals, so everyone is a hybrid of their parents. It’s also a product of arbitrary cultural biases: if a white person has a child with a non-white person, there is no more loss of identity than if they had a child with a white person, but because of bigoted attitudes, the child is considered non-white. So of course, by definition, the frequency of “pure” white children declines with every generation, even if there is no decline in the frequency of genes contributed by white people. It’s an invented problem with no basis in reality.

Walsh continues, still feeling the need to prefix his comments with the idea that he’s a brave truth-teller that people want to silence.

We know that it’s — like, it doesn’t even need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway because we all know that’s true. But we know that the continued existence of any other race of people is considered deeply important. And the preservation of the historical and traditional racial identity of any nation is considered deeply important. You know? So, for example, if there was an influx of white immigration to a historically Black country, and that was resulting in a giant demographic shift wherein it was becoming a predominantly white country rather than predominantly Black, this would be considered a major, major problem. And there’s no doubt about it. And yet, in the reverse, it is either neutral or cause for celebration. But really it should be a cause for celebration.

Uh, yes — the continued existence of people is important. I’d also add that preserving unique cultures is also valuable. That is not something to worry about here, because the American historical and traditional identity is not at risk, nor are any white individuals. The culture is thriving and expanding as more people contribute to it, which is what you expect of a healthy evolving population.

He seems to have confused what is happening in the US to colonialism, where an external culture invades, takes over, and works to eradicate the native population … you know, like white Europeans did to the native populations of the Americas. That’s what’s really at the root of his problem, though. He thinks that they will do to us what we did to them. Except that’s not applicable: there is no alien “they”. “They” is us. Immigrants are joining us, not conquering us. The white population is diminishing in relative frequency, not because “they” are murdering us, but because we’re happily having consensual sex with each other.

As usual, he then goes off with half-assed distortions of biology.

And you know what? This pertains even to the the animal kingdom. I mean — think if there’s a particular type of, I don’t know, hummingbird that’s going extinct. Even for that, we’re supposed to panic. And if I were to say, hey, whatever. I mean, what does it matter? We — so we don’t have that of hummingbird. We got plenty of other hummingbirds. What does it matter what type of hummingbird it is? What difference does it make? So, yeah, this type of hummingbird is — there’s more of that then there’s less of this. Like, who cares? If I say that, I’m callous because, no, it’s very important that we have all varieties of hummingbirds. Every variety is very, very important. We have to keep them all around. Every part, every animal in the animal kingdom, we gotta keep them all around. It’s extremely important. If any particular variety starts to dwindle, if any particular type of species of animal gets driven out of its territory, it’s a very bad thing. So, it’s interesting that we can see this with hummingbirds, but not with certain kinds of people — well, in particular, one kind of person, which would be white person. The preservation of the hummingbird community is more important than the preservation of the white race.

No. Just no. Race and species are not synonyms. The analogy falls apart from its onset, and is in fact an extremely common trope among racists. I won’t take it apart word by word because that job has already been done: read Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy by HL Norton et al. Here’s the abstract.

In 1956, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhounds and bulldogs…?” It reads as if it were posted on social media today. The analogy comparing human races to dog breeds is not only widespread in history and pop culture, but also sounds like scientific justification for eschewing the social construction of race, or for holding racist beliefs about human nature. Here we answer Haldane’s question in an effort to improve the public understanding of human biological variation and “race”—two phenomena that are not synonymous. Speaking to everyone without expert levels of familiarity with this material, we investigate whether the dog breed analogy for human race stands up to biology. It does not. Groups of humans that are culturally labeled as “races” differ in population structure, genotype–phenotype relationships, and phenotypic diversity from breeds of dogs in unsurprising ways, given how artificial selection has shaped the evolution of dogs, not humans. Our demonstration complements the vast body of existing knowledge about how human “races” differ in fundamental sociocultural, historical, and political ways from categories of nonhuman animals. By the end of this paper, readers will understand how the assumption that human races are the same as dog breeds is a racist strategy for justifying social, political, and economic inequality.

Just the fact that Walsh brings this argument up is an indictment, biologists can tell you that it is rank bullshit. It’s old-fashioned garbage that I’d expect of Nazis or the KKK, but Walsh takes it for granted.

Once again, have you noticed how you don’t have to probe a transphobe very deeply before you uncover a Nazi?

Not…great

After more than a week of narcotics and steroids, I decided to quit this morning — the fog and haze and insomnia were too much. It wasn’t quite cold turkey, because I started dropping the dosage a couple of days ago, but still, this is my first day totally drug-free.

It’s not going real well so far. The pain is back (but still much less than last week), and now I get to deal with diffuse feelings of nausea, and I’m still foggy and slow. It’s one of those lose:lose situations and I’m not having a grand time. I also keep getting reminded that classes start in a few weeks.

I will get better. Next doctor’s appointment is early Monday morning.