Then they came for the sociology departments, but I was not a sociologist…

Respect. Sociology has been targeted for destruction by the raving mad conservatives of Florida. I guess it’s so dangerous that they fear it.

Last fall, with little explanation, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. proposed removing sociology from the menu of courses university students can take to meet graduation requirements. On Wednesday, he spoke more clearly, suggesting that sociology studies could veer into “identity politics or theories,” in violation of a new state law.

“Students should be focused on learning the truth about our country instead of being radicalized by woke ideology in our college classrooms,” Diaz said in comments to the State Board of Education.

Now sociology is woke and might steer students towards considering the broader implications of, for instance, racism and misogyny on, you know, society. Don’t worry, though, they’re going to provide an alternative.

The sociology option will be replaced with an introductory course about American history prior to 1877.

Let me guess: instead of teaching about the complexities of sociology, they’re going praise the Founding Fathers and how wonderful America is.

It requires that core courses “whenever applicable, provide instruction on the historical background and philosophical foundation of Western civilization and this nation’s historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments, and the Federalist Papers.”

Yep. You know, that isn’t even close to the content you’d find in a sociology course. Can you guess what the problem with sociology is?

“I think the statute is clear that, within the general education core code, courses may not distort significant historical events or include curriculum that teaches identity politics or theories,” Diaz said. “And I think when you go into the sociology course, you’re talking about theories, and that’s an option that students have to explore those theories in a nongeneral education course.”

It teaches theories. The people behind these prohibitions really don’t understand the meaning of “theory” in science! I teach theory in all of my classes — it’s how you learn and progress, by teaching the ideas behind a subject and discussing the evidence that led to those theories. To exclude a subject because it incorporates theory is absurd, and to suggest that it is inappropriate for a specific, more advanced course and should only be taught in a broader, more general course is exactly the opposite of what should be done. I think the idea is to put know-nothing ideologues in charge of interpreting the subject.

It’s all part of policies intended to neuter any political implications of…knowing stuff. Learning is dangerous. Especially if it’s DEI, that might expose the biases of the status quo, and might lead to educated adults working to change the flaws in the “perfect” country established by omniscient 18th century landowners.

In their rules, the State Board and the Board of Governors focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, often referred to as “DEI.” They define them as “any program, campus activity or policy” that classifies people by race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity or sexual orientation and “promotes differential or preferential treatment” based on those classifications.

They define political and social activism as actions that would “affect or prevent change in government policy based on social issues.” And social issues are defined as issues that would “polarize or divide society along political, ideological, religious or moral beliefs.”

Sorry, guys. I want my students to be engaged with the important issues in society, such as correcting the howling ignorance of conservatives. More activist students, please.

First round of Survivor: Morris cleared

Class went fairly well this afternoon, mainly because I’ve got a good, engaged bunch of students. The omens bode well for a good semester.

Me, lecturing

One catch: I haven’t spoken in over a month. Little bits of conversation, sure, but I haven’t used my voice in a sustained discussion in all that time, and I think it’s atrophied a bit. I made it through an hour, but at the end, it was all rough and gravelly and actually starting to hurt a bit. I’ve got to practice more.

I was also feeling a bit dehydrated. I’m going to start bringing a water bottle to work and take regular swigs throughout the day. Minnesota winters don’t help much, either: humidity bottoms out when it’s this cold, as my spiders will attest.

Is ignorance a prerequisite for being a Tory?

Sometimes it’s good to see that conservatives in every country are freakin’ morons. Look who the Tories appointed to be Space Minister in the UK:

The Conservative space minister has apparently confused Mars with the Sun.

Andrew Griffith, who has been in charge of the space sector since November, also mistook Jupiter for Saturn.

On a walk around the Science Museum in London, Mr Griffith pointed to an exhibit showing the surfaces of different planets, the House magazine reported. “Now we have got Mars,” he said, before being told by a member of museum staff that it was actually the Sun.

He went on to say “that one is Saturn”, after the display changed, before the employee said “no, no, that is Jupiter”, according to the magazine.

Insisting he is learning on the job as space minister, he said: “I’m not an encyclopaedia.”

No one expects a bureaucrat to be an encyclopedia, but why does he even have this position? He’s clearly not very curious or informed about space — last summer, my 4 year old granddaughter was getting hooked on space science, reading children’s books about the planets, drawing pictures of different planets…maybe the UK can appoint her to the position of Space Minister?

Evolution is the control of development by ecology

Today is my actual first day of classes. We had MLK Day off, and I have no classes on Tuesday, and today I get to meet the 12 students in my Ecological Developmental Biology course. It should be fun. I plan to present that famous aphorism by Van Valen, “Evolution is the control of development by ecology,” and then I’m done for the entire semester — once they’ve grasped that, there is nothing else left to teach, so we can just coast through February, March, April, and May.

OK, so maybe we should also think about the details. We’re going to spend the first two weeks diving into Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. It’s short but clears the stage beautifully of any vestige of genetic determinism and primes us with an introduction to some fundamental concepts. Everyone ought to read it!

The rest of the semester we’ll work through Gilbert and Epel’s Ecological Developmental Biology. We’re going to talk about plasticity, epigenetics, symbiosis, developmental physiology, and the book has lots of material on teratogenesis, cancer, and aging (those are all developmental concerns, you know — we’re doing all the interesting and important stuff).

We’re also going to dig into the primary literature. This week, we’re reading a review by Sultan, “Development in context: the timely
emergence of eco-devo” to get everyone filled in with the background, but subsequent weeks will be mainly about primary research papers. There’s going to be a fair amount of reading in this class!

I’ve also made the radical decision to abolish all exams: about 60% of the grade is derived from just showing up, alert and ready to contribute. We’ll see how well that flies.

I’ll let you know. I’m thinking I’ll try to post a weekly wrap-up here, so that if I fail it’ll be visible.

Headhunting

Remember when Harvard president Gay, UPenn president Magill, and MIT president Kornbluth were pilloried for being insufficiently outraged about Palestinians on their campuses? They did give pretty tepid and timid answers to questions about campus protests, but I hate to break the news to you about college presidents: that’s their job, being professionally tepid and timid about everything in order to avoid antagonizing politicians and donors. They could have done better, but they never received any training in being forthright.

Then, strangely, everything shifted from being about their responsibilities to all sides on a politically contentious issue to…plagiarism? Not that that isn’t an important matter, but it’s peculiar how we got this abrupt change in focus. What had happened is that certain ideologically motivated people had decided to really get those college presidents, and they’d been doing their best to dig up dirt on them. They didn’t find evidence of anti-Semitism (that would have been a bad tactic, since the dirt diggers tended to be anti-Semitic themselves), but they did find that one nasty little nugget, the horrible secret that plagues a lot of academics who are pressured to churn out lots of papers.*

Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that neither anti-Semitism or an epidemic of cheating were the actual motivations behind the assault on university presidents, or universities in general. They really, really hate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). This was another anti-woke crusade all along.

Gay’s resignation almost a month after Magill’s had initially redirected the backlash onto Kornbluth, who has largely evaded the brunt of the outrage, kept her job and remained relatively silent amid the calls for her ouster. But as the focus of the online outrage now trains on Business Insider, the calls for the presidents’ firings — once primarily fueled by concerns over antisemitism on campus — are shifting to a broader campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at U.S. colleges and then detouring into seemingly tit-for-tat plagiarism probes. The shift appears to reveal that the initial uproar was never really about protecting Jewish students, scholars told Salon.

“Given how quickly the focus of the people claiming to be concerned about antisemitism on our campuses shifted to academic dishonesty, it certainly appears that the focus was never really about antisemitism and protecting students,” Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Presidents told Salon. “It’s part of a long-running, well-funded effort to create a false narrative for the public that higher education is broken.”

What’s driving that well-funded effort are conservative billionaires, like Bill Ackman. Ackman’s campaign got briefly short-circuited when it was discovered that his wife, Neri Oxman, had the same plagiarism sins that were used to get Gay fired. Uh-oh. Need to recalibrate. Suddenly, Ackman is babbling about “nuance” and “context.” It would be funny if this weren’t a rich, powerful guy looking for pretexts to get people he doesn’t like fired.

But the act backfired for the financier, whose involvement in the controversy had brought him his fair share of criticism according to Bloomberg, last Thursday after Business Insider released reports accusing Oxman of failing to cite and copying passages from other authors without proper citation in her 2010 MIT dissertation, claims The New Republic notes are similar to those thrown at Gay. While Oxman acknowledged some of the claims and apologized for errors in a post to X, the outlet published a second report the day after alleging at least 15 new instances of plagiarism in her dissertation, including segments claimed to be directly lifted from Wikipedia.

With the ire aimed at his spouse, Ackman’s strong-minded stance against plagiarism in all forms suddenly became more nuanced, with the billionaire arguing in a post to X that charges of plagiarism in academia should be more context-reliant and weigh intentionality. The Business Insider reports prompted Ackman to expand his campaign against higher education to the journalism industry, with the Pershing Square CEO announcing his plans to launch an AI-powered dig for potential plagiarism in the outlet’s work.

What’s this about “intentionality”? I suspect he means plagiarism with intent to lend support to the poor and oppressed is bad, while plagiarism with an intent to enrich billionaires is good.

He just hates DEI. It is the root of all sins.

In the same post in which he detailed a strict stance on plagiarism, Ackman also gave voice to a conservative talking point about DEI, concluding, after meeting with students and faculty at Harvard, that DEI was at the core of the antisemitism cropping up on the campus in the wake of Oct. 7.

I think it would be a stronger point to argue that evangelical Christianity is at the core of that anti-Semitism. Except that conservative evangelical Christians also hate DEI, so he can’t blame them.

You know that DEI initiatives strongly oppose anti-Semitism, along with any racial or ethnic discrimination, right? You can’t be a DEI proponent and also promote bigoted ideas about any group.

This is really all about finding any excuse to cut down anyone who opposes the billionaire agenda.

Is too on the nose?

There are jerks on Mastodon, too

It’s too bad that social media has to have that “social” component — as we all know, Hell is other people. I got some comments on this post about the ongoing atrocities in Israel/Palestine on Mastodon that earned someone an instant block. Look at this facile nonsense:

@[email protected]
@pzmyers It says in your profile you are an atheist yet you still seem to have been convinced by the religious moralizers that there exists a clearly defined objective standard of good and evil, which there is not.
@[email protected]
@pzmyers Also, though many people claim half-heartedly to condemn both Israel and Hamas (which in my view is unjustified), they spend the majority of the time and effort condemning Israel, therefore tacitly endorsing Hamas. They hold rallies against Israel, not against Israel and Hamas. They bring cases to the ICJ against Israel, not against Israel and Hamas.


First, they argue that because I’m an atheist, I can’t recognize good and evil. Those are religious concepts only! As if an atheist can’t have a moral standard based on entirely human values, and as if religious values aren’t totally fucked up and invalid. Checkmate, atheist! You are not allowed to condemn violence and genocide, because you don’t have a holy book telling you what’s right!

Next, now that they have established themselves firmly on the moral high ground vs. the trough of futility and despair that is the atheist position, they go on to read my mind. My condemnation of Israel and Hamas is “half-hearted”? Say what? I despise both with my entire heart — even an atheist and humanist can regard terrorist violence as brutal and cruel. That’s their justification for suggesting that I am “tacitly endorsing Hamas”?

No, I am not. I think both the Hamas leadership and the government of Israel should be dragged before the Hague and receive their just punishment. The difference between the two is that 1) right now, the Hamas leadership is being bombed into bloody gibs, and 2) my country is actively supporting the state-run terrorism by Israel, so I feel that condemning the violence my government is “tacitly endorsing” is more important today. There’s also the fact that the Palestinians are clearly the underdog, with about 24,000 dead citizens so far.

No matter, though: my perspective as an atheist and humanist is that no one should be butchering either Israeli or Palestinian civilians. No one should be arming the butchers, either.

Why should I care?

There was an…election event yesterday. That gives it more attention than it deserves. Election spasm? Political twitch? Republican fart?

It was a caucus. I’ve attended a few — these are weird little parties where a select few show up and are given a platform for their often weird ass opinions.

It was in Iowa, a conservative rural state with a bloated status in politics for the sole, and trivial, reason that they schedule their primaries to be first.

It was a solely Republican event. Democrats were put in the shade.

The crook and rapist won.

And yet, all of the newspapers are running this as a front page story, headline news that’s going to be trumpeted endlessly. The Republican also-rans, Haley & DeSantis, were negligible. The media are ready to crown Trump after this trivial and pointless event, that we all knew how was going to turn out. They are happily feeding the illusion that Trump is inevitable without acknowledging that he’s only inevitable among the most contemptible people in the country, MAGA freaks who will ignore his record and his crimes.

Except in the sense that a corrupt criminal is dominating the Republican party, why should I care what happened in Iowa? The media are just playing the horse race game, again. Who cares that this man could destroy the country and that a significant fraction of the electorate are ignorant assholes? We got us a competition! Let’s see who gets first place! Wheeeee! Time to sell more ads!

I’m feeling it

Morris weather:

-23°C (-8°F), -36°C (-32°F) with windchill

It’s been this way all weekend. I lost all feeling in my fingers in the few minutes walking from the garage to my front door when I took off my gloves and was fumbling with my keys. Those dang metal keys are dangerous in this weather.

It’s hard to explain this to the people who actively avoid thinking, but the problem is global warming.

Stupid wiggily jet stream, letting all that cold air freeze me.

Libertarians will never change

I feel like Libertarians have been keeping a low profile for the last few years, after learning that airing their ridiculous views gets them almost as much ridicule as “sovereign citizen” declarations (I think there is a lot of overlap between the two groups, though.) The existence of laws and regulations is a slap in their faces, and they believe that if only they could get rid of those meddling, interfering restrictions they could live in an Edenic paradise. So a group of independent thinkers decided to build a suburb in Arizona while ignoring the need to provide water. Water? It falls out of the sky and flows on the ground, we don’t need no stinkin’ pipelines. In the desert.

Arizona law requires homebuilders in active management areas to secure a reliable source of water expected to last at least a hundred years. However, there’s a loophole: the law only applies to subdivisions of six homes or more. You can guess what some clever developers do: they simply build lots of “subdivisions” each consisting of only five homes.

These so-called “wildcat” communities are all over the state. They’re miniature havens of freedom, perfect for stubbornly independent libertarians who want to get out from under the thumb of government bureaucrats telling them where they can and can’t live. Rio Verde Foothills is one such.

But then they made an awful discovery. It turns out, even when you find a way to skirt regulations about water… humans still need water.

Curse you, physical laws of the universe! How dare you disrupt my fantasies with harsh realities?

Suddenly, these people faced what every Libertarian dreads most: consequences.

…because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.

In my limited experience with life in the dry Eastern Washington state, residents have to pay attention to things like aquifers and reservoirs and irrigation, especially if you’re in a resource-intensive occupation like farming, and those are communal resources with strict rules about how they may be shared. Everyone has to work together to get access to the water they need. These developers decided to just ignore those rules for their own selfish gain.

But let’s not just blame Libertarians and developers. Everyone in the desert Southwest has to recognize that their environment imposes limitations on their growth.