Tom Morello is too mean to Nazis

The NY Post claims — consider the source, and be skeptical — that Tom Morello is being canceled by his fans for being against Nazis. Tom Morello! Rage Against the Machine Morello! He said something on Twitter.

Rage Against The Machine rocker Tom Morello, 59, is getting blasted on Twitter for sharing an anti-Nazi quote…

Wait for it,  w a i t  for it…

…with fans accusing him of fascism and intolerance.

“Fans.” I don’t think actual fans would be mad at Tom Morello for being aggressively anti-Nazi. Have they listened to any of his music? Especially since this is the quote they found offensive.

German saying: If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, there are 10 Nazis at the table

Uh, yeah? That’s right. The people who are complaining are the “change my mind” folks. The debate bros.

“While that sounds principled, it isn’t,” one Twitter user wrote. “It’s a mechanism to stop conversation. 9 people can sit down at a table with 1 Nazi and talk and educate said single Nazi on the issues and the truth with evidence and convert that Nazi. It’s called diplomacy.”

“So do you think it’s impossible to politely converse with someone to change their mind?” another asked.

You can’t debate Nazis, full stop.

Hey, man, shouldn’t you go back to listening to Hootie & the Blowfish? Rage Against the Machine isn’t your jam.

Backlash incoming?

How about some optimistic news? These right-wing idiots have become caricatures of themselves, fulminating over the most absurd and trivial things, and believing that they are justified in radical action against fundamental American ideals, like schools and libraries. Stories about school board meetings where some angry nitwit stands up to rant about the “wokes” are commonplace, like this one in Florida.

At the meeting, right-wing parents and a minority of the school board amplified the usual attacks: Pornography in classrooms, indoctrination, wokeness. Watching them, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they were relishing every second of the tumult they’ve unleashed.

At the meeting, Shannon Rodriguez — a favorite of the right wing Moms for Liberty that led the attack on the Disney movie episode — kept robotically repeating phrases like “woke ideologies” and “woke agenda,” not even slightly disturbed by any sense of obligation to define their meaning. She proudly brandished her solidarity with boycotts of Bud Light and Disney as a badge of anti-woke heroism. Another conservative parent practically shouted, “You have awakened the entire alpha male blood of this country!”

It’s all fury for the sake of fury — they’re getting high on their own outrage. It has an effect, though. Fifty teachers in Hernando County, where this meeting took place, are resigning (come to Minnesota, we’d love to have you here). Ron DeSantis is basically destroying the educational infrastructure of the state, all in the name of stoking that moronic subset of the population that vote for him, and there are signs that the citizens are waking up.

But the real story of the night was the response. Again and again, parents and students forcefully defended teachers. They cast the right’s attacks, the censoring of educators and the removal of books as the real threats to education.

“War on woke?” one student said pointedly. “More like war on your children’s future.”

“It’s me and my fellow students who are feeling the effects of this,” said a second student. A third said the removal of books from classrooms is what’s really “indoctrinating students.”

Things like this are happening all over. As Sarah Jones of New York magazine reports, liberal parents in states as far-flung as New York, North Carolina and Montana are organizing local groups, pressuring school boards and running for office to challenge the right’s education takeover.

We can’t get too over-confident, though. Keep in mind that Hernando County elected DeSantis with a 41 point margin, and would probably re-elect him if a vote were held today. It would probably be by a smaller margin, though, and that’s where we are at — we need to keep chipping away, pointing out how incompetent and destructive the Right has been, and try to get incremental advantages that weaken them.

The triumph of form over content

That’s all ChatGPT is. Emily Bender explains.

When you read the output of ChatGPT, it’s important to remember that despite its apparent fluency and despite its ability to create confident sounding strings that are on topic and seem like answers to your questions, it’s only manipulating linguistic form. It’s not understanding what you asked nor what it’s answering, let alone “reasoning” from your question + its “knowledge” to come up with the answer. The only knowledge it has is knowledge of distribution of linguistic form.

It doesn’t matter how “intelligent” it is — it can’t get to meaning if all it has access to is form. But also: it’s not “intelligent”. Our only evidence for its “intelligence” is the apparent coherence of its output. But we’re the ones doing all the meaning making there, as we make sense of it.

I think we know this from how we learn language ourselves. Babies don’t lie there with their eyes closed processing sounds without context — they are associating and integrating sounds with a complex environment, and also with internal states that are responsive to external cues. Clearly what we need to do is imbed ChatGPT in a device that gets hungry and craps itself and needs constant attention from a human.

Oh no…someone, somewhere is about to wrap a diaper around a server.

Ken Ham is right!

I bet you never thought you’d see me writing that, did you? Ham has always insisted on a rigidly applied set of doctrines that may not be questioned — any doubt about any one Christian claim will lead to the whole house of cards collapsing. The Washington Post demonstrates the validity of that argument with this article, The Revolt of Christian Homeschoolers.

It’s about a couple in Virginia, Christina and Aaron Beall, who were brought up in an ultraconservative faith, with all the usual restrictions: women will submit to the man, public schools were evil, contraception was bad (she got pregnant within weeks of getting married.)

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”

What broke their faith was that last bit: the rod. They could not beat their children. And if whupping their kids with a stick was wrong, what else could be wrong about their faith? So they enrolled their daughter in <gasp> public school. She thrived and was happy. And they discovered that their religion had lied to them about schooling.

“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

They kept on learning.

Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.

Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.

The article says they didn’t question Christianity, so they didn’t become godless atheists or anything horrible like that, but they did become significantly more open-minded and are now reading more than the Bible and awful books like Bill Gothard’s or Michael and Debi Pearl’s. Now look at what they’re reading.

Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups.

Poor Ken Ham. He was right that any lapse in dedication to his interpretation of Christianity would lead to apostasy, but he’s probably sitting in a dark corner, hissing and gnashing his teeth and flicking his forked tail if he hears about the Bealls. One family has escaped his grasp!

We hunted the rabbit

I know it’s not as impressive as the mammoth, but it gives AMAB people an edge in rugby, therefore trans athletes should be banned. So saith Sean Ingle, chief sportswriter for the increasingly transphobic Guardian.

As he repeated many lies about trans women in sport, whether through ignorance or malice, Ingle said, And going back to the start with the science is to have a separate, exclusive, preserved category for natal females with trans women and trans men then going into an open, universal category. And those that support this approach point to the recent science that suggests that even when testosterone is reduced, strength in transgender women only goes down 5%.

Most of that advantage for male puberty is retained. They also point out, and I hear this a lot, that women are not men with lower testosterone. They point out there are thousands of physical differences between males and females, and they aren’t always obvious.

Females tend to have better peripheral vision than males. Males, in contrast, are quite as fast[sic?] at accurately detecting the trajectory of a moving object. That is, how fast it’s moving, in which direction it’s moving, and where it’s going to be 1 second from now.

That’s helpful when you’re trying to chuck a spear at a rabbit. If you’re going back to evolutionary biology times, it’s also helpful when you’re trying to intercept a rugby ball. My general view here is that The Guardian should be at the heart of all this and that we should write about the subject fearlessly.

Ah, even sportswriters have absorbed the biases of evolutionary psychology. Now men, not women, have evolved to be better at throwing spears.

These glib comparisons always make me wonder what was being compared in these studies. All women tend to have better peripheral vision than men? What if you compared men, in general, to women tennis players? Is it still true? Isn’t it quite likely that peripheral vision, and the ability to calculate trajectories, are plastic and responsive to practice?

Also, how large is the variation within men, and within women? Aren’t we really dealing with selected subsets of populations, making blanket claims about the aggregate abilities of diverse populations rather problematic?

The whole premise is flawed. It assumes that men of the paleolithic were specifically and exclusively selected for spear chucking, that women of that time had no use for that talent, and that some epigenetic factor inhibits the genetic spear-chucking complex in women. No evidence for any of that. Then we have to assume that there was no further selection for or against that complex for 100,000 years — men retained a fairly specific ability through many generations of life farming. Then we assume further that whatever epigenetic modifiers allow for enhanced spearchucking in men, they don’t include things like testosterone that might be blocked by inhibitors — these hypothetical male advantages sail through everything that affects trans women unaffected.

But sure, if you’re an evolutionary psychologist sportswriter, you can just propose that whole chain of improbabilities as a given and call it “science” or “biology,” all in the name of transphobia. I call it magical thinking.

The administration has destroyed all my lesson plans!

I was looking forward to a mellow, relaxed Fall term, when the office of human resources sent me this memo:

Dear Faculty and Staff,

As you may have read in the news, Governor Walz recently signed a bill into law legalizing the use of marijuana for recreational purposes by adults age 21 and over as well as the right to grow up to eight plants for personal use. The new law will also decriminalize its possession and expunge misdemeanor marijuana offenses from criminal records.

While the new law may begin to shift societal norms outside the workplace, University employees will still be expected to follow the University’s Drug-Free policy, Smoke-and Tobacco-Free policy, and Code of Conduct, which outlines the responsibilities of employees to “act according to the highest ethical and professional standards of conduct” and “be personally accountable for individual actions.”

As has been the standard procedure in the past, employees who violate these policies and perform work while impaired due to the use of controlled substances are subject to disciplinary action, including termination. Additionally, while the new law allows for the growing of cannabis plants at home, no such plants grown for personal use are allowed on any University property nor should such plants be visible on camera during remote work. Please also note that the legalization of marijuana at the state level does not change the federal DOT Drug policy for drivers, of which the University has about 100 employees. All members of our University community are responsible for encouraging compliance with these policies.

If you, or someone you are concerned about, need help with substance misuse, the University has resources available to you, including confidential counseling and chemical health consultation through the Employee Assistance Program and mental health resources for University employees and their dependents enrolled in the medical plan.

We appreciate your awareness and compliance with this issue in support of protecting the health of our entire community.

Darn. I guess the backup plan is MDMA.

(No, actually, I don’t partake of anything anymore, not even alcohol. I have no idea what the students will be doing to make my classes tolerable.)