A litany of bad science

Trumpism is nothing new. Fevered racism has been simmering in the US for a long, long time. What’s embarrassing is how Daniel Okrent explains how much well educated scientists at famous institutions contributed to the toxic stew. It’s not southern rednecks who necessarily are full of ignorance and hate; genteel northern scholars with bad ideas had more power and influence.

Also note how the social sciences have been scorned all along.

Together, they [a gang of prestigious scientists] popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

People with no knowledge of sociology are always eager to shut down sociology departments because they keep on digging up hard data to show that racists are wrong. But wait — when a sociologist says bigoted things, then we can listen to them. Also, I guess people of Slavic descent weren’t considered white enough?

Writing about Slavic immigrants, the sociologist Edward A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin — later the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union — declared, they “are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man.” The president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.”

Racial classifications were so confusing. Italians were Asiatic?

The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians coming to the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.” A Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, his city’s leading supporter of progressive causes, explained to friends why he became the single largest financial backer of the anti-immigrant campaign: His concern, he wrote, was that without a restriction law, Europe would be “drained of Jews — to its benefit no doubt but not to ours.”

Cold Spring Harbor has a deep history of aiding and abetting racism — removing that stain was one of the reasons James Watson got the boot there, although that doesn’t explain why they hired him in the first place.

The “biological” justifications for this nativism were first developed in Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, in laboratories financed by the widow of the railroad baron E.H. Harriman. (One of her goals, Mary Harriman said, was preventing “the decay of the American race.”) The laboratory’s head, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, took the ideas of the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of human breeding. One of the first steps, he believed, was to impose new controls on open immigration.

I read “The Passing of the Great Race” a few decades ago, and recall it as awful pseudoscience of the sort that might fit in at the Daily Stormer nowadays. I should re-read it, I suppose, but the memory is painful and infuriating.

At first, Davenport wished to bar the immigration only of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

Never forget how entrenched anti-semitism was and is.

Grant was not an actual scientist. But Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-famous paleontologist and his closest friend, definitely was. Osborn, who once expressed his opposition to the extension of the Westchester Parkway near his country estate because it would bring thousands of “East Side Jews” to the area, presided over the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, and made that institution the beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement. “I am convinced,” said Osborn, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and intellectual structure” of individuals is “based on racial characteristics.” It wasn’t a matter of ethnic bias, he said — it was “cold-blooded” science.

Good news for me — I’m one of those Nordics. That means I get to sneer at everyone with ancestry from a more southern country. That’s what this is all about, right, ranking people in arbitrary hierarchies so you always have someone lesser to spit on?

“Whether we like to admit it or not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting” to the “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the questionable “Alpines.” Lower than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.” And, he concluded, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

We’ve still got people today babbling about IQ tests. Thanks, scientists!

Other scholars rallied to the cause. Robert M. Yerkes — his name immortalized today at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta — conducted a severely flawed series of tests of American servicemen purporting to establish the intellectual inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans. Charles W. Gould, a lawyer in New York, sponsored “A Study of American Intelligence,” by Carl C. Brigham, a young Princeton psychologist (and later the inventor of the SAT). Brigham’s conclusion: “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”

It’s good to be reminded now and then that all the pseudo-scientific respectability given racist science today was granted by bigoted assholes with science degrees yesterday.

Friday Cephalopod: Do not taunt the octopuses while they are invading

They’ve established a beachhead in Wales, where swarms of cephalopods have begun their march inland.

Hey, lady! Yeah, you with the white nail polish! Do not tickle and mock Squad Captain Oi’sh’sh’schlick! We see you, we’re marking you down as a target!

When the marine squadrons link up with the spider cavalry, they’re going to be unstoppable.

Bye bye, Alex Jones, Infowars, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, Paul Nehlen, and Louis Farrakhan

Facebook and Instagram have finally had enough bad PR from those wackaloons and has outright banned a host of bad actors. It’s a start. However, it doesn’t affect the structural problems in social media algorithms — they’re built around simple-minded mechanisms that don’t consider the quality of the content, but rely on who is linking to who, and counting the number of references as an indication of popularity. It’s an extravagant version of a sneaky online poll. So you still get fed bad information, even if they retroactively cut out the original source of the lies.

Simply by following Instagram’s suggestions, Russell was recommended 240 Instagram pages posting misinformation. Looking at one QAnon page resulted in suggestions for 12 more. Liking and engaging with even borderline-extremist content on the platform results in recommendations for more extreme content. Just last week, Instagram recommended that I follow Yiannopoulos and Jones after I liked and followed many right-wing meme pages. Russell also noted that more than 30 white-nationalist pages flagged to Facebook and Instagram last month are still up. “One would think that Instagram would bother to halfway try to clean this stuff up,” he tweeted, “but it’s all still there.”

Banning these extremist figures is a step toward stricter moderation of extremist views, but time and again, we’ve seen that the internet’s worst actors always find new ways to exploit platforms. For instance, after Instagram promised to ban anti-vaccine hashtags such as #vaccinescauseautism, anti-vaxxers simply developed new hashtags by changing a letter or adding a word.

The one good thing about cutting off these phonies at the knees is that it makes it far more difficult for them to directly profit from their lies — the lies still get out there, but InfoWars, for instance, has just lost a big chunk of advertising revenue, which we can hope will reduce their effectiveness at poisoning the discourse. It might also discourage the next guy with a get-rich-quick scheme based on selling conspiracy theories.

Australian wildlife is getting weird

Rangers in the Northern Territory found this lovely beast, a three-eyed snake, which is particularly interesting because the eye is so well formed, and it’s unlikely to be the result of a secondary fusion of two embryos. Something just triggered the formation of another eye near the midline of the cranium.

Unfortunately, it didn’t live long. That extra eye was an obstacle to feeding.

Also unfortunate is the speculation in the comments. This is not likely to be the result of a mutation — mutations don’t work like that. It’s also not likely to be a direct effect of a teratogen. Most likely is that there was an environmental insult of some sort to the early developing head that caused ectopic production of a morphogen signal. I doubt there will be a wave of similar defects appearing all over the snake population (although I confess it would be kind of cool if there were).

Least likely is the idea that this is a sign of the apocalypse, or that white walkers are going to march out of Timor or New Guinea to descend on Australia.

Microbiology scares me

They actually do a simple experiment in this video to show the effectiveness of washing your hands after handling meat (but where was the control of sampling the bacterial load before handling?), but still, this is one of the reasons we’ve been going vegetarian at my house.

Of course, another control that should have been done: what kind of bacterial smear is on your hands after handling lettuce? I demand a new video with more rigorous quantitative comparisons.

That’s especially since my new dietary regime I’ve imposed on myself and my wife is salads, and nothing else, for dinner every other night. We get our protein dose every other day. Tonight it’s fake pulled pork (seitan) sandwiches, we’ll see how this stuff tastes.

Nothing like a little fearmongering to drag the citizenry into war

Life Magazine indulged in a little propaganda in 1916 to persuade the citizenry that we ought to be involved in World War I. If we weren’t, why, the Germans would invade from the east and the Japanese from the west, and we good Americans would be confined to a …reservation in the desert, a prospect offered without irony.

Curiously, Canada is labeled as a land of barbarians. Canada joined the war effort in 1914, though, before the US did. I’m not sure what they’re implying.

Meineapolis/St Karl are nice touches, as is Nagaseattle.

Please, I would like to hear more and join the Cult of the Void

Aaron Rabinowitz summarizes his cult:

Someone asked what are the views of our cult. Thoughts on this:

  1. The truth is complex and painful but intrinsically valuable, so help others learn it and help others suffer through it.
  2. Luck drives everything, so have as much empathy as you can for those who suffer and do wrong.
  3. Morality and value are still real, because experience is real and instills in us a variety of obligations that, when enacted, promote flourishing.

This is what atheism could have been. I think many atheists accepted #1 — loudly proclaiming that we have the truth has been a big deal all along — but balked at #2. So many atheists are proud adherents of the cult of capitalism, which insists that all personal progress is a result of merit, and were willing to accept the science of evolution only because of the concept of natural selection, which they considered to be the natural representation of capitalism. They don’t like to hear that modern evolutionary theory puts much more emphasis on chance, or even that selection is a stochastic process rather than an inevitability.

They choke before they even get to #3, because they are so busy cheering for Ben Shapiro’s facts don’t care about your feelings that they don’t notice that feelings are also part of reality. I’ve noticed that a lot of atheists run away angrily at the very notion of moral obligations, because, as they tell me all the time, “atheism means nothing more than a disbelief in gods”. The virtue of Rabinowitz’s formulation is that it moves beyond a statement of fact to a recognition of the implications of that fact.

I think they may have misinterpreted #1, come to think of it, as “The truth is complex and painful but intrinsically valuable, so be sure to feel superior about your possession of it”.

UMM is #1 in something!

Environment America has noticed that my campus has made a big accomplishment in renewable energy.

The University of Minnesota (UMN), Morris leads in producing renewable electricity on its own campus. The university produces about 60 percent of its electricity needs with two commercial-scale wind turbines, and also powers one of its residence halls with a 20-kW solar PV installation.

Switching to renewable energy sources is a very big deal at this campus. I know one of our goals is 100% energy independence, and the turbines are just the beginning — we also have a biomass gasifier on campus, which has been off to a slow start, but it’s part of a grand plan to lead the way in sustainable energy production.

You can read more at our page on Renewable Energy Initiatives.

A series of unfortunate life-choices

I remember Katie McHugh mainly as a flash-in-the-pan obnoxious anti-semitic Islamaphobe — someone who got a job in the racist hothouses of Breitbart and the Daily Caller, made a little noise with some extremely hateful tweets, like a kind of mini-Katie Hopkins, and then got fired as the alt-right strained to appear a little less thuggish (they failed). Now Rosie Gray has a thorough article on her history, and it’s a sad, dismal story all around. McHugh regrets her role in the alt-right, although I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a genuine repentance — it’s more like she regrets how she has fucked up her own life by embracing a series of bad actors.

Her journey to remorseful failure begins in college. She attended a small liberal arts college where she stood out alone as a far-right firebrand, which was sufficient to win the attention of the far-right media. I’ve seen that happen at my university. Yes, you can stand out by acting the colossal regressive on a campus full of progressive, optimistic, intelligent students, but while it may appeal to the ego in the short run, it’s going to lead to catastrophe eventually. We had a student here who made a reputation for himself writing ugly crap for the alternative newspaper (not as ugly as McHugh’s stuff, though), which led to him making connections with James O’Keefe, which led to him getting arrested in a break-in in Louisiana. It’s not a great career trajectory.

McHugh’s story is similar. She leapt from writing for the college newspaper to working with Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the usual upstart conservative rags, and making connections with major racist white nationalist figures. The pipeline from young conservative to Trumpian conservative is apparent in her history, and she also exposes the real nastiness in their beliefs that these organizations try to hide.

The alt-right was at the time all about smoothing over its public image, becoming approachable, more mainstream. “They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,” as McHugh put it. The very term “alt-right” represented this effort to rebrand white nationalism. Everything in public was euphemism. The names of the main organizations were bland: National Policy Institute, American Renaissance. People could blend in, and they did. They were “polished, sophisticated,” she said. “There’s a very high culture aspect to it.” The class markers were important to someone like McHugh, who had come from the sticks. And the emphasis on genetics and IQ was appealing as well. “They see it almost as a moral value,” she said. “They think that people with high IQ confers them with some kind of super-ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders.”

The emphasis on intelligence confers the whole enterprise with a pseudo-intellectual veneer, and it also provides white supremacists with a way to elide accusations of white supremacy. According to their argument, they can’t be white supremacists because they say that Jews and people of East Asian descent have a higher average IQ. This both whitewashes their bigotry and feeds into the alt-right’s victim mentality, especially as it relates to Jews. The work of the anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald is a cornerstone of the alt-right movement. His Culture of Critique series argues that Jews, using their higher intelligence, employed Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” to perpetuate themselves and win out over other groups. MacDonald blames Jews for the very existence of anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Semitism is a justified response to Jews’ plot to run the world.

If they’re so smart, though, how is it that looking at the details of their groups exposes great pulsing veins of absurdity? This is almost funny.

Their differences went deeper — and stranger — than that, and allowed McHugh to see inside a truly bizarre subculture. McHugh was a Catholic, while DeAnna was a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a group based near Lynchburg that was focused around a neopagan theology based on self-improvement and feats of strength, as well as coded white nationalism. The idea was to cast off the bounds of modern Judeo-Christian society and find a way back to pre-Christian northern European culture. McHugh sometimes accompanied DeAnna on weekend trips down to the Wolves’ headquarters for what they called a “moot” — a ceremony in which the assembled Wolves would smear ash on their bodies around a fire and give what McHugh described as “dramatic speeches” about self-sufficiency and relying on the other group members. They would then sit around the fire and drink beers.

One part of McHugh’s disaffection with the movement was over such silliness. She couldn’t accept it, so she reverted to…Catholicism. More absurdity, different flavor.

McHugh recognizes now how hard she screwed herself over. She’s working as a waitress in a small town somewhere unnamed, and struggling to keep up with her medical bills (she’s diabetic). She has regrets and advice, and not much else.

At age 28, she has made herself unemployable in the career field she chose — even on its fringes. She perpetually struggles to support herself financially. It’s easy to see how someone in McHugh’s position might regret the path she took that got her here. Would she regret it if she still had friends, still had a writing job?

McHugh has a message for the people on a similar path, though, one that can be considered regardless of whether you believe she’s actually changed.

“People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system, they have no chance, and they’re just harmful,” McHugh said. “There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people, and tell your story, and say, ‘Get out while you can.’”

Well, we can hope some college students somewhere read about her and recognize that hate is loud and gets you noticed, but it doesn’t make you a better person.

I am so tired of religious conservatives calling atheists immoral

Here’s Stephen Moore, a rather prominent conservative chosen by Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve board, a fellow who has strong opinions on the importance of traditional marriage, husband as the breadwinner, wife as the mother and homemaker.

Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”.

Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.

Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.

He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.

You would think a guy like that would be a dedicated husband and father, wouldn’t you? Setting an example and all that.

Nope.

The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010.

Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said.

Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.

There’s more. He has remarkable history of bad ideas.

“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work. They want equal pay for inferior work,” Moore wrote. He went on to claim that the real “injustice” was that female pros were paid, while men playing college tennis who could “beat them handily” were not.

“I’m a radical on this; I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people starting to work at 11, 12,” he said during the debate.

“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males, as well. They’ve been declining, and that is, I think, a big problem,” he said in a CNBC interview.

“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course, but you know, people are talking about women’s earnings — they’ve risen,” Moore continued. “The problem, actually, has been the steady decline in male earnings, and I think we should pay attention to that, because I think that has very negative consequences for the economy and for society.”

“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.),” Moore wrote. “It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”

“The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”

Moore’s solution? “No more women refs, no more women announcers, no more women beer venders, no women anything.” He did offer one caveat: “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like (sportscaster) Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant.”

I think it’s kind of obvious that he has a deep contempt for women, and that his ideal of traditional roles for women is simply chattel slavery.