Thursday: Hili dialogue

December 14, 2023 • 7:00 am

Welcome to Thursday, December 14, 2023, and National Bouillabaisse Day (I don’t much care for it, not being a piscivore).  Especially this one, labeled by Wikipedia as “A traditional bouillabaisse from Marseille, with the fish served separately after the soup.” OY!

It’s also International Shareware Day, National Screwdriver Day (the drink, not the tool), Monkey Day, and National Biscuits and Gravy Day.  You won’t find that last fine item anywhere outside the southern U.S.  Finally, it’s also Alabama Day, Forty-seven Ronin Remembrance Day in Tokyo, and Martyred Intellectuals Day in Bangladesh.

This is infinitely better than bouillabaisse. It may look gross, but it makes a fine breakfast, especially with grits and fried eggs (and perhaps some country ham on the side).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In a nonbinding resolution, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted Tuesday, and by an overwhelming margin, for a cease-fire in the Hamas/Israel war.

The U.N. General Assembly demanded an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in an overwhelming vote on Tuesday that highlighted much of the world’s desire to bring the bloody conflict to an end.

About three-quarters of the body’s members voted in favor of the nonbinding resolution, underscoring the isolation of Israel and the United States, which last week blocked a cease-fire resolution in the Security Council.

Resounding applause and cheers erupted after the vote was announced: 153 in favor, 10 against and 23 abstentions. The resolution required two-thirds majority for passage.

“How many more thousands of lives must be lost before we do something?” Dennis Francis, a diplomat from Trinidad and Tobago currently serving as president of the General Assembly, said in an address to the chamber before the vote. “No more time is left. The carnage must stop.”

The resolution was put forth by the U.N.’s Arab Group and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which represents Arab and Muslim countries.

The substance, from CNN:

Tuesday’s brief resolution calls for a ceasefire, for all parties to comply with international law, and for humanitarian access to hostages as well as their “immediate and unconditional” release. It notably contains stronger language than an October vote in the assembly that had called for a “sustained humanitarian truce.”

Here’s the resolution itself, which is hard to find. Click on the tweet to read it in its entirety:

The list of which countries voted which way is here; besides the US, the “no” votes among European states were the Czech Republic and Austria. Among the abstainers were Italy, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

My response is brief: the damage being inflicted on Gaza is the fault of Hamas, who wanted this debacle, not the fault of Israel, which is still defending itself against a brutal terrorist organization that says it will commit more October 7-like attacks in the future. It’s imperative, then, to destroy Hamas now.

Israel is trying to do so, but given that Hamas has embedded itself among civilian, and uses them and facilities like schools and hospitals as shields, and because Israel is trying to avoid targeting civilians in an unprecedented manner, the onus is on the UN or the critics to tell us how Israel can get rid of Hamas without causing the damage that we all deplore.  The UN and its members, and those who call for a permanent ceasefire, are simply trying to avoid allowing Israel to win this war, insisting on the the usual, “well, you tried, but it’s time to resume the status quo” result. Israel is not going to put up with it this time, for it realizes that the existence of Hamas is an existential threat to the Jewish state.

The statement below by the Israeli representative to the UN sums up my views pretty well. If the UN wants an end to the war, all it has to do is ask Hamas to surrender, give up power and let the hostages go. In other words, Hamas has to admit that it lost.  The humanitarian crisis in Gaza could then be solved peacefully. Note that the resolution doesn’t condemn Hamas for beginning the war (the UN never even condemned the October 7 attacks).

In a sardonic bit of humor, Erdan also holds up a sign with the phone number of the Hamas’s office in Gaza, with the name of the political head of the terrorist organization.

*The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has gone further down the drain, personally attacking scientists who question the empirical claims gender activists.  A short summary of the report is here, and the full report here.

From the summary:

Weaponizing science is not a new phenomenon. It is a longstanding practice, rooted in white supremacy, that disguises biases and myths using familiar scientific terms and language with the goal of limiting bodily autonomy and eliminating basic rights of LGBTQ+ people through legislative and legal campaigns.

“Each of us has a role to play in stopping the spread of disinformation and building resilience against supremacist ideologies and narratives,” said Emerson Hodges, research analyst for SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “This report affirms LGBTQ+ peoples’ existence and offers tools for our lawmakers, doctors, educators and media organizations to identify and directly challenge the false narratives that attempt to erase LGBTQ+ identities — especially as we enter state legislative sessions and the 2024 election cycle.”

And from the report, which has six chapters. Some of it is okay, like criticism of “conversion therapy” meant, among other things, to change an individual’s sexual preferences and identity to conform to societal “norms”. But the tenor of the piece is that all attacks on gender activism and the science engaged in gender transition constitute hateful anti-LGBTQ speech, transphobia, and the like. Here’s one example:

Because the anti-LGBTQ+ movement can no longer easily find medical or scientific justification for conversion therapy, they are generally left with one option – poking holes in the affirming care model, labeling affirming health care practices as too “experimental” and advocating so-called “talk” therapies and “gender exploratory therapies.” With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, these claims found a readymade audience of science deniers and conspiracy theorists to promote their pseudoscience and anti-LGBTQ+ political agenda.

Well, one response is that puberty blockers are indeed “experimental”, and there’s a lot more to investigate about what happens to children who aren’t given hormones but good therapy when they ask for puberty blockers,  But no, that’s “transphobic.”

Colin Wright, who specializes in sex and sex identity, has some things to say about the SPCL document. That document seems to be largely an exercise in smearing those who criticize extreme gender activism. You can see below they go after Colin’s girlfriend simply because she was associated with Colin and another organization, but never deal with any claims she made.

Here are a few tweeets:

That thread also shows that the SPLC’s piece is loaded with misspellings and/or typos. Here are a few examples:

One more. Look at the heading of the third column. Didn’t they proofread their analysis?

That suggests the report wasn’t written with care. But that’s trivial: the main point is that, exactly like the ACLU, the SPLC was once a very good organization at defending civil rights, but now both groups have moved into territory where ideology, in the form of gender activism, has distorted their original mission.  It’s hard to make real mistakes when you’re simply defending everyone’s civil rights written in the law, but much easier when you’re sworn to go after anyone perceived to attack LGBTQ issues. This is the difference between the ACLU’s now-retired executive director “Mighty” Ira Glasser and its present day gender ideologue Chase Strangio. Taking an uncompromising side on, say, gender transition, can damage people’s lives, so great care is required, not legal bulldozers.

*In a NYT piece called, “Denying the gender-based violence of Oct. 7 helps no one,” author and lawyer Jill Filopovic decries the silence around the gender-based violence committed by Hamas on October 7. You’d think that now we have plenty of evidence for rapes, killing, and mutilation of Israeli women, the denialism would stop, but there are still plenty of denialists around. Why? Because the attacked women were mostly Jews, of course. Filopovic:

But even as evidence mounted, so did disbelief. On social media, accounts often flood mentions of Hamas’s gendered violence with arguments that no such thing happened, often insisting that the allegations were invented by the Israeli government as a pretext for war, are simply too unsubstantiated to be believed or pale in comparison with Palestinian suffering. Some of these accounts may be bots; others have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Hamas, too, denies carrying out any rapes. One Hamas official told The Washington Post that the group considers “any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram,” using the Arabic word for “forbidden” (unlike, apparently, the mass murder of civilians, including women and babies).

Denials and deflections have come from people with vast reach. Some work at prominent magazines; others run popular podcasts, YouTube channels and websites. These denials have migrated into global leftist discourse and seem intended to sow doubt or prompt wholesale dismissal of the subject.

Israeli authorities say that police investigations are ongoing. According to one Israeli diplomat, evidence of rape has been submitted to the United Nations, and last week, one person who recovered bodies and another who prepared them for burial testified as part of a U.N. event in which speakers condemned the vast silence on Oct. 7 gender-based crimes. A U.N. commission of inquiry charged with investigating war crimes by both Israel and Hamas will look into acts of sexual violence on Oct. 7, and its chair said there are people ready to provide testimony. Israel, though, believes the commission is biased and is apparently refusing to cooperate.

While we wait for more information to emerge, it may seem flummoxing to casual observers that anyone would downplay the existing evidence: Does it really seem so outlandish that a group that murdered some 1,200 people, broadcast some of the killings and seemed to revel in degrading their victims might have committed acts of sexual violence, too? Does anyone really believe that, were it not for rape claims, Israel’s campaign in Gaza would be any less brutal, let alone nonexistent?

But that misses the point. For many denialists, truth doesn’t seem to be the goal; a monopoly on righteousness is.

So many denialists in the face of so much evidence! If this involved claims of Israelis raping Palestinian women—something that I haven’t heard of, but, if proven, would be severely punished by the IDF—the whole world would believe it, and even without evidence. All it would take is the word of Hamas.

*You’ve surely heard that the Supreme Court is going to take up the case of the abortion drug mifepristone. An appeals court had ruled to curb the use of the drug because the FDA didn’t test it properly, an unprecedented incursion of law into drug testing. Reader and legal eagle Ken gives us his take. When I asked him whether the Supreme Court’s taking on the case was a bad thing, he emailed me this, which I quote with permission:

No, I don’t think so. Although the case will have a direct impact on the availability of medical abortions, it is not an abortion case per se. It will be decided on administrative law grounds — did the FDA abuse its discretion in approving mifepristone 23 years ago?

And (although administrative law is not my field of expertise) I think the Court will be loath to say it did, since that could open a hornets’ nest of stale regulatory claims. Also the Court is aware the case was brought by a group of anti-abortion zealots, and is well aware of the havoc caused across the nation by its decision in Dobbs. It is also aware of the damage that has been done recently to its standing with the public. Under the circumstances, I doubt the Court wants to appear to be reaching out to issue another decision making access to abortion more difficult. I expect that the Texas plaintiffs will carry the votes of justices Thomas and Alito, but that the other seven justices’ votes are up for grabs.
And Ken later added this:

Plus, I’m not sure of the full scope of what SCOTUS will be reviewing in this case. The Court granted the cert petitions filed by the Biden Administration and by mifepristone’s manufacturer, but denied cert on the petition filed by the original Texas plaintiffs. So it appears that the Court’s review will be limited to the FDA’s 2016 and 2021 decisions to make mifepristone more widely available, but will not include the FDA’s original 2000 approval of mifepristone as an abortifacient, since that claim was found to be untimely.

*The New York Post reveals that not only did Harvard keep its investigation of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism (begun in October) secret up to and including her testimony in Congress, which is probably okay, but they apparently intimidated the newspaper when it inquired about her purported plagiarism well before her testimony (h/t Wayne):

Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own probe.

The college announced Tuesday morning that it had investigated Claudine Gay over whether some of her academic work was plagiarized and had cleared her of breaching the college’s “standards for research misconduct.”

Instead, it said that she would request four corrections in two publications to insert citations and quotation marks that were originally “omitted.”

But The Post can disclose that Harvard spent weeks failing to come clean about Gay being under investigation — staying quiet even when she was hauled in front of Congress for disastrous testimony on how the Ivy League college is dealing with antisemitism on campus.

Well, one can argue that Harvard had no obligation to disclose this until they issued their “she’s not fired” letter. But it’s not okay to threaten a newspaper if it makes inquiries about a University investigation.

Tuesday’s statement, issued to “members of the Harvard community” said that the probe began in late October, after Harvard “became aware” of allegations about Gay.

But the statement did not tell the full story — including how Harvard called in bulldog attorneys to protect Gay.

The Post contacted the university on October 24, asking for comment on more than two dozen instances in which Gay’s words appeared to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in published works by other academics.

Harvard delayed and then, according to the Post, wrote back in this way:

And two days later, on Oct. 27, The Post was sent a 15-page letter by Thomas Clare, a high-powered Virginia-based attorney with the firm Clare-Locke who identified himself as defamation counsel for Harvard University and Gay.

The letter contained comments from academics whose work Gay was alleged to have improperly cited — even though the political scientists’ review could only just have begun.

Apparently the “threat” is a threat of a defamation suit, though it’s not clarified. In the meantime, the conservative Washington Free Beacon asked about a dozen scholars to review paragraphs and their putative sources from four of Gay’s publications. Several of them, including Lee Jussim, say that Gay clearly committed plagiarism, though the Post article above quotes a few scholars say that the similarities did not rise to the level of plagiarism.

Finally, apparently more “copying” has been found, not just in Gay’s Ph.D. thesis but in 5 of her 11 published papers. Stay tuned. This may be a tempest in a teapot, or Harvard, feet to the fire, could be forced to ask for Gay’s resignation.

More to read: “Harvard’s double standard for Gay” on the Heterodox STEM site. It’s written by four Harvard undergraduates who would be punished if they did what Claudine Gay did.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is wary of Szaron:

Hili: Probably you would like to come in.
Szaron: Yes.
Hili: I don’t know whether I will let you in.
Hili: Pewnie chciałbyś wejść?
Szaron: Tak.
Hili: Nie wiem, czy cię wpuszczę.

*******************

From Thomas, a Dave Coverly “Speed Bump” cartoon:

Here’s a satire of the BBC’s Israel coverage from the Israeli humor show Eretz Nehederet (h/t Barry; see the new Free Press piece about the show).  The Israelis have a remarkable ability to squeeze humor out of a dire situation.

From Barry:

From Masih: A professor fired because she showed her hair. Don’t those wanton women know that showing hair excites the uncontrollable passions of men, making women responsible for any harassment or sexual violence that ensues?

Speaking of hair, this was in my Twitter/X feed. That is some hair!

I’m on the fence about Claudine Gay, but I thought I’d put up this sardonic tweet by Peter Boghassian:

This guy is MEAN! (I don’t think the cat likes it!):

 

Demonstrators at Brown, supporting divestment in companies supplying Israel war weapons, held an illegal sit-in on Tuesday and, unlike at MIT, the foreign students might face deportation after arrest.  (MIT they didn’t arrest any illegal protestors because the foreign students could be deported. Brown, however, isn’t letting anyone off the hook.)  The arrests are detailed in the second tweet.

From The Providence Journal:

“The disruption to secure buildings is not acceptable, and the University is prepared to escalate the level of criminal charges for future incidents of students occupying secure buildings,” said university spokesman Brian Clark. “Given that this is the second prominent incident in recent weeks of students trespassing in a secure, non-residential building after operating hours, the University fully expects to recommend more significant criminal misdemeanor charges for any future incidents after the Dec. 11 sit-in.”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Dutch girl gassed upon arrival at the camp; she was just eight:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. He says of the first one “This is the most depressing graph in the whole of science, because of the events that are highlighted on it.”

. . . and a nice longhorn beetle:

33 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    557 – Constantinople is severely damaged by an earthquake, which cracks the dome of Hagia Sophia.

    1287 – St. Lucia’s flood: The Zuiderzee sea wall in the Netherlands collapses, killing over 50,000 people.

    1782 – The Montgolfier brothers first test fly an unmanned hot air balloon in France; it floats nearly 2.5 km (1.6 mi).

    1812 – The French invasion of Russia comes to an end as the remnants of the Grande Armée are expelled from Russia.

    1900 – Quantum mechanics: Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law (quantum theory) at the Physic Society in Berlin.

    1902 – The Commercial Pacific Cable Company lays the first Pacific telegraph cable, from San Francisco to Honolulu.

    1903 – The Wright brothers make their first attempt to fly with the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

    1911 – Roald Amundsen’s team, comprising himself, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, becomes the first to reach the South Pole.

    1918 – The 1918 United Kingdom general election occurs, the first where women were permitted to vote. In Ireland the Irish republican political party Sinn Féin wins a landslide victory with nearly 47% of the popular vote.

    1939 – Winter War: The Soviet Union is expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland.

    1940 – Plutonium (specifically Pu-238) is first isolated at Berkeley, California.

    1948 – Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann are granted a patent for their cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game.

    1958 – The 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition becomes the first to reach the southern pole of inaccessibility.

    1960 – Convention against Discrimination in Education of UNESCO is adopted.

    1962 – NASA’s Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.

    1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War: Over 200 of East Pakistan’s intellectuals are executed by the Pakistan Army and their local allies. (The date is commemorated in Bangladesh as Martyred Intellectuals Day.)

    1972 – Apollo program: Eugene Cernan is the most recent person to walk on the Moon, after he and Harrison Schmitt complete the third and final extravehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo 17 mission.

    1981 – Arab–Israeli conflict: Israel’s Knesset ratifies the Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli law to the Golan Heights.

    1994 – Construction begins on the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river.

    1995 – Yugoslav Wars: The Dayton Agreement is signed in Paris by the leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    1999 – Torrential rains cause flash floods in Vargas, Venezuela, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the complete collapse of the state’s infrastructure.

    2004 – The Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world, is formally inaugurated near Millau, France.

    2012 – Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting: Twenty-eight people, including the gunman, are killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. [Alex Jones still hasn’t paid the court-ordered compensation to the victims’ families for his egregious lies.]

    Births:
    1546 – Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer and chemist (d. 1601).

    1631 – Anne Conway, English philosopher and author (d. 1679).

    1640 – Aphra Behn, English playwright and author (d. 1689).

    1789 – Maria Szymanowska, Polish composer and pianist (d. 1831).

    1899 – DeFord Bailey, American Hall of Fame country and blues musician (d. 1982).

    1904 – Virginia Coffey, American civil rights activist (d. 2003).

    1909 – Edward Lawrie Tatum, American geneticist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1975).

    1911 – Spike Jones, American singer and bandleader (d. 1965).

    1914 – Rosalyn Tureck, American pianist and harpsichord player (d. 2003).

    1916 – Shirley Jackson, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1965).

    1922 – Don Hewitt, American journalist and producer, created 60 Minutes (d. 2009).

    1932 – Charlie Rich, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1995).

    1935 – Lee Remick, American actress (d. 1991).

    1942 – Dick Wagner, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2014).

    1946 – Jane Birkin, English-French actress and singer (d. 2023).

    1948 – Lester Bangs, American journalist and author (d. 1982).

    1970 – Beth Orton, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1972 – Miranda Hart, English actress.

    1988 – Vanessa Hudgens, American actress and singer.

    It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.
    1480 – Niccolò Perotti, humanist scholar (b. 1429).

    1799 – George Washington, American general and politician, 1st President of the United States (b. 1732).

    1861 – Albert, Prince Consort of the United Kingdom (b. 1819).

    1873 – Louis Agassiz, Swiss-American zoologist and geologist (b. 1807) .

    1943 – John Harvey Kellogg, American physician and businessman, co-invented corn flakes (b. 1852).

    1953 – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, American author and academic (b. 1896).

    1963 – Dinah Washington, American singer and pianist (b. 1924).

    1975 – Arthur Treacher, English-American entertainer (b. 1894. [Known for playing English types, especially butler and manservant roles, such as the P.G. Wodehouse valet character Jeeves (Thank You, Jeeves!, 1936) and the kind butlers opposite Shirley Temple in Curly Top (1935) and Heidi (1937).]

    1984 – Vicente Aleixandre, Spanish poet and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1898).

    1989 – Andrei Sakharov, Russian physicist and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1921).

    1997 – Kurt Winter, Canadian guitarist and songwriter (b. 1946). [Best known as a member of The Guess Who.]

    2001 – W. G. Sebald, German novelist, essayist, and poet (b. 1944).

    2006 – Ahmet Ertegun, Turkish-American composer and producer, co-founded Atlantic Records (b. 1923).

    2013 – Peter O’Toole, British-Irish actor (b. 1932).

    2014 – Bess Myerson, American model, activist, game show panelist and television personality; Miss America 1945 (b. 1924).

    1. Arthur Treacher’s [died on this date in 1975] Fish and Chips was at least named after him. Whether he invested is unknown. He was its spokesperson for a time, and it is said the fish recipe was his.

    2. A follow-up to your recent joke about Wild Woodbines: “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?…”;-)

  2. If bouillabaisse is not to your taste, Jerry, seek out a cotriade next time you are in France. It’s a creamy fish stew made with as many kinds of fish as you can find, vegetables, potatoes, peppercorns, white wine, garlic and cream. It’s easy to make at home too, and extremely yummy with a crusty baguette.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotriade

  3. 1. Matt Lieberman wrote a bit on eXtwitter about what academic plagiarism looks like – sort of asking what the baseline is : https://x.com/social_brains/status/1735144264408109141?s=46

    He writes “… what Gay did (repeatedly in nearly half of her published work) is what plagiarism by graduate students and faculty looks like.”

    See link for more.

    2. [deleted in exasperation] : how else can I say it :

    Wright is right.

  4. I hadn’t seen, so I went and looked. The ten countries voting against the UN Resolution were: Israel, the United States, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Austria, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, and Nauru.

    1. Well it is good that they voted against but realistically the UN is a dysfunctional organisation which has lost any respect it once had and I do not believe that anyone believes or gives a damn about anything it does or pontificates about. It has proved time after time that it is rabidly antisemitic and the so called “security” council is a joke! There are some agencies which perform well, ICAO is one but there are many which are useless.
      It is well past its best before date.

    2. Canada, rather surprisingly and contrary to track record, voted for it instead of abstaining like it sometimes does on anti-Israel resolutions. The reason is that a group of wealthy and influential Canadian Muslim professionals — you know, “the assimilable Muslims” — wrote the Prime Minister to tell him they were leaving en masse the Laurier Club, an inner circle of stalwart Liberal Party campaign donors. In their letter, they said the PM’s eloquent (if content-empty) expressions of support since 7 Oct for Israel and for Canada’s Jewish community, many of whom have family in Israel, made it impossible for them to continue to donate money to the Party.

      (The PM has doubled down by joining the PMs of Australia and New Zealand to make a separate call for a cease-fire.)

      And that was that. OK, the UN doesn’t matter and neither do its “non-binding” resolutions. (What resolution was ever binding? Korea?) But the larger picture is the political influence our domestic governments are vulnerable to. The Libs figure if they lose the Muslims, they are electoral toast. Isn’t that a scary thought anywhere in the West?

      1. Now that the muslim population of Europe and also the UK is approaching 5% of the whole yes it is most definitely a problem and giving in to their blackmail which is not surprising from Trudeau, is a warning for the future. Islam is an existential threat and we should all be aware because there are no moderate muslims. I have said it before on here, a moderate muslim is not a muslim. They are the fifth column in our midst and the aim is global domination. We are the infidels, the apostates, the non believers.

  7. I’ve been thinking about PCCE’s posts on how calls for genocide both are and should be legal, as long as they don’t involve “direct incitement” to violence.

    I disagree. I think calls for genocide should be illegal, and here is why.

    A strong argument in favor of freedom of speech is the “shoe on the other foot” test: how much power would you want your political opponents to have over free speech? Say you ban all offensive speech; well, if your opponents take power, they will outlaw utterances they consider offensive, such as “Jesus was not the Son of God and he probably never existed” or “I refuse to acknowledge Donald Trump as God’s Anointed Servant and the True Leader of America.” That would be bad! That’s one reason why I support free speech.

    But I have never, ever, ever wanted to call for genocide. Of anyone. I don’t think any decent person would. There is a huge difference between “I hate Trump/Putin/Kim Jong-Un” (perfectly ok) and “Trump voters/Russians/North Koreans deserve to DIE” (a horrible thing to say). So, the “shoe is on the other foot” test fails. If someone tells me, “But if you outlaw calls for genocide, then… uh… you won’t be able to call for the genocide of any people you hate!” my response is, “So? Why would I call for genocide? That’s awful!”

    To address the inevitable problem of slippery slopes: the older I get, the less concerned I am about slippery slopes. There are tons of situations where we set somewhat arbitrary limits just because the line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it mostly works ok. Other than hardcore libertarians/anarchists, nobody says, “We can’t set the speed limit on this freeway at 60 MPH, because next thing you know someone will want to lower it to 50 MPH, and then 40 MPH, and then OMG we’ll all be forced to putter along at 6 MPH!!!”

    1. But here we run into the problem of where to draw lines and who becomes the arbiter of those lines. Its pretty common to hear of calls for genocide (or words to that effect) from a person who cannot possibly carry out such a thing and very definitely does not really mean it. Does a female white art history major in Harvard doing the “from the river to the sea” call, which is really a call for genocide, pose a real threat? I know it hurts to be the target of that, but so it would hurt to hear a lot of other mean things. These calls are commonly just an attempt to stand out and be a bit edgy, it being so common that it does not have shock value in many venues. I bet that most people who shout that slogan don’t even know what it really means

      1. >These calls are commonly just an attempt to stand out and be a bit edgy, . . .

        More likely an attempt to blend in with your tribe and be soft and cuddly to to people you find fetching and hope to get lucky with in that soup of pheromones that a demonstration of pretty. young people is. It is a university campus, after all. You really want to stand out in a crowd?, try shouting, “Death to Hamas!” or even “Bring them Home!”

        Since I have no intention (or hope) of ever sleeping with any of these people, it matters not to me whether someone calling for genocide really “means it”. I care only if they have the means to do it. In North America, they probably don’t because it requires the mobilization of substantial state resources and the support of the law enforcement apparatus to pull it off. In Rwanda, a call for genocide did succeed because 1) the people had the means (hundreds of thousands of agricultural machetes) to use on accessible, nearby neighbours and 2) the state (such as it was) abetted it and actively participated, even going so far as to murder UN peacekeeping troops to ensure their non-intervention.

      2. I’d be fine with banning utterances of the form “death to [people from group X]” or “[people from group x] should/must/deserve to die.” Simple, gets the point across. Plausibly deniable utterances like “from the river to the sea” (“but I didn’t mean GENOCIDE, I meant Jews should peacefully emigrate to the US or Europe!”) would not be included, because trying to figure out what is or is not a veiled reference to genocide would get too messy.

        What say you?

    2. That’s an interesting way of analysing thing. I’ve always thought that the central point of “free speech” is the right to disagree with someone else’s ideas. That does not extend to the right to advocate violence.

    3. Sure, but then someone gets to decide what is or is not a “call to genocide”. We already have trans activists claiming that anyone who disagrees with them is trying to erase their very existence.

      I am uncomfortable with the idea of coming up with new things people can be punished for, then hoping that the enforcement power will not be sought out and abused by the wrong sort of people.

  8. “Trends in Atmospheric CO2 vs Global Temperature Change”

    Which axis is temperature in the histogram?

      1. Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now a humanities-heavy progressive university) used to have a program called “Qualitative Engineering.” The joke was that their slide-rule scales were marked “Small, Medium, Large.” Colour scales would have provided greater precision.

        I’m confused about the tweet that contains the graph. “We” are digging and drilling not “for” the profit of the carbon companies but because “we” find consuming fossil fuels to be the most utility-enhancing way to power our lives. That someone* makes a profit off of providing them to our thirsty demands is not why we do it. It’s why they do it. If it ever becomes possible for non-fossil energy sources to provide those benefits at cheaper cost and equal reliability, I’m sure we would happily switch and let the carbon companies go broke. Would you pay 12 cents a kilometre for gasoline and 20 cents a kW-h for fossil electricity if you could get the equivalent 24/365 reliability from non-fossil sources for 10 cents and 18 cents? Of course not. But when you ask, “How many cents more than fossil would you pay for fully reliable non-fossil energy?”, the answer is zero, which is not enough cents to make these non-fossil sources viable. Some people tell pollsters that they might pay 5 cents more per km or per kW-h but they are probably lying, unless they think that their neighbours can be compelled to pay it for them. So we buy oil and coal and don’t really care how much profit the carbon companies make. Doubtless this is pernicious and morally contemptible, of us. Yeah.
        —————-
        * Someone includes us our own selves, since all government and private pension funds invest in fossil energy companies and the various businesses, from railroads to chemical companies to health care to food processors to tech companies that rely on reliable energy. It doesn’t have to be cheap, because expensive energy can be priced into the products and services. What it has to be is reliable.

  10. Occasionally something comes along worth having a National Day for, and Biscuits & Gravy is one of those.

  11. Regarding Hamas, it’s even worse than using civilians as human shields. Hamas is not just hiding behind civilians. It is purposely positioning civilians into the battlefield as if they were munitions. To Hamas, civilians are instruments of war. The onus is on Hamas to end the war. So long as they have Israeli, American, and other hostages in their custody, and so long as they continue to fire rockets into Israel, Israel must prosecute this war. There is no choice.

    The United Nations should be directing its attention to Hamas.

  12. On topics in the progressive discourse I often find myself agreeing with religious conservatives like the political scientist Carol Swain (on Claudine Gay’s plagiarism) or Muslim parent groups (SPLC’s “anti-trans” watch list). IDK what this says about me or about progressive discourse. I don’t think I’m becoming more religious (my old Catholicism doesn’t appeal any more than it used to). I didn’t think I was becoming more conservative. Am I on Colin Wright’s political journey?
    https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1462114108535312388

    1. There’s a word I think Christians started using but I could be wrong :

      based

      … IMHO it means based in Enlightenment values. In counteracting my inner Romantic reactionary vulnerabilities/bugs in the system.

      People got pissed over the Enlightenment and the brutal birth of the Industrial Revolution – understandably so. Religions were invented/retooled because of it.

      So in an age where we must find common ground, I look for that ground which is “based” – or at least against alchemy.

      Hell, might even get some goddies to go One God Further.

  13. At the University of Washington, faculty are required to complete an on-line Title IX training course and check its boxes. One of the boxes reads: “I commit to holding myself and others to these policy standards and to challenging myself to go beyond compliance and work towards prevention, respect, and inclusion whenever possible.”

    Let’s require academics at parishes less elevated than Harvard to sign a similar box about scholarship standards. Such as: “I commit to holding myself to the standards exemplified by the President of Harvard in regard to citations and quotation.” Not entirely clear how one might “go beyond compliance”, but I guess we will soon find out.

    [By the way, the Edit function has mysteriously reappeared on this website. Thanks, a helpful convenience to those of us suffering from progressive (in the old, medical sense) finger clumsiness.]

  14. Biscuits and gravy are definitely a thing found widely outside the southern U.S. I had my first sampling in a greasy spoon cafe in Wyoming in the 1980s and regularly enjoy them on trips throughout the midwest U.S.

    It appears that they are also a hit amongst British youth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzdbFnv4yWQ

  15. Also, it appears that Ginny Gentles thinks she knows how to spell schedule, but she apparently doesn’t.

Comments are closed.