Friday: Hili dialogue

42 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

1. Yesterday evening, the University of Chicago Forum for Free Speech and Expression sponsored a two-hour lecture/q&a on “The Aftermath of October 7: Student Fears and Free Speech” with guest speakers Robert Pape and Geoffrey Stone. I watched the livestream and hopefully they will make a you tube copy available very soon (the Forum seems to be slow at posting videos from these otherwise excellent productions).
   Dr Pape had some very recent data on how people perceive what they hear from protestors (main example “from the river to the sea”) versus what speaker means by saying it. He called for leadership by 100 university presidents to issue an educational statement on free expression modeled after President Biden’s statement of yesterday morning and email to their full mailing lists of employees, students, parents, alumni. University leadership must take some action he said.

   I agree that some actual leadership must be shown by the university chiefs. But I suggest it also have a strong educational component on the particular matter at hand: Israel/Palestine. I suggest that UChicago lead the development an Oxford Union style panel discussion modeled on those in the Union’s “Speaker series” with experts drawn from both sides of the issue and include a history from maybe 1000BCE or 700CE or late 19th century first glimpses of Zionism or ??? to present. Speakers shouldInclude visual aids such as maps as appropriate. The object is to leave the audience with some hard facts of history, interpretations, and politics that lead us to the current conundrum to supplement the screaming kids on two sides. IT MUST BE LIVESTREAMED AND ARCHIVED for the nation. This should not be a months long gold-plated project, but rather with today’s technology and experts available at our great universities, should be done in 3-4 weeks.

   1. And of course, disruptive heckling of speakers will not be tolerated…need a Walter Isaacson on call (tongue planted firmly in cheek). Miscreants can be removed and should. Make that “shall”.

2. Speaking of protests at Cornell, there is an interesting piece on Tablet (here) pointing out the mild response of the administration to pro-Hamas protestors as opposed to the draconian response to anything done by a fraternity. I would say that, in this case, Cornell’s response to the protests is driven primarily by sympathy and not to any great degree by fear of conflict or bad press (a reverse of the order of priorities that I suggested for UC the other day).

   1. Though Cornell is private, they may use Tinker which gives huge leeway to political speech in public schools as a guideline for their actions…or then again, who knows?

      1. What the piece said to me was that Cornell knows how to get tough and does so, when they don’t actually like what’s happening.

3. Can’t see the NYT, so I don’t know if they printed Biden’s complete remarks, but this sounds like both-sidesism:

   But let’s be clear about this as well. There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

   1. Both-sides-ing antisemitism with Islamophobia is just grotesque. The latter is a rational response to the former. Let’s not fear the Islamists, though. Just stand up to them and resist them.

      As for “discrimination”, well, there are narrow circumstances where discriminating against Arabs and Palestinians is illegal, and much broader circumstances in everyday life where it is not. Or is President trying to say that if 90% of protesters arrested are Muslim, this disparate impact proves discrimination?? And hate speech is legal in every “place” President Biden’s authority extends to.

4. It’s funny – the cult recruiters – I mean, protestors – had to be removed from the campuses – but the protests were supposed to look like all of a sudden, the zeitgeist appeared in our centers of knowledge – where students were uprising of their own accord. They’d be expected just to go back to the dorm. But they needed to camp out. Makes sense.

   BTW there’s an antisemitism bill in the works. I figure everyone saw that by now.

5. When deluded Westerners chant “Yemen, Yemen, turn another ship around”, they’re cheering on the fascists funded and armed by the Iranian fascists who shot that woman in the eye.

   PS – Similar “campus protests” have taken off in the UK, albeit, smaller in nature. But the same pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist rhetoric can be witnessed. At Newcastle University, among students waving placards with the old “hammer and sickle” on them, they have pictures of Leila Khaled – the international plane hijacker from the 1970s.

6. A teacher told me that she had spoken to her students about early space exploration only to have a kid come to her the following day and tell her that the moon landings had never happened. The teacher blames the parents 🙂

   Someone I know gave a public talk on Astronomy and was told the same thing (after the talk) by a woman in the audience.

   Wasn’t there a chap in some corner of the US who built his own rocket to go up there and see for himself if the earth was round? I wonder what happened to him.

   I didn’t know Stanley Kubrick is one of those who stands accused of the fake film footage.

   1. In 2017, I was giving an invited talk at our local science museum in celebration of the 100th anniversary of NASA Langley Research Center. When I mentioned the creation of the Science Directorate which investigated the 14BY history of the universe and 4.5 BY history of the Earth, a voice called out from the back of the audience: “You mean 5000 years”. I tried to engage with her, but she quickly grabbed up her belongings and her two or three children and stormed out. Unless their teachers had an oversized impact on them, these are the kids who are now about to raise those questions as adults and will soon be raising yet another generations of luddites…and of course critical theory of post modernism ain’t helping any on the humanities side of things.

   2. He died during his attempt.
      The footage below is a bit hard to watch:

7. On the topic of academic freedom even if it violates heresy taboos, a number of notables have written to The Times defending Nathan Cofnas. Since it’s paywalled, here it is:

   Sir, We were dismayed to learn that Dr Nathan Cofnas, a researcher at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Philosophy and a research associate at Emmanuel College, is to be expelled from the college and is the subject of investigations by the faculty and the Leverhulme Trust on the grounds that he made controversial comments about race and academic ability. Cambridge University’s initial response seems to us to have been completely correct. Professor Bhaskar Vira, pro-vice-chancellor for education, issued a statement that began: “Freedom of speech within the law is a right that sits at the heart of the University of Cambridge. We encourage our community to challenge ideas they disagree with and engage in rigorous debate.” Given this, we do not understand why the philosophy faculty is conducting an investigation. Members of the college or university who disagree with Dr Cofnas’s views could issue statements repudiating those views and explaining why they believe them to be mistaken.

   We urge Emmanuel College to reverse its decision and the Faculty of Philosophy and the Leverhulme Trust to call off their investigations. There is nothing to investigate. This should not need to be said, but given the present climate we would like to add that signing this letter does not indicate endorsement of Dr Cofnas’s views.

   Roger Crisp, Oxford University; Sir Partha Dasgupta, Cambridge University; Marie Daouda, Oxford University; Paul Elbourne, Oxford University; Jonathan Glover, KCL; Coleman Hughes, author; Matthew Kramer, Cambridge University; Brian Leiter, Chicago University; Jeff McMahan, Oxford University; Francesca Minerva, Milan University; Steven Pinker, Harvard University; Robert Plomin, KCL; Peter Singer, Princeton University; Amia Srinivasan, Oxford University

   1. Excellent! +1

8. Regarding the self-medicating orangutan:

   How long before some ideologues start calling for primate knowledge to be given equal footing with western medicine?

   1. Of course this comment is made in jest, but if we noticed an orang using a previously untapped plant in this way, it would make absolute sense to pay attention.

      1. Excellent point, Mr. Smith. You are absolutely correct.

         Which may, if I understand correctly, underscore Dr. Coyne’s previously made point about the differences in folk knowledge gleaned from observations of nature and the rigorous application of the scientific method.

      2. I’d be inclined to give the animal’s judgement about wound care more credence than native folklore that a plant supposedly having analgesic, anitpyretic, and diuretic properties was somehow good for diabetes, dysentery, and malaria.

   2. Next thing they’re going for is a zeitgeist involving “lesser” mammals such as couples therapy modeled by Muskrat Susie and Muskrat Sam (earworm anybody?).

      1. It took me a minute for it to dawn on me what you might be referring to. Then I had to do a little research:

         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBYV_7a0FQs

         Just my opinion, but I didn’t like that song when it was first released, and I still don’t like it. 🙂

         1. “Looks like butts grandma”:
            the autogenerated YouTube subtitle for the song’s hook line.

            Come to think of it, a well-placed comma in that would have it sort of make sense.

   3. What a good point!

   4. It’s not “primate knowledge”, but knowledgeS, plural. The development you foresee will occur on Canadian campuses, and administrators there, in line with a popular misunderstanding about evolution, will refer to other primates as “First Speciess”.

      1. I think that you mean “self-identifying as First Species”.

9. If Hamas rejects the plan currently on the table, it’s because it wants to goad Israel into launching a ground attack on Rafah. (Of course, Israel is already carrying out small-scale operations in Rafah.)

   Hamas’s calculation is that the U.S. and the rest of the world will condemn a Rafah incursion, that a Rafah incursion will add to campus unrest in the U.S. and elsewhere, and that the Hamas-sympathetic media will flood the airwaves and Internet with charges of Israeli genocide. Hamas leadership is very good at adjusting tactics on the fly. Last week a deal might have been to Hamas’s benefit; this week it’s better to forego a deal and play the Rafah card.

   President Biden has not helped. (I’m being generous here.) Had he not meddled in Israel’s war effort, the Rafah operation might have already been over and Hamas’s ability to wage war destroyed. The fastest way to end the suffering in Gaza is to destroy Hamas, and the Biden administration has been a major impediment.

   Hamas is playing the various parties for every advantage, using dead Gazans as its most potent weapon. When will it finally dawn on the Biden administration that by kneecapping Israel it is only prolonging the war and its attendant suffering? Hamas’s actions are telling us that it will continue playing the Biden administration until either the U.S. finally “gets it” or until Israel loses the war. It is banking that the latter will happen first.

   1. I am hoping (and there is reason to hope), that the campus protests are on their way out. Some are shut down. Others have gotten the message. And there is summer and the kids are supposed to go home.

      1. At the risk of repeating myself, some of the kids going home are nerving up for exciting demonstrations in Chicago this summer, outside the Democratic Party convention. Tom Hayden’s ghost will be laughing….

   2. Out in the web, I’ve noticed that for every post/comment about Biden not helping Israel and impeding their war effort, there is a comment that Biden is helping too much, giving Israel all it needs to continue their war effort. What is the truth? I sure don’t have the confidence to say I know, but in the mind-numbingly complicated Middle-East, I’d say it will never be black and white. It’s very easy to cast blame whilst in the fog of war.

      1. I think it depends on which side of the war you’re on, Mark, if you’ve taken a side. Both views you cite could be true, objectively, in terms of what the Biden Administration is actually doing. The disagreement is over whether it’s for the right ends. Obviously if someone supports Hamas they’ll call him Genocide Joe. If you haven’t taken a side, you’ll drive yourself into fits trying to figure out if each new fact you read is, a) true and b) good or bad. This is particularly acute when Israel makes what it calls a mistake, like the attack on the aid vehicles. If you are an Israeli partisan, you’ll be meh. Shit happens in war. Chill out, President Biden. In a war of civilization against mediaeval barbarism, civilization has a free hand, with the only risk being we become what we oppose….which I suppose is where “Not in our name” comes from.

         Isolationists in 1940-41 thought FDR was going too far with Lease-Lend and, later, recklessly sending the US Navy to escort convoys bound for England. The hawks (and Prime Minister Churchill) wanted him to declare war on Germany and get on with it.

         Remember in that time few in the U.S. or Canada cared about the Jews and certainly wouldn’t go to war for them. Those that did thought that the Soviet Union had cured antisemitism. Many neutral Americans were more afraid of Bolsheviks than they were of Nazis. They were sore at Britain for welshing on its repayment of debts to America from the First World War while still spending to pursue her colonial adventures.

         We have no quarrel with Germany, said practically everyone, including the large number of ethnic German-Americans who had emigrated in a great wave following the German revolutions in the mid-19th century. And now that the Germans were killing Russian communists after Barbarossa why stop them? So yes it was gray and complicated. Then on 7 Dec it became simple, although technically not simple vis-à-vis Germany until Hitler declared war on the U.S. four days later, answering Churchill’s prayers.

         1. Thanks for this thoughtful response, Leslie. I’m on the side of Israel, no doubt, and I see Biden on the side of Israel, though of course he must temper every word, and who knows what goes on behind closed doors and on private telephone conversations. (Not to say there is something nefarious going on, just that “we” don’t know.)

            Ken Burns has a great 2022 documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” Indeed, America did not care for the plight of the Jews and actively banned them from our shores and many died because of it.

      2. To some people any help is too much.

10. “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

    -Blaise Pascal, Pensées
    sec. SECTION XIV: APPENDIX: POLEMICAL FRAGMENTS, no. 864
    17th c., posthumous, (1670 2nd. ed.)

    ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees/pensees.xv.html

    BTW “Pascal’s Wager” is supposed to be in that^^^

11. If I may draw people’s attention to Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan’s powerful “J’accuse” speech to the UN General assembly when they attempted to reward Hamas terrorists by creating a Palestinian state. The mask has slipped completely off the useful idiots on campus and in the UN assembly; they are anti-Semites and Erdan’s speech calls them out. It is on point and does not pull punches.

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6fcLJmutz2/?igsh=NzgyYTk0Y2Yyng

    1. Why do those things always load with the audio off? Makes no sense.

12. Forgive me for my long story. It’s my first telling in some detail, which was provoked by Jerry’s listing of “International Space Day”…

    I don’t think there is any real “International Space Day” today. The link provided by Jerry goes to a generic calendar listing that mentions an event sponsored by Lockheed Corporation in 1997. I found another calendar listing online that referred to this day as “National Space Day.” I think these references are bogus fillers for online calendar listings that are hoping for clicks.

    • • •

    I arrived in San Francisco in late 1978…

    I soon learned of a small group of people who had organized a modest event in July 1979 called “Space Day.” It was a celebration of the anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first landing of astronauts on the Moon — July 20, 1969.

    I befriended these organizers of what was the first Space Day event, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like myself, they were frustrated with the pace of human space exploration then, and I dived in to help make the next Space Day — Space Day 80 — bigger and better. (It was held on July 19 because we favored that Saturday for the event.)

    I had some modest background in art, so I designed a large poster for the event, which a group of us put up around the Bay Area. I paid $600 for the printing of the poster, which was a no small thing, as I was then a “barista” working at a dessert café. I also put together an elaborate, multipage press release, which I mailed to various Bay Area news outlets, several of which picked it up. A San Francisco radio station gave it 20 minutes of positive advertising.

    Andrew Fraknoi was enlisted as the main professional science speaker. A stage was set up, and a pretty good rock band called “Beluga Whale” got onboard. Local astronomy groups put up information tables. NASA provided big standing racks of space posters, lots of free literature, and a ton of 8×10 photos of the planets, including the first Voyager spacecraft close-ups of Jupiter, plus earlier, less-detailed photos of Jupiter & Saturn taken by the twin outer-planets Pioneer spacecraft.

    Mayor Diane Feinstein’s office proclaimed July 19, 1980 “San Francisco Space Awareness Day.” (I have a copy of the official document signed by her.)

    I estimate that several thousand people attended the event in Golden Gate Park. The next year we put together an event called “Space Week 81,” which had multiple events in different venues throughout July 11-20. I designed the poster this time, too, which showed the first launch of the Space Shuttle. (I learned many years later that both of my posters are in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California.)

    Many people now celebrate “Yuri’s Night” on April 12, which commemorates the first orbits of Earth by an astronaut, the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. (April 12 also happens to be the day that the first Space Shuttle was launched, in 1981.)

    But in terms of an event likely to be remembered for as long as humanity survives, I think the first landing of humans on another celestial body makes July 20, 1969 as the most significant “Space Day.” I think it should be a national holiday or international holiday, and I think it someday will be.

    Orbiting Earth for the first time is like putting one’s toes into the ocean. But sailing to an island in the sky (and returning) marks an adventure truly mythic in scope. It represents the first tentative step of humanity toward becoming a civilization of the Solar System, not just of Earth.

    http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/2010547704

    1. Also, a reminder: Tomorrow is the National Day of Reason. (Not May 2, as it was shown in Jerry’s posting yesterday.)

       The National Day of Reason has been advertised as a response to the Nation Day of Prayer, which is on the first Thursday of May.

       But the National Day of Reason has always been on May 4. It is not based on the day of the week.

       (The folks at Google and Wikipedia have been confused.)

       Press release by Jamie Raskin:
       https://raskin.house.gov/2024/5/raskin-huffman-reintroduce-resolution-designating-may-4th-national-day-of-reason

       Text of resolution introduced this year by Jamie Raskin:
       https://raskin.house.gov/_cache/files/c/a/ca66bdd9-ae32-4247-9e3d-eda8266feec4/52B5029FB8E0A564CD38181E1994648A.text—national-day-of-reason-resolution.pdf

       1. *National Day of Prayer.

          By the way, a friend suggested that we have a National Day of Prairies instead.

          1. Absolutely! I second that.

       2. I’ve been informed that the National Day of Reason wasn’t always on May 4. But it has been in recent years. I will write Jamie Raskin about why there was a change.

    2. Thanks for the info.

    3. Interesting story, thanks

13. The Cornell student Momodou…..FAFO

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