Friday: Hili dialogue

September 13, 2024 • 7:30 am

Welcome to the tail end of the week: Friday, September 13th (yes, Friday the 13th), 2024, and  National Peanut Day.

Sadly, four years ago Planters killed off the top-hatted, monocle-wearing, cane-toting Mr. Peanut in a commercial. He was 104:

It looks like (with one exception), the readers are unanimous in wanting the old-style Hili Dialogues, especially with “The Nooz.”  So, I’ll institute them again, but please be aware that they are time-consuming, and I have to get back into the swing of things.  It may be a week or so before I can restore the original format, so stick with me. I do my best. Today will be a trial run, and the contents may be a bit below par.  Have a peanut.

Da Nooz;

*After his severe drubbing in his debate with Harris, Trump has declared (as expected) that there will be no more debates. Why? We all know the reason, but Trump has to lie about it:

Former President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he won’t debate Vice President Kamala Harris again, following Tuesday night’s matchup between the two in Philadelphia.

“THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” Trump said at the end of a long post on his Truth Social account. The first presidential debate was in June between Trump and President Biden.

“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,'” Trump wrote in his post, explaining his decision and insisting unnamed polls showed he won.

Later in the day, at a campaign stop in Tucson, Arizona, he said, “Because we’ve done two debates and because they were successful, there will be no third debate. Too late anyway, the voting has already begun.”

But initial polls by Reuters, YouGov and CNN showed a wide majority of voters thought Harris outperformed Trump. Most commentators and observers agreed that Harris got the upper hand in the showdown, with the vice president generally remaining on the attack while putting Trump on the defensive.

Trump at times struggled to focus his messaging, repeating debunked claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets, insisting people aren’t leaving his rallies early and saying he has “concepts” of a health care plan.

The icon below shows his full rationals:

*This seems to be the years that the mighty, at least among race activists, have fallen. First Ibram Kendi laid off half the staff at his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, with little scholarship to show in BU’s investment, with the Center described by some of its employees as dysfunctional, and now the axe has fallen on his white consœur Robyn DiAngelo, who has been accused of fairly serious plagiarism—and from minority (Asian) authors, no less! The conservative Washington Free Beacon (h/t Jay) gives the examples, but the story is also now in the New York Times, which says this:

Four years ago, Robin DiAngelo, the author of the best seller “White Fragility,” emerged as a prominent public intellectual and advocate for racial equity and inclusion.

Now, she faces accusations that she plagiarized portions of her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington.

A complaint was filed this month with the University of Washington. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal, obtained and published passages from it. The complaint accuses DiAngelo of “research misconduct,” and details 20 instances in which DiAngelo appears to have drawn on the work of other scholars and reproduced it without proper attribution in her 2004 dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.”

Among the scholars whose work DiAngelo drew on without proper acknowledgment, according to the complaint, are Stacey J. Lee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Northeastern University’s Thomas K. Nakayama, and his coauthor, Robert L. Krizek, a professor emeritus at St. Louis University.

While DiAngelo cites the scholars whose ideas she is reproducing, and later credits them in her bibliography, the complaint highlights some lengthy passages that repeat phrases almost word for word from their source material, without quotation marks.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is still plagiarism, and it is this behavior that largely brought down Harvard President Claudine Gay, who did the same thing in her Ph.D dissertation—and elsewhere. The Free Beacon, which gives examples of the copying, adds this:

The complaint describes dozens of cases in which DiAngelo, who rakes in almost $1 million a year in speaking fees, passed off the work of others as her own. It calls into question the key credential on which DiAngelo built her career, which has relied on the notion that her therapeutic workshops—which can cost up to $40,000 and insist that all white people are racist—are backed by scholarly expertise.

“No one who respected the basic expectations of scholarship would do this,” said Steve McGuire, a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and former professor of political theory at Villanova University. “The amount of copying of verbatim language without quotation marks or clear and consistent citations in these examples is appalling.”

The doctorate has become a centerpiece of DiAngelo’s marketing. Her website, “Robin DiAngelo, PhD,” refers to her as “Dr. DiAngelo,” notes that she is a professor at the University of Washington, and states that she coined the term “white fragility” in an “academic article” in 2011.

Here are two example from the Free Beacon: with their description:

[This example] involves two sentences from Bronwyn Davies, a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Rom Harré, a deceased philosopher and psychologist. DiAngelo copies the sentences almost verbatim, tweaking a word here or there to avoid an exact reproduction:

(click to enlarge).

And another:

DiAngelo, for example, copies a page of material from Kristin Gates Cloyes—her classmate in the university’s Ph.D. program—and frames it as original language.

There are more, and probably will be more as those trying to bring her down comb through her writings. But regardless, this form of plagiarism is wrong.  Will DiAngelo suffer for it? Well, they could revoke her Ph.D, but that won’t make her lose all the millions she made on her book. In the end, all she has to lose is her reputation among scholars—and which DiAngelo fans care about that?

*The New Yorker‘s story “The Chaos Continues at Columbia“, describes how the troubles are about to start up again this fall (I predict it will be even worse this year than last), but singles out a group that’s been neglected by the Columbia protests—the campus workers.

While media coverage of campus demonstrations tends to focus on the top ranks of universities, the effects of the protests tend to be most keenly felt by lower-level workers. That’s what happened this spring, when a group of about fifty protesters barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, one of Columbia’s academic buildings. Four workers—three janitors and a public-safety officer—were inside when the takeover started, and they had to “fight their way out,” according to the president of the Transport Union Workers local, Alex Molina, who also works as an electrician on campus. “After the building was taken back, there was a group that didn’t want to return to work,” Molina told me. But “they didn’t have a choice. We have to feed our families.” He said that union members are feeling uneasy going into the new school year. The union has asked for a written safety protocol, along with indemnification from legal liability if workers feel they have to defend themselves. But “nothing has ever been put out from the university,” Molina said. “We’re not getting anything to assure us that we’re safe.” (A university spokesperson said that Columbia is committed to the safety of all its employees and is working with the union to address their concerns.)

For months now, Columbia’s main campus, in Morningside Heights, has been effectively locked down, open only to those with I.D.s and their guests. An army of security guards enforce this policy, some of them employed by Columbia, others part of private-security firms that the university has maintained in recent months. Workers told me that, at times, they’ve felt like students see them as the enemy, perhaps because they conflate uniformed guards with police. In the spring, protesters would often scream that “we’re a part of the problem, we’re a part of the genocide,” one longtime security officer told me. On the first day of classes this week, a group of protesters gathered outside the gates at 116th and Broadway, blocking students from coming onto campus. “We’re the ones getting the brunt of the attitude and the anger and frustration,” the officer said. “Without us, this place doesn’t really run.”

. . .A fter Hamilton Hall was occupied this spring, John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which represents Columbia’s staff, along with tens of thousands of workers for New York City’s subways and buses and commuter trains, made a plan for what to do if something like that were to happen again. “We’re not going to let a bunch of freaking trust-fund babies hold our members against their will at Columbia,” he told me. “We’re going to go get track workers with sledgehammers and track wrenches and we’re going to go get them. That’s our plan.” (Another union representative, Shannon Poland, who leads the T.W.U.’s security team, clarified that track wrenches are like regular wrenches, “just supersized.” With “the size and the girth of the men that’s coming,” he added, “the protesters would part like the Red Sea.”)

Samuelsen has sympathy for the impossible dilemma facing university presidents, who are accountable to students, professors, and alumni with vastly different world views. “The presidents are caught in the middle, like a piñata,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that job. It’s untenable.” But the situation long ago spun out of administrators’ control. Just a few days into the semester, more protesters have already been arrested. Molina told me, “I have a feeling this is just the beginning of things that will happen this school year.”

I like Samuelsen. He doesn’t pull any punches, but I hope he doesn’t initiate any violence at Columbia.

*Should we pay more attention to political endorsements by celebrities? I ask because Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for President has gone viral, with many people thinking it’s a fatal blow to Trump’s bid for the Presidency.  The NYT seems to share this view in its op-ed “The deeper meaning of Taylor Swift’s mic drop” by novelist Jennifer Weiner.

Here’s Swift’s endorsement: click to see the whole thing:

That’s fine with me, and I love the touch of humor in the signature.  But should people pay more attention to Swift than, say, to any other smart person, many of whom spend more time reading and thinking about politics? The NYT seems to share this view in its op-ed “The deeper meaning of Taylor Swift’s mic drop” by novelist Jennifer Weiner. Excerpts:

For a certain swath of America, the big news of Tuesday night’s presidential debate wasn’t made by Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but by Taylor Swift. As you’ve probably heard by now, mere moments after the candidates left the stage, she went on Instagram and, in a move many Democrats had prayed for, endorsed Ms. Harris. “She fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” Ms. Swift wrote to her 283 million followers.

The endorsement was not a surprise, nor were the responses: Democrats exulted. Republicans fumed. Elon Musk chimed in with something deeply creepy.

Many pundits described Ms. Swift’s statement as a knockout punch — the cherry on the garbage sundae that was Mr. Trump’s Tuesday night. Ms. Swift, they said, had smartly waited until the former president was wounded, down on the floor whimpering, in order to deliver that final blow. “The timing on it is absolutely exquisite. The wording of it is flawless,” said the MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell.

. . .Ms. Swift’s endorsement may not swing the needle for the tiny sliver of persuadable voters in the handful of swing states. If people want to make their decisions based on something other than a pop star’s Instagram post, more power to them. But that post, with its tongue-in-cheek-y humor, raises the hope that the joy Ms. Harris has been running on might get us to a place that attacks never could.

Note that Swift does urge people to get out and vote: a message far more important to me than saying who they should vote for. Of course Swift has every right to endorse who she will, and if young people follow her advice and vote, it may move the needle on the results just a tad (note that Hulk Hogan has endorsed Trump).  In my view, though, one should vote for a candidate on the basis of their stated policy as well as their history that either supports or goes against what they say now. And that means listening to arguments, not celebrity.  But Swift, who didn’t endorse anybody in 2016 but endorsed Biden four years ago, does mention a few reasons why she supports Harris.

It’s her immense fame that has caused the viral news, not that she is any more politically prescient than any other intelligent person. What amazes me is the huge and pervasive debates about the power of the singer to influence the vote. And I doubt that in the end we’ll know whether there really was any power. What does seem true is that young people seem to be much more interested in registering to vote since the endorsement.

Here’s Ricky Gervais mocking celebrity endorsements (see his comment at 6:59 in this infamous Golden Globes bit), followed by a bunch of people addressing the question in interviews:

*The Jerusalem Post has a piece about how National Students for Justice in Palestine, the anti-Israel organization that most often violates campus rules, and which has many chapters on American campuses, inadvertently let its mask slip in a post issued by the National organization. Then it realized its mistake and made its tweet disappear.  From the JPo

National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), an umbrella organization with multiple chapters across US campuses, shared a message last week written by alleged anti-Israel activists at Columbia University which states: “Divestment [against Israel] is not an incremental goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and the American empire itself. To divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.” NSJP’s post was deleted shortly after it was posted for unknown reasons, yet screenshots were saved and are still available online.

 . . . this is not the first time in which the renowned student organization promotes violence. In April 2024, at the height of the student encampment endeavor, NSJP helped instate a Telegram channel to unite and coordinate efforts of the movement, which included sharing a dossier instructing how to violently obstruct police officers from doing their job, including pushing officers and breaking their grip, forcefully opening the doors of police cars, and carrying handcuff keys and wire cutters to release suspects.

Can you deny that they pulled the post because it shows SJP’s true agenda: not just to get rid of Israel, but to erase the “American empire” as well.

I’ve called for SJP’s status as a recognized student organization on my campus to be re-examined because of their repeated violations of campus regulations (as far as free speech, they can say what they want within Chicago’s very tolerant guidelines, but they must observe “time, place, and manner” regulations. In a long post in April called “J’Accuse” (props to Zola), I recounted all of SJP’s violations of campus policy, how two Jewish students filed a formal complaint against them, and how the University gave SJP a slap on the wrist, giving them an “official warning” as their sole punishment. No individual suffered any punishment for the many violations of campus policy.

No wonder we’ve fallen from #1 to #43 in FIRE’s free-speech rankings, rated only “slightly above average”.  Some of our faculty, determined to uphold our reputation, are dissing these rankings, saying that you simply can’t rank free speech in a meaningful way.  Tell that to the parents and trustees who have become used to our school’s reputation as “the best free speech university in America.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m observing reality in the bushes.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Przyglądam się rzeczywistości w krzakach.

*********

From reader David:

From Cat Memes:

From Irena:

From Masih: two Western adherents to Islam defend polygny:

President Maud Mandel of prestigious Williams College has announced that the school will observe institutional neutrality, though her statement seems to imply that she herself won’t make political or ideological statements. What about the rest of the administration, including departments, deans, and other units?

From Barry: a somnolent cat awakens (it’s the food, Jake!):

From Simon: a tweet by his friend Magda. I heartily approve because to me cilanto tastes like soap. It’s genetic!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 13-year-old French girl gassed to death upon arrival:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb.  First, kides or cats? (Matthew has two kids and three cats)

This is true, and an amazing feat of natural selection. How does the flower “know” how to open after just one day of trapping the beetls? (i.e., what are the cues for opening?)

 

39 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Stop apologizing. You provide a valuable service what must be at a considerable time expense. We are grateful for your unique insight and forum.

  2. Great stuff, welcome back! Haven’t skipped a beat!

    It just occurred to me (others have probably said this) that the Hili Dialogue is like an intellectual variety show: news, humor, human condition stories, thought-provocation, science, satire, entertainment, and, of course, cats!

  3. I’m wondering how these debates are organized. Won’t the libertarian candidate get to debate the two major candidates? I’m not saying this in support of the libertarians, but it would be nice if the other candidates get some exposure.

    1. There used (still is?) to be a bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. The GOP announced in 2022 that it would cease participation in debates going forward due to issues with the rules. This year both parties decided to ignore the CPD. The question of which candidates get to participate in the debates is always a hot one. Major candidates don’t want to share the stage with minor candidates and third-parties.

      1. “Major candidates don’t want to share the stage with minor candidates and third-parties.”

        Obviously democratic and not authoritarian. Sic Semper American Exceptionalism.

  4. I love the privileged students at ivy league universities who will graduate into profitable positions within the American empire advocate for destroying the American empire. No doubt they are in the position they are because their parents were also a big part of the American empire. This makes me think they are just entertaining themselves until they graduate.

    And I love the longer Hili Dialogues.

  5. “It looks like (with one exception), the readers are unanimous in wanting the old-style Hili Dialogues, especially with “The Nooz.” ”

    Awesome!

    I’ll learn to pace myself – giving Hili’s wit time to develop…

    Maybe read everything backwards, finishing with Hili’s rumination… or whatever the word is for that…

    Ah – just noticed Hili is about 3/4 the way down today – I thought usually Hili is almost first.

    #BigFan

  6. It will be interesting to see if, after the fact, there is any provable bump from the Swift endorsement. I know I am an old fart, but I can’t think of any celebrity (or non-celebrity) whose endorsement would impact my choice. I think the Swift endorsement likewise wouldn’t change anyone’s preference, but it might motivate them to actually got out and vote. I don’t know if that’s enough, though, for people who had not heretofore already decided that voting was something they should do. And I have not idea what “undecided” voters are about.

      1. Absolutely agree with Mark.
        If Taylor Swift gets young people out to register and vote, and Linda Ronstadt (https://www.instagram.com/p/C_zE5anv8UO) and Stevie Nicks do the same for my generation, even if the endorsements as such don’t swing the already-intending-to-vote group, then they’re doing great work.
        However, I think the endorsements do carry some weight: probably little for the already-intending-to-vote-for-X group; but if Taylor Swift, as an example, can convince a person to register and vote, that person will probably pay attention to the endorsement.

    2. “Should we pay more attention to political endorsements by celebrities?”

      Yes of course we should. It was a celebrity (George Cloony) that brought down a president

  7. Regarding DiAngelo, I’m going to make a bold generalization:

    You should not expect many folks who pursue a career in the kinds of critical studies “scholarship” you see in the humanities departments at most universities to be highly invested in things like intellectual integrity and academic honesty. Critical studies scholarship is almost a pure void when it comes to curiosity about what the world is actually like. It’s for people who are very concerned with being perceived as some kind of big smarty pants but, for whatever reason, don’t have it in them to do the hard work of actually checking their ideas against reality.

    And by that I don’t mean to imply that critical studies folks are unusually dishonest or actively mendacious. Some of them may be, but you get folks like that in the sciences, too. Rather, I’m just contending that the choice of career itself suggests a low degree of emphasis on or interest in what’s true–extending to what’s true of the origin’s of ideas and phrases.

    1. Agreed. We saw this among the responses to Claudine Gay’s plagiarism by those she plagiarized, who argued that the accusers were racists therefore the accusations were no big deal. It’s understandable those folks were willing to take one for the team, but not honest either.

      The bigger hit to DiAngelo’s bottom line may come from her unwitting appearance in the new Matt Walsh documentary “Am I Racist?”. If the pre-release interviews are to be believed, she sat for an interview with Walsh (disguised with a bad wig as a DEI consultant). While on camera he invites one of the production crew (a black guy) onto the set. Walsh flummoxes DiAngelo with a conversation among the three of them about reparations for slavery, which ends with DiAngelo reluctantly emptying her wallet.

      If “Am I Racist” is half as funny as “What Is A Woman” then it will be very entertaining. I disagree with Walsh (who is a fundie Catholic) about almost everything else, but on woke hypocrisy he’s spot on.

      [edit to add: Folks should read that complaint about plagiarism by DiAngelo. More than a thousand words plagiarized from other sources. It’s not even close to a mistake. Only deliberate short-cutting could produce that much identical or inadequately paraphrased text. And as someone with a PhD from the University of Washington I’m really appalled.]

      1. A thousand words out of how many? Is it not possible that DiAngelo simply isn’t that bright? That over the course of a year or two, photocopying this, cut-and-pasting that, screenshot here, download there, that the woman lost track of what was hers and what wasn’t? That she has no sense of her own voice? That regurgitating others is what critical studies folks do? Okay, perhaps I’m taking devil’s advocacy to an extreme!

        The juxtaposition of the Harris debate with the DiAngelo scandal amuses me. Perhaps Robin should have gone into politics, a profession in which we praise people who can parrot the words provided by others.

        1. If a college student did what she did, the student would be punished or even expelled. “Lack of brightness” isn’t an excuse. Besides, the woman has a Ph.D. “I didn’t know the rules” doesn’t wash in cases like this, and it didn’t wash for Claudine Gay, who was basically fired as Harvard’s President.

        2. The thesis is here:

          https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/New%20Documents/DiAngelo%20Dissertation%20-%202004.pdf

          Excluding the front and back matter it’s 255 pages. Scanning lots of pages from Ch.1, each page averages about 15 lines of about 10 words per line (excluding the many direct quotations from other works). So generously say it’s ~50,000 words or ~2% plagiarized text. IDK whether that number seems small or makes any difference. Many theses in grievance studies are much shorter. If the thesis was shorter and the proportion plagiarized was greater what would be too much? I think the absolute amount (it’s a lot, directly lifted from other work, or very lightly disguised with minor word changes or rearrangements of blocks of text) is damning.

          Of course it doesn’t have to be either or: evidently she’s both an unscrupulous plagiarist and not that bright.

  8. Excellent post! You’re definitely back!

    I didn’t know about DiAngelo’s plagiarism, even though I live close to ground zero—just a few miles from the University of Washington campus. Such a grifter.

    And I, too, read the tweet from National Students for Justice in Palestine. Is this not enough for colleges and universities across the country to nullify their SJP charters? SJP is a ticking time bomb.

  9. “Divestment [against Israel] is not an incremental goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and the American empire itself. To divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”

    I may have posted this before, but it bears repeating:

    “A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it’s always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor.
    “He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned.
    “He laughed. ‘Nothing you call original,’ he said. Death’s terrible, suffering’s worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire.
    “Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them.”
    Whisperer turned and looked at me. “So that’s what you meant, huh? You’ve been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?”
    “Yes,” I replied. “I’ve heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They’ve been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I’ve been listening to them.”
    “And you don’t think we have—the people in Washington?” He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know.
    “Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut.” —Terry Hayes, I am Pilgrim

    1. You know, Mark, I think you have mentioned this book before and I decided to look it up. It’s interesting that people gave it either 1 * and ripped it to shreds or 5 *s and absolutely loved it. I’m intrigued by that and put a copy on hold at the library.

  10. Cilantro is one of my favorite herbs. Someone gave me something from Trader Joe’s called Zhoug Sauce, made from cilantro, garlic, jalapenos, oil, cardamom (! my favorite spice), cumin seeds and salt.

    What a strange combo, but it is excellent!

  11. Toppling DiAngelo’s Guilt Empire with a successful plagiarism charge reminds me of when they went after Al Capone for tax evasion. Toxic academic ideas, brutal crime syndicate — hey, whatever works, I guess.

  12. I think VP Harris needs to change her first name to Karmala after that long overdue a$$ whipping she gave to the criminal.

      1. Agreed, I’m no fan of Harris but tRump is abhorrent. I’m absolutely amazed he has so much support.

  15. Does everyone hate Elon Musk now because he’s supporting Trump? Maybe the same people who hate him now hated him before, I don’t know. With respect to his remark to Taylor Swift, “deeply creepy”? I thought it was funny.
    I particularly liked Thursday’s Hili Dialogue when she was thinking deeply about “a treaty on the borders of tolerance”.

    1. I agree that I thought Musk’s quote was funny. It was obviously a joke based on her description. Besides, he could have been offering to give her one his his kids.

      If Swift responded to it, and said she thought it was funny, it would remind me of the Gary Larson/Jane Goodall cartoon, where one of Goodall’s staff took offense to Larson’s cartoon and threatened him with legal action, while Goodall herself thought it was hilarious.

  16. Any day now the NSJP will rename themselves to National Students for Direct Action on Palestine… for the acronym alone…

  17. Polyamory is the same thing surely, as polygamy, & there are trendy people who say they are into that? I do not care about that – what I care is that they are so stupid as to believe in a god.

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