Good morning from L.A., where the wildfires are still raging, though they’ve been somewhat contained (see below). High winds, however, are threatening to undo the progress firefighters have made. There is still no sign of the fire from USC.
I will be here three more days chilling and visiting friends.
The meeting yesterday on censorship in the sciences was good, I thought, The highlights for me were Wilfred Reilly’s talk on the taboos in social discourse, the panel on gender led by Sally Satel with Carole Hooven, Diana Blum, and Michael Bailey, Greg Lukianoff’s talk on “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise” and of course our own panel led by Julia Schaletzky and comprising me and my long-time partner in crime, Luana Maroja.
I was nervous about the last one, as it was the only panel at the meeting with free-form discussion between the panelists (the rest of the panels I saw involved three or four speakers, with each speaker giving a 10-15-minute talk followed by audience questions. But it went well, I thought, with Julia doing a great job moderating, and, since we know each other’s views, we all talked back and forth fluently. During the 10-minute Q&A session, some distressed man accused me of using atheism and science to fill the “god-shaped hole” that, he said, afflicts all of humanity. This is the Little People’s argument that Richard Dawkins recently addressed in the Spectator (reprinted in Free Inquiry), and I was prepared to answer him, though the man was persistent in claiming that I was effectively religious. I finally gave up and told him that if he wanted to define “nature” as “god”, as pantheists do, then yes, I was religious by that definition. But that is pure nonsense.
Wilfred Reilly’s talk was okay but he was not as eloquent a speaker as I had assumed after having read several of his several excellent books. The highlight of the day was Greg Lukianoff’s talk, which ranged broadly over academia, censorship, and deplatforming. I hope people will listen to at least part of the conference when the recording (and videos, I hope) become public and free.
Greg’s points that I remember:
- Firings and punishments of professors for speech are higher now than they ever have been since they were made illegal after McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1960 led to laws making it illegal to punish professors for their political view. In the last two years there has been a slight decrease in sanctions on faculty, but the level is still hugely higher than, say, twenty years ago.
- Deplatformings of speakers by both administrators and students are also at an all-time high, most recently because of the actions of pro-Palestinian protestors. FIRE keeps track of which side the deplatformings come from, and most come from the Left (these include the pro-Palestinian protestors, which of course are considered Leftists). Here’s a slide showing the trend over time. It is OUR SIDE that is doing most of the deplatforming: the blue line are deplatforming attempts from the Left, and the red line from the Right (of course most administrators and students are from the Left, but this graph shows just numbers, not per capita attempts). One could conclude from this that, as far as stifling of speech on campus goes, the Left is more repressive than the Right. We must do better.
- Harvard and Columbia are almost neck and neck for the position of dead last on FIRE’s 2025 college free-speech rankings, with Harvard in the ignominious last slot. Both schools have a score of ZERO (and yes, FIRE takes into account several indices of speech freedom) and are rated as “abysmal”, along with NYU, which is third from the bottom. Lukianoff’s solution is to repurpose Columbia as a technical school!
- Lukianoff is firm in saying that DEI is encouraging this kind of speech suppression, and he will have none of it.
- Asked about his views on the ACLU and American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Lukianoff pulled no punches. While he still admires much of the ACLU’s work, and even worked for them, he is disappointed with their unwillingness to defend the civil liberties of non-progressive groups, and with their zeal for defending gender activists over those who oppose them. As for the AAUP, which recently endorsed academic boycotts (read: of Israel) as well as endorsing DEI statements, he said that this group is no longer defending free speech, but is actively opposed to it. I agree!
Lukianoff said a lot more, and I recommend that you listen to his entire talk, which was illuminated with many slides. I hope that the organizers will show them all, but I’m sure they will because the entire conference was videotaped.
Kudos to Anna Krylov, who did most of the heavy lifting to get this conference off the ground,
*The NYT reports that the fires in LA are still causing devastation, with about two dozen people killed.
Dangerous winds were again expected to sweep through Los Angeles late Monday, threatening the progress firefighters have made against the devastating wildfires in the area.
Forecasters have issued a rare fire danger alert, known as a “particularly dangerous situation” red flag warning, for Monday night through Wednesday morning. That is the same level of alert that was issued last week as strong wind gusts fueled the fires that have become some of the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.
Over the weekend, firefighters slowed the progress of the Eaton fire, near Pasadena. The 14,000-acre blaze was 27 percent contained early Monday, while the 23,700-acre Palisades fire on the west side of Los Angeles was 13 percent contained. The Eaton fire has killed 16 people, making it one of the deadliest in California’s history, and at least eight people have died in the Palisades blaze. Another 16 people have been reported missing in the areas of the two fires, and officials have warned the number of fatalities is likely to rise.
The rare “particularly dangerous situation” designation applied to three areas across Ventura and Los Angeles counties. While forecasters usually only use this special warning every few years, this marks the fourth time it has been issued in the past few months. The previous two warnings came during conditions that led to the Mountain fire in November and the Franklin fire in December.
*Things are expected to improve later this week as the winds die down. One of the people who had to flee was Sam Harris, who wrote about it on his Substack in a column called “Starting from scratch“:
When the fire started, I was at my desk, on a call with my team at Waking Up. Moments later, I was meditating on the futility of deciding which material things, gathered over a lifetime of acquisitiveness, I most cherished. In the end, I packed our daughters’ favorite stuffed animals, our two cats, a gun, and a bottle of MDMA (“Why the hell not?”). The one object of sentimental value I grabbed on my way out of my office was a mala from my days in India and Nepal. This moment of triage produced a brief reflection on the many years I’d spent traveling along seemingly incongruent paths: How many people understand the value of both a mala and a gun, and can carry each without feeling like a fraud? As I prepared to step out into a city where nearly everyone would soon be bracing for chaos, I was very grateful to have developed both sides of my personality.
After retrieving our youngest daughter from school, Annaka returned to pack for herself and the girls, while I stood at the window in our living room watching the progress of the fire. I find few things more beautiful than perfectly formed cumulus clouds, and the ramparts of smoke now rising in the West were their magnificent, evil twins. After watching this merciless vision evolve for several minutes, I suddenly decided that we had run out of time.
Based on several reports received in the middle of the night, I became nearly certain that we had lost our home. Later evidence has convinced me that it was spared—while two doors away houses were destroyed. We still haven’t been able to return to our street to see for ourselves, but several times a day Annaka and I learn of more friends and acquaintances from nearby areas who have lost everything.
Whatever the state of our home, much of our world has vanished. Our daughter’s school appears to have been burned only partially, and may eventually be rebuilt, but the surrounding neighborhood is now a toxic wasteland. Many other places that have been part of our daily lives for decades were obliterated. I’ve only seen pictures and video, but they reveal a landscape that resembles Hiroshima the day after the bombing. It is hard to imagine how communities that have been so comprehensively destroyed can be rebuilt.
But Sam uses most of his column to urge the very rich to engage in an act of unprecedented philantropy to rebuild the city. An excerpt:
I have a proposal for the Resnicks, and for every other wealthy person who has deep ties to Los Angeles: Identify the portion of your wealth that has no conceivable impact on your quality of life—I am talking about what is, and will always be, just a number on a spreadsheet—and pledge those residual assets to help rebuild our city. To be clear, I am not asking you to sacrifice anything beyond the idea of how wealthy you are on paper.
Whatever happens, it will take years to rebuild the damaged portions of this city.
*Luana sent me a link to this NYT article, “Judge rejects Biden’s title IX rules, scrapping protection for trans students” (archived here). An excerpt:
A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.
The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It arrived just days before those protections were likely to face more scrutiny under a Trump administration that is expected to be hostile to the new rules and could refuse to defend them in court.
In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.
“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”
The pronoun issue is not as important to me (though it does constitute compelled speech) as the need to protect women’s spaces, especially in sports. The Biden administration had already backed off on this, but this ensures that women’s spaces will be reserved for those whose biological sex is female:
. . .But more significantly, the judge also rejected the revised rule on free-speech grounds, writing that it “offends the First Amendment” by potentially requiring educators to use names and pronouns associated with a student’s chosen gender identity.
“Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” he wrote.
*Speaking of woke practices, the NYT has a guest essay by Kathleen DuVal, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, called “Enough with the land acknowledgments” (archived here). This has always been a purely performative exercise, and I’ve always said that if those who ritually utter these acknowlegments were truly serious, they would give either money or land back to the Native American tribes they acknowledge. DuVal agrees:
If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”
The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.
Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.
The problem that remains is identifying who “owned” the land on which many universities and corporations are built, since tribe conquered tribe, with turtles all the way down up to the first people who came to North America across the Bering Strait.
*Of all places, the Deseret News, an organ of the Mormon Church, has a balanced and informative article about the FFRF KerFFRFle; it’s by Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M university. Click to read:
She also has an earlier article, well worth reading, on Californians’ views about gender extremism. Click headline to read, and remember that California is generally a blue state:
A statue of Tommy Trojan, the iconic image of the University of Southern California. I’m told that when their football team plays UCLA, the UCLAers deface Tommy:
And some animals that once lived in this area sculpted on an academic building. Perhaps it’s the USC biology department:
From Stacy, You know the answer:
From Positive Attitude Quotes via Diana. Tgus us
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Masih: a Kurdish woman facing execution in Iran for being a political dissenter.
Save Pakhshan Azizi: A Kurdish Woman Opposing Islamism in the Region, Now Facing Execution in Iran
Pakhshan Azizi’s only “crime” was dedicating her life to supporting displaced women and children while championing the values of freedom and justice. A social worker and women’s… pic.twitter.com/A4BEKef9fA
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 8, 2025
From the Babylon Bee:
British Man Arrested For Making Meme Offensive To Child Rapists https://t.co/kkWzan4g5t pic.twitter.com/ROs2fI6ncy
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 11, 2025
A few from my feed. If this is true, it’s horrible!
A child marriage in Iraq.
I’m at a loss for words.
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) January 13, 2025
Wolves’ reaction when a mother wolf returns to the pack – Manitoba, Canada pic.twitter.com/cmvKdaGVO7
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 12, 2025
Lots of brave people working the California wildfires:
I’m not a pilot but I have to imagine that you have to be an absolute BADASS to skim the water in what is basically a flying tank, over and over all day long, and do it with the accuracy it takes to scoop up 1,000+ gallons of water and not have an accident.
My hat is off to… pic.twitter.com/zwzHfy0xI1
— SaltyGoat (@SaltyGoat17) January 11, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
This is one person of the 90% of Jews gassed to death when their train arrived at Auschwitz. He was only 13, and never got to see what life held for him beyond cyanide.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-13T16:27:46.847Z
Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First, find the hidden animal. I am not going to tell you, so put your guess in the comments below:
Hidden in plain sight. Can you find the critter? 🔎 🧐
— Matt Bertone (@bertonemyia.bsky.social) 2025-01-12T15:59:25.865Z
Matthew posted this one:
Strange, it’s Helen’s car.
Lukianoff’s solution is to repurpose Columbia as a technical school!
I hope this was said in jest…
I am not sure exactly what he meant he could have meant renaming the school. And I’m not sure if what he said was said in jest. Lukianoff clearly thinks that Harvard and Columbia are beyond the pale. He simply has no use for Harvard at all.
Well I didn’t hear it, which is why I asked. Whatever his views, since he is not employed at either Harvard or Columbia what he thinks should be done with such private institutions should remain opinion and I find that kind of thing alarming-most of all because I work at Columbia. Is he right that the speech related atmosphere on campus is bad? I think he is. But most faculty here are not the ones making headlines. We are scientists, engineers and professional school employees. Like many elitist schools we have a big divide between students of these disciplines, as well as faculty (again along subject lines). The failures of the school are probably more complex than what is written about, perhaps more complex than Lukianoff himself understands (although I don’t know-I have never talked to him), and they are matters of degree common to many schools. I’d rather just have the administration start to adopt good governance principles as you yourself advocate and simply enforce rules properly, but we aren’t unique in these failures. There is a lot of excellent work done here, and turning it into a “technical” school to me sounds more like the desire to kill the place off.
Of course, here in Chicago we already have Columbia College. It’s not really a “technical school” but does place an emphasis on career preparation in a variety of pursuits.
https://www.colum.edu/
My sense on zoom was that it was both a bit tongue in cheek and a bit of calling out of the “studies” departments there.
You and Luana did a good job yesterday. Your moderator probably spoke for at least 1/3 of the time, but she was good, too, keeping the conversation fluid. Would have liked to hear more of what you and Luana had to say—including a reprise of your joint paper.
I was surprised at how small the audience seemed to be (from my vantage point on Zoom). It appeared that there were maybe 50 people there at the end. I wonder why the audience wasn’t filled with people favoring free speech—or even those opposing it. I hope that the published proceedings have a wider audience.
Finally, I was left with little hope. (Maybe that’s just reality.) For example, Gregg Lukianoff quipped at the end that for Penn to improve, it should declare itself a technology institute. This must imply that Lukianoff thinks humanities and social sciences are hopeless and can only be improved by being removed. On the other hand, there were some who thought that reform was possible.
Love to hear your thoughts on what can be done to change the culture. Perhaps things need to be fixed one lawsuit at a time. That would be a sad conclusion, if true.
It was agreed that Julia would be a full participant in the debate as well as moderator, as she has at least as much expertise as the rest of us on these issues. Our talk was the next-to-last one of a three-day meeting, and people already had their suitcases there to leave immediately. Some, of course, had already left. I am not worried about this as the audio and video will be available to everyone, and I’ll make a post when it happens.
Makes sense. Thanks.
Got a feeling that the story about the man being arrested by the Met for making a meme is, how shall I put it kindly, dubious. Firstly he is, apparently, being held in the Tower of London which hasn’t been used as a prison since the 1950s. Next, a google search on his name produced nothing, the photo is a stock photo…. This one doesn’t smack of being true.
Your instincts are correct. The Babylon Bee is satirical.
Yes, as already noted, it’s the Babylon Bee, only marginally less satirical than Titania McGrath.
Fake News You Can Trust
I’d have jumped in to back up PCC(E) when the guy tried to equate commitments to empiricism – “science” – (perhaps Enlightenment values) as religious sorta like this :
Deism is I think what PCC(E) was getting coerced into by that “question”. This is meaningless in the world as we know it, as opposed to Theism where god answers prayers, works miracles, as part of a bargain with His believers that commit to church every Sunday in religion-as-our-great-grandparents-knew-religion.
What that dichotomy misses is Gnosticism – or, to put it rudely : cults. Like, actual religious Cults In Our Midst (Margaret Thaler Singer), that conceal themselves except to those with gnosis. I’d note Hermeticism as well. Both these have an enormous literature that our great grandparents were likely oblivious to, as well as the cults themselves e.g. Freemasonry. Looks like a silly town club – but it’s a mystical cult.
A quote:
“[R]eligion can be defined as a comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience.”
Ben Clements
Cornell Law Review
Volume 74
Issue 3 March 1989
Defining Religion in the First Amendment: A Functional Approach
One salient reference I regularly put up, perhaps unfashionably :
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;
Washington D.C.
… or hit ’em with the Hitchen’s razor,
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”.
A great quote, with a great lineage of thought – however, the originators of that idea were religious in theologic ways – and wary of theosophic heresies with gnosis of how to break the soul out from the worldly prison of the demiurge.
They’d have gotten in trouble at church for that.
I must say, though, Bryan, that I don’t like definitions of religion such as the one from Clements. According to a definition like that, anyone’s personal philosophy of life, even if it’s a naturalistic one and based on science and reason, would automatically count as a religion. Certainly, ancient philosophical systems such as Epicureanism would count as religions, though Epicureanism was meant to be a materialist and this-worldly alternative to religion. There’s much more to say about this, but I don’t want to write a very long comment.
I also don’t want to hijack Jerry’s website to advertise my own work. But I hope I can mention that I’ve written a great deal in various books and articles about this topic of “What is religion?” and “What is a religion?” Most recently, I discuss it at some length in Chapter 2 of my 2024 book How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration, if anyone wants to track it down. That’s enough of that, given my reluctance to spam the site, but I obviously deal with objections and complexities there in a way that I can’t here.
I do think that some systems of belief and practice that are not strictly religions – and may not have the characteristics that justify separation of religion from state power – nonetheless show many of the trappings of religion as we’ve experienced it in the West since the rise of Christianity. These are political ideologies that play similar roles in their adherents’ lives to the role played by religions in the strict sense, so it’s reasonable to use the term “political religions” that was popularized by Voegelin and others back in the 1930s and 1940s. Most obviously, Marxism was seen by many of its adherents as a successor system of belief and practice to Christianity, and it played the role of a religion for many people. I think the ideology of the Social Justice Movement, based on attitudes to various demographic groups, some of which are denigrated while others are almost venerated, is best thought of as a political religion.
But it’s possible to give quite a “thick” description of what counts as a religion in the strict sense, and I think that’s the concept that the courts should apply (and to a large extent have applied in practice at least in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia).
Interesting thoughts – I shall check that literature, thanks.
At some level, it has occurred to me that hey, perhaps the individual can adopt its own religion – a religion of one adherent.
I think such a religion satisfies Thomas Jefferson’s “neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket” rule.
Unless I designate my house on 160 acres (I wish!) as the place of worship for The Church of Latter-Day MacMillanism and get it declared exempt from having to pay property tax. My religion has a deeply spiritual connection with the land, you see, which is why we need so much of it.
Killing two birds with one stone, this is also why tribal nations should not be able to buy up private land and fold it into the Reservation just on their own say-so, as suggested by another commenter. The affected State would lose territory and jurisdiction and the municipality would lose the property taxes. So both get a say, through lobbying the federal government to say No to the accretion of large tax-free Native land empires.
In a complex modern society breaking your nose is, in principle, easy to prevent. Detecting when someone is picking your pocket much less stopping them is another matter.
On the re-building in California, I would call to everyone’s attention this retrospective by Amity Shlaes of the 1946 article by Milton Friedman and George Stigler on the rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906, called “Roofs or Ceilings?” (The original article is linked within.) We’ve been here before.
Not surprising that Deseret News agrees that there are two sexes. This is where the loony left has taken us.
But there’s also problems on the right.
It’s becoming very noticeable in comments on WSJ articles about the LA fires. These right leaning readers are blaming the entire disaster on “Democratic policies.”
They’re blaming DEI because the black female mayor was in Ghana when the fires started. Also the head of the fire department is female.
Last year the state government cut $17 million out of the fire budget so Gavin Newsom is to blame. But the total budget was $900 million.
Plus the fire department contributed a small amount of equipment to Ukraine.
These factors are being tweeted by Elon Musk and Trump to their millions of followers.
If you suggest that global warming played any role at all, you’re told that it’s nothing but a “hoax.”
I’d say about 95% of the comments reflect this view. A view ascribing blame to all of the above is attacked savagely.
Based on reading sources on the left and right, I’d say the fire was possibly partly due to global warming but almost certainly largely due to a perfect storm of dry and windy conditions expected in the area. There may have been some political issues here and there with water availability; I can’t tell so don’t know. Diversity hiring in the fire department sounds like a bad idea but one which had little effect: firefighters are doing a heroic job. If anyone wasn’t quite qualified before, they are now.
There is a hierarchy of causality. The fires were proximately caused by some spark (unknown; possibly powerline equipment…but unknown). Two average-to-wet winters followed by a nearly unprecedented drought year provided abundant natural fuel (mostly in very steep and rugged hill-and-canyon terrain). Flames and embers were blowtorched and spread by nearly unprecedentedly powerful sustained winds. And a whole lot of wood-framed residential neighborhoods were downhill and downwind.
None of this was ’caused by’ climate change directly. But my understanding is that both the frequency of extreme wind events over time and the likelihood of annual wet/dry climate seesaws are robustly predicted by climate models to increase under warming conditions.
As for the locations of the affected residential areas…they were extremely nice places to live. Before.
Yes. It’s complicated.
I’m not suggesting that climate change alone caused it or that it was even the major factor. But to say that climate change itself is a hoax is ignorant.
I’ve lived long enough (70+) to see the change here on the west coast of BC. We used to have reliably wet winters and warm dry summers.
Now the winter rains are failing. In fact, they appear to have gone south to California.
One article I read said that LA had two abnormally rainy years, leading to growth of grass and bush. Then there was an eight month drought. This provided a big supply of dry vegetation for the fires.
I don’t know the dynamics of current weather over there, but where I am, in Michigan, we do see changes in the seasons and part of that is from changes in the polar vortex. This wind stream is now scalloped, so we oscillate from where it is to the north of us (bringing unusually warm weather), and then to the south of us (with arctic cold periods). I call it “bouncy” weather patterns.
Very true Chaz.
Like California Australia has a LOT, more maybe of burning down frequently. Most of the eucalyptus trees in LA “started” in Australia where they need fire to germinate.
LA should look to their Aussie friends who do a great job handling that menace particularly in urban centers (where nearly all Aussies live).
On my last visit to Oz in 2020 we could still smell the burn in the center of Melbourne from the recent worst fires on record.
D.A.
NYC/Florida right now. 🙂
I heard on The Roads with Belle (Youtube) that Newsom signed increases of the CalFire budget by about 90% since taking office in 2019 ($2 billion to $3.8 billion), and then rolled back about 2-3% of this increase in 2021. Which is why the right-wing is showing a chart starting in 2021, not in 2019.
And I heard on another episode of either this or Belle of the Ranch that the firefighters running out of water was a water pressure issue, not a lack of water issue.
I haven’t personally dug into the details.
https://youtu.be/IRVp1uqXRE0?t=382
Yes, the water pressure issue appears to have been caused by the tremendous demand.
Interesting about the budget stats. If true then they’re being very misleading.
It’s unfortunate that someone like Elon Musk is tweeting misleading information to his millions of followers.
If one accepts the evidence that climate change is real and as a result the risk of wild fires rises in certain areas, then it would be prudent to work to mitigate that risk. Reducing carbon usage is a long-term solution, and until that occurs (if ever), then we need to figure out ways to protect human-occupied areas. In my opinion, this would be good governance. I don’t know if anyone is proactively doing this (maybe the Dutch to protect against potentially rising seas?), so maybe these fires will spark some interest in longer-term thinking.
One can only hope. But the notion that a sufficient climate-related disaster will provoke longer-term thinking has I think been soundly refuted by the many previous such disasters. “In the long run we’re all dead” (Keynes). Or as an acquaintance of mine put it, “You can’t eat the long run”.
Longer term solutions ’round here would be in rebuilding after a disaster, following new housing codes — if they can pass legislation. So brick and adobe, not wood.
I expect the blame game will get really ugly before it’s over. I anticipate TFG will blame Mexican immigrants as soon as his handlers can figure out a way to do it. Compassion, empathy for the victims? Sure.
TFG ??
That f-ing guy. I refuse to say his nsme.
Ah. That makes a lot more sense than The Federal Government, which is the best I could find from allacronyms.com .
I see a little insect (upper right, 2nd stem in from the right) mimicking the branches it’s camouflaged in.
Looking forward to the post with your discussion.
Leave it to Sam Harris — the gun and the mala. Thank goodness he and his family made it out safely. He often speaks to the impermanence of things… he’s having to truly practice what he preaches now. I say that kindly.
I saw it, and its NOT on the upper right.
This was very difficult!
Oh, shoot. I was fooled.
Me too. And I should know better!
I’m surprised that Wilfred Reilly didn’t give a good talk, since he is eloquent on several podcasts that I’ve heard, including the latest one on Triggernometry.
Others may disagree with my assessment of his talk, but I did expect a better job. I haven’t heard anybody else’s opinions, but you can all form your own when the video is posted.
I’ll reserve my judgement until the much awaited youtubes of the conference.
Looking forward to that.
Wilfred is generally excellent – one of my favorite finds of the past few years, his books and interviews.
How fantastic that in this day and age (I’m 54, hardly a codger!) we have access to people like him — and our host – which a few decades ago would have been out of our purview.
Any doomerism of the present era never seems to take this kind of thing into account. And most of this intellectual wonderland is totally free. Incredible. Kids today have NO idea how smart ideas were difficult to access at scale in the 80s.
D.A.
NYC
Re the LA fires, this is an interesting read, just FYI: https://www.americaunwon.com/p/why-los-angeles-burned
This is nothing but an opportunistic laundry list of anti-environmental and anti-Democratic pet peeves. Almost none of it is relevant in any way to the current fires in LA.
There are a few good points made; all of them are irrelevant. The rest is a pile of biased, ignorant crap.
To suggest that fire hydrants ran dry in Pacific Palisades because of the delta smelt is the apex of preposterous bullshit. (Much more accurate, if equally pointless, to blame gravity.)
I am sick of the opportunistic political blame-gaming. Another example is The Free Press editorial someone linked here yesterday.
Once fires were sparked, all the money and water in the world could not have made much difference, if any.
Maybe Trump will build a Wall to block the 70-mph Santa Ana winds.
Agreed on that FP piece — I pretty much stopped reading when the writer declared that Los Angeles is a “grassland.” No. Just no.
Thanks. There’s going to be a lot of this crapola around and I appreciate the you have the stomach to read it and the patience to respond.
WaPo has an article on the theory that it resulted from a New Year’s Eve fire that wasn’t quite out. It was believed to have been caused by fireworks. The winds gusting to 100 mph would have helped.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/12/palisades-fire-origin-new-years-eve-fire/
https://archive.is/b6tjN
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, it took less than six months for Parliament to pass a fire code, which basically outlawed wooden structures in the city. I would submit that the only effective way to prevent another Great Fire of LA would be to require any new structure [including the surrounding lot] be resistant to spreading fire. Given the terrain and climate of LA, any effective code would have to be a lot more complicated. I don’t foresee any legislation within six months in this case, if ever, given the NIMBYs.
On a lighter note: one of the rituals of elementary school kids in LA in my day [late 1940’s, Forty Second Street School], was to bus us to the LA County Museum of Natural History to see the remains of the animals pulled out of the La Brea Tar Pits. The Museum is just across Exposition Boulevard from USC, so maybe the animal relief is in homage to the Museum.
In 1961, a wildfire made worse by Santa Ana winds destroyed almost 500 homes in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the aftermath, the city banned wood shingles on new homes, and mandated rules around clearing brush.
That approach eventually spread across the state. By 2008, California adopted as part of its state building code a series of requirements governing how homes are to be constructed in areas at high risk of fires. Builders must use materials that are unlikely to burn, such as stucco, concrete or steel. Homeowners must thin or remove vegetation up to 100 feet from the edge of buildings. Now, the state is even looking at establishing a so-called “zone zero” in the five feet immediately around houses, requiring the removal of all flammable material.
Many states have comparable guidelines. But California’s state rules regarding building materials and clearing vegetation are mandatory — local officials don’t have the ability to ignore or overrule them.
quoted from source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/climate/california-fires-climate-change.html?smid=url-share
Of course, all of the buildings that have burned were built before these regulations. Most 20th century buildings were wooden, in part to protect against earthquake damage!
p.s. Since your day, most of the La Brea Tar Pit fossils have been moved to the really excellent Page Museum, on site. Very highest recommendation for a visit to L.A.
A few years ago, a high school friend of mine realized a life-long dream of visiting the La Brea Tar Pits, doubtless inspired by the same books on prehistoric life and palaeontology I read as a boy. Part of the charm is that are located right in the urban city. After he had surgery and radiation for cancer he knew that now was the time. He and his wife visited many sites in Los Angeles and he talked fondly and with the greatest animation about La Brea for the rest of his short life.
Good on you, Fred.
Are students protected if they decide to address a professor, or even a chancellor, as “Hey dude”?
With the recent appointment of Scott Yenor to UWF[1], I think it’s even more important to highlight all reasons for firing (or lack of hiring) academics, as just looking at direct speech may ignore things such as strategic pedagogical alignment. For instance, if the board of a university decides to sex segregate schooling, and a professor or other academic disagrees with this segregation in whole or in part, would their firing be considered a speech firing? We’ll also be seeing a lot of employment terminations in DEI departments. How will these be catalogued?
“This has always been a purely performative exercise”
You’ve got an audience. As an outsider it’s made me more aware of the issue, and more likely to vote (or someday, if I can afford it, even donate) for the return of lands to native tribes for community use and husbandry.
“with turtles all the way down”
This is a very good excuse for never rectifying one’s own wrongdoing. As a country we’ve done a lot of shit, and can address that. If the native tribes want to address their own wrongdoing, that’s up to them. To the extent we should even think about addressing any wrongdoing between tribes it would be wrongdoing caused by our own actions (such as literally driving certain tribes into the land of other tribes, as during the trail of tears).
[1] – https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/desantis-appointee-to-university-board-says-women-should-become-mothers-not-pursue-higher-ed/
And by “you” in the “you’ve got an audience”, I meant academics, not this blog.
Serious question: what do you envision the return of tribal lands, such as a university campus or city block, to look like?
Let’s assume that you can accurately determine the last tribe that lived there and that there is a clear lineage to some existing people.
Since the lands were originally undeveloped (vs today), would existing structures be razed and returned to the original state?
If not, does ownership and administration of the property then get handed over to the tribe?
If the government hands over the land to the tribe, are they obligated to also compensate the current owner of the land, as those owners were provided deed to the property through the government and have paid taxes on the property as legally-recognized owners?
How would this work in the case of university land? The university as an entity is not tied to the land, so I’d assume the tribe would try to collect rent from the university. But again, does the government need to compensate the uni?
Lastly, how would you define tribal lands, since the tribes didn’t have the same definition of ownership as we do?
In the case of nomadic tribes, does it include the full range of their movement? Just because someone chased a bison through a certain area of the prairie doesn’t mean they owned that land.
In the case of tribes that didn’t roam as much, is it only their hogan settlement area, or all of the land between their hogan settlement and some halfway point between the next hogan settlement? I own my home, but I have no claim to the land around it, even if I use it for hunting to feed my family.
If you can provide a coherent way to show how this would work, I’d love to learn. Until then, I’m of the same opinion as our host that these land acknowledgements are performative virtue signaling at best and lack of rational thinking at worst.
To be clear, if you, as a private citizen, wish to purchase land from the existing government-recognized owner and then sign the deed over to a tribe or any individuals, do it. I support this 100%.
As a voter I’m primarily waiting for someone else to make a proposal. And I personally am not invested in this issue, so haven’t researched it. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to think that what happened was wrong and should be acknowledged and addressed.
But since you insist, off the top of my head, with no research or input from anyone invested in this: Like most sorts of reparations, small steps that don’t necessarily include giving specific developed lands back. This could include help with development of current tribal lands. Rights of first refusal on sales of public lands. For universities specifically, full-ride scholarships for a number of tribal members (tradable between universities so that a tribal member could go to another school more pertinent to their interests). Laws allowing tribes to purchase lands and incorporate them as part of their reservation (I assume that purchased lands external to the reservation are currently not a part of the reservation proper). Allowing tribes to have dedicated, limited-to-them access to certain public lands at certain times of the year (for ceremonies, cultural exploration, or the like).
I don’t think anyone has to be systematic about it.
Do you know if those gestures, which might even be of real benefit to the lucky recipients, will be enough to placate the activists? What if the activists don’t care about scholarships but instead want sovereignty over the land, not merely return of fee simple private ownership? They never had this in the first place. It was an unknown concept until Europeans arrived and started fencing off the land and posting No Trespassing signs. Transfer of sovereignty would mean (presumably large) tracts of land would no longer be American soil; tribal law not American law would apply on it; and tribal governments, not the citizens of the United States acting through their republican (small-r) government, would decide who could live there and who must leave. Non-aboriginals who happened to be living in these lands at the time of transfer might be able to keep their fee simple land, if the new sovereign government decided to honour the deeds. But they would be ex-patriate American citizens now living in a foreign country beyond the protection of U.S. law, always fearing the day when “land reform” handed their land title over to aboriginals who coveted it.
That’s what decolonization means. The colonizing people dissolve their oppressive colonial government, haul down their flag for the last time, salute the new head of state, and sail back where they came from. How do you know this is not what the activists want? If it is, what is your response to them?
People are entitled to be mad, and to not find an offer acceptable, even if they do accept it as better than nothing. That doesn’t mean you don’t try to make good for a previous wrongdoing.
I don’t know about property laws, so I don’t know that I understand what you’re saying, but as pre-contact tribes fought wars over land, I’m quite sure they understood about sovereignty (not discounting actual private ownership or feudal structures that would have existed among certain indigenous tribes, though not necessarily in the lands now under US jurisdiction).
None of my examples were of lands currently owned by non-tribal US citizens being made tribal lands. So I don’t know why you’re bringing that up as an idea. You don’t wrong a third party to make up for the act of another party. I don’t believe the takings clause of the US constitution allows for the taking of privately held land except for the public good (Kelo notwithstanding), so the US government could not take privately held lands to assign to tribal governments. Though it could do so with publicly held lands. You can make the extreme case all you want, but it cannot be done lawfully under our Constitution. Not without a significant amendment that would never pass.
Not every tribal citizen is going to think or feel the same about all of this. There are going to be disappointed people. Especially among those who are not enrolled in a tribe. Acknowledging wrongdoing and trying to rectify even in small amounts can go a long way for a lot of people. And it’s the right thing to do anyway. You don’t lose face with an apology and an offer of recompense.
To further complicate matters, would the rights to the land be with the last tribe to live there prior to white colonists’ moving in, or the first tribe?
While some might say that if the US (or France or Spain) took the land from a certain tribe then that tribe is entitled to compensation. However, it stands to reason that that particular tribe may have taken the land from some other tribe, etc., so wouldn’t those older occupiers also have some argument to say they were unfairly dealt with by the tribe that took the land? If no, by reason that they were all indigenous peoples who took the land using indigenous means, aren’t we all just indigenous peoples of different areas, some of whom advanced in their use of technologies more than others and as a result spread out across a wider swath?
Thanks for the thought-out replies. It’s certainly interesting, and it would be a better discussion if those who give these land acknowledgements offered some concrete proposals as you have, even if I or others disagreed with them.
Remember, by “we” you mean “my ancestors” since you didn’t dispossess anybody. And I can’t even say that, as my first ancestors were Jews who came to America around 1900.
Sure. I was using the republican “We” that all citizens of a republic are entitled to use when speaking of the collective polity.
Re ensuring that “women’s spaces will be reserved for those whose biological sex is female”, such a proposal would have met with complete incomprehension not that long ago. O tempora, o mores.
And a bit before that “not that long ago” people would just be wondering whether it was meant to exclude eunuchs.
Which brings to mind the eunuch scene in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Part I”.
It’s been so long I had to look this up again. 😀
+1
I didn’t expect Sam Harris to have a gun. There are times that gun ownership for personal protection makes sense, and this seems to be one of them.
I think sam was worried about his family’s safety given his attacks on Islam in particular, but I’m just guessing
He discussed it on his podcast about gun control once. If I had his public profile I’d probably be armed and I’m FAAAR from pro gun. Islam in his (and my much less well read) writings are a major motivator.
I’ve experienced this in a small way once. Not enough to be armed, but enough to think about it. Threats are asymmetrical like that, you only need one very determined deranged religious person…
I’m in Florida at the moment so I can probably buy one at Walmart which, as a NYer blows my mind! 🙂
D.A.
NYC/Florida
From the linked study on gender bias in science:
“Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science.”
Two questions:
1.) The small gender gap in pay favoring men is noted as “concerning”. It should only be concerning if this gap is due to sexism, and not based on other factors like productivity. Is that the case, or is it just assumed that any remaining, unaccounted pay gap (after equalizing for other factors) is due to sexism?
2.) There is the noted hiring gap favoring women. Why is this also not noted as “concerning” by the authors, as they did the gender pay gap favoring men? Or are gaps only deemed problematic when they don’t favor women?
Excellent to see though that this issue is finally being scrutinized in sufficient detail. Science works, albeit slowly sometimes.
There is a fair chance that I am missing a nuance here since I did not read it. If women are found to do slightly better in hiring, I for one (an academic of sorts) would not find that concerning since I still see more males than females among existing faculty in the sciences. So maybe the hiring preference is steadily nibbling away at that.
It’s also concerning if the pay gap is partly responsible for the hiring boost. Maybe women have a leg up in hiring because they are, on average, cheaper? Which productivity are you measuring here? You can always assign men and women an equal workload. I’ve heard though that full professors tend to teach fewer courses than assistant and adjunct professors. I’ve also heard that women, who are not yet at numerical parity with men in most of academia, are stretched thin being asked to participate in various groups. Which, like housework, isn’t typically valued as much as other work, at least when it comes to compensation or promotion.
This work is humanities, not science. I say that as a scientist.
Is there a similar concern within the humanities – is there hand wringing occurring due to the lack of men in those fields with studies and initiatives designed to correct the situation?
I can say that in our firm, we actively recruit female engineering co-op and intern students, as well as poaching female managerial talent from other firms to try to bring up the percentage of female engineers and engineering managers (which is around 25%, with our regional VP being female) but I don’t see our HR team actively recruiting males into their ranks (about 90% female, with no males in regional management or above). In a recent all-staff meeting, this was brought up as a question as to why the lack of male representation in HR, and the answer was that we just don’t get many applicants since males are not typically drawn to the HR field.
Thanks for the Zoom link in the previous post. Busy day but I was able to attend Burgess’ talk before your discussion and also your session.
Related to a previous thread, someone mentioned MaryCate Delvey with regard to trans “in their own words”. That led me to a YouTube discussion: MaryCate with Stephanie Winn, a Portland OR-based psychologist who has taken on RODG. I found it intriguing and educational –and SW might be helpful to people I know, considering what I’ve heard about some acquaintances’ adolescents.
I came to this site to learn — and to run my own mouth, I guess — and some of it has been enlightening, some of it vexing, some delightful (photos), some insomnia-provoking.
The “woke” self-styled “progressives”, the Trumpazoid crazies, (mass shootings — get used to it), the science denialism, right and left, advancement of medical crankery (I’ll see your two gender-affirmation quacks and raise you one antivaxxer, & toss in a virus conspiracy crank, left or right, doesn’t matter) — things sure have gotten out of hand, and maybe they always will.
I think there is a pox on both political houses. I also looked at the “in their own words” link. Although funny and at first concerning, I did develop concerns about this sort of thing since it does have a parallel to some dark times in the past. You see, if we had social media 80-90 years ago like we have now, someone could have posted the same sort of thing about black people being bad in ways that are stereotyped for them — and a lot of white folks then would have a nice chuckle over it. So structurally I don’t see the post as being that different from old prejudices in the past that are best left far behind.
I think that the vast majority of trans people just want to be as boring and normal as possible. They don’t wan’t attention or to cause trouble. I just feel sorry that there seems to be no easy solution to some of the issues we have now.
I think I get your point. What struck me about that link was not the bizarre content of trans “in their own words” but exploring the links and content beyond that as I looked to see who Stephanie W and MaryCate D are. I was more impressed by SW, who seems to be thoughtful and thorough. You point re social media 90 years ago & what could depicted has merit, but what strikes me is the opprobrium heaped on people like JK Rowling and cancellation of, for example, Nina Paley (and many many others) for daring to raise the mildest questions about the reality of what is a woman and sex binary. That’s something that would not map onto “old prejudices from the past…” unless you want to consider the fate of early civil rights advocates, and in that case — what do you see?
We would paint Tommy Trojan blue and gold. One year we bombed it blue and gold with a helicopter. They would vandalize the parking machines on the UCLA campus, because they have no imagination.
Weren’t the Trojans the losers? 🙂
“Arrests after Charles Darwin grave spray-painted:
Two women have been arrested after climate protesters spray-painted over the grave of Charles Darwin inside Westminster Abbey.
Climate protest group Just Stop Oil (JSO) said two activists used chalk paint on the grave of the famous naturalist, who is best known for his theories on evolution.…”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9mldjpdyo
From that article:
Really? This implies it was a good-faith non-performative effort to actually get results. In fact it was a watered-down consensus that nobody had to do nuthin’.
Thanks for the bbc link. So rather than defacing Darwin’s grave, according to the protesters, they believed he would support their position and were simply allowing him to speak from the grave. Interesting take.
I visited USC a few months ago as part of a program review. I was surprised that it is basically a fortress, and one has to go through security just to get on campus. It is totally walled off from the rest of the city.
“…I finally gave up and told him that if he wanted to define “nature” as “god”, as pantheists do, then yes, I was religious by that definition. But that is pure nonsense.” – J. Coyne
Yes, indeed.
“Pantheism is a concept that invalidates itself, since the concept of a God presupposes as its essential correlative a world different from him. If, on the other hand, the world itself is to take over his role, there remains simply an absolute world without God, and so pantheism is only a euphemism for atheism. …But even the assumption of some cause of the world different therefrom is still not theism. For this demands a world-cause that is not only different from the world, but is intelligent, that is to say, knows and wills, and so is personal and consequently also individual; it is only such a cause that is indicated by the word ‘God’. An impersonal God is no God at all, but merely a word wrongly used, a misconception, a contradictio in adjecto, a shibboleth for professors of philosophy, who, having had to give up the thing, are anxious to slip through with the word.”
(Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Fragments for the History of Philosophy.” In Parerga and Paralipomena. Vol. 1. 1851. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. pp. 114-5)
I don’t understand the “Willy’s bum” one.
You’re probably trying to read too much into it.
I believe this would be called something like ironic literalism (I’m really bad with proper nomenclature of literary elements).
Matthew is pretending to take literal the writing of “Willy’s bum” on the car: That another personally literally thought the car was someone’s bum. And is then saying that this label is strange as it’s a car that belongs to Helen, and is thus not only not a bum, but doesn’t belong to Willy either. The humor is in the contrast of the audience’s expectation that Matthew would understand “Willy’s bum” is a figurative label, and his apparent reading of it as literal.
I was quite surprised by Sam Harris’s plea for the very wealthy to give their money to the government to save LA. I think if you want to see money used inefficiently, give it to the government.
You can’t make the the government efficient, and taxes in California are so high already. It seems hard to imagine that they will do a better job if only they could have even more money.
The picture of the Iranian girl getting married really struck home for me. I have a daughter roughly the same age. She is way too young to be married. Maybe in 10-20 years she won’t be. For now, we can only feel sorry for the Iranian girl.