Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 8, 2025 • 8:00 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 8, 2025, and National Coconut Cream Pie Day. Is any reader going to eat one today? Here’s a “photo of a slice of coconut cream pie. Taken at the Golden Nugget Restaurant, Chicago, Ill.” I don’t even know where that is, but I’d totally nom it.

Kim Scarborough, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Free Trade Day, No Socks Day, Give Someone a Cupcake Day, National Have a Coke Day (honoring the introduction of the drink in an Atlanta Pharmacy on this day in 1896), and Victory in Europe Day. Wikipedia says this:

Victory in Europe Day is the day celebrating the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces on Tuesday, 8 May 1945; it marked the official surrender of all German military operations.

Here is Winston Churchill helping the crowds celebrate VE Day in Whitehall in London. He of course has his iconic cigar.

It is also David Attenborough’s 99th birthday. He was born on May 8, 1926,

David Attenborough has got to have “one of the greatest legacies of any human being ever”, a BBC executive has said.

The naturalist, who has been on our TV screens for more than seven decades presenting programmes such as Planet Earth and Blue Planet, is celebrating his 99th birthday.

Mike Gunton, creative director at BBC Studios Natural History Unit, told the PA news agency: “Each generation has its own kind of personal legacy from him, and I think that’s remarkable.

“But also, there’s a broader, I suppose, global legacy, which I think is that he has shown us wonders, he’s helped us understand wonders, and he’s encouraged us to protect these wonders.

“If you could do that in a lifetime, and speak to hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people and inspire them to do all that, that’s got to be one of the greatest legacies of any human being ever.

Here are the top 5 moments sekected by BBC EarthL

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz is truncated today:

*The troubles continue at Columbia: anti Israel students have taken over the campus library. (h/t Bat).

Anti-Israel student activists at Columbia University occupy the university’s main library, escalating the campus conflict yet again amid heavy pressure on the university from the Trump administration.

The campus coalition of protest groups, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, sends out a video of the protest on Telegram. The clip shows masked protesters chanting “Free Palestine” to the beat of a drum, led by a demonstrator standing on a table.

In an emailed statement, the group says it has “flooded” the library.

“The flood shows that as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia’s profits and legitimacy. Repression breeds resistance,” the statement says.

The group issues demands, including “full financial divestment from Zionist occupation, apartheid and genocide,” a boycott of “complicit institutions,” and amnesty for all students and staff “targeted” with disciplinary procedures.

The takeover occurs during days set aside for studying ahead of the university’s final exams next week.

The university commencement is scheduled for May 21. Last year’s commencement was canceled due to protests.

From the NYT:

Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were taken into police custody on Wednesday evening after occupying part of the main library on Columbia University’s campus in an attempt to rekindle the protest movement that swept the campus last spring.

The protesters, wearing masks and kaffiyehs, had burst through a security gate shortly after 3 p.m. and hung banners in the soaring main room of Butler Library’s second floor, renaming the space “the Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” according to the demonstrators and witnesses at the library.

Columbia security guards blocked them from leaving unless they showed their identification, causing an hourslong standoff. Outside the library, crowds gathered, leading to a chaotic scene. By about 7 p.m., Columbia administrators had called the New York City police back to campus for the first time since the occupation of Hamilton Hall, another campus building, in April 2024.

“Requesting the presence of the N.Y.P.D. is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community,” Claire Shipman, the acting president of the university, wrote in a statement.

The disruption was limited to a single reading room, a university spokeswoman said. A statement from Columbia said that the protesters would face consequences.

“It is completely unacceptable that some individuals are choosing to disrupt academic activities as our students are studying and preparing for final exams,” the statement said.

Public security officers evacuated students not involved in the disruption from the library, which was filled with people studying. Hundreds of onlookers gathered outside the library.

Some tweets of the invasion:

From one of the organizations of thugs and cowards who did this:

A student prevented from entering:

An NBC News video showing the arrests. Note that every protestor has their face covered. They are cowards, and this is not civil disobedience but thuggery:

I am wondering how many of these people will really be punished. As far as I know, Columbia students who illegally occupied the library won’t face punishment if they showed their IDs. I’m not sure, but how many parents are going to send their kids to Columbia after all this.

*On his Substack site “Reality’s last stand,” Colin Wright revisits the infamous “feminist glaciology paper of 2016“. (I wrote about it at the time: here and here), which vies with the queer feminist brine shrimp paper for the title of Bonkers Paper of the Last Decade. Colin titles his piece, “The paper that made me realize academia had lost its mind.”  A few quotes:

The paper, titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change,” wasn’t satire—though it seemed indistinguishable from it. It was peer-reviewed, taxpayer-funded, and taken seriously within the academic community. When I first read it, I assumed it had to be some elaborate hoax. I wasn’t alone. Even Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, said he was convinced it must be fake—until he found out it wasn’t. “Barking mad,” he called it, “but not fake.”

In fact, this very paper became the catalyst for one of the most infamous academic stings in recent memory: the Grievance Studies Affair. James Lindsay has said that it was this feminist glaciology paper that “legitimately changed the world” by radicalizing him. Peter Boghossian, one of Lindsay’s co-conspirators in the hoax project, later confirmed that the paper “broke” Lindsay and pushed him to realize that entire fields of academia had lost their tether to reality. A few years later, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose would go on to submit dozens of absurd, ideologically-driven fake papers to journals in fields like gender studies and critical race theory. Many were accepted. One, on “rape culture and queer performativity” in dog parks, even won an award. But the paper that lit the match was the one about glaciers.

Despite its viral reputation, the feminist glaciology paper has rarely been given the full scrutiny it deserves. Many people laughed at the title and moved on. But after revisiting the paper recently on my podcast, I decided it deserved a proper breakdown—because it doesn’t just represent one bizarre academic curiosity, but the start of a genre of academic absurdity that has continued to metastasize within academia and displace reason in entire fields of scholarship.

. . . . At first glance, the paper sounds like it might be a conventional environmental commentary. The abstract begins by stating that glaciers are “key icons of climate change and global environmental change,” which is perfectly reasonable. But things quickly spiral. The authors claim that the “relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied.” This sort of rationale—arguing something should be researched simply because it hasn’t been—should be a red flag in academic writing. Just because a topic is unexplored doesn’t mean it’s worth exploring. Some gaps in the literature exist for good reason: they’re either uninteresting, irrelevant, or built on faulty premises. Good research identifies a meaningful problem or question and makes a positive case for why it matters—not simply that no one has looked at it yet.

This paper, however, leans heavily on the assumption that neglect alone justifies their inquiry. Instead of explaining why gender should be a relevant lens in glaciology, the authors proceed as if it’s self-evident—and that the only reason no one has studied it yet is due to systemic bias or oversight.

What follows from this flimsy justification is a nearly 15,000-word exercise in ideological projection. The authors introduce a “feminist glaciology framework” built on four central themes: who produces knowledge, the gendering of science, the power dynamics within scientific institutions, and “alternative representations” of glaciers. Their stated goal is to generate a “more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.” Yes, apparently even glaciers demand social justice.

Colin goes on to dissect the paper, and it’s unintentionally hilarious because the paper is so absolutely bonkers. This is the state of social-justice academia these days.

From Jez:

*A group of five men (four of them Iranians, I don’t think the nationality of the other one was confirmed yet) were arrested in the UK a few days ago for involvement in a terrorist plot. It looks like their target was the Israeli embassy in London. Another separate group of three Iranians was arrested on the same day, but in relation to another terrorism plot entirely. (h/t Jez)

The Israeli embassy in London was the alleged target of five Iranian men arrested on suspicion of preparing an act of terrorism, the BBC understands.

Police have not yet confirmed that the embassy in Kensington was the suspected target, as first reported by the Times, citing operational reasons. But the BBC understands the report is accurate.

Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism command, said it was a “fast-moving” investigation and there were “significant operational reasons” why the force could not provide further details.

Iran “categorically rejects” any involvement, said the Iranian foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, on the social media site X.

He added his country was ready to assist with the investigation.

The men – two aged 29, a 40-year-old, a 24-year-old and another aged 46 – were arrested on Saturday over an alleged plan to target “a specific premises”, the Met said.

. . . .Commissioner for countering extremism Robin Simcox said it was quite unusual for an embassy to be targeted in the UK.

“I think the scale of Iranian-backed activity in this country is probably underestimated,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“We are increasingly aware of the hard power side of things but Iran also looks to spread its influence in the UK via religious institutes it controls, television channels, charities, educational institutes, online disinformation campaigns – all organisations which share Tehran’s aims and objectives.

“It is not always very visible. Iranian actives I think are a bit more subversive and a bit subtler – they are probably a bit more strategic in their targeting.”

Speaking in the Commons on Tuesday, Home Office minister Dan Jarvis said hundreds of officers were carrying out forensic investigations at different sites across the country.

He said the arrests were “some of the largest counter-state threats and counter-terrorism actions that we have seen in recent times”.

Masih was right: there are plots atop plots, and assassins from Iran targeted her three times, fortunately without success.

*A column in the WaPo by George Will is worth reading, “The Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda.”  (archived here, h/t Callum).

Even academics are educable, so universities might emerge from their current travails improved — more willing to include intellectual diversity on campuses, or at least be more circumspect about impeding it. This is the good news.

The bad news: Republicans rejoicing about breaking academia to the saddle and bridle of federal government supervision demonstrate that we have two parties barely distinguishable in their shared enthusiasm for muscular statism. As “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda: the permeation of everything with politics.

Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.

. . . .Government presumptuousness that struts on campuses will not strut only there: Secretaries of state wield a law that says an alien is deportable if the secretary has a “reasonable ground to believe” that the alien’s “presence or activities” would “potentially” have serious adverse “consequences” for U.S. foreign policy. This potentially life-shattering discretion presupposes judicious, temperate secretaries of state, forever.

Today, each party pretends to be dramatically different from the other regarding philosophical fundamentals. Actually, they offer no clear choice to voters who are wary of any American Gleichschaltung. Both parties seem equally oblivious to the deep disharmony that inevitably accompanies attempts to harmonize all important sectors of civil society by melding political and cultural power.

What could go wrong? Look around.

Will’s claim is that a Denocratic government will do what the Republican one does now, but pushing a different agenda. I don’t believe that, nor do I believe that the Democrats, for example, would do to universities and to science what the Republicans are doing now.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej discuss evolution and philosophy:

Hili: What did Homo sapiens gain by getting a bigger brain?
A: A demand for more calories and the knowledge about the vastness of that he doesn’t know.

Hili: You are exaggerating about the latter.

In Polish:
Hili: Co Homo sapiens zyskał na wzroście mózgu?
Ja: Zapotrzebowanie na więcej kalorii oraz świadomość ogromu tego, czego nie wie.
Hili: Z tym drugim to przesadziłeś.
And a picture of Baby Kulka:

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

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Another Science Humor Group, a groaner:

From Jesus of the Day, a way to chill your butt:

From Jack Corbo. It’s hilarious!

The email by a University of Chicago professor cancelling class so his students could go to an anti-Trump protest:

The professor is Yali Amit, and here’s his email:

 

A palpable violation of academic freedom: we are not allow to propagandize our students in the classroom.

From Simon; Pritzker was not at all happy with Noem’s visit:

“We would urge all pet owners in the region to make sure all of your beloved animals are under watchful protection while the secretary is in the region,” the @govpritzker.illinois.gov note said.

— Juan Escalante (@juansaaa.com) 2025-05-07T02:05:33.546Z

From Malcolm: Look at the tail on this moggy!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This German Jewish boy was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-08T13:00:20.740Z

From my feed. Sound up!

32 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “‘Some gaps in the literature exist for good reason: they’re either uninteresting, irrelevant, or built on faulty premises..'”

    Or as a famous book review once said, “This book fills a much-needed gap in the Historical literature.”

    I am reading a book called Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire. The subject is ostensibly about hula troupes traveling the continental US from the 1890s to 1950s. It is 100% in the Critical Studies idiom, though. While it is informative, and has a great bibliography, the author has long paragraphs where she ascribes anti-cultural motives to her subjects. Significantly, the references to sources dry up in these discourses. At the same time she often quotes other sociologists in terms like, “X has stated that Y is Z,” where X is some vaguely related, reified activity and Z is a load of post-Marxian power dynamics. The author treats those statements as evidence. It puts me in mind of another famous review quote: “This is a book in search of an article.”

  2. Great picks today:

    • David Attenborough @ 99 – hooray! Thank Ceiling Cat (Paws Be Upon Him)!

    • Colin Wright with the 🎯🎯🎯

    • George WILL of all people, getting MAGA’s heads out of their a$$es with a box-office German political concept!

    PS

    Just FYI – well-under-18 children are well-aware of Snoop Dogg, to the extent he is regarded as a celebrity. That Snoop is the personification of hallucinogenic sedation is disturbing in this context. It would not surprise me at all if that AI-meme has spread in that demographic.

    I’m not finger-wagging on this website, I’m giving some unexpected insight to Snoop’s penetration of the culture with getting baked.

  3. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Jazz arises from a spirit of love, it comes from the mind and heart and goes through the fingertips. -Mary Lou Williams, pianist, arranger, and composer (8 May 1910-1981)

    1. A paraphrase of Herbie Hancock – I tried finding the video, no luck :

      Music comes from your life’s experiences.

      … if anyone finds that, LMK.

  4. George Will writes,

    “Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.”

    I would have thought that that were a core LIBERAL aspiration.

  5. Note that every protestor has their face covered. They are cowards, and this is not civil disobedience but thuggery:

    I wonder why it isn’t police procedure to unmask those they arrest. Who is in custody should not be a secret. (The police are, correctly, clearly identifiable.)

    1. And I thought that when the police in the movie The Batman (2022) left the the titular character masked after arresting him, it was one of the few ridiculous scenes in an otherwise great movie.

  6. It’s disturbing that the Columbia protestors say they “flooded” the library. Hamas refers to the October 7 atrocity as “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”.

      1. Notice that Bassel died in a shootout. I am uncomfortable being ambivalent about the prospect of a similar outcome at his Popular University.

  8. I am indeed eating coconut cream pie today. My wife made one yesterday and it is, hmm, breakfast time now….

  9. “nor do I believe that the Democrats, for example, would do to universities and to science what the Republicans are doing now.”
    I agree. Democrats, especially progressives, are much more aligned with the universities and media than the Republicans. A Harris administration would likely have put out a strongly-worded statement about campus antisemitism, but would not have taken any action at the federal level about it. Nor would they have required the scaling back of DEI programs or eliminated the right of men to compete as females in sports by threatening to withhold funding from schools that allow it. If anything, they would likely have celebrated those athletes.

    If schools allow racists to parade around smashing things, defacing property with nazi symbols, and creating a hostile environment for a certain group of people, in what would seem to be violation of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act, and given that the federal governments primary “stick” is funding, then what should the government do? Let schools continue to sit on their hands, because reducing funding would harm all aspects of the university (i.e., the too big to fail argument), or identify specific actions that the schools must take for funding to be retained (which they did)? If a university allowed and endorsed neo-nazis hanging nooses and breaking into buildings while shouting certain things at Black students, wouldn’t we expect some action by the government? I do understand the don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater argument; would a better solution have been to reduce funding except for basic science research?

    We often say, “somebody should do something about that”. In this case the university didn’t so the administration did. I hope this works out as a compromise; threats that lead to change that leads to restoration of research funding. Frankly, they could kill the “studies” programs without me crying any tears though.

    1. University indulgence of the various grievance studies fiefdoms could be approached in a different way. Picture a university which supports teaching and research in various reality-based subjects, but also maintains departments of Astrology, Voodoo, Sasquatchology, and Past Lives Studies. Could not the federal government conclude that such an institution was not trustworthy to administer funds for reality-based research, and therefore restrict such funding? This determination would be independent of this or that Title of the Civil Rights Act, and based instead on simple prudence.

  10. Proud of my birthland of Australia this week.

    Although in the election this week (like Canada) the left-ish party got back in – in reaction to Trump’s madness, like Canada messed up and Australia said: “Hold my beer”.

    Although that….. the good news is the Greens – who tied themselves VERY close to Palestine.. lost all house of rep. seats. They went big into genderwang also.
    Thrown out on their hippy terrorist trans asses!

    Good on ya mates!

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. Be fair. The vast majority of hippies and hippie-adjacents were never terrorists, and did grow up out of their various weirdnesses. “We sold out, but we got a good price.”

  11. Will’s claim is that a Democratic government will do what the Republican one does now, but pushing a different agenda. I don’t believe that, nor do I believe that the Democrats, for example, would do to universities and to science what the Republicans are doing now.

    For the most part I agree, but it is still worth noting that it was the Dems (Obama’s DOE) that issued a very threatening Dear Colleague letter (related to Title IX claims and how they must be investigated and adjudicated) who, in a way, came first — and one reason no university had its funding cut by Obama was because they all agreed to do what the Obama feds demanded. What Trump is doing goes far beyond that — but it’s a matter of degree, not kind.

    Also perhaps worth noting is that most of what Trump has demanded of Columbia and Harvard — is sorely needed. So Harvard now finds itself in the interesting situation where if they actually do what they must know has to be done, they will be perceived as having caved to Trump’s demands.

  12. Breaking: we have a Pope from Chicago. Nom-de-plume Leo XIV. He’s just appeared on the Vatican balcony. Nice frock.

      1. No no no, that’s the other vicar of a son-of-a-god.

        Also, this Pope seems to be a compromise among the factions. I suspect the Cards wanted to get the media event wrapped up before the audience got bored, and likely with the plan of kicking the can down the road until Leo kicks his own bucket.

        And who would have expected a Pope with the pronoun “xiv”? Or maybe he aspires to be the Sun Pope.

  13. Hi Jerry-all of the students arrested (at least 50 of the 80 arrested are students) will be punished with punishment ranging from suspension to expulsion. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are all expelled but on that we’ll have to wait and see. And the judgement will be fast now that this is out of the hands of the Senate which always protected the students.

  14. I hope Sir David Attenborough has a good birthday. We are huge fans of him in my house, and not just because of his many wonderful programs. Around 30 years ago my young son wrote him a fan letter about “The Trials of Life” and received a very charming hand-written reply from the great man, in an envelope with a hand-written address. I’ve since heard of similar occurrences, and have always been impressed that he takes the time to encourage young people.

    1. My sister is a Attenborough superfan in Australia. He wrote back to her also when she wrote to him as a kid.

      It is framed in her home.
      D.A.
      NYC

    2. I watched the “Top 5” video that Jerry posted. Riveting. I completely forgot about my surroundings which doesn’t happen to me much these days.

  15. Let’s see if anything actually happens to the Columbia protesters.
    I was very surprised when Michigan AG Nessel originally said that she’d pursue felony charges against University of Michigan protesters last year, given her progressive bonafides. I thought it displayed some backbone for both her and Whitmer to do this. But then last week she dropped the charges, once the spotlight was off. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/05/05/michigan-attorney-general-dana-nessel-drops-all-charges-university-michigan-diag-protesters/83452242007/

    This seems to be the pattern: make a show of arresting the protesters to look tough, and then let them off later after the news dies down.

    So we’ll see what happens with these Columbia kids. My prediction is nothing. For these kids, their parents, the professors, and the administrators, it’s cool to hate Jews, so this isn’t a crime in their eyes.

    1. Is that normal for the state attorney-general and the governor to be involved in charging/prosecuting decisions in run-of-the-mill crimes like trespassing and vandalism? Don’t assistant DAs handle these all by their own selves? It just seems inappropriate to have the appearance of high-level political interference at both the charging end and the dropping end.

      (I can’t read the freep link on this old iPad.)

  17. Re nature red in tooth and claw —
    • “The advantage starts to shift away from the sardines” is a phrase I never thought I’d hear.
    • Terror birds and their relatives like shoebills give me the creeps, maybe an atavistic reaction. The size, the gyroscopically steady gaze, the nictitating membranes with the colour of death. <shudder>

  18. Re disbelieving that the Democrats, for example, would do to universities and to science what the Republicans are doing now — Really? What about doing to science (“sex is a spectrum”), free speech and thought (“hate speech”, “non-crime hate incidents”), equal opportunity (“equity”), due process (cancel culture)? Gleichschaltung indeed.

    Today’s Democrats, far more than today’s Republicans, have respect for norms and precedents, which will include the most recent ones. And resentment leading to revenge has no party affiliation.

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