Category: lunacy

The misguided South African “genocide” accusation

January 22, 2024 • 11:15 am

If you’ve been following the charade that is South Africa’s (SA’s) claim at the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, you’ll know that SA—that paradigm of good governance and equity—is relying heavily on statements by Israeli officials and military people made right after October 7—statements to the effect that Gazans should be wiped out.

Those statements were either made in the heat of the moment or, as the article below shows, are simply misquoted. Further, if you want to see whether Israel is committing genocide, you don’t use quotations; you have to observe if its behavior is aimed at wiping out not just Hamas, but all the Gazans. Only a dolt would think that’s true: the IDF is clearly the world’s most moral army, warning Gazans of strikes, telling them where to go to avoid fighting, never deliberately going after known non-combatants, and so on.

In contrast, Hamas is among the world’s most immoral militant groups, deliberately trying to kill Israeli civilians (do they ever warn Israelis before they strike Don’t make me laugh.); firing rockets willy-nilly into Israel, sending terrorists across the border to blow up Jews, committing repeated war crimes by hiding behind civilians, and, of course, explicitly stating that their aim is to exterminate the Jews. (The deaths of Gazan civilians, reprehensible and sad as it is, can be largely laid at the door of Hamas, who seems to want Gazan civilians killed and facilitates it.)

Moreover, as Hamas has emphasized, the butchery of October 7 was just a rehearsal for repeated episodes of the same kind of butchery.  It is shameful that although South Africa, the paradigm of current hatred and bad governance in Africa, can bring a case against Israel, no other nation in the world is willing to bring a case against Hamas, the group that runs Gaza. And that case would be much easier, since Hamas has declared its genocidal intentions.

The only upside for Israel of this sad episode is that when the country is found guilty—as is inevitable in such a lopsided world—it can and will simply ignore the Hague’s decision.

But it turns out that the Israeli quotes tossed around with such abandon by South Africa, supposedly approving of genocide, aren’t as damning as they seem.

Reader Norman, who sent me this article from The Atlantic, added his summary:

No, writes Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic. Some on the far right have made stupid statements, but Israel’s leadership—Netanyahu, Gallant, Herzog—have not. They have called for the elimination only of Hamas. At least some of this chatter about the genocidal intent of Israel has been perpetrated by a reporter at NPR, whose conclusions were carelessly spread by other news outlets. (I don’t trust NPR on any subject.) Other claims of genocidal intent come from (indefensible) purposeful omissions, mistranslations from the Hebrew, missed plays on words, misinterpreted biblical allusions, as well as innocent—but careless—reportage. On balance, it seems to me that the media is all too ready to believe—and spread!—the worst interpretations of Israeli words and actions.

Click the screenshot to read, but more likely than not you’ll be paywalled. (NOTE: a kind reader gave a link, here, that’s good for 13 days; I’ve added it to the screenshot.) Judicious inquiry can also yield you a copy (I haven’t found it archived), but I’ll give a few quotes (indented) to show how flimly SA’s assertions are:

Rosenberg recounts how NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed David Crane, a lawyer with expertise in prosecuting cases of genocide at the Hague. Crane said that making a case against Israel would require proof that the head of state had directed those under him to destroy all or part of a people. The article goes on:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.

Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.”

As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.

On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video.

The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.

But of course given the dislike of Israel by the mainstream media (NPR is a particularly frequent offender), the mistake spread (“duplicative journalism,” as Harvard would call it):

And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.

Does nobody do fact-checking anymore? Apparently not; one outlet copies another, and nobody checks the source. Could this be because the quotes are so convenient a way to indict Israel, even though you need much, much more than quotes to prove genocide? It turns out that this kind of distortion wasn’t rare:

Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.

Often people are referring to Hamas and not Gazans (as in Gallant’s characterization of Hamas as “human animals”, misrepresented by the antisemite Rashida Tlaib in her defense of the SA accusation.  Those words may not present good “optics,” but they’re no.proof of genocide.

Likewise, Netanyahu did not broach the idea of deporting Gaza’s population—he was referring to Hamas. Netanyahu’s statement about Amalek (I won’t go into it; you can read it) was gotten wrong by the media: there are two such stories, and the media used the wrong one to imply that Netanyahu was calling for the extirpation of an entire people. He was not: he was referring to another story that calls for revenge for those who killed innocents. He was subject to yet another distortion when referring to a story in the Old Testament.

Make no mistake: Rosenberg is no fan of Netanyahu (nor am I):

I’ve written extensively about Netanyahu’s profound failures. He welcomed the far-right into Israel’s government and gave its members titles and ministries. He has regularly refused to rebuke their extremism because he fears losing power. He is the reason Israel is reduced to arguing that it is innocent of genocidal intent, not because its politicians haven’t expressed it, but because those politicians aren’t military decision makers. In other words, Netanyahu is the one who created the context in which banal biblical references could be understood as far-right appeals. But Jewish scripture should not be distorted by journalists or jurists in an erroneous attempt to indict him.

In the end, Rosenberg concludes this:

These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened.

He doesn’t explain why, but it’s clear from the words above: this is part of an “erroneous attempt to indict [Israeli leaders].”  Rosenberg is too kind. It is part of a pervasive dislike of Israel and the desire of the media to see the country found guilty.

Rosenberg comes to an anodyne conclusion—the media should get things right—but it’s still important, for this is an indictment of a country for genocide

Neutral principles like these can’t resolve the deep moral and political quandaries posed by the Israel-Hamas conflict. They can’t tell readers what to think about its devastation. But they will ensure that whatever conclusions readers draw will be based on facts, not fictions—which is, at root, the purpose of journalism.

American secondary schools ditch algebra and advanced math requirements in the name of equity

July 23, 2023 • 9:30 am

Here’s a bit of Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary that I highlighted on Saturday.

→ Make algebra illegal! Progressives have been waging a long battle against accelerated math courses in middle and high school, and they are winning. A lot. First they won San Francisco, where Algebra I was banned in public middle schools. Now this week, they basically got that to be the new California math policy. And it’s been spreading: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other school districts have followed suit. Basically, white parents are 1) convinced that black kids simply can’t learn algebra and the only possible solution is to ban the class, and 2) alarmed how much better the Asian kids are at this class and worried it might hurt little Miffy’s prospects. For now, just read this great takedown by economics writer Noah Smith: “Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity.”

Well, of course you have to check the references for yourself, but by and large they do check out. Remember that in America “middle school” is all secondary school from grade 6 up to the beginning of high school, which is grade 9—students from about twelve to fifteen years old.  Nellie’s explanation for the banning of algebra, however, is undoubtedly correct.

First, let’s check out her three claims, which I’ve put in bold below. Two of them are accurate, and one is semi-accurate:

1.) San Francisco bans algebra in public middle schools: This appears to be true: go here or here.

2.) New California math policy bans algebra in middle schools: This appears to be questionable. The source above says this (my emphasis):

Critics, including many parents of high-achieving students, worried that students would be prohibited from taking appropriately challenging courses—and that delaying Algebra until 9th grade wouldn’t leave students enough time to take calculus, generally viewed as a prerequisite for competitive colleges, by their final year in high school.

That language has since been revised. The approved framework still suggests that most students take Algebra I or equivalent courses in 9th grade, through either a traditional pathway or an “integrated” pathway that blends different math topics throughout each year of high school.

But the framework notes that “some students” will be ready to accelerate in 8th grade. It cautions that schools offering Algebra in middle school assess students for readiness and provide options for summer enrichment support that can prepare them to be successful.

This implies that algebra will be optional (as other sources say) in the 8th grade, the last year of “middle school” (“junior high school” as mine was called). It’s possible that some schools won’t offer it, though.

HOWEVER, the new California standards don’t appear to ban algebra, though I haven’t read them carefully. What they seem to offer up to grade 8 is a form of  optional algebra: “algebra lite”. Perhaps that’s why Nellis said “basically” that is the new California math policy.  From a FAQ on the state’s website:

Chapter 8 of the draft Mathematics Framework notes that: “Some students will be ready to accelerate into Algebra I or Mathematics I in eighth grade, and, where they are ready to do so successfully, this can support greater access to a broader range of advanced courses for them.”

The framework also notes that successful acceleration requires a strong mathematical foundation, and that earlier state requirements that all students take eighth grade Algebra I were not implemented in a manner that proved optimal for all students. It cites research about successful middle school acceleration leading to positive outcomes for achievement and mathematics coursetaking, built on an overhaul of the middle school curriculum to prepare students for Mathematics I in eighth grade, teacher professional development and collaborative planning time, and an extra lab class for any students wanting more help.

To support successful acceleration, the framework also urges, in chapter 8: “For schools that offer an eighth grade Algebra course or a Mathematics I course as an option in lieu of Common Core Math 8, both careful plans for instruction that links to students’ prior course taking and an assessment of readiness should be considered. Such an assessment might be coupled with supplementary or summer courses that provide the kind of support for readiness that Bob Moses’ Algebra project has provided for many years for underrepresented students tackling Algebra.”

3.) Cambridge, Massachusetts bans algebra in middle schools. The link above, via the Boston Globe, appears to give an accurate account: algebra is banned until high school:

Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.

Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.

Now getting rid of the algebra option in middle school, which is where I took it, is about the dumbest thing I can imagine, even if you buy the rationale: to “level the playing field of knowledge” so that the variation in math knowledge is reduced among all students, providing a kind of “knowledge equity”. Because minority students don’t do as well in algebra as white students or especially Asian students, by eliminating algebra you reduce the disparity in achievement among groups.  But preventing advanced students from taking algebra before high school only punishes those students, including minority students, who have the ability and desire to handle algebra. It prevents those students from going on to calculus, and perhaps other advanced math classes, early in high school. The result: a impediment in the way of students who want to and have the ability to go onto STEMM careers. This may be the craziest move I’ve seen done in the name of “equity”: removing the ability of capable students to access classes they want and can handle.

But Noah Smith’s column, cited by Nellie above, gives a much better summary, underlining the sheer lunacy of this policy. Click to read:

An excerpt:

A few days after Armand’s post, the new California Math Framework was adopted. Some of the worst provisions had been thankfully watered down, but the basic strategy of trying to delay the teaching of subjects like algebra remained. It’s a sign that the so-called “progressive” approach to math education championed by people like Stanford’s Jo Boaler has not yet engendered a critical mass of pushback.

And meanwhile, the idea that teaching kids less math will create “equity” has spread far beyond the Golden State. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.

It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.

The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.

. . . When you ban or discourage the teaching of a subject like algebra in junior high schools, what you are doing is withdrawing state resources from public education. There is a thing you could be teaching kids how to do, but instead you are refusing to teach it. In what way is refusing to use state resources to teach children an important skill “progressive”? How would this further the goal of equity?

. . .Now imagine what will happen if we ban kids from learning algebra in public junior high schools. The kids who have the most family resources — the rich kids, the kids with educated parents, etc. — will be able to use those resources to compensate for the retreat of the state. Either their parents will teach them algebra at home, or hire tutors, or even withdraw them to private schools. Meanwhile, the kids without family resources will be out of luck; since the state was the only actor who could have taught them algebra in junior high, there’s now simply no one to teach them. The rich kids will learn algebra and the poor kids will not.

That will not be an equitable outcome.

In fact, Smith cites a fairly well-known study from Dallas Texas in which students were all put into honors math classes and were forced to opt out instead of opt in. This policy was implemented in 2019-2020, and the result was a dramatic increase in ethnic diversity in honors math classes in the sixth grade (students about 12 years old). The rise is stunning.  This is what we could have if we challenge students rather than accept their deficiencies. But no, that’s not the “progressive” way, which is to dumb down everything to the lowest level.

, , , , How did we end up in a world where “progressive” places like California and Cambridge, Massachusetts believe in teaching children less math via the public school system, while a city in Texas believes in and invests in its disadvantaged kids? What combination of performativity, laziness, and tacit disbelief in human potential made the degradation of public education a “progressive” cause célèbre? I cannot answer this question; all I know is that the “teach less math” approach will work against the cause of equity, while also weakening the human capital of the American workforce in the process.

We created public schools for a reason, and that reason still makes sense. Teach the kids math. They can learn.

I’m not even going to get into the debate about those who suggest that math class could be a way (surprise!) of teaching social justice. That’s also part of the revised California standards, and is summarized in this article by the Sacramento Observer (click to read):

A short excerpt:

The state of California is under scrutiny for its release of a math framework that aims to incorporate “social justice” into mathematics, despite calls from parents for improved education. The California Department of Education (CDE) and the California State Board of Education (SBE) unveiled the instructional guidance for public school teachers last week.

One crucial section of the framework  [JAC: go to chapter 2 of the link] emphasizes teaching “for equity and engagement” and encourages math educators to adopt a perspective of “teaching toward social justice.” The CDE and SBE suggest that cultivating “culturally responsive” lessons, which highlight the contributions of historically marginalized individuals to mathematics, can help accomplish this goal. The guidance further advocates for avoiding a single-minded focus on one way of thinking or one correct answer.

It’s clear from reading the California standards (especially Chapter 2 above) that “equity” means not just equal opportunity, but equal outcomes.  I want to take a second to address that because a few readers have maintained that “equity” simply means “equal opportunity”. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need the word “equity,” would we? No, equity is understood, in all the discussions above, to mean equal outcomes: children of all ethnic groups should be on par in their math learning.

That this is the standard meaning of equity (i.e., “groups should be represented in a discipline exactly in proportion to their presence in a population”) is instantiated in this well known cartoon:

Now this cartoon has a valid point: “equality” means little if groups start out with two strikes against them. But it’s also clear that “equity” means “equal outcomes” (more boxes) not equal opportunity (everybody gets a box).  I’m completely in favor of equality of opportunity for all groups, recognizing at the same time that this is the “hard problem” of society, one that won’t be solved easily. But it has to be solved if you believe in fairness.

I’m not a huge fan of equity, simply because it’s often used as proof of ongoing “systemic racism”, when in fact there are many other causes for unequal representation. Further, it’s the single-minded drive for “equity” that has led to to ridiculous actions like removing algebra from middle school.

Imposing your ideology on nature: Kew Gardens celebrates “queer plants”

July 9, 2023 • 9:20 am

At the end of the Skeptical Inquirer paper I wrote with Luana Maroja, we explained one big reason for the ideological distortion of biology:

All the biological misconceptions we’ve discussed involve forcing preconceived beliefs onto nature. This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.” It demands that you must see the natural world through lenses prescribed by your ideology. If you are a gender activist, you must see more than two biological sexes. If you’re a strict egalitarian, all groups must be behaviorally identical and their ways of knowing equally valid. And if you’re an anti-hereditarian—a blank slater who sees genetic differences as promoting eugenics and racism—then you must find that genes can have only trivial and inconsequential effects on the behavior of groups and individuals. This kind of bias violates the most important rule of science, famously expressed by Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

And, unfortunately, one of the institutions that’s succumbed to the “reverse naturalistic fallacy” is the venerable Kew Gardens in London, site of a ton of famous botanical research, including work by Darwin, who requested material from Kew. As Wikipedia notes, Kew is home to

the “largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world”.[1] Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London’s top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.

How sad, then, that Kew, bending to the ideological winds of the time, has put on an exhibit, “Queer Nature”, whose aim is to show that, yes, plants are “queer”.  In so doing, it apparently hopes to show queer humans that “queerness” is instantiated in plants, too. And this is supposed to empower queer humans.

First, though, what, exactly does “queer” mean in this context?  As I commented to a reader below,

We’re not talking about what “queer theory” is but about what “queer” means. Here’s a definition that seems to occur quite frequently, this in a discussion of what the initials in LGBTQ2S mean:

Q – Queer: queer is a broad term that includes all sexual orientations and gender identities within the LGBTQ2S+ community, including those who don’t identify with any other identity in LGBTQ2S+. The term queer can be both positive and negative. Historically, queer was used as an insult, but it has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ2S+ community to self identify in a positive way.

In other word, it appears to cover all the initials.

But “queerness” is a social concept concocted by humans and has nothing to do with plants. (And I hasten to add that I see nothing wrong with queerness in humans; my point is to show that Kew is trying to impose a human concept onto nature, which is one of the points of my paper with Luana.)  The Kew exhibit is at once cringe-making and patronizing.

Here’s the tweet.

Click on the screenshot to read this short and misguided description from Kew, which appeared four days ago:

Here are a few quotes demonstrating what I mean:

The natural world is anything but straight-forward.

Scientists have named over 350,000 plants species and almost 150,000 fungal species but it’s impossible to find a way of classifying everything into a simple binary system.

Take flowers, for instance. Many plants have flowers with both stamen and stigma, reproductive organs that are sometimes called the ‘male’ and ‘female’ parts of the flower.

Whilst other plant species have ‘male’ and ‘female’ individuals that only grow one type of flower on a single plant. The monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), for instance, grows with either pollen cones or seed cones.

First, note that “male” and “female” are put in scare quotes? Why? Male and female plants are similar to male and female mammals: each individual is a member of just one sex. This is like saying “humans have two sexes comprising ‘male’ and ‘female’ individuals.”  Casting doubt on the sex binary much??

The fact that flowers are hermaphrodites doesn’t either buttress or denigrate “queerness”. These are hermaphrodites, and hermaphrodites are not known in humans in a form that is fertile as both male and female. (We do have some human hermaphrodites, but they are almost vanishingly rare and are never fertile as both male and female.) They are not a third sex but have bits of reproductive apparatus evolved to produce sperm and eggs. More:

Ruizia mauritiana can actually change sex depending on the temperature of the environment.  In hot conditions it grows male flowers, while in cooler conditions it produces female ones.

Similarly, some species of Cycnoches orchids, better known as swan orchids, produce separate male and female flowers on the same plant, depending on how much sunlight it receives.

Temperature-dependent sex determination is known in animals (turtles are one example), and environmental determination of sex is known in other animals (the famous clownfish, in which males can become females if the alpha female dies). Again, what does this do to justify, or even mirror, queerness in humans? As far as I can see, nothing. Humans don’t have environmental determination of sex, and none of these “queer” plants or animals show the social or psychological concomitants of queer humans. They also mention fungi, which have “mating types” that can number in the hundreds, but this is the exception among organisms and not seen as “sexes” by biologists. Even if they were, would you call fungi sexually “queer”?. All vertebrates and vascular plants show male or female sexes, in plants with the male and female functions sometimes combined into one individual.

Here is where the ideology becomes clear; we’ve already learned that Kew’s use of “queer” doesn’t simply mean “odd” or “unusual”:

This autumn, we’re celebrating the diversity and beauty of plants and fungi with an inspiring new festival, Queer Nature, at Kew Gardens.

Step inside Kew’s iconic Temperate House to discover a large-scale suspended artwork at its centre.

Created by New York based artist Jeffrey Gibson, House of Spirits is an immersive installation fusing vibrant colour and pattern.

The intricately-crafted collage of printed fabrics incorporates botanical illustrations alongside language and patterns informed by Gibson’s own perspectives on queerness, and the endless diversity of plants and nature.

Gibson draws upon his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage as well as queer theory, politics and art history as part of his multi-disciplinary practice.

. . .Breaking the binary

Elsewhere in the Temperate House, visitors can discover a newly-designed garden titled Breaking the Binary, created by Patrick Featherstone in collaboration with Kew’s Youth Forum.

Sorry, but plants don’t break the binary of two sexes, male and female (see below). But wait—there’s more!

Raising queer voices

British artist and designer Adam Nathaniel Furman will design an immersive space to house a film-based installation, featuring interviews with over a dozen horticulturists, scientists, authors, drag artists and activists as they explore what Queer Nature means to them.

, , , Queer plants of the Temperate House

. . . Inside the house, you’ll find the sex-switching Ruizia mauritiana, which is now believed to be extinct in the wild. Kew is now the only place in the world with it in cultivation.

You’ll also be able to see species of Banksia, Australian wildflowers that begin as female, then shift over time to become male.

Here we have the clownfish of plants. But again, Banksia has nothing to do with human sex roles or identification.

Finally, we have the declaration that all of nature is queer:

What makes nature queer? [JAC: I’ve put the last two lines in italics to emphasize them.]

As well as refusing to conform with socially-constructed binaries that science has applied to them over the years, plants and fungi have also been used as symbols for LGBTQ+ groups throughout history.

The green carnation became a symbol for homosexuality in the early 20th century, due to Oscar Wilde’s wearing of it, at a time when being openly gay was still a criminal offence.

Since the mid-20th century, the colour lavender was used to represent gay communities across the world.

Looking at plants and fungi through a queer lens sheds a new light on the complexity and infinite possibilities of nature, highlighting the vital importance of conserving biodiversity and protecting the natural world.

That’s why it’s the perfect time to celebrate Queer Nature. Why not join us this autumn and discover the true diversity of the natural world?

I don’t identify as queer, but I bet if I did I would find this infinitely patronizing. You don’t need to find “queer” plants in nature, which aren’t even close to being “queer” in the human sense, to justify your existence as a queer human and your demands for and rights of moral and legal equality.  What Kew is doing here is trying to tell queer people that they shouldn’t feel bad because, after all, there are queer plants. And if queerness can be seen in plants, it must be okay!.  How dumb and patronizing can you get? And shame on Kew for such a pandering and biologically inaccurate presentation.

Finally, I’ll give the take of one reader, a botanist, who wrote the following to me (quoted with permission):

At the Kew link, they bang on about the ‘diversity’ of plant sexual systems, as a way of implying that plants are ‘queer’. In addition to the commandeering of words like “diversity” and “queer” to mean other things, this really makes me both angry and sad. Sad, first, to see such a venerated institution as Kew go the way of Lysenko, joining other scientific organisations on this issue that you’ve been drawing attention to. Angry, because they seem to be misrepresenting plant sex as something it isn’t—for political purposes.

Their chief claim here is a relatively mild one, but totally false: that plant sex isn’t binary. The implication is, I suppose, that botany supports transgenderism and homosexuality.

Except plant sex IS binary.

  • First, all land plants are anisogamous, producing two and only two types of gamete: sperms and eggs. Binary.
  • Second, every sexually-produced plant embryo results from fusion of one sperm and one egg. Binary.
  • In land plants, it’s the gametophyte generation that produces gametes. In seed plants the gametophytes (male pollen grains and female embryo sacs) are unisexual and remain so throughout their short lives. Binary.
  • Of course, the plants most people are familiar with, the roses and cabbages in the garden, are sporophytes, not gametophytes. Sporophytes produce spores, not gametes, and in most plants, spores are sexed, anisospory. In seed plants, they’re always so, either male or female. Binary.
  • Most seed plant sporophytes produce both kinds of spores. That doesn’t make them queer or non-binary; they’re just hermaphrodites—like many other living things—producing both types (binary) of spore instead of just one. There are many ways that hermaphrodite sporophytes separate their male spore and female spore production in both space (herkogamy) and time (dichogamy).

But in the end, whether plant sex is binary or not says nothing about what humans do, still less about what humans should do. Sex involves two gametes because sexual organisms are diploids, and usually these gametes are differentiated into male and female.

Indian science curriculum axes not only evolution, but the periodic table, energy sources, and pollution

May 31, 2023 • 9:15 am

As I wrote in April, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), decided to remove evolution—a great unifying theory of biology—from all science classes below “class 11”, , which means that only students who have decided to major in biology will learn about evolution. (Indian students begin specializing younger than do American students.)

. . . . evolution used to be part of science class in “Classes 9 and 10,” which in India are kids 13-15 years old.  After that they take exams and have to decide what subjects to specialize in: science (with or without biology), commerce, economics, the arts, and so on. Specialization begins early, before the age at which kids go to college in America.

In India now, only the students who decide to go the Biology route in Classes 11 and 12 will get any exposure to evolution at all! It’s been wiped out of the biology material taught to any kids who don’t choose to major in biology.

The deep-sixing of evolution was originally part of the whittling-down of the Indian school curriculum during the pandemic, but now it appears to be a permanent change, and not just in public schools, but also in many private ones, who follow the same standards set by the ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education).

But it’s gotten worse. NCERT has eliminated not only evolution from most secondary school science classes, but have also deep-sixed the periodic table (!), as well as sources of energy and material about air and water pollution. (One would think those topics would be relevant in a country as crowded as India.)

This is all reported in a new article from Nature (click on screenshot for a free read):

An excerpt:

In India, children under-16 returning to school at the start of the new school year this month, will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy.

The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.

Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year starting in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked.

Not only that, but NCERT didn’t get input from parents or teachers, or even respond to Nature‘s request for comment. Here’s what’s gone besides evolution:

Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.

A chapter on the periodic table of elements has been removed from the syllabus for class-10 students, who are typically 15–16 years old. Whole chapters on sources of energy and the sustainable management of natural resources have also been removed.

They’ve also bowdlerized stuff on politics:

A small section on Michael Faraday’s contributions to the understanding of electricity and magnetism in the nineteenth century has also been stripped from the class-10 syllabus. In non-science content, chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy have been scrapped. And a chapter on the industrial revolution has been removed for older students.

And here’s NCERT’s explanation, which doesn’t make sense at all.

In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant. It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity.

First, evolution is NOT covered elsewhere, nor is it that difficult in principle. You don’t even have to teach natural selection; you can just give people the evidence for evolution, which is hardly rocket science. And the periodic table? That’s hard? How else will students learn about the elements?  As I said, only students age 16 and above will even hear about evolution or the elements, and most students in India will not go on to college where they can also learn these things. Remember, only high-school-age (in the U.S.) students who decide to specialize in science will learn about evolution, the periodic table, and energy.

And these cuts may well be permanent:

NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying that they would ease pressures on students studying online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. Instead, the NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year with a statement that the changes will remain for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.

At first I thought the dropping of evolution reflected the Hindu-centric policies of Modi, somewhat of a theocrat, but an Indian biologist (see earlier post) told me this was unlikely, as Hindus aren’t particularly offended by evolution. The reasons must lie elsewhere, but they’re a mystery to all of us. However, Joshi does that the dumping of evolution reflect in part some religious beliefs:

Science educators are particularly concerned about the removal of evolution. A chapter on diversity in living organisms and one called ‘Why do we fall ill’ has been removed from the syllabus for class-9 students, who are typically 14–15 years old. Darwin’s contributions to evolution, how fossils form and human evolution have all been removed from the chapter on heredity and evolution for class-10 pupils. That chapter is now called just ‘Heredity’. Evolution, says Joshi, is essential to understanding human diversity and “our place in the world”.

In India, class 10 is the last year in which science is taught to every student. Only students who elect to study biology in the final two years of education (before university) will learn about the topic.

Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.

And here’s one more suggestion: that some of these ideas are “Western”—truly the dumbest reason ever not to teach them. So what if Darwin was British?

“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.

So here we have the world’s largest democracy dumbing down its curriculum, making some of the greatest ideas in science unavailable to its citizens.  This is unconscionable, but there’s little those outside of India can do about this.  The only thing I can think of is to is tell Richard Dawkins, who can at least embarrass the government by tweeting about this.  Otherwise, there are no petitions to sign, nobody to protest to.  And millions of Indian kids will be deprived of the greatest idea in biology.

From the Indian Express:

h/t: Matthew

 

A creationist writes in: repent your acceptance of evolution lest ye burn in hell

May 30, 2023 • 12:15 pm

News is slow today, and I’m not feeling great, as my insomnia has returned. Let’s look at a new reader’s comment, which was meant to be put up after the post below but of course was trashed by moi.  If you reply, though, I’ll alert the religious Paul Polster to your comments.

Read and weep. It’s Pascal’s wager!

Details: From one “Paul A Polster” in reply to Carlos on the post “Odious Ray Comfort movie (watch it below) to be distributed in public schools“:

Think about this, and pass it along to all your fellow atheists: if you are right, you die, it is all over, no harm, but if God does exist, and the Bible is true, when you die, you will appear at the great white throne as a lost soul. You will hear a list of sins that you have committed since you were aware of right and wrong, you will bow a knee to Jesus Christ, however, it will be too late to repent and you will be cast into Hell for eternity. You evolutionists are thinkers, think that one through in your quiet time and add this to it: have I lied? stolen?looked at the opposite sex with lust? Cheated on a test? Give some thought as to why these things happen as well as why good and evil exist. Evolution has no answer to these questions. One final thought: are you willing to risk possibly going to hell in order to hold to your faith in evolution? (it requires faith to believe it). Or are you willing to give true science ( discovery of the truth) a chance with an open mind? I hope you can ,your eternity depends on it.

Well, we’re all going to hell, including Jimmy Carter, who has looked on women with lust.  He’s close to the end, and I bet he can feel the flames now. . .

A few comments:

  1. Why is “believing in evolution” a sin? Did God put the evidence for evolution everywhere to deceive us?  (And if you think it takes “faith” to believe in evolution, read my article dispelling that bit of stupidity.)
  2. Which moral dictates are we supposed to believe? If we’re Jews, we can’t mix meat and milk in one meal. If we’re Catholics, we have to go to confession. If we’re Muslims, we have to observe Ramadan. I presume that Mr. Polster somehow knows that the Christian god is the REAL god. But how does he know?
  3. What kind of God would send someone to hell who has lived a good life even if he didn’t accept the existence of God.’
  4. The absolute certainty of Polster—about the falsity of evolution, about God being the Christian god, and about liars and the lustful going to hell—is breathtaking.

The kind of God that Polster paints is the ruler, as Hitchens used to say, of a celestial North Korea. He’ll toss into the fire anybody who doesn’t accept Jesus Christ (even those who were faithful before the time of Jesus Christ), he burn anybody who accept the evidence for evolution that God supposedly put all around us, and he’s not in the least merciful.  Why did he design our bodies to lust after members of the opposite sex if you’re going to hell for it?

 

The Lancet’s editor jumps the shark, disses global health because of its racist and white supremacist history

May 25, 2023 • 9:30 am

I don’t know much about Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet (one of the world’s top medical journals); but what is clear is that he’s uber-woke. He was, for example, responsible for this controversial cover:

 

 

There have been other political covers, other woke editorials by Horton, and a fair few woke articles that, in saner times, wouldn’t be published in The Lancet. But once someone like Horton is handed his bully pulpit (and is presumably supported by “allies”), he can go hog wild with proselytizing and virtue flaunting. Yes, he may mean well, but his latest op-ed is so over the top, so full of the drive to reform everything in the world, and so unhinged in its tone, that there was a reason I once called The Lancet “the medical Scientific American.”

Here’s my own brief summary of Horton’s op-ed that you can (and should) read by clicking the screenshot below. These are my words:

“Global health” is a manifestation of colonialism and white supremacy, an exclusive and structurally racist club that must be decolonized and dismantled. We shouldn’t waste our time pursuing the traditional version of this practice, which won’t be decolonized until the entire world is fixed: rid of war, racism, unequal wealth, climate skepticism, and all other manifestations of right-wing politics.”

But what is “global health”? Well, I use the Lancet’s own definition:

. . . . we offer the following definition: global health is an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasises transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care.

This, then, involves not just improving health of people throughout the world, but achieving “equity in health,” which to me means that everyone gets equal opportunities to access health care. Well, that seems fine: equal opportunity for everyone is what I want. Note, however, that they emphasize “equity in health,” not simple “equity,” which means representation of  all underserved groups of people in professions—presumably healthcare here—in proportion to the groups’ occurrence in the population.  But, as you see below, “equity in health” has been reinterpreted by Horton, half intoxicated with wokeness, into simple equity in everything, which leads him to not only indict “global health” for racism and colonialism, but also to call for sweeping reforms of the entire planet.  Yes, most of these reforms would be nice, but right now there are sick people to cure, and we can’t wait centuries until everyone has more comparable incomes before we start making people well.

Click to read:

 

Seriously, Horton has gone the Scientific American route.  I don’t mind him noting the underlying cause of health disparities, but here he picks up a megaphone, mounts a soapbox, and shouts his own views to the world. I will quote him so that you’ll see that I’m not making this up. I’ve put the more interesting claims in bold:

Global health has become fashionably unfashionable. The case against global health is strong. Global health is the invention of a largely white and wealthy elite residing in high-income, English-language speaking countries. The discipline claims to be concerned about the health of people living in low-income and middle-income settings. But the resources—human, infrastructural, and financial—underpinning global health are mostly concentrated in those countries already replete with power and money. “Helicopter” research is not uncommon. The contribution of scientists and research funders to sustainable advances in health care in the countries of their alleged concern is minimal. More often, the relationship between western medical science and the countries they work in is extractive. Global health institutions are mostly led by western-educated men. Global health agencies are only superficially member-state organisations. In truth, influence lies with those nations providing the greatest resources. Global health has enabled public health schools and university departments to continue to enrich themselves through exorbitant student fees and generous research grants. Global health journals are no better. Most are creatures of western medical publishing houses, even those that proclaim radical open access histories. The unearned privileges of a few suppress the justified demands of the many. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that global health is little more than an exclusive club, disguising its colonial origins and practices in the stirring language of equity and justice.

That’s a big passel of accusations. (He doesn’t note that modern science is also largely the invention of a “white and wealthy elite”.)  First , I take issue with his claim that the desire to give everyone equal access to health care is the product of a “white and wealthy elite”, whose faux concern for sick people throughout the world really masks a desire to enrich themselves and their “colonialist” countries. Could it be that the powerful and rich countries like Britain and the U.S. (once colonialist, but no longer) simply had the resources and the moral wherewithal to do something about global health?

By the way, I happen to know a few people in global health, and I detect no whiff of colonialism about them, but rather a dogged determination to give medical care to people in poor countries. And believe me, they have not gotten rich doing so. Those are, of course, anecdotes, but Horton gives no data at all.

But you can see where he’s going.  He wants global health “decolonized,” which presumably means that the initiatives of rich, white, colonialist countries would give way to those of poorer countries. But right now that’s not possible—at least not without the help and funding from wealtheir nations.  I also note that to do so we must solve “inequities,” and by that he doesn’t mean just healthcare inequities, but even inequities in everything, including journal fees, which have already been tackled.

The view that global health is a colonial project underlies the call for decolonisation. As Franziska Hommes and colleagues wrote in The Lancet Global Health in 2021, the goal of decolonisation must be “to critically reflect on [global health’s] history, identify hierarchies and culturally Eurocentric conceptions, and overcome the global inequities that such structures perpetuate”. The democratic promise of global health to be an inclusive enterprise has been broken. Some critics argue that global health can never solve inequity. Some go further and suggest that global health is structurally racist. It is hard to disagree with these conclusions. Although global health journals might mean well, the operation of waiver policies for article processing charges has created a culture of humiliation for scientists who cannot afford western journal open access fees. Journals have worsened Northern ventriloquism, where scientists from lower-income settings feel forced to adhere to high-income norms and standards to be permitted to publish in their pages. In Global Health in Practice, Olusoji Adeyi offers a compelling analysis of how imperialism and colonialism became the “founding pillars” of global health. And his observation that “The din of protest against colonialism in global health is getting louder and it has merit” should provoke those of us who work in global health to pause. For Adeyi is surely right that “the Global North decides the narrative and assumes the omniscience to tell the Global South what the latter needs, when it can have it, how to do it, and on whose terms it must be done”.

But science journals, as Horton admits, have already waived publication fees for scientists and doctors from poor countries. Yet even in that gesture Horton finds sin, as fee waivers have created a “cultural of humiliation.” Okay, Dr. Horton, what’s the alternative? If there are to be publication fees, should we eliminate the “humiliation” by hitting authors from poor countries with those huge (and, to my mind, exorbitant) charges? Only a Pecksniff would find in an attempt to achieve equity yet another form of inequity!

And what are the “high-income norms and standards” to which those from poorer countries need not adhere for publication? Does he mean that we should give up standards of merit when refereeing papers from that group? Apparently! Let us lower the bar for papers coming from scientists in underserved countries. Perhaps we shouldn’t require them to have control groups, or use statistics instead of “lived experience”?

Well, I might as well cite the the rest of Horton’s short article. At the end the editor seems to lose it, calling for impossible (though desirable) reforms that must replace the effort we put into global health care. What he means is that we must get rid of right-wingers—the true opponents of global health:

When I was a medical student, I remember those attached to various causes arguing with passion among and against ourselves, viewing one part of our group as betraying the real truth that we were seeking to defend. Those on the progressive wing of politics are supremely good at introspective annihilation. And that same process of internal obliteration is now unfolding in global health. While we identify enemies among ourselves, we miss the larger story of just who our opponents really are—those trying to destroy the conditions for achieving the right to health, equity, liberty, and social justice. For the real enemies of the values we stand for do not sit within the ranks of global health. They are to be found in governments that instinctively mistrust—and who wish to undermine and defund—global organisations. They will be found among those who demonise refugees. They are the climate sceptics, anti-vaxxers, and purveyors of scientific misinformation. They are those who attack the redistribution of wealth, those who believe that war brings peace, and those who defend racism under the guise of patriotism. Global health practitioners should certainly engage in robust discussions about the meaning of their discipline. But they should be clear about who our struggle is really against. It is not global health. Instead, we must work harder together to create a new political frontier and forge a new collective against the true enemies of health.

This has very little to do with making people in poor countries better, for it is a political and ideological program to which he’s calling The Lancet’s readers.  (Note the language of war: “enemies”.) High-sounding words indeed, and some of them I agree with (who could help but criticize anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics?). But demonisizing refugees? That is a viable discussion in the U.S. right now, and those who call for limits in immigration can hardly all be tarred with “demonising refugees.” This is hyperbolic, divisive, and inaccurate language. In the end, Horton calls us to follow his own program, for apparently he alone has identified the “true enemies of health.”

Even on her worst days Sci. Am. editor Laura Helmuth has never written stuff like this, even if she believes it. But Horton is turning The Lancet from a medical journal into Mother Jones. I wonder how many doctors adhere to his hyperbole and to his political program. Does he represent the views of British medicine? And what gives the editor of a medical journal the right to spout his personal politics as if it were official doctrine? Yes, if there are root causes of global health inequality that can be pinpointed, he has a right to mention them. But note that he gives no evidence for his claims, and in the end calls for all readers to join him in forming The New Collective.

Curiously, in an earlier editorial opposing Brexit, Horton, citing John Gray, asserts that the idea of progress itself is a “dangerous fallacy”:

Scientists and those educated scientifically are prone to a dangerous fallacy—we believe in progress. The notion that human beings are forever moving forwards towards a better place. It is a noble vision: the accumulation of knowledge, self-correction, the application of science to enhance society’s wellbeing and wealth. The discipline of medical history is almost entirely based on this admiringly Whiggish precept. But it is mistaken, philosophically and historically. John Gray shattered the notion of progress two decades ago in his bitter polemic, Straw Dogs.

No he didn’t. Only a fool could say that progress hasn’t been possible, and medicine is one of the areas where it’s been profound. Since 1900 the average global life expectancy has more than doubled. You’d have to be a fool to say that that is not progress. (I could go on about medical progress, but there’s no point; you all know about it.)

So, in the paragraph above, Horton apparently rejects an overweening characteristic of liberalism and Englightenment values: belief that progress can be made. Yet what is he doing in this entire editorial but laying out a path for progress and “health equity”?  Either he is confused or has rejected what he wrote in 2019.

It is Horton’s dead certainty that he alone is right, combined with the accusations that his opponents are rich white  colonialist supremacists who promote “global health” not to help others, but to enrich themselves—that combination is the sign of wokeness.  He is sure his critics are wrong, and he will brook no discussion.

As usual, I don’t like publicly calling for people’s jobs, for that’s a woke tactic. But I do think that those who publish The Lancet should take a hard look at what Horton is doing to the journal.  “Bodies with vaginas” indeed!

Let me finish by saying that Horton and I probably agree on many political issues. But that doesn’t mean that were I to become editor of a science journal, I would splash my views all over its pages.

Psychoanalysist + wokeness = lunacy + logorrhea

September 15, 2022 • 9:15 am

I can’t remember how I found this 2020 article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; I think it came from a reader but have no record. (If you sent it to me, thanks–I think!). Here Donald Moss, a member of the faculty at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and—at least when this was published—Chair of the Program Committee, American Psychoanalytic Institute, seems to have discovered white racism, which he calls “Whiteness” with a capital “W”. He also sees it as parasitic (on the objects of racism) and chronic—persisitent and nearly impossible to get rid of. He gives no convincing evidence for the impossibility of eradicating it within people, but draws that conclusion case studies of two of his patients. (Freud, of course, used his interpretation of his cases to buttress his phony “science.”)

Psychoanalysis is, of course, pretty much quackery, and the closer it is to the Freudian version, the more quackish it is.  I’m not sure if we can pin the obscurantism of Dr. Moss on Freud, who is cited twice, but the Viennese quack surely contributed. The whole article is an exercise in showing off, signaling virtue (Moss is white), and trying to couch a real phenomenon, describable in simple English wors, in psychoanalytic jargon, which makes Moss look professional but obscures his point to those lacking the argot.

Click on the screenshot to read it (I believe it’s free), or get the pdf here or through judicious inquiry. The reference is at the bottom.

But I don’t recommend that you read it unless you need some amusement (or horror). It will at least teach you what passes for “thought” among psychoanalists.

The paper’s abstract, which I’ve put below the title, pretty much sums up the thesis.

Moss gives two of his case studies of angry/neurotic racist patients from which he concludes that racism can never be eliminated in anyone. But the use of the term “Whiteness”, instead of “racism” (he doesn’t consider “Blackness” or “Hispanicness”), is designed to divide and anger people. For Moss distinguishes “Whiteness’ from being ethnically white itself (which Moss doesn’t see as a social construct). His distinction is below. Check out the second paragraph, which is only the beginning of a long and obscure screed, perhaps comprehensible only to his fellow quacks (remember, psychoanalysts are also M.D.s).

In what follows, I will capitalize Whiteness to signify Parasitic Whiteness— an acquired multidimensional condition: (1) a way of being, (2) a mode of identity, (3) a way of knowing and sorting the objects constituting one’s human surround. Whiteness should not be confused with lowercase whiteness, a commonly used signifier of racial identity.

Parasitic Whiteness infiltrates our drives early on. The infiltrated drive binds id-ego-superego into a singular entity, empowered to dismiss and override all forms of resistance. The drive apparatus of Whiteness divides the object world into two distinct zones. In one, the Whiteness infiltrated drive works in familiar ways—inhibited, checked, distorted, transformed—susceptible, that is, to standard neurotic deformations. In the other, however, none of this holds true. There the liberated drive goes rogue, unchecked and unlimited, inhibited by neither the protests of its objects nor the counterforces of its internal structures.

Here are a few quotes to give you the tenor of Moss’s theory, which is his. Like the rest of the article, it’s postmodern-ish twaddle:

Our merely unruly sexualities may exert a constant pressure to erotize the bodies and beings of strangers, transgressively aiming to defy the wall, to integrate those bodies and beings, to take them in. But the rogue sexualities of Parasitic Whiteness add to that. They negatively erotize nonwhite bodies and beings. These objects, now marked, are wanted still, but wanted not to be taken in but simply to be taken, not to be loved but to be hated. Holding these objects in place, inflicting pain on them—this sadism becomes the exquisite and economical solution to any apparent conflict between wanting and hating. Parasitic Whiteness further demeans its nonwhite bodies and beings by way of a naturalizing system of naming and classification. Once it has mapped and transformed its nonwhite objects into such a fixed taxonomical category, the rogue sexuality of Parasitic Whiteness can expand its aim. It permanently maps them as external/away, and from there, wherever that is, these objects are available for limitless use—limitless labor, of limitless kind.

What is the sweating analyst trying to say? That racism is a love/hate relationship based on “othering”. Well, I’m not sure how much love is in it, but hey, he’s a psychoanalyst!

Moss also seems to have discovered the notion of “verticality”, a complicated descriptor for “a hierarchy of worth”, as with white people feeling superior to blacks and blacks being made to feel inferior to whites.  All it really means is “bigotry”, but this “verticality” meme, which sounds scholarly, appears over and over again, making the article look more original than it is. Below he also drags in Freud, making Moss Freud-adjacent and quackish:

When targeting individuals, Whiteness opportunistically attaches to any psychic structure that maps self and object vertically. These vertical planes are ubiquitous and as such provide an abundance of potential host receptors for Parasitic Whiteness. Six separate, yet intersecting, such planes should be kept in mind here. (1) The ego’s foundation in a vertical split—pleasure inside, pain outside; good subject here, bad object there. The original object, then, is the bad object, the demeaned one, below and threatening, of whom Freud writes: “the ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy” (1915, p. 138). (2) The subject-object world of the paranoid/schizoid position. The emerging subject here is in constant struggle to maintain itself against threats emerging from bad objects, to withstand them, and, finally, to fix and locate them elsewhere enough, below enough, to settle in, to keep going.2 (3) The subject-object world of narcissism, of grandiosity and diminishment, of the Master and the Slave, of the all and the nothing, the highest and the lowest. (4) The subject object world of perversion: of the user and the used, the person and the thing, the whole and the part, the owner and the owned, the dominator and  the dominated. (5) The subject-object world of the oedipal triangle. . .

But I can’t go on. If you want to read it, go to the link or make a judicious inquiry for a pdf. One more obfuscation of the obvious: racism is a form of tribalism, so that you can find confidence and comfort in the bigotry of others: Here’s how he describes the tribalism of racism:

Along each of these vertical planes, subject-object relations are defined by power and grounded in the fantasy of sovereignty. And along each of these vertical planes, safety, satisfaction, and pleasure are necessarily fragile and contingent. Everything I have, everything I am, can be lost: my strength turned to abjection, my inclusion to exile, my calm to terror.

This vertical fragility makes us all susceptible to Parasitic Whiteness. Whiteness promises to turn anxious singularity into confident plurality; isolated frailty into collective might. Whiteness caresses its hosts with reassurances; never again, it can seem to murmur, will you have to be alone. An always strained and always jeopardized “I am” will necessarily be susceptible to this preformed dream of an always empowered “We are.”

At the end, Moss gives two (yes, just two) of his case studies tha—to him—demonstrate that racism cannot be eradicated from a person’s mind.  (He of course concludes that from only one form of treatment: psychoanalysis.) If you want some fun, read the case about the “pink monkey.” And note that this is the totality of his clinical “evidence” (only four papers are cited, one by Freud).

After you hack your way through the logorrhea, do you find anything new here? I didn’t, but I’m not an adept in this quackery. (There are, by the way, horizontal planes, too, which house your confrères.) Below  a picture of Moss, who is apparently white but not White.

There are of course racists in groups other than whites—though some would deny it. Had Moss written a similar article about them, it would not have been publishable, and he would have been attacked and then fired for racism.

The only popular media I could find about this execrable article was, of course, in the New York Post, which mistook Moss’s concept of “Whiteness” for ethnic whiteness, thereby implying that Moss is denigrating all white people. (In fact, he doesn’t say what fraction of white people are White.) But the paper does cite some pushback from other quacks. Click to read:

A few words from the Post:

The article sparked outrage online, including among other academics in the same field.

“How do my colleagues consider this scholarship? Anyone actuality take this seriously?” tweeted Pennsylvania-based clinical psychologist Dr. Philip Pellegrino. [JAC: that tweet no longer exists.]

Many others even doubted it was a real study until they confirmed that it was officially published.

“I was skeptical so I looked it up, and yeah this is real and now I want to throw my Psychology degree in the garbage,” one person tweeted. [JAC: that tweet no longer exists.]

“This racist vomit should be called out for what it is,” someone else wrote, saying, “This is the lowest and most dangerous form of racism masquerading as academic discourse. Shameful.”

I haven’t looked to see whether other psychoanalysts have criticized Moss’s article in journals, but it might be fun to watch all these loons squabbling with each other like cats in a laundry bag.

_____________________
Moss, D. 2021. On having whiteness. J. Am. Psychoanalytic Assoc. 69:355-371.