Spy novel author advised by an editor not to create black characters because he is white

May 21, 2017 • 1:00 pm

This story  was reported in the BBC,  but verified by the Guardian and the Torygraph. It’s another example of so-called cultural appropriation, and an example that is risible. It involves Anthony Horowitz, an author of spy and mystery novels and a screenwriter who is well regarded, at least in some quarters, for he has an OBE. I hadn’t heard of him, but my reading in that genre stopped with Sherlock Holmes, which I loved. (Horowitz apparently wrote two Holmes books as well.)

The BBC:

Author Anthony Horowitz says he was “warned off” including a black character in his new book because it was “inappropriate” for a white writer.

The creator of the Alex Rider teenage spy novels says an editor told him it could be considered “patronising”.

Horowitz wanted a white and black protagonist in his new children’s books but says he is now reconsidering.

“I will have to think about whether this character can be black or white,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

“I have for a long, long time said that there aren’t enough books around for every ethnicity.”

Horowitz, who has written 10 novels featuring teenage spy Alex Rider, said there was a “chain of thought” in America that it was “inappropriate” for white writers to try to create black characters, something which he described as “dangerous territory”.

He said it was considered “artificial and possibly patronising” to do so because “it is actually not our experience”.

“Therefore I was warned off doing it. Which was, I thought, disturbing and upsetting.”

Horowitz, who has written a new James Bond book, went on: “Taking it to the extreme, all my characters will from now be 62-year-old white Jewish men living in London.”

And in the interest of honesty, the report adds this:

The author also revealed he had apologised to actor Idris Elba after saying he was “too street” to be the next James Bond in an interview in 2015.

He was criticised by fans who accused him of making a veiled racial remark.

Horowitz said the fallout from his remarks was “unpleasant because it went against everything I believe in”.

“The character I was being portrayed as was not the person I am,” he added. “I’m still deeply sorry. I’m still annoyed at myself, it was stupid.”

Horowitz said he apologised to Elba at a film premiere and the actor “could not have been more charming, more delightful, more humane”.

He revealed the experience changed him and he is now “more guarded, more careful and more discreet”.

Be that as it may, it’s simply ludicrous to prevent white authors from writing about black characters. Not only wouldn’t we have Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Thomas Wolfe’s wonderful and sad The Child by Tiger, but, in fact, omitting black characters from literature or plays written by whites would lead to complaints of marginalization and racism. You can’t win!

Grania also pointed this out:

I wonder what will happen to Ben Aaronovitch who is writing an entire series about a black police officer in London, and the local Jamaican immigrant culture there.

He’s as cishet white male as you can get and has spent most of his career writing science fiction.

Of course his wife is not white, and neither are their children, obviously.

Does this mean that nobody can “write down”? Can whites write about Hispanics, or Hispanics about African-Americans?  Can any man write about women? If not, why not? After all, men don’t have “the woman experience”? (And vice versa, but that’s supposedly “writing up”.)

The solution, of course, is to stop this nonsense. Let writers write what fiction they want, and let everyone and the market sort it out. But let us not have this chilling a priori censorship.

h/t: Michael

A humanities scholar rebuts criticisms of the “conceptual penis” paper

May 21, 2017 • 10:30 am

“At a time when superstitions, obscurantism and nationalist and religious fanaticism are spreading in many parts of the world – including the ‘developed’ West – it is irresponsible, to say the least, to treat with such casualness what has historically been the principal defense against these follies, namely a rational vision of the world… [F]or all those of us who identify with the political left, postmodernism has specific negative consequences. First of all, the extreme focus on language and the elitism linked to the use of a pretentious jargon contribute to enclosing intellectuals in sterile debates and to isolating them from social movements taking place outside their ivory tower… Second, the persistence of confused ideas and obscure discourses in some parts of the left tends to discredit the entire left; and the right does not pass up the opportunity to exploit this connection demagogically.”

That is a quote from the book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1999) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, written three years after Sokal’s famous “hoax paper” was published in the journal Social Text.  The quote shows the danger that postmodern scholarship in the humanities and “cultural studies” pose not only to science, but to the entire Progressive Left.

That quote appears in a new paper in  Areo Magazine by Helen Pluckrose: “Sokal affair 2.0: Penis envy: addressing its critics“. Pluckrose is identified as “a researcher in the humanities who focuses on late medieval/early modern religious writing for and about women. She is critical of postmodernism and cultural constructivism which she sees as currently dominating the humanities.” She certainly has the credibility, and the chops, to assess the “conceptual penis” paper published only two days ago by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (B&L).

As you probably know, B&L’s paper, accepted and published by the journal Cogent Social Sciences, was a Sokal-ian hoax: a mishmash of jargon from gender studies written to demonstrate the low academic standards of some areas of the humanities, and exposing the willingness of those infected with postmodernism to promote “scholarship” congenial to their ideology. I wrote about the B&L paper on this site, and won’t go into its substance (or rather “non-substance”).  Nor will I rebut the many Regressive Leftist critics of that paper, for that’s what Pluckrose ably does in her Areo piece. You can find those criticisms everywhere simply by Googling “Boghossian Lindsay hoax”, and there’s a fair amount of criticism  in the comments following my original post.

I’ll list the five criticisms of B&L listed and dismantled by Pluckrose, giving one quote from her paper (indented) and adding a few comments of my own at the end. The bullet points are taken directly from her article; do read it to see her rebuttals. I’ve left out summaries of her rebuttals because I want you to see them in the paper,

  • The hoax isn’t really a hoax because it makes a good argument. 

 

  • The hoax targeted a bad journal which does not represent gender studies. Here’s part of Pluckrose’s response:

In stark contradiction to the criticism above, many defenders of gender studies have claimed that Cogent Social Sciences is widely known to be a bad journal and more reputable ones would not have taken it seriously. The problem with that is that it is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), ProQuest Social Science Journals, the British Library, Cabell’s International and many more of the largest indices. It is not highlighted as a problem in the much-relied upon Beall’s list of predatory journals and was recommended to Lindsay and Boghossian by the NORMA journal. It is part of the highly-regarded Taylor & Francis Group which confirms that Cogent offers thorough scholarly peer review and has all the “traditional values and high standards associated with Taylor & Francis and Routledge at its core.”

Even more significantly (and as shown by the first criticism), the language and “argument” of the hoax piece is indistinguishable from sincere gender studies publications from a range of academic journals. The Twitter account New Real Peer Review, which is dedicated to highlighting ludicrous theses, spent much of the day demonstrating this.

Pluckrose then gives links from that Twitter site to real academic papers. I’ve highlighted some on my own site over the last year, including papers on the white supremacy instantiated by Halloween pumpkins, feminist glaciology, the racism of Pilates, and the “otherness” of introduced squirrels. Lest you think these are an unrepresentative sample of a large and solid scholarly literature, the “Real Peer Review” site had highlighted over 1000 ludicrous papers in only four months, and, about a year ago, offended scholars had that account briefly shut down after threatening to expose its author, who feared retaliation simply for calling attention to bizarre and shoddy publications. It’s now back up, and you should follow it.

More criticisms rebutted by Pluckrose:

  • The hoax is a one-off and proves nothing.

 

  • The hoax is just another attack on the humanities/ Social Science by science.

 

  • The hoax was transphobic and sexist.

I’ll add just a few remarks of my own. First, those who respond by saying that over a thousand articles, of which B&L’s is one, are all cherry picked from a body of substantive and meaningful scholarship, then assume the onus of demonstrating that culture and gender studies really have produced a substantive body of knowledge compared to the time and money invested in research and writing. The critics haven’t done any such thing; they’ve merely attacked B&L for cherry picking. There is ample evidence, documented for in Sokal and Bricmont’s book—and Gross and Levitt’s 1994 book Higher Superstition—that much research in this area is trivial, obscurantist, and serves only to advance the careers of academics. The “cherry picking” claim resembles that of theologians, who say that a few examples of “bad theology” aren’t sufficient to discredit a body of work whose “best examples” are ignored. Having read a reasonable amount of theology, I’ve found this argument specious, and suspect, based on what reading I’ve done in academic humanities, that the same speciousness is true for claims in some areas of academic humanities. Again, I emphasize that much of the humanities is worthwhile: a boon to our species. But the trendy sort infected by postmodernism is a rotten edifice.

Finally, I find it amusing that those who implicitly defend cultural and gender studies by attacking B&L’s paper are often the same people who attack evolutionary psychology as a worthless discipline, despite the fact that evo psych has produced considerable insights into human behavior—far more insights, I suspect, than have been produced by postmodernist humanities scholars.

h/t: Grania

Are there more American atheists than we thought?

May 21, 2017 • 9:15 am

Surveys of the proportion of Americans who are atheists show an incidence of between 3% and 11%, but of course those are often phone surveys, and people may be reluctant to divulge their nonbelief.  That probably means that there are more atheists than those who admit it. And that’s the conclusion of two psychologists from the University of Kentucky, Will M. Gervais and Maxine B. Najle, who have a new paper up on “psyarxiv” that used a questionnaire to answer the question (link and reference below; I’m not sure if the paper has yet been accepted anywhere).

Their conclusion came, which came from two surveys of 2000 American adults is this: “[A]theist prevalence exceeds 11% with greater than .99 probability and exceeds 20% with roughly .8 probability”. . . “our most credible indirect estimate is 26% (albeit with considerable estimate and method uncertainty).”

They used a survey method I was unaware of: the “unmatched count technique”. This method involves giving people a list of personality and behavior traits, one of which was either “I believe in God” or “I do not believe in God”, depending on whether the survey asked respondents to identify the traits that “are NOT true for me” (“I believe in God”) or “are true of me” (“I do not believe in God”).  There were two lists, one including the God statement and the other omitting it; these were given to two independent groups of people. A third and independent group was asked to self report whether they believed in God. Here’s an example of the “negative” survey from the paper:

Note that there are nine items in column 2 and ten in column 3, which adds the “I believe in God” item that you’re suppose to consider whether it’s among those statements not true of you.

The incidence of atheism can then be gauged by simply looking at the difference in the number of statements given at the bottom of the two columns. Bayesian analysis of the data can then give you an estimate of the proportion of atheists in the sample. They also did a “positive” survey with six versus seven items that are supposed to be true of you. (There’s a control for credibility based on a math question, but you can read about that in the paper.)

The results (authors’ wording, my emphasis); the numbers in brackets are the 95% confidence limits from the Bayesian analysis:

1).  Sample I’s unmatched count data revealed atheism rates much higher than existing self-reports suggest: the most credible indirect measure estimate from Sample I is that 32% [11%, 54%] of Americans do not believe in God, Figure 1.

2). Sample II included a conceptual replication effort of Sample I’s indirect estimate by comparing the baseline and critical conditions. Sample II also included an additional condition assessing validity of the indirect count technique by comparing the baseline and mathematical impossibility conditions.

Sample II yielded an indirect atheism rate estimate of 20% [6%, 35%], Figure 1. This atheism estimate is lower than that in Sample I. Speculatively, this difference may reflect (among other things) a difference in how participants respond to positive versus negative framing of the unmatched count tasks. That is, Sample II primarily differed from Sample I in that it included a positive affirmation of atheism (agreeing with the statement “I do not believe in God”) rather than a more passive denial of theism as in Sample I.

3).  Our aggregate analysis, pooling across samples, provided an indirect atheism prevalence rate of 26% [13%, 39%]. Unsurprisingly, this estimate is intermediate between both samples’ individual point estimates, but with a tighter range of  plausible values than either alone.

The estimate of self-reported atheism in the survey is 17% (error limits 14% and 20%), which is, as expected, lower than the indirect reports, but still higher than previous estimates. This may reflect either a sampling issue or the fact that Americans are more likely to say they’re atheists on paper than in a telephone survey.  But the upshot is that as many as one in four Americans may be atheists.

Now the paper is a fair one, and does highlight its problems; read it for yourself. It also shows that the estimate of atheism is, as most of us know, higher among men than among women, among Democrats and Independents than among Republicans, and increases with level of education. The authors’ conclusions:

Existing nationally representative polls indicate that atheist prevalence is relatively low in the United States, perhaps only 3% (Pew, 2015) to 11% (Gallup, 2015). Given the heavy stigmatization of atheism (Edgell et al., 2006), we hypothesized that many atheists might be reluctant to disclose their disbelief to pollsters. We therefore deployed two nationally representative samples in an attempt to indirectly measure atheist prevalence using the unmatched count technique (Raghavarao & Federer, 1979). These indirect measures suggest that roughly one in four (26%) American adults may be atheists—2.4 to 8.7 times as many as telephone polls (Gallup, 2015; Pew, 2015) suggest. This implies the existence of potentially more than 80 million American atheists. The disparity between self-report and indirectly measured atheism rates underscores the potent stigma faced by atheists (Edgell et al., 2006; Gervais, 2013), as even in an anonymous online survey, about a third of American atheists may be effectively “closeted,” even in anonymous telephone polls.

The lesson for us: Atheists, while still heavily stigmatized in America, are increasing in number. Most will not admit it for obvious reasons. But the more of us willing to declare our nonbelief, the more likely it is that those in the “closet” will come out. So declare your atheism—loudly and proudly.

__________

Gervais, Will M, and Maxine B Najle. 2017. “How Many Atheists Are There?”. PsyArXiv. March 3.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 21, 2017 • 7:30 am

We have a first-time contributor today: reader Bob Jochums, who sends us Honorary Cats™ in the form of owl photos. His notes are indented:

We’ve had some success getting barred owls (Strix varia) to use a nesting box when it’s mounted fairly close to our home.  Even though we’ve got an acre plus of nicely forested land, we’ve attached the nest to a big pine so that we can see it, and what’s happening in it, from our sunroom.

This year our owl adults had a solo owlet so we named him (and yes, we don’t know it’s a “him”) Han, as in Han Solo.  Today was fledging day.  Early this morning he was on the landing branches on the face of the nesting box and then on the roof.  A couple hours later he had fledged and was on the metal railing leading down toward the backyard/forest.  After resting there a bit, he started attempting to climb trees and was successful after several attempts (couldn’t get going on a birch, got about 20 feet up a shagbark hickory which is about 12 inches in diameter before he lost his grip, and then got up a skinny tree that was leaning against a larger maple with limbs that were pretty much horizontal).  The final picture shows him on a nice perch after being joined by his mother.

All pictures were taken on May 19.

\

I asked Bob how a young owl could possibly climb up a tree. He responded and sent photographic proof:

When barred owl owlets leave the nest, their flying skills are rudimentary and often not very successful so they often end up on the ground or maybe in a bush  They’ve got to get back up in a tree where they’re safer from predators.  Here’s a picture of Han climbing a large tree yesterday. Owls use their talons and beak to grasp onto the bark and by flapping their wings, they walk their way up the trunk.  It’s quite a sight.

Indeed!

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 21, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s Sunday, May 21, 2017: National Strawberries and Cream Day. It’s also the Circassian Day of Mourning, commemorating the genocide of a people everyone forgets.

On this day in 1863, the Seventh-day Adventist Church was founded in Battle Creek, Michigan, and exactly 18 years later Clara Barton founded a more useful organization in Washington, D.C.: The American Red Cross.

On May 21, 1924, two University of Chicago students, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., murdered a random victim, 14-year-old Bobby Franks, just to see if they could get away with “the perfect crime”. They didn’t: they were caught because Leopold left his distinctive eyeglasses at the desolate site in Indiana where Franks’s body was dumped. The two men pleaded guilty, but Clarence Darrow, their lawyer, won a life sentence (plus 99 years) rather than execution after his justly famous and impassioned twelve-hour plea to the judge,  You can read about that magnificent speech here. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936; Leopold was released in 1958 and moved to Puerto Rico, where he died in 1971.

On this day in 1927 Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Field in Paris, finishing the world’s first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean and ensuring lifelong fame. Exactly five years later, Amelia Earhart landed in Northern Ireland, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

On May 21, 1936, Sada Abe was arrested after wandering the streets of Tokyo for days carrying the severed genitals of Kichizo Ishida, her lover whom she had strangled in an erotic marathon in a brothel. At the time it was a huge scandal in Japan and was depicted in the 1976 movie In the Realm of the Senses, notorious for its explicit sexual scenes. I liked the move, which is at once compelling, erotic, and disturbing; it earned a 84% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Here is Abe after her arrest in 1936. She doesn’t look very upset; in fact, everyone looks amused:

Abe spent about five years in prison and died some time around 1971, then living anonymously. Here’s a still from the movie in which Abe engages in erotic asphyxiation (you can see the YouTube trailer here):

Finally, on this day in 1982, Johnny Carson wrapped up  30 years hosting The Tonight Show with his final taping, featuring guests Robin Williams and Bette Midler.  Here’s his farewell:

Notables born on this day include Alexander Pope (1688), paleontologist Mary Anning (1799), Henri Rousseau (1844). Fats Waller (1904) and Al Franken (1951). Those who died on this day (in 1935) include just one notable: social reformer Jane Addams, who co-founded Hull House here in Chicago and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is as solipsistic as ever:

A: Because of the cold weather wisteria has only few flowers this year.
Hili: Well, yes, but I still look good next to it.
In Polish:
Ja: Przez te chłody wisteria ma w tym roku mało kwiatów.
Hili: No tak, ale i tak mi z nią do pyszczka.
 Finally, out in Winnipeg Gus has a new friend–a squirrel. His staff Taskin tells the tale and includes a photo of the female, who’s obviously nursing some pups:

There is a new red squirrel around. I had seen two of them around earlier but lately it’s just been the new one. She’s smaller, tap dances faster and is really noisy. I just snapped this photo of her at our feeder. I think we are in trouble….. She was helping herself to the bird feeder for at least  half an hour. No birds were allowed near it 🙂

 

UCLA pays students to advocate social justice and “educate their peers”

May 20, 2017 • 1:15 pm

If you haven’t read the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE’s) 2017 report on U.S. college “bias response teams”, you should, even though it’s long. FIRE found 231 such teams, with 143 at public institutions. Their purpose is to investigate cases of bias and issue reports about them, which may or may not involve disciplining any students, staff, or faculty involved. While such teams may serve a useful purpose in preventing harassment, they also pose a palpable danger to free speech–speech by both faculty and students.  The problem is that what constitutes a reportable offensive is invariably nebulous, so all kinds of stuff gets reported, including obvious cases of free speech. Have a look at FIRE’s list of reported incidents. I decided to just pick one at random without reading it and, I swear to Ceiling Cat, here it is (I turned the footnotes into links):

(You can also read a short summary of the FIRE report at The Washington Examiner.)

Hand in hand with the bias response teams go the reporters: the students who get upset or outraged enough to contact the teams. (Again, some of these reports are justified.) And some schools will actually hire students to either make reports, or, as in the case of the University of California at Los Angeles, to go among their peers advocating “social justice,” which of course is usually a form of Regressive Leftist Politics. As Campus Reform reports (yes, it’s a right-wing site, but who else would cover this?),

The University of California-Los Angeles is offering to pay students to serve as “Social Justice Advocates” who will “educate” their peers about “systems [of] oppression.”

The Social Justice Advocates program [JAC: note that the form has disappeared and is “closed”!] seeks students who want to help their classmates “navigate a world that operates on whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity as the primary ideologies,” and comes with a quarterly stipend, the amount of which has yet to be determined.

“Social Justice Advocates will systems [of] oppression and how they intersect and build upon each other to maintain the status quo,” the description continues. “Most importantly individuals and the collective will be empowered through liberatory scholarship and practices and strengthening their emotional intelligence to create change within their spheres of influence.”

The application for the inaugural students asks aspiring Social Justice Advocates to explain their interest in social justice, list their preferred gender pronouns (such as “zi” and “hir”), and describe any experience they have in facilitating workshops on “social justice” issues.

Successful applicants will join the inaugural cohort of 8-10 Social Justice Advocates for the upcoming fall semester, during which time they are expected to commit three hours per week to their duties, which include weekly meetings and crafting presentations.

The program is funded through the Bruin Excellence & Student Transformation Grant Program (BEST), which receives funding from the university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and from Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA.

The pilot program for Social Justice Advocacy involves several workshops, and here they are. I am not making them up:

All aboard the struggle bus!  This isn’t discussion and exploration of viewpoints, but indoctrination.

Is a public university supposed to be paying its undergraduates to inculcate their peers with such views? Yes, some of those views are good ones, but I thought that in college you were supposed to come to these conclusions yourself after a process of reading, listening, learning, and thinking—not have them shoved down your throat by hired Thought Goons.  Somehow when I was in college (1967-1971), the students managed to see the injustice of segregation and the futility and needless deaths of the Vietnam War—all of it without being harangued by hired “social justice advocates.”

 

h/t: BJ

The crazies reveal themselves

May 20, 2017 • 10:00 am

As Grania predicted, it was only a matter of time until Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay’s “hoax” article on the conceptual penis was construed as hate speech by Regressive Leftists—even though the reviewers and the journal saw the paper as pro-feminist and progressive.

And, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, we have our first Offended Person, flailing his horns around like a bull stuck by a picador:

https://twitter.com/danarel/status/865766609209532416

https://twitter.com/danarel/status/865766367785439232

https://twitter.com/danarel/status/865755800605569024

https://twitter.com/danarel/status/865696743966482432

The poor lad was SO infuriated he even thought that hoax paper was written by DAWKINS!

But wait–there’s more!

You will find other attacks on Boghossian and Lindsay on the thread of my original post. Bleeding Heart Libertarians published a critique of this hoax, calling it a “big cock up” because the journal was poor, but they missed the point, a point that one prescient commenter made:

I don’t know what all this proves, but it’s entertaining, like a soap opera unfolding.

Finally, for those misguided souls who argued that a publication in a substandard journal doesn’t prove anything, and that the standard of scholarship in other feminist or culture studies journals is high, see here, here, here, and here.

Caturday felid trifecta: A Ginormous cat, ninja cats, and a jerk cat

May 20, 2017 • 9:00 am

I saw the Aussie cat Omar on the news the other day, and was amazed. He’s huge! And he eats raw kangaroo meat!

As the BBC reports:

Omar was the same size as all the other kittens in his litter when he was taken home by his owner Stephy Hirst in 2013.

But now the 120cm (3ft 11in) Maine Coon from Melbourne, Australia, could be the world’s longest domestic cat.

After the supersized feline found internet fame to match, Ms Hirst said Guinness World Records contacted her to send in his measurements.

The current record-holder is a 118cm (3ft 10.5in) Maine Coon from Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

Ms Hirst started a social media account for Omar two weeks ago and one of her photos was shared on the Cats of Instagram account more than 270,000 times.

The usually placid pet has since been featured in major Australian newspapers and on national TV.

“He hasn’t really been coping with all the attention,” Ms Hirst told the BBC. “He had a little bit of a meltdown this morning.”

Omar typically rises at 05:00, eats a couple of scoops of dry cat food for breakfast, lounges around the house, plays in the backyard, naps on the trampoline and eats raw kangaroo meat for dinner.

“We buy human-grade kangaroo meat at the supermarket,” Ms Hirst said. “It’s the only meat we could find that he actually wants to eat.”

The overgrown pet has lots of personality and leaves lots of hair around the house.

Weighing in at 14kg (31lb), Omar is too heavy to regularly pick up. Ms Hirst has to use a dog crate to take him to the vet.

“He does take up a bit too much room on the bed so he gets locked out of the bedroom at night,” she said.

That’s horrible! Who wouldn’t want to sleep with a 31-pound cat???

Here’s a longer version (pardon the pun):

 

**********

The Cheezburger site has some nice gifs of “10 ninja cats caught in slow motion“, showing their incredible grace and athleticism. Here’s a sample of three:

*********

And a cat that’s a jerk (h/t: Barry):

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/865262035021574144