On internet anonymity

April 21, 2017 • 8:30 am

I always post under my own name, and also use my name when commenting on other sites. As I’ve written before, I think this should be standard practice on the Internet. It not only tells people who is commenting, but dampens the sort of nastiness, trolling, and name-calling that has caused so many websites to become toxic cesspools of discourse. People should take responsibility for their words spoken in public. Only a very few writers with websites or a public presence resort to pseudonyms, and the ones who don’t include those most endangered by public exposure: people like Maajid Nawaz, Sarah Haider, Ali Rizvi, Asra Nomani, and so on.  These people, who criticize Islam, are risking their very lives by exposing themselves, and they are brave folks. We who risk less should do no less.

Now many readers do use their real names here, and I appreciate that. I also appreciate, though, that there are good reasons for some to withhold their names: fear of “outing” as an atheist and its attendant ostracism (but the more people who come out, the more who will come out); fear of public exposure and harm, especially if you have children; and fear of intolerableharassment (sometimes valid, often not—after all, I get harassed several times a day on email and even by phone).  I think that pretty much exhausts the valid reasons.  Most of pseudonymity, I claim—though not necessarily on this site—is practiced by people who want to be free to say whatever they want without taking responsibility for their words. That’s not a good reason.

So I’m writing this to encourage (not demand!) posters to use their real names unless they have a good reason to do otherwise. If you want to maintain pseudonymity, I ask (again, not demand!) that you let us know why below. I’m asking not to pressure people, but simply to know if I’ve missed some good reasons why people don’t use their real names when posting.

Finally, remember that there’s a reason why newspapers demand that, when you publish a letter to the editor, you give your real name.

Thanks,
The Management

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 21, 2017 • 7:30 am

Once again I have begged some lovely animal photos from Pete Moulton. He lives in Phoenix, where these photos were taken, and his descriptions are indented.

*;) winking I haven’t traveled too far from home lately, so these are all from my usual haunts at Papago Park and the Gilbert Water Ranch.
American Avocet, Recurvirostra americana, in basic plumage, late February at Gilbert.
Black-necked Stilt Himantopus mexicanus, same day, same location, so now we have all the North American representatives of that Family.

Western Grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis) at Gilbert for this lot’s grebe du jour. I’m not delighted with this image because the lighting was so poor, but have never been so close to this species before, so I just had to try. You might wish to exclude this one, and I wouldn’t be disappointed. [JAC: it’s fine!]

Female Williamson’s Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus) at the Desert Botanical Garden. She spent about a week at that spot nectaring assiduously at the blooming aloes, and then decamped, much to latecomers’ disappointment.

Black-and-white Warbler (Mniotilta varia) in Gilbert. These little acrobats occur in Arizona every winter, but they are rare at best.

Male Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus) in Papago Park. These are abundant and familiar even to nonbirders in Arizona, but it wasn’t always so. Representatives of two different Mexican populations began to invade the state only in the late 1930s. And they aren’t done yet. They’re still expanding north and east, so that now there are breeding populations as far north as Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa. The males are beautifully iridescent.

And finally a couple of mammals: a female Round-tailed Ground Squirrel (Xerospermophilus tereticaudus) munching on a fallen mesquite catkin, and a Harris’s Antelope Squirrel (Ammospermophilus harrisii) with her head buried in a cactus flower.

Friday: Hili dialogue

April 21, 2017 • 6:30 am

Congratulations! We’ve almost made it through another work week, as it’s Friday, April 21, 2017. It’s also an odd food holiday: National Chocolate-Covered Cashews Day. An estimable comestible to be sure, but I’ve never had one. It’s also an important Rastafarian holiday in Jamaica: Grounation Day, honoring Haile Selassie’s 1966 visit to Jamaica.

On this day in 1509, Henry VIII became King of England on the death of his father, Henry VII. On April 21, 1918, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was shot down and killed after becoming Germany’s biggest Great War ace, having downed 80 Allied planes. Here’s a rare video of him and his famous three-winged Fokker Dr.I plane:

Finally, on this day in 1934, the most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster, the “surgeon’s photo” (it was supposedly taken by a London gynecologist), was published in the Daily Fail (below; I’m sure you’ve seen it). It was later shown to be a hoax: a toy model towed by a disgruntled Fail employee as a form of revenge:

Notables born on April 12 include Charlotte Brontë (1816), John Muir (1838), Garrett Hardin and Anthony Quinn (both 1915), Iggy Pop (1947), and Andie MacDowell (1958). Those who died on this day include Mark Twain (1910), John Maynard Keynes (1947), Nina Simone (2003), and Prince (just last year). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn. Hili is on the prowl:

Hili: I’m determined.
A: And where are you going?
Hili: I don’t know yet.
In Polish
Hili: Jestem zdeterminowana.
Ja: A dokąd idziesz?
Hili: Jeszcze nie wiem.

And out in Winnipeg, where Spring is arriving, Gus is pretending to be a polar bear on the tundra:

Squirrel loves tiny ice cream cones

April 20, 2017 • 2:30 pm

There’s not much I can add to this except that it’s a squirrel named Putter who, living above an ice cream shop (Fantasy Isle Ice Cream and Mini Golf in Holden Beach. North Carolina), gets two tiny cones a day. She also has a penchant for golf, ergo her name.

Whether such consumption is good for the squirrel I cannot say, but Putter sure loves her treats. Here are two videos about Putter:

Your host on NPR San Francisco tomorrow; topic is the Science March

April 20, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Tomorrow I’ll be on KQED, San Francisco’s National Public Radio station, between 9 and 10 a.m. Pacific Time (inclusive, so I’m told), discussing the Science March on the “Forum” show. I’m told that for the first half hour I’ll be conversing with Ken Caldeira (an ecologist and environmental scientist at the Carnegie Institution), one of the organizers of the science march, KQED’s science editor Craig Miller, and the host Mina Kim, and then at 9:30 (again Pacific Time) we’ll join in responding to listener calls and comments.

That’s 11 to noon Chicago time and noon to 1 p.m. Eastern time. If there’s breaking news, everything will be delayed by one hour.

You can listen live by clicking on the screenshot below and then clicking on the blue arrow.  I don’t know if there will be fireworks, but I’m game.

Ann Coulter banned at Berkeley

April 20, 2017 • 12:00 pm

I’ve always despised the conservative commentator Ann Coulter, especially for writing a book that largely made fun of those who accept evolution. In fact, I wrote a satirical piece for the New Republic excoriating her dumb anti-evolution book Godless (my piece, called “Coultergeist“, is free online).

But I’m also for free speech, which trumps (pardon the word) the perceived offensiveness of a speaker’s ideas. So I have big-time objections to the University of California’s canceling of Coulter’s speech at Berekeley planned for April 27—due to, as the Washington Post reports, “safety concerns”:

In a letter to a campus Republican group that invited Coulter to speak [Young America’s Foundation], university officials said Wednesday that they made the decision to cancel Coulter’s appearance after assessing the violence that flared on campus in February, when the same college Republican group invited right-wing provocateur and now-former Breitbart News senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos to speak. As the protest and clashes escalated during the Yiannopoulos’ event, some began setting fires, throwing rocks and molotov cocktails and attacking members of the crowd.

That’s ridiculous, for it motivates those who don’t like a speaker to threaten violence: what better way to shut someone down? (It’s worked well for Muslims, of course.) It’s Berkeley’s responsibility to muster enough security to protect Coulter and prevent violence. The WaPo adds this:

Coulter said in an email to The Washington Post on Wednesday that the university had been trying to force her to cancel her speech by “imposing ridiculous demands” on her but that she still agreed “to all of their silly requirements.” She said she believes that her speech “has been unconstitutionally banned” by the “public, taxpayer-supported UC-Berkeley.”

Coulter said the university insisted that her speech take place in the middle of the day, that only students could attend and that the exact venue wouldn’t be announced until the last minute. She said that she agreed with the conditions but that apparently wasn’t good enough.

“They just up and announced that I was prohibited from speaking anyway,” Coulter said, noting that her speech topic was to be immigration, the subject of one of her books. “I feel like the Constitution is important and that taxpayer-supported universities should not be using public funds to violate American citizens’ constitutional rights.”

In this Twitter post she vows to speak anyway. Good for her!

The University said they’ll try to reschedule Coulter’s visit for September, and their decision was made because they consider the safety of students paramount. Again, this just prompts people to threaten the safety of speakers and attendees as a way to censor speech they don’t like.

It’s telling that Robert Reich, a liberal who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and is now Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley, objected to this cancellation on his Facebook page:

h/t: Heather Hastie

The Regressive left and the Science March

April 20, 2017 • 10:30 am

What I thought was a fairly innocuous post about why I wasn’t participating in the Science March—but also didn’t discourage others from participating (mine was a personal decision that I didn’t want to foist on others)—turned out to inspire a lot of good discussion about what such a march should be, but also a fair amount of acrimony and arguments that I should be participating. Some people accused me, for instance,  hypocrisy, as when my claim that Bill Nye wasn’t the best honorary chair for a science march was characterized as my own deployment of identity politics. Of course there’s a difference: while you may think that Nye would be a good chair as a science popularizer, I don’t demonize people who favor Nye. It’s a suggestion, not a purity test!

So be it; with a public presence on this site, I draw criticism, and I can take it when it doesn’t verge on incivility. But these Facebook comments, posted by Lucas Lynch in response to my own post, are not only uncivil, but demonstrate exactly what’s wrong with the Science March and its infiltration by the Regressive Left:

Apparently I should not only leave science, but I “treat women and minorities like shit”. “M. K. A.”, whoever she is, apparently reached that conclusion solely because of my criticisms of the Science March. Unfortunately, I share the Leftism of most of the organizers and advocates; I just object to their excoriation of science itself for being a tool of bigotry, oppression, and murder.

This is the kind of demonization of the ideologically impure that divides the Regressive Left, and is sadly characteristic of the Science March. I’m not having it. As a friend said, “Criticizing the March is like being critical of Hillary Clinton. It’s not enough to vote for her, you have to vote for her enthusiastically and with a big happy smile on your lips and a song in your heart.”

When I talked to a reporter yesterday about my problems with the March, he said at the end that I sounded a tad defensive. That took me aback for a minute, as I didn’t think that I’m at all defensive about my position, and I don’t feel beleaguered by my critics.

But thinking about that statement, I realized that there’s one thing I am defensive about vis-à-vis the Science March. It’s both the air of sanctimoniousness surrounding the whole thing, which is manifested by “purity tests” (as when the Science March was excoriated for using the word “female” instead of “woman” in a tweet asking how “females” could be brought into engineering), and the censoriousness manifested in the first and third responses above, as if I’ve failed some kind of test. In my profession I’m used to free and open discussion of scientific ideas, and no suggestion is taboo. But that’s not true in Regressive Leftism: some positions aren’t just wrong, but taboo to mention, and if you do mention them you’re tarred for life (viz., Sam Harris’s remarks on torture and Hitchens’s support of the Iraq war).

We can do better than this. Inclusivity should encompass tolerance (discussion, not acceptance!) for not only human diversity, but diversity of ideas.  It’s the censorship that I’m defensive about

What’s wrong with a bit of tyranny for the greater good?

April 20, 2017 • 9:30 am

by Grania Spingies

A drive-by commenter named “Jaime” appeared yesterday evening when Jerry posted his commentary on the hoax that fooled the South African branch of the HuffPo. (Recall that the original piece published by HuffPo called for both removing the ability to vote from white men for several decades, and also confiscating and redistributing their property. “Jaime” apparently agrees.

It is  entirely possible that “Jaime”  (no longer able to post here as a result of PCC[E]’s decision) is a Poe who had trouble identifying when the joke has run its course. However, considering the number of people who actually defended the suggestions in the original HuffPo piece before the piece was taken down, the ideas put forward by this commenter are worth answering. Here’s the attempted comment:

Problem #1

When you come up with a brilliant idea that has one small flaw, in that it’s utterly unworkable and unenforceable, what you have is mental masturbation rather than a useful or thought-provoking philosophy.

Problem #2

This argument is functionally illiterate when it comes to the subject of statistics.

Let’s take the claim that “Virtually 100% of child molesters are men.” Even if one assumes this to be completely correct (it isn’t, but let’s hypothesize), it tells you nothing at all about how prevalent it is in society at large. A study conducted by Dr Michael Seto at Royal Ottawa Healthcare group to answer the question How many men are paedophiles? put the figure uppermost at 5% – note this was not an estimate of how many men actually abused children, but of how many men had sexual thoughts or fantasies about children, even if only once as opposed to an lifelong obsession. Five percent is a a potentially very serious figure, although one cannot assume that someone who commits a thoughtcrime is ever going to try to translate his fantasies into reality. However, the argument here is that it is not only acceptable but even desirable for society to censure 100% of the male population to attempt to hobble the 5%. For comparison, 40% of abused or molested children are attacked by a family member. Should we ban parents from rearing their children?

Here’s another: the average car owner can expect to be in 3 to 4 accidents in their lifetime. That’s 100% of car owners who can statistically expect an accident in their lifetime. And yet nobody seriously entertains the idea of putting all cars off the road with immediate effect. (But I look forward to the ascendancy of Google Smart Cars).

Problem #3

So you’re concerned about fairness, equality, safety and the well-being of the human race. It is curious – no, actually it beggars belief – that anyone thinks that you can make society more egalitarian and diminish human misery by making 50% of the world’s population second class citizens. It also beggars belief that someone who no doubt identifies as liberal thinks that is in any way a morally defensible position to effectively disenfranchise a group based on the behaviour of a minority of that group. How does anyone not see the ground being dug out underneath their own feet with this tactic?

Let me put it more plainly: how are you going to condemn racist attacks on Muslims or on People of Color when you’ve just argued that it is morally not only acceptable but desirable to judge and censure an entire social group based solely on the the actions of a minority of that group?

This line of thinking is morally bankrupt and intellectually idiotic. There can be no basis for arguing that society should be fair or egalitarian if you think that the tactics that should be used to achieve it are ones that are discriminatory, divisive and punitive based on skin color or genitalia.

Anyone who thinks that such tactics will only be used by people with whom they agree and who think exactly like they do is the sort of person who buys the Brooklyn Bridge from a smooth-talking con artist.

The PuffHo piece was not a clever thought-exercise, and those who liked it, like erstwhile reader “Jaime,” were not morally virtuous. It’s the philosophical equivalent of running off the edge of a cliff and wondering why there is suddenly a yawning chasm underneath your feet.

[JAC: I’ll add here that “Jaime” wasn’t brave enough to use his/her real name and stand behind their comment. It’s cowardice]