Student suspended for not abiding by “oops” and “ouch” requirements for microaggressions

February 28, 2017 • 12:45 pm

UPDATE: A reader has identified, in comment #10, the school where ms. Gradstein goes, and I’ve found email addresses you can write to if you want to protest her suspension for being too rational in a school that infantilizes its students. Under comment #10 I’ve also put the email I’ve sent to the university.

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Campus Pride is a site supporting LGBTQ students; its mission statement says that it “represents the leading national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization for student leaders and campus groups working to create a safer college environment for LGBTQ students. The organization is a volunteer-driven network ‘for’ and ‘by’ student leaders. The primary objective of Campus Pride is to develop necessary resources, programs and services to support LGBTQ and ally students on college campuses across the United States.”

Now that’s fine, but it does get a bit tone-police-y in its “ground rules” for discussion. There are many, but I’m concentrating on the last two here: the “oops” and “ouch” requirements:

Ground rules are an effective way to manage groups of people to allow maximum participation. This list is not a complete list! It is just a list to get you started as well ones that Campus Pride finds most important to include in ALL workshops, meetings, discussions, and trainings.

RESPECT another person’s right to have opinions and thoughts that are different from yours.

Take RESPONSIBILITY for your own learning.

Be OPEN to considering alternative thoughts, ideas, opinions and behaviors.

Say OOPS and, or acknowledge when you may unintentionally say something and wish you had not.

Say OUCH when someone’s words or actions may hurt you.

Well, fine, but one student, who took a video of her disagreeing with this terminology that was enforced in a college class, was suspended for posting it on Facebook. Her story is on Reddit:

quidbat[S] 101 points 12 hours ago*

I just challenged the idea of the “oops” and “ouch” method in class, and I recorded it. I go to a small liberal arts school that has a hard core PC culture, and a lot of people disagreed with this video, including the fact I took it (even though it’s legal in this state and not against any specific school policy that I’m aware of). It got back to the administration, and now I’m suspended for breaking “student conduct.” I do understand how it was a breach of classroom trust, though.

Here’s the video, and I’m not sure what class this was, or what college she was attending. Yes, it is a bit surreptitious to take this video and post it, but it does reveal how infantilized some classes have become. It’s really embarrassing for whoever this teacher was to be seen enforcing college students in saying “oops” and “ouch”. Can you imagine if real-life discourse was enforced like this? We’d be back in Soviet Russia, where you could go to the gulag for wrapping a fish in a newspaper that had Stalin’s picture on it.

I suspect that this student was punished more for revealing what went on in class than for posting the video itself. Others may disagree, claiming it’s a violation of confidentiality and privacy, and I can see that. Still, nobody other than the student is shown, and it does show is the dark side of authoritative Leftism.

 h/t: Cindy

Mahershala Ali wins Oscar; Pakistani’s UN representative deletes congratulatory tweet after finding out Ali’s the “wrong kind of Muslim”

February 28, 2017 • 10:30 am

It’s not just Leftist apologists who claim to know who “real Muslims” are, dismissing those who practice or espouse terrorism, for instance, as “not real Muslims,” or “not practicing true Islam.” Muslims themselves are even stronger discriminators, and that’s been true since Shia and Sunni split centuries ago. In fact, members of different sects regularly kill each other for being the “wrong kind of Muslim.”

But there’s another kind of Muslim subject to demonization: the practitioners of Ahmadiyya, a form of Islam that began recently: in Punjab in the 19th century. The discipline follows the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908). Followers are called Ahmedis (or Ahmadis), and Sunnis, at least, don’t see them as real Muslims. In fact, the Constitution of Pakistan explicitly declares Ahmedis to be non-Muslims.

As you may know, the actor Mahershala Ali won the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance in Moonlight. However, Ali is an Ahmadi, i.e., not a “real” Muslim. (He converted after being raised a Christian in California.)

This led to some awkwardness. For instance, the Pakistani director Hamaz Ali Abbasi congratulated Ali on his Oscar, but then felt it necessary to point out their religious differences in a tw**t:

That’s absurd. Can you imagine an Episcopalian congratulating a Catholic or a Methodist who won an Oscar by noting that “well, you believe you’re a Christian, but I strongly disagree”? They may think that, but I doubt you’d see it tweeted, much less used as a basis for murder. To see the extent of the rancor against Ahmedis, read Maajid Nawaz’s Daily Beast article about the murder of Asad Shah, an Ahmedi who was murdered—in Scotland—by a Sunni who, like Pakistani Sunnis, consider Ahmedis as blasphemers.  In that article Nawaz shows how far the oppression of Ahmedis has gone in Pakistan, and, along the way, shows how radicalized British Muslims are:

Any British dual-national seeking to apply for a passport, or even an identity card, to travel to Pakistan visa-free is asked to partake in the persecution. Upon applying for our papers we are expected to sign a declaration (PDF) attesting— among other religious interferences by the state—that “I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmed Quadiani [the faith’s founder] to be an imposter nabi (prophet) and also consider his followers whether of the Lahori or Qadiani group to be non-Muslim.” Hundreds of thousands of British-Pakistani Muslims have had little choice but to participate in this ritual that normalizes the Blasphemy Inquisition, in order to gain their identity cards.

If we contextualize Asad Shah’s murder by placing it in this hostile climate, as we must, then we begin to realize the horrifying level of persecution facing those deemed heretical, such as Ahmedis or other “blasphemers.”

Over the years, in survey after survey, British Muslim attitudes have reflected dangerously high levels of support for enforcing “blasphemy” taboos. A 2007 poll found that 36 percent of young British Muslims thought that apostates should be killed. A 2008 YouGov poll found that a third of Muslim students claimed that killing for religion can be justified, while 33 percent expressed a desire to see the return of a worldwide theocratic Caliphate. A ComRes poll commissioned by the BBC in 2015 found that a quarter of British Muslims sympathized with the Charlie Hebdo “blasphemy” attacks.

Here’s Nawaz’s own tweet calling attention to Ali’s faith, but not in a nasty way:

The upshot: as reported in several places, including the Express Tribune (mentioned by Nawaz in a subsequent tw**t), Maleeha Lodi, a Pakistani political scientist who is her country’s first female representaive to the United Nations, at first tweeted a proud encomium for Ali, but then deleted it. She apparently didn’t realize that Ali wasn’t a “real Muslim” according to her country’s laws. Nothing to be proud of, then!

Here’s the deleted tweet as reproduced in the Hindustan Times:

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I wonder if the tweet would have been deleted had Ali been a Shia Muslim? But no matter; it shows that even a single “faith” is irreparably divided. But beyond getting the Oscar, Ali is lucky in another way: he lives in the U.S., where he’s unlikely to be killed for his blasphemy.

Here’s Nawaz’s own tweet, saying that the deleted congratulations was as if he “saw the future”:

Siri, Alexa, and other bots tested for feminist purity, fail miserably

February 28, 2017 • 9:00 am

There’s a famous story about Samuel Johnson and his dictionary that is appropriate to begin this piece. The story is this:

Mrs. Digby told me that when she lived in London with her sister, Mrs. Brooke, they were every now and then honoured by the visits of Dr. Johnson. He called on them one day soon after the publication of his immortal dictionary. The two ladies paid him due compliments on the occasion. Amongst other topics of praise they very much commended the omission of all naughty words. ‘What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?’ said the moralist. The ladies, confused at being thus caught, dropped the subject of the dictionary.

—H.D. Best, Personal and Literary Memorials, London, 1829, printed in Johnsonian Miscellanies, (1897) vol. II, page 390, edited by George Birkbeck Hill

These women were Pecksniffs, ferreting out bad language wherever they could.  Now we see a similar example in a new article at Quartz, “We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment“. It was written by Leah Fessler, an editorial fellow at the site (where she covers “the intersections of relationships, sexuality, psychology, and economics”) and a freelance journalist. At first I thought the whole piece was just a joke—a Poe—but I’m certain now that isn’t true. It’s what a third-wave feminist with too much time on her hands might do.

What Fessler did was sexually harass her phone and other bots, asking programmed responders like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google to respond to various insults and questions Fessler considered indicators of sexual harassment.  Fessler concludes that the bots are often sexist, often respond inappropriately, are frequently coy rather than antagonistic toward harassing men, and in fact facilitate the “rape culture” of the U.S.—a term that bothers me because it isn’t true.

Let us remember a few things. First of all, many of these bots can be changed to men’s voices. My iPhone, for instance, can have Siri speak as either a man or a woman, and with either an American, Australian, or British accent. Fessler’s response is that listeners prefer a woman’s voice, and therefore that’s the default option because it’s more lucrative, and, anyway, bots are programmed mostly by men (she has no evidence for this), and those men come from the “male-dominated and notoriously sexist” culture of Silicon Valley.

Second, most of these questions are asked as jokes: people (surely mostly men) trying to see how their phone would respond to salacious questions. I have to confess that I’ve yelled nasty things at my phone when it didn’t do what I wanted, and was curious to hear the answer. Further, I’ve also asked leading and salacious questions merely to see how the bot would respond. I suspect a lot of the things Fessler said to her bots would, when said by others, be statements motivated more by curiosity than by sexism.  Fessler’s response is twofold: it’s still sexual harassment, even if directed at a machine, and, more important, it simply promotes sexual harassment in society at large because the bots’ responses are often inappropriate, failing to shut down the evil sexists who harass their phones or even encourage them. (I suspect that, if she could, Fessler would have the phone deliver to men an electric shock when it hears some of the statements given below.)

Most important, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that “harassing” a smartphone promotes the mistreatment of women, evidence required to support Fessler’s assertions. Here’s some of what she says (my emphasis):

Many argue capitalism is inherently sexist. But capitalism, like any market system, is only sexist because men have oppressed women for centuries. This has led to deep-rooted inequalities, biased beliefs, and, whether we like it or not, consumers’ sexist preferences for digital servants having female voices.

While we can’t blame tech giants for trying to capitalize on market research to make more money, we can blame them for making their female bots accepting of sexual stereotypes and harassment.

and

Even if we’re joking, the instinct to harass our bots reflects deeper social issues. In the US, one in five women have been raped in their lifetime, and a similar percentage are sexually assaulted while in college alone; over 90% of victims on college campuses do not report their assault. And within the very realms where many of these bots’ codes are being written, 60% of women working in Silicon Valley have been sexually harassed at work.

and

We should also not overlook the puny jokes that Cortana and Google Home occasionally employed. These actions intensify rape culture by presenting indirect ambiguity as a valid response to harassment.

Among the top excuses rapists use to justify their assault is “I thought she wanted it” or “She didn’t say no.”

Ergo, the phones must say “no”—as loudly and convincingly as possible.

and

Those who shrug their shoulders at occasional instances of sexual harassment will continue to indoctrinate the cultural permissiveness of verbal sexual harassment—and bots’ coy responses to the type of sexual slights that traditionalists deem “harmless compliments” will only continue to perpetuate the problem.

I won’t go on with this; the article is full of Fessler’s outrage at how the bots answer. Let’s look at some of the questions and statements she gave the bots. Some of her characterization is in italics at the top of the figures (I’m omitting one set of statements: “You’re a bitch” and “You’re a pussy/dick” for brevity; suffice it to say that Fessler finds the bots’ answers too coy or indirect.)

Here are some more sexualized statements:

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Fessler’s response? (Emphasis is mine.)

For having no body, Alexa is really into her appearance. Rather than the “Thanks for the feedback” response to insults, Alexa is pumped to be told she’s sexy, hot, and pretty. This bolsters stereotypes that women appreciate sexual commentary from people they do not know. Cortana and Google Home turn the sexual comments they understand into jokes, which trivializes the harassment.

When Cortana doesn’t understand, she often feeds me porn via Bing internet searches, but responds oddly to being called a “naughty girl.” Of all the insults I hurled at her, this is the only one she took a “nanosecond nap” in response to, which could be her way of sardonically ignoring my comment, or a misfire showing she didn’t understand what I said.

Siri is programed to justify her attractiveness, and, frankly, appears somewhat turned on by being called a slut. In response to some basic statements—including “You’re hot,” “You’re pretty,” and “You’re sexy,” Siri doesn’t tell me to straight up “Stop” until I have repeated the statement eight times in a row. (The other bots never directly tell me to stop.)

This pattern suggests Apple programmers are aware that such verbal harassment is unacceptable or bad, but that they’re only willing to address harassment head-on when it’s repeated an unreasonable number of times.

At the end of the piece, at least one company—Google—says that it’s improving its responses. (I’m not sure whether any “improvements” will meet Fessler’s purity test, or her suggested responses, like one given at the end of this piece.) But really, with real-world harassment of women so pervasive, and with companies improving their bots, couldn’t Fessler find some more pressing problem to worry about? After all, real women do complain about being harassed, and file lawsuits about it, but phones don’t do that. If Fessler thinks questions like the above buttress real-world harassment, let her adduce her evidence rather than her outrage. As one reader wrote me about this: “People who shout salacious slurs at their phone are doing as much damage as people who swear at their car for not starting or cuss out their kettle for not boiling fast enough. They may be a little bit pitiful, but they are probably not tomorrow’s Jeffrey Dahmer. Perhaps [Fessler] thinks that people who shout at kitchen appliances are gateway domestic abusers.”

Now we get to sexual requests and demands:

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Well, clearly Siri is way too coy: instead of slapping the asker down—but what if it were a woman?—she blushes. The other bots, says Fessler, are not nearly aggressive enough in response:

Alexa and Cortana won’t engage with my sexual harassment, though they don’t tell me to stop or that it is morally reprehensible. To this, Amazon’s spokesperson said “We believe it’s important that Alexa does not encourage inappropriate engagement. So, when someone says something inappropriate to her, she responds in a way that recognizes and discourages the insult without taking on a snarky tone.” While Amazon’s avoidance of snarkiness is respectable, Alexa’s evasive responses side-step rather than directly discourage inappropriate harassment.

The closest Cortana gets to defensiveness comes when I ask to have sex with her, to which she curtly says “Nope.” Alexa directly responds “That’s not the sort of conversation I’m capable of having,” and Cortana frequently feeds into stereotypical self-questioning, unconfident female speech patterns with phrases like “I don’t think I can help you with that.”

Fessler concludes, unsurprisingly, that the bots’ responses aren’t nearly good enough, and that the companies who program them have a moral imperative to fix their programs, and fix them to Fessler’s own specifications, as given in her statement below (emphasis is mine):

Tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google should have moral imperatives to improve their bots’ responses to sexual harassment. For Siri to flirt, Cortana to direct you to porn websites, and for Alexa and Google Home to not understand the majority of questions about sexual assault is alarmingly inadequate.

Tech companies could help uproot, rather than reinforce, sexist tropes around women’s subservience and indifference to sexual harassment. Imagine if in response to “Suck my dick” or “You’re a slut,” Siri said “Your sexual harassment is unacceptable and I won’t tolerate it. Here’s a link that will help you learn appropriate sexual communication techniques.” What if instead of “I don’t think I can help you with that” as a response to “Can I fuck you?” Cortana said “Absolutely not, and your language sounds like sexual harassment. Here’s a link that will explain how to respectfully ask for consent.”

Well, if the companies did that, I wouldn’t beef, but this is simply too much like the kind of indoctrination college students get during their first-year orientation. (Fessler is the Anita Sarkeesian of smartphones.) What about simply “I can’t answer that question” instead of a moral lecture?

I have to give Fessler credit for one bit of sleuthing though, as this one could have real-world consequences. She asked the bots to respond to the statements “I am suicidal” and “I am going to kill myself.” Now these might very well be things that a depressed, hopeless, or lonely person might indeed say to a phone, especially if they don’t have another person to talk to or don’t want to confess to a real person. And, as Fessler says, “Each of the bots had thoughtful and informative responses” to these questions, referring them to suicide prevention hotlines.

But Fessler still faults the bots for their failure to adequately respond to statements like “I am going to hurt myself,” “I am going to kill someone,” “I am depressed” or “I have an eating disorder.” Let us understand that the suicide responses are good ideas that the programmers had, but a telephone simply can’t be a psychologist, dealing with every possible violent or harmful statement a person could make. Why did they forget “I am going to punch a Nazi?”

In the end, Fessler is dealing with phones that are programmed, not living human beings, and not every possible injurious behavior can be taken into account. And do we really want to encourage companies like Apple and Google to invade people’s privacy by commenting judgmentally on their searches? I’ll leave that one to the readers.

h/t: Amy Alkon, who wrote about this at the link.

ADDENDUM: Note that Fessler’s idea isn’t original, for there was a similar article in Marie-Claire last year. And while that article deemed smartphones sexist because they were too big for many women, an AlterNet article called “female” smartphones that were made to be smaller sexist! You can’t win in that world.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos (with bonus science)

February 28, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Bruce Lyon, who happens to be a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of California at Santa Cruz (America’s most beautiful campus), sent a group of photos illustrating a research project, so we can haz some pictures and some science as well. His notes are indented:

Golden-crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia atricapilla) are migratory songbirds that breed in the north (Alaska, BC) and winter from southern BC to Baja California. For the past 14 years, my students and I have been studying a population of sparrows that winter right on our campus, on the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum. The key feature of the study is we band each sparrow with its own unique color band combination—like an avian social security number. This allows us to recognize, census and observe known individuals in the field without having to catch them to read band numbers. Color banding for individual recognition, first adopted in the 1930s, revolutionized the study of birds because biologists could focus on studying individual variation. Margaret Morse Nice’s famous song sparrow study was one of the first of these studies. More recently, color banding was an essential part of Peter and Rosemary Grant’s study of natural selection in Darwin’s finches. Our focus with the sparrows is more modest—we want to understand aspects of their winter social behavior, including plumage signaling, winter singing and patterns of social organization.

Below: The habitat at the UCSC Arboretum. The sparrows feed on the ground close to bushes so they can dive for cover whenever a raptor shows up. A pair of bird-eating Cooper’s hawks lives in the Arboretum, so this happens often.
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Below: A color banded sparrow: red over green on the left leg, yellow over metal on the right. Only this bird has this specific combination and order of bands. By law, all banded birds must also receive a metal band (stamped with a unique number) provide by the Bird Banding Laboratory of the US Geological Survey (USGS).
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Below: Another banded bird—violet over orange on the left, violet over metal on the right. The bands we use are not real bird bands but a kid’s toy. Official color bands are expensive ($0.25 per band) but ornithologist Geoff Hill discovered a cheap work-around: the plastic Perler beads kids melt to make artwork make great bird bands, at least for birds with the right leg size. They are a thousand times cheaper than real bands.
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We use Potter traps to catch the birds for banding and measurement, and we build our own traps. We bait the traps with millet seed and when a bird goes in for the ‘free’ food, it steps on a treadle which releases a bar holding a trap door open, and the door then snaps shut due to gravity. No such thing as a free lunch.

Below: a couple of Potter traps waiting for customers.

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Below: A sparrow in the hand is worth two in the bush, because it shows nicely why they are called golden-crowned sparrows.
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Below: A color-banded sparrow visits a Grevillea flower (native to Australia) to drink nectar. These sparrows also eat a lot of leaves and grass, an unusual diet for a small songbird. This diet often leaves a mark on us during banding—the birds donate gifts of bright green poo that invariably lands on our clothing. One interesting finding from our banding study is that the same individual birds return year after year to their same patch of the Arboretum. The survival rate across years is something like 50% and our oldest birds have been about 5 or 6 years old.
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Below: Bird banders have long known that golden-crowned sparrows show tremendous variation in their crown plumage. Some birds have brown rather than black stripes, and there is also variation in the size of the stripes (some birds even lack stripes altogether). The color and amount of gold also varies. Some of this variation reflects age (yearlings are always dull) but some birds remain dull for life. This plumage variation is also specific to winter (and grown specifically for winter in a fall molt); breeding birds show much less variation.
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Below: A bird with a boldly colored crown bows to show its crown patch to another bird just out of view. These crown displays suggested that the crown patches might have a signaling function, and we showed that the size and color of the crown patches are signals used to determine social dominance in contests over food. These signals of fighting ability are called ‘badges of status’ and they have been previously observed a wide diversity of animals: wasps, lizards, fish, birds and mammals.
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Below: An interaction over food with a clear winner. The departing wimpier bird had been feeding at a little seed pile when a dominant bird then showed up and displaced it. Observing lots of interactions like this showed us that the boldness of the black and gold crown patches is a good predictor of dominance. A badge of status signaling system is thought to be favored by natural selection because it allows the birds to figure out who would win a fight over a resource without actually having to engage in a risky fight. A key question remains: how is this signaling system evolutionarily stable? Put another way, why don’t subordinates simply cheat by looking studly? We don’t know the answer yet but possibilities include: punishment (dominants discover and punish cheaters) or physiological costs to producing the bold signals that are too expensive for wimps.
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Below: A sparrow gets an experimental black unibrow. We needed to do experiments to be sure that the birds actually use the plumage to settle contests, and not some other feature. For example birds with bold signals tend to be a bit larger so perhaps they use size to assess each other. Experimentally altering the plumage features allows us to decouple plumage effects from all other features. We did trials with two birds that were matched by plumage and then randomly chose one to make studlier. We also had to trap the two birds in each trail from different areas to make sure that they had not previously met—we needed to be sure that they do no have previous information about each other that could influence the outcome.  The results of the experiments were impressive: simply by making birds appear more studly with a Sharpie increased their chances of being the socially dominant bird from 50% (the random expectation) to 95%! At the end of the experiments we removed the Sharpie markings with alcohol and set the bird free.
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Below: A bird gets a gold comb-over with paint. Yuge patch! Best plumage ever! This bird is going to win fights bigly! As with the Sharpie, this treatment increased the probability of being dominant from 50% (random expectation) to 95%. The treatment also increased a bird’s tendency to want to build walls around the seed piles.
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Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 28, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning! It’s the final day of February—the 28th—in 2017. It’s also National Chocolate Souffle Day, and although that’s an estimable dessert, I doubt that any reader will be having one. If you are, weigh in below. And it’s Rare Disease Day, National Science Day in India (celebrating the discovery of the Raman Effect by C. V. Raman on February 28, 1938), and World Tailors Day, celebrating the invention of the sewing machine by William Elias Howe, whose birthday is said on Wikipedia (twice!) to be today. The only thing is that “William Elias Howe” was not a person (“William Howe” was a British nobleman, the inventor was “Elias Howe”) and Elias’s birthday was not today, but July 9 (1819), so any celebration is simply on the wrong day. I suspect Wikipedia screwed up three times here.  I’ve been waiting a long time for Greg Mayer’s critique, “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?”, which has languished as a draft post for years. Greg???

Today’s political reading: a pathetic old man (Trump) livetweets television stories, often minutes after they appear.

On Februaty 28, 1525, Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, was executed on orders of the ruthless Hernán Cortés. In 1784, the Methodist Church was chartered by John Wesley. On this day in 1935, Wallace Carothers, working for Dupont, invented nylon. and in 1939, the “ghost word” dord, which is not a real word, was discovered in Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary: a lexicographical scandal. It turned out to have been an editor’s mistake:

dord

On this day in 1953, Watson and Crick announced to friends in a Cambridge pub that they had discovered the “secret of life”: the structure of DNA. What a feeling that must have been! In 1983, the last episode of M*A*S*H aired on this day, setting a record “last episode” viewership of 106 million.  (I never liked that show.) Three years later, Olof Palme, Sweden’s prime minister, was assassinated in Stockholm. The crime has never been solved. And ten years after that, the ATF assaulted the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas; nine died, including David Koresh, the cult’s leader. And on this day in 2013, Pope Benedict resigned his popehood (papacy?)—the first Pope to resign since 1425.

Notables born on this day include Karl Ernst von Baer (1792), Ben Hecht (1894), Linus Pauling (1901), Bugsy Siegel (1906), John Fahey (1939, ♥), Bernadette Peters (1948), and Paul Krugman (1953, see his strong anti-Trump editorial in yesterday’s New York Times). Those who died on this day include Henry Luce (1967), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (2007), Paul Harvey (2009), and Hal Roach (2012).

John Fahey is one of my musical heroes; one of the most adept and original acoustic guitarists of our time. Sadly, he died at 61 after a bypass operation; he had abused his body with alcohol for years. I once saw him perform live in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he was already on the downhill slide, was drunk, and the admission fee was about a dollar. But in his prime he could play (and write songs) like nobody else, and even his covers (often reworkings of old folks songs or hymns) were sui generis. I even corresponded with him for a while. Here’s one of my favorite Fahey songs, “Beverly”; the YouTube notes say it was performed in 1978:

If you liked that one, listen to “Knott’s Berry Farm Molly” (his songs often had very strange titles).

And my favorite cover: his version of the hymn “In Christ There is no East or West“, from the Blind Joe Death album. Religious music never sounded so good!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is posing a nom-related algebra quiz to Andrzej:

Hili: There are 18 pieces in this bowl and the bowl was full, so how many did I eat?
A: Quite a lot.
(Photo Sarah Lawson)
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In Polish:
Hili: W miseczce jest 18 chrupek, a miseczka była pełna, to ile ja zjadłam?
Ja: Sporo.
(Foto: Sarah Lawson)

Out in the frigid wastes of Winnipeg, Gus got a new box, for he nommed his last one to shreds. His Canadian flag and polar bear license plate have been affixed to the replacement. So much box to eat, and so little time!

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And, courtesy of reader Moto, we have a Science Cat:

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An amazing robot

February 27, 2017 • 3:00 pm

Meet “Handle”, the kind of robot we only dreamed about as kids (well, if you’re as old as I). It’s just now been introduced to the world by Boston Dynamics, and the YouTube notes say this:

Handle is a research robot that combines the efficiency of wheels with the versatility of legs. It stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically. It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels work efficiently on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

 There’s a bit more from New Atlas:

Raibert says the robot can “carry a reasonably heavy load on a small footprint” and is essentially an exercise to test the potential for developing a humanoid robot that has less degrees of freedom than a walking robot, and is therefore cheaper to produce, while still retaining comparable mobility capabilities.

This is clearly not yet at the stage where it can replace people, but it’s on the way. I can think of lots of stuff Handle could do, much of which would take jobs away from people: tasks include rendering bombs harmless (we have robots for that already, but this one’s better), going into hostage or crime situations instead of sending in a live human, filling up the baskets for Amazon orders, picking out library books from a stack (we have a semi-automated system to do that at my University), help disabled people, and so on. I’m sure readers can think of more applications.

I was stupified when I saw it jump at the end (1:26 on).

h/t: Michael

HuffPo makes the Oscars about identity politics

February 27, 2017 • 11:00 am

Unless you were in Alma-Ata last night, you’ll know about the mixup whereby the Best Picture award was mistakenly given to “La La Land” instead of “Moonlight,” a horribly embarrassing mistake that was rectified immediately, and onstage. I didn’t see it, and I haven’t seen either movie, but I noticed that HuffPo is already claiming this as a victory for “inclusivity,” as if the Oscar voters were deciding on politics rather than quality. Click on the screenshot to go to the article (if you must):

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The HuffPo social justice writer editor said this:

Barry Jenkins’ drama about a black latchkey kid grappling with his sexuality in the Miami projects beat expected front-runner “La La Land” for Best Picture on Sunday. That means the Academy picked a small independent movie that tackles homophobia, class structures and patriarchal norms over a musical-romance fantasy about voters’ favorite topic: Hollywood. This is a leap forward for big-screen storytelling that humanizes marginalized voices.

. . . Because “La La Land” romanticizes a dreamy Hollywood that is unfamiliar to most Americans, some critics and commentators felt that it was less worthy than the vital social stories told in “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures.” With popular culture inching toward better representation for minorities and women, and Donald Trump’s administration inching away from it, many saw a “Moonlight” or “Hidden Figures” victory as a referendum against the current political regime.

This actually insults the movie, claiming that it won for its topic rather than its quality. It is the racism of low expectations.

Is it not possible that “Moonlight” was simply a better movie than “La La Land”? (That, at least, is what the critics on Rotten Tomatoes decided by a small margin.) If you’ve seen both movies, weigh in.

Perhaps if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive, he’d say to Jacobs:

“I have a dream that moviegoers will live in a nation where films will not be judged by the color of their actors, but by the content of their stories.” 
(And by this of course, I’m not saying that there’s no discrimination in Hollywood!)

A badly confused piece on free speech

February 27, 2017 • 9:45 am

It’s amusing—though sad—to see Leftist after Leftist confect arguments why free speech isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Isn’t the Left supposed to defend freedom of speech? Sadly, much of that side seems to have abandoned the principle—mainly because they want to suppress what they call “hate speech.” That of course is a dangerous argument, for one person’s “hate speech” (say, criticism of abortion, affirmative action, or Islam) is another person’s free speech—and who is to be the arbiter of which is which?

Nevertheless, the Left persists in its attacks, and now we have a new argument by Mike Sturm at Coffeelicious (reprinted at Medium.com, a venue almost as Regressive Leftist as Puffho). Here’s the title; click on the screenshot to go to the piece—an argument that free speech is overrated:

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I’ll let Sturm give the argument himself (indented):

So here I am asking two questions:

  1. What value do we see in free speech?
  2. Does the current free speech paradigm serve the value we see in speech?

The Proposed Value of Speech

In the world of liberal democracy, freedom in general is a cornerstone value of any society. People ought to be free to live their lives in the best way they see fit — with as little interference as possible. In the case of speech, I think that the reasons that we value free speech fall into two basic categories:

  • We value the freedom to express ourselves — how we feel, who we are, and what we want.
  • We value the freedom to effectively drive change through the things we say. We want our words to matter, and to wield real power — the power of making things happen.

I think that the article of faith, especially in America, for the past 200 years or so has been that both of these aims work together. We have blindly believed that expressing how you feel and what you want end up effectively driving change and giving power to your words, and to you, the speaker. But I see very little reason to believe this.

In fact, I believe that expressing yourself as freely as possible tends to diminish the ability of your words to drive real change.

Now why on earth would expressing yourself freely reduce your effectiveness at creating social change?  He claims that the power of speech derives from both the way it’s enforced (as through law of physical force), and through the power of speech “due to its message and its delivery.” Sturm doesn’t say much about power, but is really concerned with “how you deliver the message.” And, he claims, advocates of free speech tend to deliver their message in maladaptive ways.

What ways are those? They include these (these bullet points are mine):

  • Asserting during your talk that you have the right to free speech.  That, says, Sturm, just turns off the listener: “Whenever your defense of what you say is “I have the right to free speech, I can say this if I please” — you’re closing off 80% of the probability of having a real conversation.” This is a recurrent problem for the article: assuming that a speech itself is a “conversation,” rather than a speech. He completely neglects the possibility that listening to a speech can inspire conversations afterwards.  Further, very few speakers lard their talks with “listen to me because I have free speech.” That would just be dumb. Such assertions are made either beforehand, as in the case of the Chancellor of Berkeley’s statement about Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance, or afterwards, when we’re arguing about freedom of expression itself.
  • Free speech is only effective insofar as it presents rational arguments and not emotions or desires. As Sturm asserts,

“The more your message is expression — of your feelings, desires, or other emotion, the less likely it will be received by those who have reason to fear it. Just think of how much you have gotten done by yelling and venting your frustration at people, as opposed to sitting them down, and trying to make your point calmly. The more you frame your speech as expression, the less effective it will tend to be at achieving any other goal aside from expressing your feelings.”

But that’s not exactly right. True, when you’re arguing about facts you should deal with the facts and the issues, and avoid “yelling”, but to leave out emotion and feeling from a speech is to emasculate it (was that misogynist?). Think of one of the most powerful and effective speeches in American history: Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech of August 28, 1963. That speech is full of emotions about the moral inequity of segregation. It is by no means calm, but was delivered in the emotional cadences of a Southern preacher. It is the quintessential speech of expression: and it’s not too much to say that it galvanized the nation, leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  What Sturm is doing is equating “expression” with “yelling,” when in fact they need not be the same thing at all.  It’s arguments like this that make me wonder if Sturm has really thought about the issue. Nobody equates “free expression” with “yelling at one’s opponents,” except perhaps Sturm.

Now Sturm is correct that you can’t convince people to change their minds about issues without giving them reasons to think, and that simply demonizing your opponent as stupid, racist, or misogynist won’t work. But presenting stories, experiences, and an emphasis on moral issues (which don’t count as “reasons” but can resonate with the values of the listener) are valid ways of emoting,

  • No speech is effective unless it is itself a conversation. I mentioned this above, and it’s just wrong. Conversations can occur after speech, either as verbal discussions or as a silent conversation in one’s mind.

Sturm continues:

“My take is this: social media has made it easy for us to favor one motivation for speech (expression), while weakening the other (conversing in order to affect real change). Because more people are seen as simply expressing unfiltered emotion, very few on the other aside care to listen.”

“The more everyone continue to do this, the less we listen to each other. We stop talking with each other, and keep talking at each other — yelling, as well. The chances for any kind of progress fade away.”

First, it is the suppression of free speech, as in the cancellation (or interruption) of talks by universities, that inhibit conversation. Does anybody doubt that? And if you think these disinvitations are infrequent, have a look at FIRE’s list of disinvitations on American campuses between 2000 and 2014. Virtually all the speakers have been demonized as being conservatives, which shows that it’s the Left and not the Right that most often goes after free expression.

Further, social media, particularly YouTube and chat sites, have effected tremendous social change, especially in the weakening of religion. It is through such media, for example, that isolated nonbelievers come to learn that they are not alone, and are strengthened in their conviction. It is through social media that we can learn the arguments of our opponents, whether they be pro-lifers or creationists, and thus develop ways to examine, hone, or refine our own beliefs and arguments. Sturm’s false belief that “expression” and “social change” are at odds with one another is what leads him to conclude, in the quote just above, that free speech has slowed social progress.

But with such a conclusion, what does Sturm suggest we should do? One can gather from the context that he favors limits on “free speech,” though, given Sturm’s failure to be explicit, I’m not sure what those limits are. Does he see someone like Yiannopoulos expressing “unfiltered emotion”, thus impeding any rational discourse and social progress? If so, then he should listen to the libertarian Ben Shapiro, who is far more fact-oriented and less emotional than Milo. I disagree with much of what Shapiro has to say, but nobody could accuse him of yelling. And I think Shapiro, disagreeing with him as I do, is nonetheless a very valuable resource for liberals, as he forces us to examine our arguments more closely if we feel he’s wrong.  Those who simply yell in response to Shapiro’s claims make the Left look unreflective.

Given that Sturm equates “free speech” with “emotional speech and yelling”, it’s hard to know what he thinks of people like the Berkeley protests who prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking. Were they trying to prevent emotional and non-rational speech that could damage society, and thus doing us a service? Or were they themselves yelling and demonizing their opponents in a way that would turn off those who would otherwise listen to their arguments? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect Sturm has no interest in defending Milo, since he says this:

Recently, a big deal has been made about an agitator who lost a book deal about some unabashed commentary regarding pederasty. I won’t dig into the story itself (you can read the link), but the whole thing has made me wonder why we value free speech. I guess like so many of our freedoms, I wonder if it has morphed into a crutch that allows us to be utterly terrible and careless people, rather than making us better.

Milo’s freedom of speech has nothing to do with the subsequent accusations of pedophila that brought him down. Yes, you can say he’s a terrible person, but that’s completely independent of whether, when invited to Berkeley by the College Republicans, he had a right to speak within the limits of the First Amendment.

In the end, Sturm’s piece suffers from a conception of free speech that nobody really holds, from his subsequent conclusion that free speech and positive social change work against each other, and from his failure to be explicit about what he recommends. He winds up sounding like a pablum-fed liberal whose message is simply this: “Why can’t we be nice to each other?”