Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Have a gander at this quote that came from Franciscan University. The backstory appears at the site Church Militant and Inside Higher Ed (IHE). Franciscan University [FU] is a Catholic school in Steubenville, Ohio; it’s sufficiently hard-line to include homosexuality in a course on “deviant behavior” along with rape and robbery.
Here’s the quote, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t both true and sad:
“Franciscan University encourages the faculty, in their teaching function, to address all material relevant to their subject matter but, as specified in the Faculty Handbook, opposes the promotion of propositions and values contrary to Catholic teaching. This in no way impinges on true academic freedom, as the Catholic church accepts all that is true and rejects all that is false.”
Where did this come from? As Inside Higher Ed (IHE) reports, FU removed the departmental chairmanship from Stephen Lewis, an FU professor of English, after he was found to have included the Emmanuel Carrère’s book The Kingdomin a course syllabus. Given its content, that book was a no-no. IHE summarizes the contentious parts:
Part memoir, part religious history — imagined and actual — the hard-to-summarize book essentially tells two stories: that of Carrère’s own crisis of his Catholic faith and that of the formation of the early Christian church. Watching pornography in one scene, Carrère’s says that Jesus’s mother, Mary, wasn’t a virgin. Rather, he says, she knew men in her youth and “might have come, let’s hope so for her, maybe she even masturbated.” There’s a bit more about a favorite adult actress and female masturbation.
There was an outcry among Catholics, and the University President apologized in an open letter, saying that The Kingdom was pornographic, blasphemous and would never again be taught at FU. There’s more to the story, but, as IHE reports, the quotation at the top came from a statement issued by FU on Monday.
According to that statement, no criticism of Catholicism can impinge on Catholic teachings because what the Catholic Church teaches is 100% true!
While religious schools are free to censor whatever they want, I find it ineffably sad that they censor criticism in this way, especially when it comes from a Catholic teacher trying to inspire thought (they’ve also made sure the book isn’t in the school bookstore).
And really, how brainwashed do you have to be to buy the school’s statement that “the Catholic church accepts all that is true and rejects all that is false”? Does that mean that homosexual behavior is really, truly, a disorder, and that you can go to hell if you don’t confess it? And that the sacramental wafers literally become Jesus’s body when blessed? And that Jesus’s mother was a virgin, which was apparently based on a dubious translation from Hebrew? Some “truths”!
UPDATE: Scott Aaronson has emailed me and pointed out that his views on this matter are set out in a clearer and longer way in a publicly available paper he wrote called “The ghost in the quantum Turing machine.” It’s 85 pages long, I wasn’t aware of its existence, and it is probably above my pay grade, but perhaps not for some readers who are physics-savvy and also willing to read the paper. If you do, weigh in below. Please consider this post a response to Aaronson’s 8.5-minute explication of free will on the “Closer to Truth” interview and not to the totality of his published views.
I’ll add, with Scott’s permission, a clarification that he emailed me along with the link to his paper:
“Briefly, you can make any theory “deterministic” by the addition of hidden variables, which is exactly what de Broglie and Bohm did for quantum mechanics. In that sense, to ask whether the world is deterministic is not even to ask an interesting question about it; it’s only to ask about a particular description of the world. But whether you can predict someone’s behavior without destroying them IS a question about the world. So focusing on that means you’re led to actual meaty empirical questions about the world, rather than endless and boring semantic debates about the exact meanings of terms like “free will” and “compatibilism.” I’d hope anyone with a scientific mindset would find that to be a feature.”
____________
I may be remiss in not knowing who Scott Aaronson is, as I gather he’s quite well known. He’s the David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and works on quantum computing. He also has a popular website called Shtetl-Optimized (“Shtetl” refers to small Jewish towns in eastern Europe), which deals largely with computation but also personal revelations and amusing tales (see here about his quirks and then here for a story in which airport police arrested him because he absent-mindedly took change from his purchase of a smoothie—on a debit card!—from the tip jar in an airport food court.
In this 8½-minute video, Aaronson is quizzed about free will by Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the “Closer to Truth” public television series. (I’m weighing an invitation to participate in this series.) Do watch the video if you have time.
Aaronson thinks there’s a real and important question in the free-will debates, but argues that that question is not whether physical determinism of our thoughts and actions be true, but whether they are predictable. He thinks that the question of whether there is free will could in principle be solved by answering the following question: “
Would one be able to construct a machine that, if it was programmed with the immense knowledge about your brain and your environment that would be required to do such a job, would be able to predict your actions?”
If the answer is “yes,” he says, then the question is solved: we have no free will and are “automatons”.
(By the way, Aaronson doesn’t appear to be a compatibilist, as he says that if such a machine were possible, and all our choices were predictable, we would certainly not have free will, even though some people would say we would still have free will. Those “some people” are surely compatibilists, who find the notion of free will compatible with physical determinism.)
Because, Aaronson says, the answer to the Big Machine question is not known (I would argue that in principle, because behavior and thoughts are the results of physical processes, the answer is “yes”), he finds the question of free will to be moot.
As he says at 4:15,
“My view is that I don’t care about determinism if it can’t be cashed out into actual predictability.”
This seems to me misguided, conflating predictability with the question of determinism. Surely it will be impossible, at least in our time, to gather the requisite information to accurately predict someone’s behavior, for such a computer would have to model not just a person’s brain, but also the entire universe, for the universe impinges on a person’s brain in ways that affect their behavior.
Further, insofar as fundamentally unpredictable quantum events may determine behavior, no machine could ever model those: at best it could give probabilities of different behaviors. But those quantum effects do not violate physical determinism, and cannot give us free will in the sense that most people think of it. (Surveys show that most people think of free will as “contracausal”: the you-could-have-done-otherwise form of free will.) In fact, insofar as Aaronson espouses physical causation of behavior in his answer—he says he sees the brain as a kind of computer running a program—he’s already admitted physical determinism.
Do Aaronson’s lucubrations, then, make the question of free will uninteresting?
Not to me; I find the issue not only philosophically interesting but a question that has practical ramifications, even if we can’t build the Aaronson Machine. If we are truly biological automatons, which I think is true on first principles (viz., we are made of molecules), then that has huge implications for religious thought and dogma, which of course depend on assuming contracausal free will. You are free to choose your saviour, your faith, your actions, and, for gay Catholics, whether to commit homosexual acts. Because you make free choices, making the wrong choice will send you to perdition, and making the right one to God, Yahweh, or Allah.
There are ramifications for the justice system. I firmly believe that if we grasped that nobody, including criminals, has a “choice” in whether or not to do something, like mugging someone, we would structure the justice system differently, concentrating less on retribution and more on keeping baddies out of society, trying to reform them, and using punishment as a deterrent to improve society.
There are ramifications for politics. Once you realize that people’s acts solely reflect the physical consequences of their genetic endowment and environment, you (or at least I!) become more sympathetic to the plight of those who drew a bad hand in the poker game of life. The notion of the “Just World”, in which people get what they deserve, depends on accepting contracausal free will. But that view must be tempered by realizing that neither the successful nor the downtrodden freely chose their paths.
I’ve always said that I don’t really care if you say people have “free will” if you define that term in some compatibilist way like “the inputs to creating a human behavior (output) are complex”.
What I care about is whether determinism be true. And I think it is, though of course I can’t prove it. All I can say is that the laws of physics don’t ever seem to be violated, and, as Sean Carroll emphasizes, the physics of everyday life is completely known.
What we see above are the ruminations of a man whose life is devoted to computing, and his profession shows in the way he thinks about free will, turning it into the question of whether machines could predict behavior.
It’s Tuesday, January 15, 2019, and National Popcorn Day. In North Korea it’s Korean Alphabet Day, celebrating the invention of the modern Korean alphabet, Hangul, in the fifteenth century. In South Korea, though, Alphabet Day falls September 9.
Today’s Google Doodle (below) celebrates Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851), Anglo-Indian author (he was the first Indian to publish a book in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomed, published on this day in 1794) and opened the first Indian restaurant in England, which Wikipedia describes like this:
Dean Mahomet opened the first Indian restaurant in England: the Hindoostane Coffee House in George Street, near Portman Square, Central London. The restaurant offered such delights as the Hookha “with real chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes, … allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England.” This venture was ended due to financial difficulties.
It’s a big day in history today, as a number of significant events happened on January 15. First, Elizabeth I was crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey in 1559. She ruled until her death in 1603. Exactly two centuries after that day, the British Museum opened to the public.
On January 15, 1870, a cartoon appeared that forever associated the Democratic Party with a donkey (it wasn’t the first cartoon to do this, however). The famous one below was drawn by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly, and here it is:
On January 15, 1870, Nast published the cartoon that would forever link the donkey to the Democrat. A few ideas should be clear for the cartoon to make sense: First, “republican” and “democrat” meant very different things in the 19th century than they do today (but that’s another article entirely); “jackass” pretty much meant the exact same thing then that it does today; and Nast was a vocal opponent of a group of Northern Democrats known as “Copperheads.”
In his cartoon, the donkey, standing in for the Copperhead press, is kicking a dead lion, representing President Lincoln’s recently deceased press secretary (E.M. Stanton). With this simple but artfully rendered statement, Nast succinctly articulated his belief that the Copperheads, a group opposed the Civil War, were dishonoring the legacy of Lincoln’s administration. The choice of a donkey –that is to say, a jackass– would be clearly understood as commentary intended to disparage the Democrats. Nast continue to use the donkey as a stand-in for Democratic organizations, and the popularity of his cartoons through 1880s ensured that the party remained inextricably tied to jackasses.
On January 15, 1889, the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated in Atlanta, Georgia. I still think their advertising slogan, “The taste you never get tired of,” is one of the most succinct and accurate in the history of advertising. Exactly three years later, James Naismith published the rules of basketball.
On this day in 1919, the Great Molasses Flood occurred in Boston when an exploding molasses tank sent an eight-foot tsunami of the good through the streets of Boston, killing 21 and injuring 150. Here’s a photo of the aftermath with a caption from Wikipedia:
Twenty one people were killed on Commercial Street in the North End when a tank of molasses ruptured and exploded. An eight foot wave of the syrupy brown liquid moved down Commercial Street at a speed of 35mph. Wreckage of the collapsed tank visible in background, center, next to light colored warehouse. Elevated railway structure visible at far left and the North End Park bathing beach to the far right. A “before” view of the disaster can be seen in this image.
On January 15, 1962, Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript, the Derveni papyrus, (ca. 340 BC, with the orignal text dating back 150+ years earlier), was found in northern Greece. It’s part of a philosophical treatise, and here are some fragments as shown on Ancient Origins:
On this day in 1967, the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 in the first Super Bowl, played in Los Angeles. Eighteen years ago today, Wikipedia went online. Finally, exactly ten years ago, US Airways Flight 1549, with pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles at the controls, went down, landing in New York’s Hudson River after the engines were stopped by collision with a flock of Canada Geese. Thanks to extremely skillful piloting and the calm heads of the crew, all 155 people on board survived, with very few injuries.
Notables born on this day include Molière (1622), Josef Breuer (1822), Osip Mandelstam (1891), Edward Teller (1908), Gene Krupa (1909), Lloyd Bridges (1913), Maurice Herzog (1919), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929).
Those who died on January 15 include Matthew Brady (1896), Rosa Luxemburg (1919), Jack Teagarden (1964), and Harry Nilsson (1994).
Nilsson hung around a lot of musical big names like Bob Dylan, but to my mind never sang much that was good—with one exception. And that is the song below, written by Fred Neil, with Nilsson’s Grammy-winning version featured in the movie “Midnight Cowboy.” This offsets any number of execrable songs like “Put the Lime in the Coconut”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has had a heart attack and is in the hospital for a few days more. He doesn’t usually let readers know when he’s ailing, but made an exception in today’s dialogue. I’m sure readers join me in wishing Andrzej all the best and a speedy recovery.
Hili: What are we going to do if Andrzej doesn’t return from the hospital tomorrow?
Malgorzata: Well, he will probably come back the day after tomorrow and everything will get back to normal.
In Polish:
Hili: Co zrobimy, jeśli Andrzej jutro nie wróci ze szpitala?
Malgorzata: To pewnie wróci pojutrze i wszystko wróci do normy.
Leon is vacationing with his staff in the snowy mountains of southern Poland.
Leon: Is anyone out there?
In Polish: Ktoś tu w ogóle przyjdzie?
A prescient Mencken quote found by reader Norm. (UPDATE: This quote appears to be at least partially doctored–see the comments–so Mencken wasn’t so prescient after all. I should have suspected that. )
A tweet by Bari Weiss, and yes, Walker’s antisemitism should become common knowledge so the Outrage Brigade can decide whether to continue to laud an antisemite or, if they follow their own pattern and principles, demonize her permanently.
Also Alice Walker: “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only/ That, but to enjoy it?” At what point does her vile anti-Semitism become common knowledge? At what point does it become socially unacceptable to quote her as a role model? https://t.co/iC0vP5nN19
This tweet, unearthed by reader Barry, shows the remarkable similarity of bones in a human foot (right) and an elephant’s foot (left). It seems that the elephant is just a human with fleshy high heels:
Here are a few “holiday snaps” from Oahu. I’ve already visited many of the major tourist sites, and now am just chilling, going snorkeling at the beach, and eating.
Two days ago I went snorkeling again at Hanauma Bay. Although it’s a popular beach, there weren’t too many people snorkeling in the reefs just offshore, and one can swim for a long time in peace among the gorgeous fish. I don’t have an underwater camera and couldn’t photograph the colorful reef-dwellers, but no matter: you can see some images here.
In the reception hall is a display of fish pictures and these four reef-fish jaws (sadly, the jaws were not identified). The first is from a parrotfish, which scrapes algae off the corals. Their teeth have fused into an upper and lower megatooth used as a scraper.
Another scraper:
This is clearly a predator:
I’m not sure what this fish is, or what kind of diet it has, but I’m sure an ichthyological reader can tell us:
After a long morning of snorkeling and beach-sitting, one gets thirsty, and it was time to repair to the nearby Koko Marina pub of the Kona Brewing Company, a microbrewery/restaurant with a LOT of proprietary beers:
Lunch: a “meat plate” with beef ribs, sausage, and the omnipresent and delicious kalua pig. The “vegetables” are rice and macaroni salad.
I had a Terikyaki Burger because I wanted to try pineapple on a burger. It also had bacon, cheese, and, naturally, macaroni salad. I washed it down with a special-production blond ale made with ginger and lemongrass. The pineapple on the burger was actually good!
Dessert at the nearby and renowned Bubbies Ice Cream. One of their specialities is mochi ice cream, delicious small sized nuggets of premium ice cream covered with sweetened rice dough. The combination of the pliant, gooey covering and the harder ice cream is fantastic. They may have these on the mainland, but I haven’t seen them. The flavors here are sakura (cherry blossom), lychee, and guava. They make 19 flavors of mochi.
Duck feeding is twice a day, and now, as well as the small group of ducks in the marina, I’m feeding a landlubber group by the sea, including a mother and her ducklings as well as an adorable and friendly muscovy duck (Carina moschata) that we’ve named “Puppy” because he’s uber-friendly and always wagging his tail. He’s huge and ponderous, with a slow and dignified gait. I started feeding him because I thought he was wounded (he had a red mark on the back of his neck that looked like a gash), but it turned out to be just part of his red wattles.
Me feeding Puppy when I thought he was sick. I’d give him a bowl of water into which I tossed duck food. There’s little water where these ducks are, except for the salt water of the sea, and they need fresh water (it also helps to wash the food down). As you see, he also has mealworms, but Hawaiian ducks tend to eschew mealworms for some reason.
Me feeding Puppy (sound up to hear the vigorous slurping):
I can’t resist feeding ducklings, and these little ones have a hard life. There were ten about five days ago, and they’re down to six now. I doubt that any will survive, but I try to feed them (and keep the other ducks away) twice a day. Mom, as you can here, is an incessant quacker. I toss them food twice in the video below.
Yesterday I visited Pearl Harbor for the second time, as I missed seeing the USS Arizona Memorial the first time around. The Memorial is in fact closed until March because of damage to the dock, but in lieu of a visit the Park Service takes you around the Memorial in a boat. During that ride, I had a look at the USS Missouri, where the Japanese surrender ceremony took place in 1945. I’ve posted previously about my visit to this ship and to the submarine USS Bowfin (picture below).
The USS Arizona Memorial is a pavilion built over the remains of that battleship, sunk on December 7, 1941 during the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A Japanese bomb ignited the ship’s powder magazine, blowing it to smithereens and killing 1177 sailors, about half of the Americans who died in the Pearl Harbor attack. The bodies of 1102 of those sailors remained in the wreck, though they’re surely now weathered away. The few who survived the ship’s sinking often requested that their ashes be placed in the wreck with their old shipmates, right below the surface.
Part of the ship’s gun turret still sticks up above the water. We were told that a gallon of oil from the ship still leaks out every day, called “black tears” for the dead sailors.
Near the exit to the complex sat an old sailor—96 years old. Everett Hyland, who enlisted in 1940 at age 17, is one of the few surviving Pearl Harbor sailors, and was severely wounded during the attack as a seaman on the USS Pennsylvania. He was in fact unconscious until he awoke on Christmas Day, 18 days later. After rehabilitating for nine months, he went back into service in the European theater. After the war, he was a science teacher, and has been volunteering at the Pearl Harbor site since 1995, telling visitors about what he experienced. Thank you for your service, Mr. Hyland.
Yesterday involved an expedition to purchase duck food, followed by lunch at the Waipahu branch of The Highway Inn. It was much more local, and the food better, than the branch in downtown Honolulu.
Lunch clockwise from 12 o’clock: pipikaula short ribs, kalua pig, a big bowl of poi (yum!), laulau chicken (wrapped in taro leaves), the coconut dessert haupia, and, of course, macaroni salad (with some potato salad mixed in). It was terrific, and I had to take half of the chicken laulau home.
Chicken laulau dissected for your inspection:
“Grindz” at a nearby restaurant. Uncle’s Hawaiian Dictionary of local pidgin defines “grindz” as “delicious food, as in at a party or a favorite food establishment.” You see the word everywhere.
If Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez (SM&P) would simply resign as co-chairs of the Women’s March, Inc. (“WMI”, the original parent organization of the 2017 March), then the upcoming March, scheduled for January 19 in Washington, D.C., would be a lot more unified, stronger, and with a bigger crowd. But now the whole organization, which includes many splinter marches not formally affiliated with the WMI, is fracturing, and that has seriously slowed the momentum that the March inspired two years ago.
I’ve posted about the WMI’s troubles before, and if you want the backstory, go here to see my earlier posts. Although there had been some earlier criticism of SM&P for cozying up to the antisemitic, homophobic, and misogynistic Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, things blew up when Tablet posted a long exposé of the March’s heads, revealing their antisemitic remarks, their ties to the NoI and raising questions about financial improprieties of the WMI.
This was about the same time that two feminist actors and #MeToo supporters, Debra Messing and Alyssa Milano, severed ties with the WMI because of the antisemitism of its leaders. Very quickly other Women’s March groups also severed ties, with most vowing to march independently. Then the think tank of Germany’s Social Democratic Party—one of that nation’s two major political parties—rescinded its Humanitarian Award to the Women’s March because of Sarsour’s antisemitism. Predictions are for much reduced attendance at the January 19 event in Washington.
NBC News and Haaretz report about the disintegration of the movement. I hope that, when the dust settles, the WMI will flourish under new leadership. In view of the debacle, the WMI has done some furious backpedaling, now including Jewish women in the list of oppressed groups for which they march. But it hasn’t worked, for SM&P have a history of antisemitism and support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that is largely populated and propelled by antisemites. Further, the WMI’s attempts to court Jewish women and disavow the organization’s connection with the Nation of Islam have been slow, reluctant, hamhanded and unconvincing.
But now the greatest indignity of all: the Southern Poverty Law Center, an authoritarian Leftist organization that in the past has demonized Maajid Nawaz, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Leftists critical of Islam) as “anti-Muslim extremists”—and faces its own accusations of financial shenanigans—has, without much explanation, quietly removed itself as a sponsor of the WMI. You can read about it at The Daily Beast (click on screenshot below), which names other important groups withdrawing sponsorship from the March:
The Southern Poverty Law Center will not partner with the Women’s March this year, The Daily Beast has confirmed.
Jen Fuson, a spokeswoman for the SPLC, said “other projects were a priority,” but added they would continue to be involved in marches at the local level in areas where they have offices.
. . . The SPLC’s quiet move away from the Women’s March is in stark contrast to its press release two years ago,
“As an official partner of the march, the Southern Poverty Law Center stands in solidarity with its organizers’ vision — that ‘women’s rights are human rights’ — and with the march’s mission to bring together communities ‘insulted, demonized and threatened by the rhetoric of the past election cycle,’ the SPLC said in January of 2017, calling itself “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. Through our core issues, we work to protect the rights of the working poor, LGBT, and undocumented immigrant women whom the Women’s March on Washington seeks to unite.”
Other groups have also recently broken away from the WMI, including EMILY’s List, a well known PAC devoted to electing pro-choice Democrats to office. That’s ironic in light of the Women’s March’s 2017 harassment of anti-abortion participants. And there are other withdrawals as well, though people are cautious about issuing reasons or statements:
A spokeswoman for EMILY’s List did not immediately return a request for comment. The National Council of Jewish Women told The New York Jewish Week Wednesday they would not be a partner in this year’s march.
A spokeswoman for the Women’s March did not immediately return a call for comment.
According to this tweet from Tali Goldsheft, a digital media marketer, at least eight other groups have withdrawn sponsorship from the D.C. Women’s March:
AFL-CIO, NARAL, GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, NRDC, OXFAM, Greenpeace, Amnesty and other major orgs are no longer listed as @womensmarch partners.
Out of over 500 orgs that were previously listed as a sponsor or partner of the @womensmarch, only 200❗️ remain affiliated. (1/2)
You can see the list of sponsors who remain on the Women’s March sponsorship page: these groups include the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the March for Science, the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, and, of course, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as well as other Muslim groups. It’s shameful that groups like the ACLU, the NAACP, and (especially for me), the March for Science are still sponsoring a group whose origins are avowedly antisemitic (WMI spokespeople even admitted that in the organizational days of the WMI there was explicit antisemitism, though the co-leaders still deny it).
The Women’s March, Inc. is now experiencing what is known in the argot as a “train wreck.” It could be stopped if the group cleaned up or cleared up its finances, stopped using Nation of Islam functionaries as security for its march and, most of all, asked Sarsour, Mallory, and Perez to step down, replacing them with leaders who don’t hate Jews and who don’t have a history of antisemitic actions or remarks.
As I’ve predicted, that won’t happen, for SM&P love their power and prestige too much: without the Women’s March, they have no limelight. In fact, they think they own the Women’s March. But if they really cared about the welfare of women and the visibility of women’s rights, they should resign.
________
ADDENDUM: Reader John called my attention to this new video of WMI organizers Bob Bland and Tamika Mallory appearing on The View. Whoopi Goldberg and Megan McCain question them about antisemitism, the Nation of Islam, and their denigration of antiabortion women. (Curious that Sarsour didn’t show up. . . )
My take is not only that their remarks are self-serving, but that both Bland and Mallory actually lie about the history of the WMI. For example, they claim that the WMI did not disenfranchise pro-life women, but the New York Times reported this in 2017:
Across the country, women who oppose abortion — including one in six women who supported Hillary Clinton, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center — are demanding to be officially included in Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. But those requests have been spurned, creating a bitter rift among women’s organizations, and raising thorny questions about what it means to be a feminist in 2017.
“If you want to come to the march you are coming with the understanding that you respect a woman’s right to choose,” Linda Sarsour, a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American Muslim racial justice and civil-rights activist, and one of four co-chairwomen of the march, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Now these tensions, which have simmered behind the scenes, are spilling out into the open.
On Monday, march organizers revoked so-called partnership status – a kind of official recognition — for a Texas anti-abortion group, New Wave Feminists. (Ms. Sarsour called the initial decision to include the group “a mistake.”)
Note that, as I predicted before I saw this, Mallory refuses to step down, saying that “some people want her to remain as leader”, and that Mallory called Farrakhan a “GOAT” (greatest of all time) simply because of his great services to the black community. And I don’t believe her denial of the antisemitic remarks made during the WMI organizing meetings, as a WMI spokesperson already verified them. As Tablet reported in its emendations of the article:
An earlier version incorrectly stated that “None of the other women in attendancewould speak openly to Tablet about the meeting.” In fact, at press time, Tablet had contacted or spoken to six out of the seven people present at the meeting. That seventh person, Cassady Fendlay, reached today, offered a description of the events that aligns with the version described in the piece.
In other words, Fendlay, the Communications director of the WMI, basically verified what Tablet reported, part of which is this:
According to several sources, it was there—in the first hours of the first meeting for what would become the Women’s March—that something happened that was so shameful to many of those who witnessed it, they chose to bury it like a family secret. Almost two years would pass before anyone present would speak about it.
It was there that, as the women were opening up about their backgrounds and personal investments in creating a resistance movement to Trump, Perez and Mallory allegedly first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade. These are canards popularized by The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam—“the bible of the new anti-Semitism,” according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., who noted in 1992: “Among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.”
. . . but multiple sources with knowledge of what happened confirmed the story.
In other words, Perez and Mallory were antisemitic from get-go.
As I’ve recounted before, I started this website at the request of WEIT’s publisher, Viking/Penguin. The model I envisioned was Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish” website, meant to publicize and explain the genesis of his eponymous book; and my intent was simply to do that and—perhaps once every few weeks—post a bit of new scientific information that supported the truth of evolution.
Well, the bailiwick of the site grew—and grew rapidly, as you can see if you consult the “Archives” on the left side of the website (it lists every post in chronological order). Here are the first twenty posts in reverse order (click on the links if you want to see any), and they include not just publicity for WEIT and evidence for evolution, but philosophy and accommodationism.
The site became more than an evolution site and more than a book site; it became a chronicle of my enthusiasms (including travel, food, ducks, and cats), my thoughts, tentative, half-baked, and firmly held, and anything that caught my interest.
Here is the first “Saturday felid” on February 7, just three weeks after I dedicated the site to posts about evolution:
Here’s the first Caturday Felid, a week later, featuring Matthew Cobb’s cats, Ollie and Pepper as kittens (they’re now 13!):
Part of the first anti-accommodationist post, put up on April 29, 2009:
The first Hili dialogue didn’t come for over four years—on September 5, 2013 when I first visited Hili, Andrzej, and Malgorzata:
Hili dialogues, now a daily feature of this site, actually began with dialogues on the website Racjonalista, the precursor of Listy. Pia was Hili’s predecessor, a very tiny tabby who liked to argue with Andrzej. I posted one of these on December 8, 2013:
And, as A. A. Milne might have said, now we are ten. I don’t want to sum up the last ten years of writing this site, except to say that it’s been a pleasure, a lot of work, and a duty. There are times I feel that I have nothing to say, or that saying what I want to say is onerous. There are times when the words flow freely and I am happy about that. And I am immensely grateful for the help of Grania, Matthew, and Greg, who contribute their own posts and pick up the slack when I’m away or indisposed.
A downside of the site is that it’s give me a social-media presence, which I never aimed for, and that brings out people who are obstreperous—and more than a few people who dislike me a lot. At first that was painful, but I’ve grown to accept that no matter what you say online, there will always be some people who go after you, sometimes in hurtful ways. The only way to stop that would be to stop writing.
But I have no intention of doing that. There may come a time when this site becomes more of a chore than a joy, but for ten years it’s opened up a lot of doors for me. I get nearly instant feedback on my ideas and get to develop my thoughts in public, my brain is always stimulated with both scientific and non-scientific issues, I get to meet new friends I wouldn’t have met otherwise, have a group of people who kindly host me and show me around when I travel, and I receive many daily tips about articles, cartoons, and cat photos that I would never have seen otherwise.
So here we are as of this writing. I am proud of the figure below, and still amazed that it exists:
I am proud of the community that exists here. Yes, people come and go, but folks have actually hooked up and made friends with fellow commenters on the site.
We’re coming up on one million comments, and the average comment number per post remains above 50, which is one of my self-aggrandizing goals (it’s 50.12). If comments drop, I’ll know that interest is waning.
All I’ll say to close is a thank you to all the readers who subscribe to and read this site, who keep me informed, correct me when I err, and send me items that inspire and inform me. As for the future, I’ll let this song, by an old dude like me, speak for itself:
_____________
Update: Reader Benjamin Taylor made me this lovely anniversary card that I wanted to put up. Many thanks!
It’s Monday, January 14, 2019, and a week from today I’ll be back in Chicago where, I hear, there’s snow and may be more. It’s Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day, a fitting food day to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this website, which happens to be today (more later). It’s also “Old New Year,” or New Year’s day in the outmoded Julian Calendar.
On this day in 1539, Spain annexed Cuba. On January 14, 1784, the ratification of the Treaty of Paris by the American Confederation Congress officially ended the Revolutionary War of the U.S. vs. Britain.
On this day in 1952, NBC broadcast the first Today Show program (with Dave Garroway); it’s still on the air after 67 years. Surprisingly, though, it’s only the fifth longest-running American t.v. show. Can you name another one? Exactly a year later, Tito was inaugurated as the President of Yugoslavia. On January 14, 1967, the “Summer of Love” (not really summer!) was kicked off by the famous Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. A 26-minute video of the event is below; I wasn’t there, but feel privileged to have been alive during those days:
On this day in 1973, according to Wikipedia, “Elvis Presley‘s concert Aloha from Hawaii is broadcast live via satellite, and sets the record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.” It was watched by over a billion viewers (according to Wikipedia), and I’ll put it below in case you’re an Elvis fan (I’m not):
It was on January 14, 2009, that I made the first post on this website.
Finally, it was on this day in 2011 that most consider the “Arab Spring” to have begun, as Tunisia’s President fled his country for Saudi Arabia after a series of street demonstrations against the government. That call for freedom spread across much of the Arab world.
Notables born on this day include Mark Antony (83 BC), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836), Albert Schweitzer (1875), Andy Rooney (1919), Julian Bond (1940), Faye Dunaway (1941), Nina Totenberg (1944), T Bone Burnett (1948), and Maureen Dowd (1952).
Albert Schweitzer was a writer, humanitarian, theologian organist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and cat-lover. Here he is practicing Bach in Lambarene (then in French Equatorial Africa) with his kitties.
Those who died on January 14 include Edmund Halley (1742), George Berkeley (1753), Lewis Carroll 1898), Humphrey Bogart (1957), Anthony Eden (1977), Anaïs Nin (1977), Kurt Gödel (1978), Ray Kroc (1984), and Donna Reed (1986).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has taken to pre-empting conversations.
Hili: Don’t quarrel with me.
A: But I didn’t say anything.
Hili: But you wanted to.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie sprzeczaj się ze mną.
Ja: Przecież nic nie mówiłem.
Hili: Ale chciałeś coś powiedzieć.
In Honolulu, I showed Pi a picture of him on my website, and he responded in Hawaiian pidgin (he is a Hawaiian cat):
Pi: Dis buggah give me stink eye!
Jerry: Pi—that’s YOU!
A tweet from Heather Hastie. I approve of this proposed border wall, which will keep out those who don’t like cats. And the dogs will pay for it!
with my whole heart i want to live in this video and never speak to anyone but the cows and this sweet irish family ever againpic.twitter.com/q7UOx1NLpe
