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.
It’s Hump Day: Wednesday, September 5, 2018, and National Cheese Pizza Day, best consumed in Chicago in the stuffed or deep-dish form. It’s also a UN-decreed day, International Day of Charity. I am leaving this afternoon for California, where I hope to see elephant seals, peregrines, and whales, but I have come to work to write Hili, water my plants, and, of course, feed the ducks (if they’re still there). Please be abstemious with your emails to me: no more than one every three days or so (except for corrections, of course).
On this day in 1666, the Great Fire of London ended, destroying nearly all the houses of residents as well as Old St. Paul’s Cathedral. Fortunately, only six people were reported to have died. If there hadn’t been that fire, here’s what we’d see in London today (from Wikipedia):
(from Wikipedia): Digital reconstruction giving an impression of Old St Paul’s during the Middle Ages. The image is based on a model of the Cathedral in the Museum of London, composited with a modern city background.
On September 5, 1698, trying to Westernize his nobility, Peter the Great of Russia imposed a tax on all men wearing beards; the clergy and peasantry were excepted. On this day in 1774, the First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, while in 1793 the Reign of Terror began in Paris. On September 5, 1882, Tottenham Hotspur was founded as Hotspur F.C.. I was told years ago to root for them, as they were supposedly “the “Jewish Team”, and were also called the “Yids”. I don’t know if any of that is true. On this day in 1906, according to Wikipedia, “The first legal forward pass in American football [was] thrown by Bradbury Robinson of St. Louis University to teammate Jack Schneider in a 22–0 victory over Carroll College (Wisconsin).”
On September 5, 1927, the first Disney cartoon of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, called Trolley Troubles, was released by Universal Pictures. It was the first Disney animated cartoons to feature a regular character, and here that first release:
On September 5, 1969, William Calley was charged with 6 counts of premeditated murder for the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre. Calley hardly served any time (3½ years of house arrest), and now works at his family’s jewelry store in Columbus, Georgia. On this day in 1972, the Munich massacre began: the Palestinian “Black September” group took 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games. All eleven died the following day. Exactly three years later, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford. She served 34 years in jail, was released in 2009, and now lives in Marcy, New York. Finally, on this day in 1984, the Space Shuttle Discovery landed after its maiden voyage.
Notables born on this day include Louis XIV (1638), Jesse James (1847), Cornelius Vanderbilt III (1873), Darryl F. Zanuck (1902), Bog Newhart (1929; still with us), Raquel Welch (1940), and Freddy Mercury (1946). Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on this day include Catherine Parr (1548), Crazy Horse (1877), Ludwig Boltzmann (1906), Georg Solti (1997), Mother Teresa (also 1997), Justin Wilson, the Cajun Chef (2001), and Phyllis Schlafly (2016).
I used to watch Wilson on “The Cajun Chef” show, fascinated with his schtick and his patois. Here he is making chicken gumbo, and prefacing it with his usual corny story. It’s cringeworthy, I garr-un-tee!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows her usual anxiety about food:
Hili: Are you aware?
A: Aware of what?
Hili: That after such a long walk I’m going to be hungry.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy jesteś świadomy?
Ja: Czego?
Hili: Że po tak długim spacerze będę głodna.
Tweets from Heather Hastie. This first one, an artwork, is plenty weird:
Heather says this: “I don’t care what USians seem to think of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I think the former is great and I’ve never understood why the latter was lionized.”
While Trump enjoys golf, 92-year-old Jimmy Carter is building homes for the poor https://t.co/SwMfIgwdux
This block of sandstone contains a mass-death assemblage of 25 fossil gars. This group is unusual because each individual is preserved fully articulated in a three-dimensional belly-up death pose, indicating rapid burial after death. #FossilFriday#MuseumCollectionpic.twitter.com/jOgC7gYOgD
— Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (@RoyalTyrrell) July 20, 2018
A white giraffe. Not albino but leucistic, yet look at the pigment on its mane and forelegs:
As Heather says, “The GOP is the only major political party IN THE WORLD that still denies climate change is real. Here’s one of their morons, who also appears to be a patronising git, at work”:
GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner called a teen activist 'young and naive' for challenging his absurd claim that climate change is caused by human body heat pic.twitter.com/hgtNQxoxJc
Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty! Malcolm Gladwell, whom I’ve never much admired, has just done something truly admirable. After the invertebrate New Yorker editor David Remnick, following a barrage of social-media criticism, disinvited Steve Bannon from their upcoming one-on-one conversation at the New Yorker Festival, and after other New Yorker staffers defended Remnick’s cowardly and self-serving decision, Malcolm Gladwell dissented:
Have a look at this!
Huh. Call me old-fashioned. But I would have thought that the point of a festival of ideas was to expose the audience to ideas. If you only invite your friends over, it’s called a dinner party. https://t.co/VwkL4zOrbX
Gladwell said what needed to be said and in plain words—not New Yorker style! Good for him! And raspberries to the pompous and pusillanimous Remnick, whose picture you can find beside the dictionary definition of “hauteur.”
And there’s this:
Joe McCarthy was done in when he was confronted by someone with intelligence and guts, before a live audience. Sometimes a platform is actually a gallows.
I never know when the ducks are going to leave for good, so I write each post as if it’s my last.
The ducks are still here, though Honey left last year on September 1. They may be staying past that because the weather is good, but I bet one factor is that this year Honey has a swain, the lovely and talented James Pond, the Giant Drake:
Yesterday morning when I went to the pond, I saw only James standing on the island, and he didn’t come to my whistle. But it turns out that Honey was sleeping behind a tree on the duck island, and quickly woke up and plopped herself into the pond for breakfast. James immediately followed suit. He eats a TON of food. I’m sure he’s got some domestic duck genes in him.
James’s talents include the following:
He is VERY BIG and thus can protect Honey from the ministrations of other horny drakes.
He can swim backwards very rapidly, something I’ve never seen other mallards do here.
He waggles his tail continuously in a very cute way.
He emits a low series of quacks, also almost continuously.
He actually watches the corn in the air as it approaches him. Honey doesn’t do that. Yesterday, as an experiment, I asked Anna to pretend she was tossing him corn but not to toss any. When she made the corn-tossing motion with her arm, James actually looked up, anticipating the tidbit. He is a very smart duck.
All of this makes me hope that they are pair bonding and that they will migrate together to a place where James will protect Honey from other drakes.
James by himself, guarding Honey in the morning:
They had a hearty breakfast and lunch (three courses: duckling chow, mealworms, and corn), and in the heat of yesterday afternoon I found them resting and napping on Duck Island #2. I learned yesterday that mallards sleep with one eye open while the side of the brain serving the closed eye is asleep. They sleep with half their brains at a time, alternating halves. Ducks are more awesome than you know.
Here are the pair resting and sleeping. Note that Honey is standing on one leg with her eye closed:
Both sleeping.
The crawfish are out in spades, and the dirt part of the bank is lined with their burrows. Here are two burrows and one of their residents:
Here’s a short video I took yesterday of a crawdad.
Honey and James after lunch today, preening on Duck Island #1. I will sneak in tomorrow early to feed them before I go to the airport, and I hope they’re still here. If they leave, this will be the last photo I’ve taken of them in 2018.
Bob Woodward’s new book on Trump, shown at bottom (click on screenshot to go to Amazon site) paints a picture of a White House even more dysfunctional and bizarre that our most rabid Trump-haters could imagine. First read the CNN article below, and then Woodward’s book, which is based on extensive research and lots of first-hand interviews with Those Who Know. Nobody does investigative reporting like Woodward.
An excerpt from the CNN precis:
Woodward offers a devastating portrait of a dysfunctional Trump White House, detailing how senior aides — both current and former Trump administration officials — grew exasperated with the President and increasingly worried about his erratic behavior, ignorance and penchant for lying.
Chief of staff John Kelly describes Trump as an “idiot” and “unhinged,” Woodward reports. Defense Secretary James Mattis describes Trump as having the understanding of “a fifth or sixth grader.” And Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd describes the President as “a fucking liar,” telling Trump he would end up in an “orange jump suit” if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.
“He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown,” Kelly is quoted as saying at a staff meeting in his office. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
Woodward’s book comes out in one week, but it’s already #5 on Amazon:
I’m a great admirer of the Ex-Muslims of North America organization (EXMNA), whose President is Muhammad Syed and whose Executive Director is Sarah Haider. They actually do stuff rather than just talking, and they’re courageous to do it in public knowing that an apostate Muslim is, to many active Muslims, deserving of death. I suspect these apostates are even worse than Jews to Islamists! At any rate, to be a public ex-Muslim these days is to evince bravery.
And you also court the disapprobation of non-Muslim Leftists, who revere Muslims as Oppressed People of Color and demonize those who criticize the religion or its pervasive oppression. You’re also spurned by the many people who are simply afraid to be around ex-Muslims because their mere proximity means you might be in danger—but even if not you’re certainly around “Islamophobes.”
That explains the incident described on the EXMNA website (click on screenshot to read about it).
What happened is that EXMNA members were in Houston handing out flyers at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual conference, as well as speaking to conference attendees. That itself is a brave thing to do. Taking a break, the EXMNA people repaired to a nearby Starbuck’s coffee shop. They weren’t protesting there, but simply looking for coffee.
But they were wearing teeshirts that said “I’m an Ex-Muslim, Ask Me Why” and “God Love is Greatest”. Those aren’t even that “in your face”, but it was enough for Starbucks to kick them out. As the report notes:
“I was surprised. I was simply drinking my iced coffee and scrolling through my phone, and they told me I needed to leave, so I asked why”, says Lina an ex-Muslim Syrian woman who had traveled to the conference on behalf of EXMNA. “I was told that they are not allowing protestors at the property, I assured the woman that I was not a protestor. She then asked me if I was part of the event or a guest at the hotel. I was neither. I was then told that even though I was a paying customer, I was not allowed to be on the premise as it was reserved for guests and event members for the weekend and that they will not be allowing anyone else on their private property. However, I noticed the Starbucks was still open to the public and I didn’t see anyone else being asked to leave.”
In other words, Starbucks was feeding them a line of bullshit.
Upon additional inquiry after leaving the premises, the hotel employees stated on video that the EXMNA group was not welcome due to their T-shirts, and repeatedly claimed the group was “protesting”, a charge which all volunteers explicitly denied multiple times.
“This appears to be a case of discrimination,” says President of Ex-Muslims of North America, Muhammad Syed. “We were asked to leave the premises and informed that we could only enter the premises if we removed the shirts, none of which stated anything inflammatory. The treatment was unjust and especially cruel considering the plight of ex-Muslims. We are killed and abused all over the world for our disbelief. It is unconscionable that companies like Starbucks and Hilton acquiesce to conservative religious sensibilities”.
. . . Armin Navabi, an Irani atheist activist, was in Houston on behalf of EXMNA. “Our goal was to see how tolerant Muslims can be, to our delight, we found many Muslims were tolerant”, he stated. “On the other hand, we found that many Westerners were intolerant. It seems that “saviors” of Muslims are more sensitive about anything that could potentially offend Muslims than Muslims are themselves.”
Hazar, another Syrian ex-Muslim who was in Houston for ISNA, states “I expected negative pushback of our presence by ISNA itself but in fact, most Muslims we talked to were welcoming. And so I certainly didn’t expect to be discriminated against on American soil by the Hilton staff for refusing to be closeted about my ex-Muslim identity. It was important for me to represent ex Muslims at ISNA because we are some of the lucky few that are able to do so with minimal consequences in comparison to those of us who aren’t privileged enough to live in a democratic society. And yet today, the treatment we received by the staff at the Hilton felt just as dehumanizing.”
Here’s a video of the EXMNA members getting the boot, apparently because they’re considered “part of the protest”. Even someone not wearing a shirt with any motto was apparently prohibited because he was “part of the protest”. But I’m sure they’d let Muslims in wearing shirts that said “Allah is greatest”, or religionists saying “I’m not an atheist. Ask me why.” This is simply discrimination against ex-Muslims.
I’m not sure about the legality of what Starbucks did, but I’m certainly going to write to them in protest. (Their drinks are overpriced, anyway.) You can see where to write below the video.
Reader Patrick, who sent me a link to the EXMNA article, adds this:
The ISNA conference took place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. The nearest Hilton is the Hilton Americas, which does have a Starbucks. Their address is 1600 Lama St., Houston, TX 77010. Their phone number is (877) 421-9062. Starbucks corporate complaint page is: https://customerservice.starbucks.com/app/contact/ask/
A bit of my own complaint (I used the “In our stores” form and asked for a response):
As you know, a faculty member has invited Steve Bannon to speak at the university of Chicago this fall. Despite students, alumni, and faculty raising objections to this, and asking Bannon to be banned (see here and here), President Robert Zimmer, adhering to the University of Chicago’s “Statement of Principles of Free Expression,” affirmed that Bannon will not be disinvited. And that’s the right thing to do, and something I wrote about in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. For many reasons given in my editorial, and in Mill’s book On Liberty, we should be allowed and even encouraged to hear even the most odious or offensive speech. Inviting someone like Bannon to speak at The University of Chicago is not an endorsement of his views. That much should be obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together. Sadly, many Social Justice types lack the requisite neurons.
And it wasn’t obvious to the many people who objected to Bannon being invited to this fall’s New Yorker Festival to have a one-on-one interview with the editor David Remnick. I am not a fan of Remnick for many reasons, including his insouciant arrogance (in his demeanor he reminds me of David Berlinski), his anti-science attitudes, and his turning the magazine into a Social Justice venue whose writing has become increasingly purple and increasingly insubstantial.
I hasten to add that I agree with Remnick’s politics except for what I said in the preceding sentence, but I don’t care for people like him who are so obviously full of themselves and so impressed with their own power. But I thought it was fine for Remnick to interview Bannon onstage to argue. It would have been a good show!
Clearly, though, Remnick didn’t know what he was getting into. As reported by The Washington Post, among other venues, social media immediately began chastising and demonizing Remnick, saying that the interview gave Bannon credibility to spread his odious views, that it even legitimized his views, and so on. That social media pushback even included Kathryn Schulz, a New Yorker staff writer:
I love working for @NewYorker, but I'm beyond appalled by this: https://t.co/WlZdsBpF1R I have already made that very clear to David Remnick. You can, too: themail@newyorker.com
And then came the usual Twitter reaction from the Pecksniffs and censors:
Well, the pressure became too great on Remnick, and after considering his own reputation, he disinvited Bannon. He did so in a very weird statement that I reproduce in larger type below:
A statement from David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, explaining his decision to no longer include Steve Bannon in the 2018 New Yorker Festival. pic.twitter.com/opayiw5GQ2
Is anybody fooled by this into thinking that Remnick changed his mind for anything but self-preservation?
The weird thing is that in this apologia the cowardly Remnick actually makes the case for interviewing Bannon (my emphasis in bold):
The effort to interview Bannon at length began many months ago. I originally reached out to him to do a lengthy interview with “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” He knew that our politics could not be more at odds—he reads The New Yorker—but he said he would do it when he had a chance. It was only later that the idea arose of doing that interview in front of an audience.
The main argument for not engaging someone like Bannon is that we are giving him a platform and that he will use it, unfiltered, to propel further the “ideas” of white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and illiberalism. But to interview Bannon is not to endorse him. By conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers, we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity. Ahead of the mid-term elections and with 2020 in sight, we’d be taking the opportunity to question someone who helped assemble Trumpism. Early this year, Michael Lewis interviewed Bannon, who made it plain how he viewed his work in the campaign. “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall,” Bannon said. “This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.” To hear this was valuable, as it revealed something about the nature of the speaker and the campaign he helped to lead. The point of an interview, a rigorous interview, particularly in a case like this, is to put pressure on the views of the person being questioned.
There’s no illusion here. It’s obvious that no matter how tough the questioning, Bannon is not going to burst into tears and change his view of the world. He believes he is right and that his ideological opponents are mere “snowflakes.” The question is whether an interview has value in terms of fact, argument, or even exposure, whether it has value to a reader or an audience. Which is why Dick Cavett, in his time, chose to interview Lester Maddox and George Wallace. Or it’s why Oriana Fallaci, in “Interview with History,” a series of question-and-answer meetings with Henry Kissinger and Ayatollah Khomeini and others, contributed something to our understanding of those figures. Fallaci hardly changed the minds of her subjects, but she did add something to our understanding of who they were. This isn’t a First Amendment question; it’s a question of putting pressure on a set of arguments and prejudices that have influenced our politics and a President still in office.
And yet after saying all that, Remnick decided “There is a better way to do this,” and offered a lame promise that he’ll try to interview Bannon in another place at some unspecified future date. The reason is clear: Remnick got too much disapprobation from his colleagues and from his readers. After all, if there’s any major magazine that has gone after Trump with more vigor than the New Yorker, I don’t know of it. But the New York elite simply can’t stand to have the right-wing Bannon, former editor of Breitbart, on their stage. And Remnick, of course, doesn’t want to become another Bari Weiss.
Certainly The New Yorker has a right to rescind Bannon’s invitation. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether, in a freewheeling and antagonistic conversation, viewers might gain some benefit. Maybe the ones whose minds are made up wouldn’t change their minds, but they’d still benefit from adhering to the advice of Barack Obama, who said this two years ago in a commencement speech at Howard University:
“As my grandmother used to tell me, every time a fool speaks, they are just advertising their own ignorance. Let them talk. Let them talk. If you don’t, you just make them a victim, and then they can avoid accountability. … Listen. Engage. If the other side has a point, learn from them. If they’re wrong, rebut them.”
The New Yorker audience clearly doesn’t want to even hear the other side. Pity, and pity for our First Amendment.
Remnick could have drawn out Bannon, criticized him, and clarified both of their views in an instructive way, for Remnick is a smart man. Sadly, he’s also a cowardly man.
When my subscription to The New Yorker runs out, I’m going to let it lapse.
