A traveling-bar illusion

September 23, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Matthew, who loves illusions, sent me this tw**t:

Now an explanation for this is published here (it’s based, as you might expect, on differences in contrast), but I can’t be arsed to read it. Those who have more patience than I are welcome to explain it below.

 

Lionel Shriver defends “literary appropriation” and calls out the Repressive Left

September 23, 2016 • 1:00 pm

Not long ago Yasmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese/Australian/Muslim writer, described in the Guardian how offended she became when author Lionel Shriver, speaking at the Brisbane Writers Festival, defended the right of authors to write fiction about “marginalized” characters (i.e., people of color and others seen as oppressed). Abdel-Magied, who came off as someone unable to tolerate even the mildest contradictions of her views, stalked out of Shriver’s talk in tears, virtually accusing the speaker of perpetuating racism by appropriating other cultures in her writing.

Not long after, Shriver published her full talk online, also in the Guardian,  and it turned out to be passionate, eloquent, and thoughtful, but not at all offensive—except to the overly tender ears of someone like Abdel-Magied. Read it for yourself. But I had no idea that, as Shriver describes in a new New York Times piece, “Will the Left survive the Millennials?“, that the ostracism of Shriver extended farther than the kvetching of Abdel-Magied. It did.

As Shriver describes:

The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A “Right of Reply” session was hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The New Republic’s “Lionel Shriver Shouldn’t Write About Minorities” and taping it above my desk as a chiding reminder.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When you read Shriver’s address, I suspect, you’ll be horrified that the festival disavowed it—and after having approved the topic in advance! And have a look at the New Republic column by Lovia Gyarkye, which basically says that cultural appropriation is okay, but only a minority group does it (“A Mexican in a Tyrolean hat is not the same as a group of college kids partying in sombreros.”)

But Shriver’s point is one we take up frequently here: the Left is under assault by college kids, many of whom adhere to “purity standards” so absurd that that parts of the Left are consuming other parts. I needn’t point out the sad saga of Peter Tatchell, or the way some feminists ignore the deep misogyny of Islam because many Muslims are brown. And now Shriver is in the center of the hurricane:

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It is Australia’s conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump. [JAC: or toward Milo Yiannopoulos.]

I used to question that last sentence—that the Regressive Left was pushing people toward the right. But now that I’ve heard so many Trumpheads mention “political correctness,” and seen the Left refuse to have an honest conversation about Islam, I’m not so sure Shriver is wrong. And yes, classical liberalism—the brand that defends minority rights and free speech at the same time, the people who promoted the Free Speech movement at Berekeley—is endangered by the antics of people like Abdel-Magied, who can’t even bear to hear her opinions contradicted.

Just like it’s salutary for nonbelievers to declare publicly that they’re atheists, so as to give courage to nonbelievers in the closet, so should we, as did Shriver, call out the bullying tactics of the Regressive Left, which might now be renamed The Repressive Left. Nick Cohen has been warning us about this for years, but few read him in the U.S. Perhaps they’ll read Shriver in the New York Times, whose peroration is this:

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.

But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy? Will people, so worried about inadvertently giving offense, avoid those with different backgrounds altogether? Is that the kind of fiction we want — in which the novels of white writers all depict John Cheever’s homogeneous Connecticut suburbs of the 1950s, while the real world outside their covers becomes ever more diverse

. . . Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.

Maybe Shriver will become the American Nick Cohen. Ceiling Cat knows we need one!

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Lionel Shriver, wearing a fine pair of red cowboy boots

Idiot compares atheists to village idiots

September 23, 2016 • 10:00 am

I know that I’m insulting the author of this piece, Sam Kriss, in my title, but his whole article in The Baffler, “Village atheists, village idiots“, is just so crazily misguided that I can’t help but turn his invective back on him. As far as I knew, The Baffler was a respectable literary journal, often sold in bookstores, but this one article has put me off it forever. What editors could possibly approve such an odiferous hunk of tripe?

I don’t know Sam Kriss, though his website says he’s a writer living in the UK. One thing’s for sure, though: he deeply, deeply hates “new” atheists, although he has no problem with “old” atheists. Below in bold I’ve put the major points he makes in his screed (excerpts from the piece have quotation marks around them):

  • All New atheists are idiots.  Have a gander at this:

“Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.

Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.”

What we learn from this is that Mr. Kriss likes to use pejorative language, but it’s hyperbolic and, worse, just plain wrong. Dawkins a lunatic? Tyson catatonic? Harris paranoid? Hitchens falling into the Euphrates? (What does that mean, anyway?) One could use the same language about famous theists, but we refrain from that kind of ad hominem stuff.

  • New atheists are idiots because they spend all their time repeating truths universally acknowledged. Kriss uses a long story from Kierkegaard about a man in a lunatic asylum who escaped and, realizing that he had to pass for sane lest he be re-incarcerated, he decides to affirm his sanity by repeating an undeniable truth over and over again—that the Earth is round. But that, of course, sends him right back to the hospital. This, says Kriss, is the equivalent of what New Atheists do: repeating boring truths over and over again, and appearing like lunatics by so doing. The tedious truths we are said to repeat are that God doesn’t exist, humans have no soul, and that evolution occurs. (Kriss also criticizes Tyson for making a rap video refuting a flat-earther, thus becoming just like the madman in Kierkegaard’s story). As Kriss says:

“In the time of Kierkegaard and Marx and Parallax, there was still some resistance to the deadness of mere facts; now it’s all melted away. Kierkegaard’s villagers saw someone maniacally repeating that the world is round and correctly sent him back to the asylum. We watched Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense, thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. We do it when Sam Harris prises deep into the human brain and announces that there’s no little vacuole there containing a soul.”

Seriously? The “last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement?” Is Kriss aware that about 42% of Americans are young-Earth creationists, with another 31% thinking that evolution happened, but was guided by God? Does he know that 71% of Americans believe in God, with 63% being certain there’s a God? Does Kriss know that  72% of Americans believe in Heaven and 58% in Hell? The “atheist truths” that Kriss sees as boring and self-evident are, in fact, rejected by a majority of Americans—reason enough to not just keep repeating them, but to keep showing why they are truths.

  • The truth is way less important, and far more boring, than lovely fictions.  This is unbelievable for any rational person to say, but Kriss says it. Referring to creationism, a flat earth, and the human soul, we hear this (my emphasis):

“All these falsehoods are beautiful, tiny, glittering reminders that the world can be something other than simply what it is; we should nurture them and let them grow. Instead, they’re crushed, mercilessly, in the name of a blind, stupid, pointless truth. But who’s more wrong—the person who droningly insists, jerking like an automaton, that the world is round, has always been round, and will always be round? Or the one who knows that this earth is not a given, and that we can imagine a whole weary planet into new and different shapes?”

When I read the part in bold, I thought that Kriss must be writing satire. Clearly, the person who insists on truth, even if he’s “jerking like an automaton” (a bad attempt to imitate the prose of Tom Wolfe) is less wrong! And what is this crap about “imagining a whole weary planet into the shape of a pancake”? Or that the earth “is not a given”? This is so bizarre that it’s beyond the bounds of even postmodern craziness.

Finally, and I’ve already wasted too much time on Kriss, he says this:

  • Atheists are no different from believers because each group touts the beauty of the Universe. Yes, you heard it right: Kriss sees people like Dawkins—who says that there is still Magic in Reality, and that understanding doesn’t turn us into cold robots who don’t appreciate beauty—as identical to believers who say the beauty of Earth is God’s doing. Kriss doesn’t like this because he thinks that the world is often ugly and people often unhappy. But that insistence misses the point, which is that naturalism doesn’t erode away our emotions to nothing. Have a look at this nonsense:

“The real cleavage, in other words, isn’t between those who believe in God and those who don’t, but between those who want to change the world and those who just want to repeat it. Watch one of those interminable debates between an atheist and a believer—anything involving Bill Nye is best, but they’re all on YouTube, endless stultifying hours of two people babbling Aristotelian at each other and convincing nobody—and you’ll notice something strange. Both of them will, inevitably, enter into some orgasmic rhapsody about how beautiful the universe is. The theist, gazing upward to his heavens, will chant awestruck odes to the majesty of God’s creation, His churning nebulae, His shining tapestry of suns, all the wonders built from His cosmic perversion.

Meanwhile, the atheist, glancing down at his own miraculous hands, will say something similarly soppy about mountains and rainbows and how incredible it is that all this came about by a happy accident of chance. When they encounter a poetic-humanist critique of cold scientific rationality, the atheists will often argue a similar line: Keats was wrong, science did not unweave the rainbow; the natural world is all the more beautiful if you know how it works. (Dawkins even published a book in 2011 called The Magic of Reality.) This accordance ought to be very worrying. What it shows is that, for all their fiercely expectorated differences, these two people are actually on the same side.

It’s sometimes charged that fundamentalist atheism has become just another intolerant religion; here, at least, religion as it’s actually practiced is only a minor species of atheism. What if you don’t think the universe is beautiful? What if you wake up every morning in a tiny brick cell slotted into a lifeless city under a gray and miserable sky, and you think that the whole thing, as it stands, is utterly wretched? For most of history, religions have tended to hold the natural world in various forms of contempt: it’s cursed by sin, it’s the Devil’s playground, it’s Dunya or Māyā. God, the great theologian Karl Barth wrote, is a ‘No’ to the world.”

Here Kriss is criticizing atheists for a brand-new reason: he sees the world as horrible and atheists misguided because atheists have “so thoroughly trained themselves out of believing in Hell that they can’t see the real one right in front of them.”

Jebus. Yes, the world isn’t great for many people, but one reason it’s getting better is because secularism and reason are replacing religion and superstition. It’s better to promote that incremental change than stand around, as Kriss does, and kvetch about how crappy everything is.

Why did The Baffler publish such a worthless pieces of pablum? I have no idea, but shame on them, and of course on Kriss as well!

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Sam Kriss. His world is hell, and he needs help. 

 

Spot the mantis!

September 23, 2016 • 8:15 am

Reader Mark Sturtevant has another “spot the. . ” picture. Click the photo to enlarge, and I’ll reveal the answer at 11 a.m. Chicago time. (I’d classify this one as “hard”.) As always, try not to give it away in the comments below, though you can say whether you spotted it.

Mark’s notes:

This summer has been a summer full of photographic adventures, and it included a multitude of mantises, which is great because there is nothing in the insect world like a preying mantis. The lady hiding in this scene was a big one, perhaps the largest of this species that I have come across. I will let the readers identify her, and that will not be hard once she is spotted.

She stayed with me for about a week, and I have plenty of candid shots to show of her later. Some of those are gruesome since she was always hungry. In any case, here I have released her again near where I found her. Can the sharp-eyed readers of WEIT find her? She is lurking in there somewhere, and woe to any grasshopper or katydid that gets in her line of sight!

spotmantis2

Readers’ wildlife photos (and videos)

September 23, 2016 • 7:30 am

Reader Lou Jost has some spectacular photos and videos from a recent foray into the rain forest. There will be several parts of this trip spread over the next week. Lou’s notes are indented:

Tambopata Research Center Part 1: Clay licks

 

Scarlet and Red-and-green Macaws on Rio Tambopata Clay Lick
Scarlet and Red-and-green Macaws on Rio Tambopata Clay Lick

I’ve just come back from a visit to a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, which humans have not yet messed up too badly (though they are trying hard). Big animals and birds that are rare and shy near humans are abundant and unafraid here.

The best places to find these animals are the clay licks along certain rivers. Large numbers of parrots, macaws, and some herbivorous mammals visit these exposed banks of soil every day. Researchers speculate that they come either for sodium or because the clay neutralizes toxic substances in the plants they eat.

Blue-headed and Orange-cheeked Parrots
Blue-headed and Orange-cheeked Parrots
About 12 species of psittacids (parrots, macaws, parakeets, and parrotlets) come to these clay banks. The ones we saw most often were Blue-headed Parrots (Pionus menstruus), Mealy Amazons (Amazona farinosa), Orange-cheeked Parrots (Pyrilia barrabandi), Scarlet Macaws (Ara macao), Blue-and-yellow Macaws (Ara ararauna), and the very large-headed Red-and-green Macaws (Ara chloroptera), known locally as “Cabezon” (“Big Head”). The Red-and-green Macaws were a special treat to see in such numbers. Back in 1990 I sometimes saw them at Rio Napo clay licks in Amazonian Ecuador, but they had disappeared there by 1995.They seem especially vulnerable to human encroachment.
Blue-and-yellow Macaws
Blue-and-yellow Macaws

Videos!!