Saudi Arabia, called out for human rights violations, goes after Canada

August 12, 2018 • 12:45 pm

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Justin Trudeau, though I tend to side with his political positions, but now I must strongly applaud the stand of his government and its ministers in calling out Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations. Referring in particular to Samur Badawi, imprisoned again for fighting for human rights and women’s rights, and including her imprisoned brother Raif Badawi, jailed (and flogged) for apostasy and “insulting Islam”, the Canadian government took a strong (and almost unique) public stand against Saudi Arabia:

This is from Canada’s foreign minister:

I’d rank Saudi Arabia and Syria just slightly above North Korea in the degree to which they violate the human rights of their citizens; all are odious countries and deserve the world’s opprobrium. But of course we need the oil and don’t want to offend monsters like Assad. (North Korea has been criticized, but now Trump is almost praising its leaders.) So kudos to Canada for going public; it’s the right thing to do. And it’s shameful that the U.S. doesn’t have the moxie to join our northern neighbor, but it will be a cold day in August when the Trump administration starts criticizing any country for human rights abuses.

Saudi Arabia, full of hubris, of course got back at Canada, recalling its ambassador, expelling the Canadian ambassador in Riyadh, freezing new trade agreements, and cutting off all scholarships supporting Saudi students in Canada. It also went on a public media campaign:

As Ali Rizvi noted, Saudi Arabia even darkly threatened Canada with this now deleted Twitter statement from Saudi state media.

Now, as described in this National Post article (click on screenshot), Saudi Arabia is going after Canada with a campaign whose theme is “you’re worse than we are.” (Click on screenshot to see the piece.)

Some of Saudi’s accusations have merit: for example, Canada has treated its indigenous people abysmally. But they’re trying now to rectify that. I suppose you could say that Saudis are now allowing women to drive, but overall, and considering women, I think most of us would rather live in Canada than Saudi Arabia. Here are the other accusations that Saudi has leveled against Canada, all of which are discussed and answered by The Post:

  • Jordan Peterson is a “Canadian political prisoner.” That’s insane; he’s free. Raif and Samar Badawi, on the other hand, are political prisoners.  Here I’ll mention the horrible punishments Saudi inflicts on criminals, including beheading and amputation of body parts. You can also be executed for blasphemy, atheism, and adultery in Saudi, but these aren’t even real crimes in Canada.
  • Canada has a lot of homeless people. True, and it could always do better, but Saudi Arabia has even more: one estimate is that it has 83,000 homeless children, as well as arresting beggars and journalists who try to document the Kingdom’s poorer quarters.
  • “Canada is one of the worst oppressors of women.” This is absolutely unbelievable—and laughable. Much of this is based on the reported incidents of domestic abuse and spousal rape in Canada, but those are not crimes in Saudi Arabia. In contrast, women have many more rights in Canada than in Saudi Arabia, including the right to go outside without wearing a sack and the ability to make decisions about travel and employment without consulting a male “guardian.”
  • Racism is rife in Canada.  The support for this, mentioned by a Saudi lobbyist in Washington, is simply that a Canadian woman verbally abused a table full of Afghan men. In contrast, Saudi Arabia goes after its own minorities, including Shia Muslims, and bans the public practice of any religion save Islam. They also use “guest workers” as a form of slavery.
  • Quebec Francophones are an oppressed minority. I’ll let you decide about that. Which would you rather be: a French-speaking Canadian or a Saudi woman?
  • Canada supports international terrorism.  Given Saudi Arabia’s record on this, they should just keep their yap shut. The only evidence given for Canadian support of terrorism is the Saudi claim that by criticizing Saudi Arabia, Canada is supporting terrorists.

Canada is a great country and a good place to live—far, far better on human rights issues than Saudi Arabia, and far better than the U.S. in calling out other countries’ abuse of human rights. We should stand with Canada. I do, but our administration won’t.

Here’s are two video clips that explain and document the new fight between Canada and Saudi Arabia. The “We Will Boycott Tim Horton’s” in the first clip cracks me up.

An eight-minute CBC news report emphasizing the failure of Canada’s allies to join it in condemning Saudi Arabia:

h/t: Nilou

Oscars create “blockbuster film” category

August 12, 2018 • 10:30 am

The  New York Times reports that, because of waning interest in the televised Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is creating a new category for Oscars: an award for “outstanding achievement in popular films.” As the paper reports below, part of this decision also reflects the public’s lack of interest in the winning films, which tend to be arcane (i.e. GOOD), like last year’s Best Picture winner: “The Shape of Water”. (That movie got a 92% critics’ rating but only a 73% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I haven’t seen it.)

As the paper reports, big-money blockbusters are ignored in favor of these “niche films”, and so, to lure television audiences who like blockbusters, we have a new category.

Whether its remedies are the correct ones or not, the academy had to take some kind of action: The Oscars are increasingly out of touch. A record low of 26.5 million people watched this year’s telecast, a nearly 20 percent drop from a year earlier. As recently as four years ago, the Academy Awards had an audience of 43.7 million viewers.

“We have heard from many of you about improvements needed to keep the Oscars and our academy relevant in a changing world,” Mr. Bailey wrote. “The Board of Governors took this charge seriously.”

. . . Reasons for the Oscars’ decline abound — the general fragmentation of the media landscape is one — but the central complaints have been about the telecast’s marathon length and increasing tendency to honor niche films that the majority of American moviegoers have not seen. Last year’s best picture winner, “The Shape of Water,” had sold about $60 million in tickets at the time after playing in theaters for 14 weeks.

“Black Panther,” by comparison, took in $202 million over its first three days in North American theaters alone.

In 2009, the academy tried to make room for more widely seen films by doubling the number of potential nominees for the best-picture award to 10 from five. That shift occurred after “The Dark Knight,” a critically acclaimed superhero film, was shut out of the best-picture category, despite receiving nominations in eight others and winning in two.

But allowing more best-picture nominations did little to solve the problem. For the most part, moviedom’s elite continued to bypass films with large audiences and simply put forward additional niche ones.

I don’t like this change. For one thing, the Academy notes that movies nominated for the “Popular Picture” category could also be nominated for the “Best Picture” category, leading to confusion about what differentiates the two. Is it the box office? Some nebulous assessment of the quality? Why should popularity be weighed at all in assessing quality? Or is quality not an issue in this category? If it is, then does the “popular picture” category amount to “movies that aren’t as good as those in the other category, but which audiences liked more?”

To me, the Academy should be a leader in promoting good films, not a slavish follower of box office and public taste. After all, look at the awards for books: the Pulitzer Prizes, the Booker Awards, and the Nobel Prizes for Literature. Many of these involve arcane authors not widely read by the general public. Indeed, only 72% of Americans even read a single book in 2015, that number is declining, and the books read are more likely to be mysteries, self-help books, or pablum like Eat, Pray, Love than the kind of books that garner the awards. (Yes, I know somebody’s going to defend Elizabeth Gilbert’s book.)

The awards, especially the Pulitzers and even more the Booker awards, have led me to a lot of great reading. My goal is to read every book that wins a Booker, and I’m trying to catch up. Those awards, for example, directed me to masterpieces like Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road trilogy and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction have focused my eyes on even more great books, including The Known World and The Hours in fiction and The Looming Tower and The Making of the Atomic Bomb in nonfiction. The list is long.  Imagine if “popular” books were given these prizes!

Some film critics and writers agree; here are two highlighted in the Times piece:

Call me an elitist, if you will, but realize that I don’t believe that some books are better than others by objective standards. But I do think that some books are better than others by consensus of the public who loves literature (including those who read more than a few books a year)—and that holds for movies as well. Awards that pander to popular taste, best sellers, and blockbusters do not improve our experience of art, but only suppresses and obscures how great art can be.

Feel free, of course, to weigh in below.

Creationist Michael Egnor on an especially loony anti-Darwin rant

August 12, 2018 • 8:45 am

The other day I put up a post about my friend Andrew Berry’s Harvard-sponsored summer course on Darwin and evolution, given yearly at Oxford University. It’s a combination lecture and field course on the history of science, with the students getting to travel through England and Wales to see sites like Darwin’s home and the places he visited while formulating his theories.

The post’s pictures and text were all by Andrew, which I made clear in the post: “A field-trip course in England on Darwin and evolution“. It’s a great course and the students love it. I’ve sat in on a few lectures and went with the students when Darwin biographer Janet Browne took us to Down House, Darwin’s home as an adult.

But Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon and faculty member in pediatrics at SUNY Stony Brook, didn’t much like that post. Egnor is in fact benighted: he’s a Catholic creationist and writes regularly for the Discovery Institute’s website Evolution News (the Institute is, of course, a “no-think tank” for Intelligent Design [ID]). Egnor apparently reads this website obsessively, as he often writes about my stupidity; and I usually egnore him.

In his new post, Egnor goes on what can be seen only as an unhinged rant against evolution. That’s typical of him, but he then denigrates Andrew’s course because it seems to “fetishize” Darwin, a man whose views, Egnor thinks, led directly to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Egnor also mistakenly thinks the post was written by me, not Andrew, which partly accounts for his bile.

Click on the screenshot to see the egnorance (the “pilgrimage” refers to the students visiting various places important in the development of evolutionary theory in the 19th century). I’ve archived Egnor’s rant so your click won’t take you to the Discovery Institute page but to the “wayback” version.

Egnor really, really hates Darwinism, but of course it’s for religious and philosophical reasons, not beause of a lack of evidence. He simply disregards the evidence and indicts evolutionary biology for spreading atheism and, yes, eugenics!

I despise Darwinism. It is, in my view, an utterly worthless scientific concept promulgated by a third-rate barnacle collector and hypochondriac to justify functional, if not explicit, atheism. Richard Dawkins got it right: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. A low bar, admittedly, but “natural selection” satisfied, and still satisfies, many. Even bright Christians, regrettably.

Darwin still has some cache [JAC: Egnor means “cachet”] among design advocates — the usual trope is that he provided evidence for common descent and explained microevolution. In this I differ from some of my friends and colleagues sympathetic to ID/Thomism. Darwin’s “theory” is completely worthless to science, a degradation of philosophy, and lethal to culture.

Note the reference to evolution enabling atheism and being “lethal to culture”. Those are the real reasons why the religion-soaked Discovery Institute fights against evolution in favor of their “non-materialistic” ID, which invokes a designer who’s formally unnamed but is actually the Abrahamic God.

But wait! Egnor gives us more!

“Natural selection” is meaningless junk science — dismal logic put to the service of atheism. Darwinism is the most effective engine of atheism in modern times, except perhaps for consumer culture, for which Darwin bears some responsibility. “Survival of the fittest” casts a scientific imprimatur on acquisition as a life-goal. 

What???? Aquisition of reproductive success, perhaps, but not goods and money.  (And as a presumably wealthy surgeon, does Egnor live, as Jesus ordered, in poverty?)

Then Egnor starts in on me, not realizing that the writer of the post he hates is actually Andrew Berry:

So why does this idiot “science” gain such respect?Jerry Coyne sheds some light on the only really important question about Darwinian evolution: why on earth would anyone not laugh at it?

Coyne recounts a pilgrimage to Darwinian Holy Land. In “A field-trip course in England on Darwin and evolution,” Coyne tells of a summer course at Oxford for Harvard undergrads. The young pilgrims tour “Darwinland” (Coyne’s word). They visit the messiah’s birthplace, his hometown (Shrewsbury/Nazareth), the sites of his revelations, and walk in the footsteps of his prophets and apostles. Pilgrims can finger his artifacts and gaze on his holy books. It’s quite a spectacle. It is clearly a religious journey, with the reverence and fervor of a cult.

Does Egnor hate evolution because he thinks it has religious aspects that would replace his beloved Catholicism? It doesn’t really, for we’re fully aware of where Darwin went wrong, and we certainly don’t deem his words infallible. Egnor continues:

And that is the meaning of Darwinism. This worthless science, idiot philosophy, and cultural rot is the creation myth of atheists, and homage is paid, as a duty, to the prophet and to his priests. Darwinian idolatry would be funny, if not for the trail of misery and horror Darwin left in his wake.

The salient influence of Darwinian worship is not on science, but on ethics. With the Origin of Species and Descent of Man, vindication of the strong and eradication of the weak was, for the first time in history, given a scientific imprimatur. The ugliest impact of the Darwinian understanding of man is this lie: man is an evolved animal, nothing more, and all of man’s highest qualities evolved from the victory of the strong over the weak.

Actually, the “victory” was of the reproductively successful over those less successful. And, in the end, Egnor draws a straight line between The Origin and Auschwitz (see the link below to understand why he’s wrong):

The only thing left out of the Darwinian pilgrimage to Oxford is Golgotha. That requires a separate trip to southern Poland, to understand the sacrifice Darwinism demanded, and still demands, of us.

Well, that’s all breathtakingly stupid, but typical of Egnor and his ID colleagues. They really shouldn’t be so transparent about their objections to evolution being philosophical and religious, as it makes ID even less credible as a “scientific” enterprise. And, having failed miserably to get ID taught in schools, and to enact the program outlined in the Wedge Strategy, they’re now reduced to kvetching about evolutionary biology and its practitioners.  What happened to their promise that scientific evidence for ID was “just around the corner”?

I asked Andrew for his response to Egnor, and he sent me the following, which was in an email and not intended for publication. But he gave me permission to reproduce it here:

As for Mr Egnor’s bile-filled comments.  Curious that he’s decided to go the ad hominem route (vis-a-vis Darwin) in his attack on evolution.  This is someone about whom there was barely a bad word said by those who knew him.  I presume Mr Egnor has chosen this approach because he either doesn’t understand the science or hasn’t troubled himself to look into it (I take it he’s not a scientist?).  As for his Holocaust fixation; perhaps he should read the Richards paper on the non-Darwinian origins of Hitler’s thinking on matters of racial purity and superiority.

However, I agree with him it is indeed fetishization of All Things Darwin/Wallace (And More) that those of us interested in the history of science indulge in (and my program promotes).  This is the reason first editions of The Origin sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  We admire Darwin and his colleagues, and enjoy the opportunity to feel in some way closer to the events and the people that we’re interested in by visiting sites etc associated with them, just as, presumably, Mr Egnor feels closer to Jesus when he travels to Jerusalem or a Muslim feels more at-one (or whatever) with the prophet on a visit to Mecca.

But there is a difference.  Historians are interested in these acts of “pilgrimage” (we prefer the term “field trip”) because they allow us to better understand the influences acting upon our heroes and to better appreciate the context in which they were working.  When Darwin scholar Jim Moore takes my students around Cambridge, it is with an eye to understanding the strict theocratic universe that was Cambridge University when Darwin studied there.  Darwin’s mentors — Henslow and Sedgwick in person, Paley in text — were part of a dominant natural theological tradition that strongly influenced Darwin’s thinking. When we visit the Linnaeus archive at the Linnean Society, we can see that Linnaeus was thinking hierarchically with respect to the organization of natural things early in his personal development: his Systema Naturae is a continuation of an existing line of thought.  And Linnaeus is charmingly humanized — he’s no longer a distant, remote, impersonal scientific superstar — when we see his attempt to illustrate the way the Sami transport their boats on land.  Historical field trips can be highly instructive.

 

h/t: Michael (not Egnor)

Readers’ wildlife photographs (and videos)

August 12, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Olen Rambow sent a video demonstrating = convergent evolution: a “hummingbird moth”, one of several species that hovers before flowers like hummingbirds and sucks nectar from them with a large proboscis. This one is probably the white-lined sphinx moth, Hyles lineata. His notes are indented:

While visiting Santa Fe, NM, I ran across a moth that I first mistook for a hummingbird. I was fooled by its flight patterns and wing movements as much as its body shape (especially when viewed from the side). I’d never seen such moths before, but I’ve looked them up and now see that there is such a thing as a “hummingbird moth.” According to Wikipedia, they are an “example of convergent evolution.”

There are also hummingbirds in Santa Fe, often feeding alongside the moths, and this makes me wonder whether the resemblance might actually be an example of mimicry, since other birds might be less inclined to try to eat a moth if they mistake it for a hummingbird. Mimicry and convergent evolution are two separate things, right? Could this be an example of both? I.e., the body shape, flight patterns, etc., give the moths all the same benefits that hummingbirds enjoy while also protecting them from predators by making them look like hummingbirds?

I suspect this isn’t a case of mimicry, as the birds have keen eyes and, although hummers can eat some small insects like gnats, would probably find a moth too large to eat. The birds are, by and large, nectar-sippers.

From Tim Anderson in Australia, a picture he calls “Fountains in the sky.” His notes:

A pic of the Southern part of the Milky Way, showing the Carina Nebula at the bottom, the Southern Cross and the Coalsack, and the Pointers. Taken with a Canon 80D and a Samsung 14mm lens.

Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

August 12, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day: Sunday, August 12, 2018, and a day for napping, eating, and lying in the sun. It’s National Julienne Fries Day, which on account of their thinness are a perversion of fries (or chips). In the UK it’s the “Glorious Twelfth,” marking the opening of the Red Grouse shooting season—a bird better left unshot.

Today’s Google Doodle is a gif that celebrates the life and work of Cantinflas, the stage name of the actor, producer, and screenwriter Mario Fortino Alfonso Moreno Reyes, who starred in innumerable movies and plays in Mexico and the US (he won a Golden Globe for his performance in Around the World in Eighty Days.) Cantinflas was born on this day in 1911 and died in 1993. The gif shows the variety of his role:

On this day in 1851, Isaac Singer was given a patent for his sewing machine. The rest is history. And on August 12, 1865, Joseph Lister performed his first antiseptic treatment of a patient—a boy with a compound fracture of the leg—and found that the fracture healed without infection. The rest is history. On this day in 1883, the very last quagga died at a zoo in Amsterdam.  Once thought to be a distinct species, the quagga is now formally recognized as a subspecies of the Plains Zebra, with the quagga’s designation being Equus quagga quagga. Here’s one in the London Zoo, photographed in 1870: the only picture of a living quagga:

On August 12, 1914, World War I further expanded as the UK declared war on Austria-Hungary, with the countries of the British Empire following along. On this day in 1950, in the Bloody Gulch Massacre, North Korean soldiers massacred 75 American prisoners of war, a Geneva Convention no-no. On this day in 1953, according to Wikipedia, occurred “the first testing of a real thermonuclear weapon (not test devices): The Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of “RDS-6s” (Joe 4), the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb.” On August 12, 1990, the famous T. rex fossil “Sue”, now in Chicago’s Field Museum, was discovered in South Dakota by Sue Hendrickson.  Finally, on this day in 1994, Major League Baseball players went on strike, resulting in the cancellation of the rest of the season and of the 1994 World Series.

Notables born on this day include Helena Blavatsky (1831), Klara Hitler (1860, Adolf’s mom), Christy Mathewson (1880), Erwin Schrödinger (1887, Nobel Laureate), Cantinflas (1911; see above), Norris and Ross McWhirter of Guinness World Record Fame (1925, twins), Buck Owens (1929) and mountaineer Rick Ridgeway (1949).

Here’s a clip of Cantinflas in a Mexican movie (English subtitles) in which he discusses his indolence and justifies it with theology:

 

Those who died on August 12 include Charles Martel (1295), William Blake (1827), William Jackson Hooker (1865), Thomas Mann (1955), Ian Fleming (1964), Henry Fonda (1982), William Shockley (1989, Nobel Laureate and miscreant), John Cage (1992), Les Paul (2009), and Lauren Bacall (2014).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili learns some natural history:

Hili: Are there wild kangaroos in Poland?
A: No.
Hili: Maybe it was a hare.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy w Polsce są dzikie kangury?
Ja: Nie ma.
Hili: Może to był zając.
Leon: Don’t you think that the greenery highlights the color of my eyes?
Tweets from Grania. She says this probably isn’t humility, but misplaced altruism:

All I can say is: Good Lord!

A nice political cartoon:
More on the Canada/Saudi Arabia squabble later today:

IT FOUND WALDO!

There’s nothing more romantic or mesmerizing than fireflies on a summer night:

From Heather Hastie:  triple turtle rescue! (sound and video on). This is what our trash causes in the oceans.  What nice divers!

A cat plays fetch:

I found this creepy tweet, but wanted to throw it in here as it appears to be the Charles Manson of Nature [UPDATE: see comments below; this appears to be a bogus report, as I should have guessed!]

Finally, a cartoon sent from Heather Hastie which shares my take on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (see my post yesterday), and throws in Bernie Sanders—for whom I voted in the primaries—to boot.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Another lionized Democrat cozying up to anti-Semites

August 11, 2018 • 2:15 pm

Well, my headline may be a tad exaggerated, but I’m pretty sure that the subject of this post is not friendly to Jews (she’s made some remarkably ill informed comments about Palestine). Read on.

Many Democrats have been excited about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the young Hispanic activist (she’s 28) won the Democratic primary for a House seat in New York, gaining a big upset victory over the incumbent. She’s a Democratic Socialist, but my take on her is that she’s not particularly bright and is espousing views that, while they may win her a seat in the House, won’t advance the Democratic platform. In fact, her election may give Democrats an even worse image.

I say that because Ocasio-Cortez has cozied up to some odious characters. Here she is headlining the Universal Muslim Association of America meeting with our favorite sharia-lover and FOF (Friend of Farrakhan), Linda Sarsour (click on screenshot):

From an interview on a Leftist website (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

 

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to talk about the travel ban, but Linda Sarsour is with us, director of the first Muslim online organizing platform, MPower Change. You supported Alexandria. This is a remarkable moment.

LINDA SARSOUR: I mean, in light of such horrible news yesterday with the travel ban and the Muslim ban, Alexandria is the hope that we’ve been waiting for. She is a young woman of color. She’s Puerto Rican. She’s a Socialist, just like me. We are both card-carrying DSA members. And she’s pro-Palestine, and she’s unapologetic. And the movement right now is elated, because this is what you’re going to see, Amy, in this election season. It’s a new day, a new generation. And Alexandria is what represents us and our values.

. . . [Ocasio-Cortez] was outraised almost 10 to one. And it’s not about money. It’s about the grassroots organizing. It’s about building power on the ground. It’s about getting voters who have been ignored and marginalized to the polls. And that’s exactly what Alexandria did. She’s charismatic. She’s young. And she was also very progressive, unapologetically progressive—tuition-free college, Medicare for all, pro-Palestine, even in the recent Great Return March putting her voice out there while she was campaigning, not afraid of any opposition that was going to come her way. And that’s the new kind of folks that are going to win. So, no Democrat is going to hold their seat for too long. And a lot of Alexandrias are coming this 2018 and 2020.

You can read about the “Great return march” in Wikipedia. It is, in short a call for the “right of return” that would destroy Israel as a state:

On 30 March 2018, a six-week campaign composed of a series of protests was launched at the Gaza Strip, near the Gaza-Israel border. Called by Palestinian organizers the “Great March of Return” (Arabic: “مسیرة العودة الكبري”‎), the protests demand that Palestinian refugees and their descendants be allowed to return to the land they were displaced from in what is now Israel.

With a friend like Linda Sarsour, and an endorsement from same, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t need enemies! You know what “Pro-Palestine” is code for, too.  But of course it pays, electoral-wise, to be friendlier to Muslims than to Jews, for Democrats, especially those on the extreme Left, see Jews as oppressors and Muslims as the oppressed.

Finally, there’s this, in which Ocasio-Cortez touts Ilhan Omar, a Somali woman in the Minnesota state legislature.

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1028123094857261057

The tweet on the right?

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/269488770066313216

Another:

Just keep it up, Democrats—a party once friendly to the Jews, now siding with regressive elements of Islam. You want four more years of Trump in 2020? Just keep cozying up to people like Sarsour and Ilhan Omar.

 

h/t: Grania