Jonathan Haidt and the Illiberal Left

June 2, 2016 • 12:00 pm

by Grania

For those of you who have been following the rise and rise of the Illiberal Left and especially the melt-downs on various campuses; this is a heads-up for an interesting discussion on The Rubin Report with Jonathan Haidt.

Haidt is a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, but is probably more familiar to readers for his discussions on subjects like morality and religion.

The conversation with host Dave Rubin covers a range of political subjects. In particular, Haidt has been watching the campus trends carefully and has some (perhaps unsurprising) insights into the main forces behind the current style of protest as well as a prediction for the future of this activism.

It’s well worth a watch or listen if you’ve been baffled by the tendency of some Leftists towards censorship and other misguided and illiberal practices.

Part 1

Part 2

The crab is spotted

June 2, 2016 • 10:30 am

by Greg Mayer

I think most readers probably spotted the crab (which happens to be spotted) rather quickly, in part because it was in the dead center of the photo, which is how I deliberately composed the shot. More than a challenge to readers’ spotting ability, I wanted to illustrate the delightfully exact camouflage that the crab’s spotted pattern achieved on the sand background. If you look at the original post, you’ll note that the crab has stopped near the edge of the crest of the little dry sand hillock it has ascended. Because the crab’s front side is raised higher than its posterior, the light, coming from behind the crab, casts a slight shadow to the front of the crab. This shadow would ordinarily make the crab stand out a bit as a dark spot. But because it is near the crest, its shadow connects with the shadow that the crest casts in the lee of the light, and the crab is less visible. I wondered whether it chose that position deliberately to aid its camouflage, but my observations were insufficiently prolonged for me to determine whether its position was intentional or accidental.

After allowing me to take a number of pictures of it atop the dry sand hillock, the crab moved off to wet sand, and its camouflage is nearly as good.

Crab on wet sand, Playa Pan Dulce, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Crab on wet sand, Playa Pan Dulce, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

The lightness of the crab’s underparts makes it a bit more visible on the darker wet sand, but it seems to my eye that the dark spots of the crab have darkened somewhat, enhancing its camouflage. Again, my observations were not extensive enough to resolve the question of color change, but blowing both pictures up, and comparing them side by side, the spots do indeed look darker on wet sand.

More common than the well-camouflaged crabs were hermit crabs (Coenobita sp.), most of which were in the shells of periwinkles, live specimens of which were common lower in the intertidal zone.

Hermit crabs (Coenobita) on Playa Pan Dulce, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Hermit crabs (Coenobita) in periwinkle shells on Playa Pan Dulce, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

Finally, in this last picture, I’m not sure if the camouflaged crab, or one of its companions, is present– it’s a real spot the crab problem, since I don’t know if there is one. (The hole, and accompanying excavated hillock of dry sand, I suspect is the work of a larger, unseen crab.)

Playa Pan Dulce, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Playa Pan Dulce, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

If anyone can help identify the camouflaged crab, the periwinkle (?Littorina sp.), or the species of the hermit crab, please weigh in.

Leftist censored by Left again

June 2, 2016 • 9:45 am

Alice Dreger is a bioethicist and the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger, a book I’ve just started reading. It’s been recommended by several friends, and I gather it has something to do with her demonization by colleagues for her research on intersex individuals. But I’ve read only 30 pages and can’t yet tell. If anybody’s read the book, weigh in below.

On her personal website yesterday, Dreger wrote about her continuing ostracism by the Left in an essay called “Zero Tolerance: Censored by the Left.” What happened is that one of her very popular pieces of writing, “What if we admitted to children that sex is primarily about pleasure?“, was noticed by the website Everyday Feminism, which wanted to reprint it. She asked for a proper citation to the original publication, mention of her two most recent book, her approval if the site made any changes to her piece, and a modest fee. That’s exactly what I’d do.

Everyday Feminism did publish the piece, but then suddenly pulled it. Dreger reports:

I thought to myself, “I’ll bet someone told them I’m supposedly an enemy of transgender rights, and so they pulled it.”

Yup.

Today by email, from Josette Sousa, Program Coordinator for Everyday Feminism, when I wrote to ask “wtf”:

“What happened was that we decided to pull the article from circulation shortly after it went up. When we asked permission from it we weren’t aware of some of the articles you’ve published on trans issues and after a reader brought it to our attention and we looked into them. We then realized that while we very much valued the information in the article on teaching children that sex is about pleasure, the views expressed in several of your other articles directly conflicts with the work we’re trying to do in Everyday Feminism. For that reason, we decided to pull the article.” 

So supposedly something I’ve written about trans issues is so terribly offensive, Everyday Feminism doesn’t dare publish a piece by me on talking to your kids about sex!

This is the literary equivalent of no-platforming: refusing to use any of an author’s pieces because you object to something they’ve written elsewhere. If we did that with Christopher Hitchens, nobody would reprint any of his work if they objected to his published defense of the Iraq war. And it’s unconscionable. We’ll never agree with everything everyone says, and if you’re a member of the Highly Offended Left, that means that you’ll reprint work only by those deemed 100% Morally Pure.

But is Dreger really a transphobe? She claims not, and her citations support it:

And what are the “viewed expressed in several of [my] other articles that directly conflicts with the work [they’re] trying to do”? Of course they don’t say. Because I think they’d have an awfully hard time pointing to any such thing.

A number of my fellow feminists have pointed out that today, women like me can subject to silencing simply on the basis that they have supposedly said something that is anti-trans rights, even if they have not. Anyone so labeled also gets labeled a “TERF”: trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

I’ve pointed out repeatedly that I’m no such thing. Take this article, for example (from a decade ago!). Take this report I helped author.Take this book I co-edited.

But it does no good. Because as soon as you assert anything that someone with the trans identity card claims is anti-trans, you are stripped of your rights to be a sex-positive feminist talking about sex ed at a feminist website. At least in the case of “Everyday Feminism.”

. . . I’m still on the left. I’m still pushing for trans rights. Try and stop me.

The Left is, to a large extent, destroying itself by eating its own. If you don’t meet someone’s Purity Test, you’re rejected lock, stock, and barrel. Indeed, this may cost the Democrats the Presidential election this fall if disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton. I’m not a big fan of Clinton, but I know that the election of Trump would destroy this country: an immense loss for all liberals and progressives. In the case of Dreger, I don’t know on what grounds she’s accused of being a transphobe. But the links above suggest she’s not, and is being demonized not by facts but by rumors.

What a shame that Everyday Feminism won’t publish a very nice article because its author has supposedly failed to meet every criterion for being a good Third-Wave Feminist. How does such censorship advance either feminism or liberalism? It reminds me of those leftist secular bloggers who spend all their time not improving society, but calling out the flaws of other liberals and secularists. To paraphrase Marx, “The point is not to criticize the world, but to change it.”

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Virtue

June 2, 2016 • 8:45 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip “crime” is a bit problematic to me.  If religion is a sham because it ‘tricks’ criminals into behaving themselves, why aren’t any forms of deterrence or imprisonment the same kind of “tricks”? In one case your fear of God keeps you lawful; in the other case it’s the fear of the law (or fear of diasapprobation). Granted, there’s no God to really punish you, while there are police, but being good is being good. I do realize that it’s always better to act on the truth (i.e., there’s no evidence for a god, punitive or otherwise) and behave on rational than on fictional grounds, but if that’s the artist’s point, it’s very subtle. Besides, the net effect of religion on people’s behavior these days is by no means certain to be positive.

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Google Doodle celebrates Lotte Reiniger

June 2, 2016 • 8:00 am

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 117th birthday of a little-known German animated filmmaker, Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981), with a 1½ minute animation, in her style, that you can see by clicking the screenshot below.

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Here’s one of her shorter movies, “Cinderella” (“Aschenputtel”) made in 1922, several years before sound was added to movies:

Four years later she made the first full-length animated movie, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” which you can see here (German captions only); it antedated “Snow White”—the first such film made in English—by 11 years.  Her films were immensely successful, and required tedious work: cutting out black paper silhouettes and photographing them frame by frame as they were moved. (I haven’t been able to find a video of another feature, “Doktor Doolittle und seine Tiere,” or “Doctor Doolittle and his Animals.”)

Lotte Reiniger bei der Arbeit am Prinzen Achmed Copyright: Stadtmuseum Tübingen
Lotte Reiniger working on Prince Achmed. Photo: Stadtmuseum Tübingen

Readers’ wildlife photographs

June 2, 2016 • 7:30 am

I have a folder of science papers to write about, but I have to read them first; this is in the near future. There’s a marvelous new paper on the famous “peppered moth” story of evolution via natural selection, but unfortunately the margins of this post are too small to contain my analysis. Stay tuned.

We’ll have a short “readers’ wildlife” today as I have fun to have, but, as usual Stephen Barnard has sent photos (and a video!) that serve nicely.

Norther Harrier (Circus cyaneus) harassing a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus):

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Baby Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus). Pretty cute:

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Western Wood Pewee (Contopus sordidulus):

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Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana):

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Stephen’s video is simply called “Greedy chick.” Those eaglets are getting huge!

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 2, 2016 • 6:30 am
Greetings from Boston, where yesterday’s glorious weather—72°F (22°C) and cloudless—has turned overcast and rainy. But it’s Boston, which is always lovely whatever the weather. On this day in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, continuing the superfluous and embarrassing British royalty. I was four at the time, and on my way to Greece to live; we stopped in London on the way and I remember all the excitement. (I got to climb inside the Lord Mayor’s gold coach.) On this day in 1840, Thomas Hardy was born, and, in 1941, Lou Gehrig died of ALS, (“Lou Gehrig’s Disease”). On June 2, 1962, Vita Sackville-West died, and, in 2008, Bo Diddley met his Composer.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows herself to be a Jewish cat, always kvetching about something: in this case, the fact that there’s nothing to kvetch about.
Hili: In principle we have nothing to complain about.
Cyrus: That’s true.
Hili: And this is also a serious problem.
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 In Polish:
Hili: W zasadzie nie mamy na co narzekać.
Cyrus: To prawda.
Hili: I to też jest poważny problem.

The roses are blooming chez Hili, and, as Andrzej says on his Facebook page, “Wygląda na to, że redakcja “Listów” kwitnie”—”It seems that the editorial office of Listy is flowering”:

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Meanwhile in Winnipeg, Gus is having a blast. Staff Taskin reported, after I kvetched about the TSA:

Here’s a Gus video to improve your day. I have a pile of grass clippings drying so I can use them for mulch. Gus found another use for them.

Kindergarten graduation in Gaza: baby terrorists are born

June 1, 2016 • 1:30 pm

Here’s a clip from MEMRI, translated into English, showing a kindergarten class graduating in Gaza. Instead of diplomas, they get toy Kalashnikovs and show off their military skills.

Click on the screenshot to go to the 7-minute video. How can kids brought up like this, getting their toy rifles at graduation and wearing miniature military uniforms, do anything but want to kill?

There are even kids putting mock explosives under toy tanks.  As the song from South Pacific goes,

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

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