Bible-toting mother of 12 walks through Target, protesting trangender bathroom access

May 17, 2016 • 2:30 pm

I’m not quite sure why all the fracas has arisen about transgender access to bathrooms, as most people, I suspect, don’t really care. It’s a tempest in a chamber pot. Perhaps if a bearded person dressed as a man walked into a woman’s bathroom, that might freak people out, but somehow I don’t think that’s gonna happen very often.  And you can always have, as we do in our department, mixed-sex bathrooms, usable by anyone.

I suspect the “bathroom issue” is just a symbol for a wider cultural war between progressives and conservatives. In the same way, the hijab, which is just a piece of cloth, has become a symbol of Muslim oppression and at at the same time of women’s demand to wear what they damn well please. The Target chain has become a literal target for religious folks like these, for it’s recently instituted a policy that anyone can use any bathroom they please based on their chosen gender identity.

Look how exercised it makes this woman, who decries the “homosexual perverted agenda.” This makes me suspect that yes, the bathroom policy has become a flashpoint for Christians who see their Bible-based values eroded by the tide of progressivism. First gay marriage, now transgender bathrooms. I try to put myself in these people’s shoes and feel their anger, but I can’t manage to do it.

It’s just one more way religion tries to beat back the better angels of our nature.

The issue seems to be far more contentious than it should be, but feel free to weigh in below.

An unenlightening disquisition on consciousness

May 17, 2016 • 10:15 am

Several readers sent me Galen Strawson’s new piece in the New York Times‘s philosophy section, “The Stone.” In his op-ed, “Consciousness isn’t a mystery. It’s matter“, respected philosopher of mind Strawson makes three contentions. I find the most important two to be uncontroversial, while the third is puzzling.

The basic premise is that consciousness is a property of matter—our evolved bodies—and one needn’t invoke spooky dualism to explain it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  His argument:

  • Consciousness is not an “illusion”; it’s real because we all experience it.  I find this pretty uncontroversial. When people say (and I’ve said it) that “Consciousness is an illusion,” what they mean—or what I meant, as I no longer make that statement—is that it’s not what it feels like: like a little person in the brain controlling and experiencing things. In that sense it’s an “illusion”, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
  • Consciousness derives from physical phenomena. Although dualists, including many religious people, think that consciousness is entirely detachable from physical phenomena, and not a result of physical phenomena, the evidence is to the contrary.  You can make all kinds of alterations to consciousness through drugs, brain stimulation, brain trauma, and so on—or eliminate it entirely with anaesthetics. Again, this seems to be Strawson’s main point, but I find it uncontroversial. I doubt many philosophers would find it problematic, either.
  • Physics itself is the real mystery, and one that is unexplainable. As the title implies, it’s MATTER that’s the mystery. Quotes:

“The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.)”

and

“We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is — what the physical is.

We may think that physics is sorting this out, and it’s true that physics is magnificent. It tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations (e = mc2, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, the periodic table and so on) and that we can use to build amazing devices. True, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure. Physics is silent — perfectly and forever silent — on this question.”

I’m not sure what he’s saying here except for this: “Why are the laws of physics what they are?” And maybe Strawson is right; perhaps the answer is, as Sean Carroll reminds us repeatedly, “Because, in the end, that’s just the way it is.”  But I’m not sure it’s forever silent on all these questions. For example, we may already know why the inverse square law holds; and we already know, I think, how some properties of matter (the periodic table) stem from their different numbers of neutrons, protons, and electrons. If Strawson is saying that physics has reached its explanatory limit insofar as the building blocks of matter go, or why the laws of physics are as they are, I think he’s wrong.

But maybe he’s raising a different question, like “why is there something instead of nothing?” Yet even that question has some tentative answers. The question, “What is matter”? seems to be  meaningless in the sense Strawson asks it.

Philosophically astute readers can tell us what’s really new in Strawson’s piece.

Christians revel in thought of Hitchens burning in hell

May 17, 2016 • 8:15 am
Grania sent me an email (below) pointing out that my post on Hitchens’s Vulture also got onto the internet via a tw**t by Lawrence Krauss, with a reaction from Christians that, I guess, was predictable.

Lawrence Krauss tweeted your article on Hitchens and while most people responding to the tweet were appreciative, these believers (they self-identify as such in their Twitter bio) are positively salivating about atheists burning in hell.

I think I might go and listen to a Jeff Dee rant on hellfire.

(Jeff Dee is a long-time host/co-host of The Atheist Experience and The Non-Prophets; and frequently got irked by Christians who called into the show threatening hell. Many of them thought they were “being nice” in issuing their little caveat; and they got their butts kicked all the way to Cairo by Jeff who pointed out that there is nothing remotely polite about telling someone that they deserve to be tortured forever.)

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Here are the descriptions of those lovely Christians.  I find these reactions odd—and un-Christian.  Any God that would send somebody to eternal flames for not believing in Him is an immoral and reprehensible God. Is there any atheist who wishes that believers should be consigned to such punishment for their ignorance? Screen Shot 2016-05-17 at 7.51.13 AMScreen Shot 2016-05-17 at 7.52.55 AM

As a palliative, here’s Jeff Dee and Matt Dillahunty taking down a Christian who claims that atheists go to hell (but God doesn’t send them there!):

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 17, 2016 • 7:30 am

I have a comfortable backlog of photos, but always welcome good ones to put in the queue. So send along your pix, but again, the good ones.

Today we’re featuring Backyard Wildlife: the beauty that we might miss because it’s quotidian. First some photos by Anne-Marie Cournoyer in Montreal:

House sparrow (Passer domesticus; male and female):

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Sexual dimorphism in sparrows—male and then female:

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Fluffy baby sparrow, still following its parents around and begging for food:

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American robin (Turdus migratorius):

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White-crowned sparrow  (Zonotrichia leucophrys):
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Common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula). [JAC: Grackles are such cool-looking birds with their sleek shape, prominent eyes, and blue-violet heads].

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From Randy Schenck in Iowa.

The Indigo Buntings (Passerina cyanea) are back and this one would say that the photo puts on a few ounces.

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Here’s a Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger) as he sits on a gargoyle in the front yard:

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Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 17, 2016 • 6:15 am
It’s Tuesday, May 17, and our school year (which ends in early June) is winding to a close. Today it will be moderately chilly (56°F, 13°C) with a chance of light showers, and they begin painting my office.  On this day in history there were two advances in civil rights. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) that separate schools for blacks and whites was an inherently unequal and unconstitutional institution, ending segregation in public schools. And, in 2004, the first legal gay marriages in the U.S. took place in Massachusetts.
Those born on this day included Edward Jenner (1749) and Eric Satie (1866). Those who died on this day included Lawrence Welk (1992), Donna Summer (2012) and Gerald Edelman (2014). When I started grad school at Rockefeller University, we used to play touch football against his lab’s team, called “The Edelman Boys,” all fiercely loyal to their boss. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a little preprandial wash:
Hili: Just one more paw and we will go and see what’s in the kitchen.
A: Do you have any orders?
Hili: I’m not fussy, as long as the food is plentiful and tasty.
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Smacznego!
In Polish:
Hili: Jeszcze tylko ta łapka i idziemy zobaczyć co jest w kuchni.
Ja: Masz jakieś zamówienia?
Hili: Nie jestem wybredna, byle było dużo i smaczne.

Newly published photos of Amy Winehouse

May 16, 2016 • 3:00 pm

Okay, it’s from PuffHo, but even a blind tabloid can harbor an acorn. Her are some previously unpublished photos of La Winehouse. I like them because they were taken on the cusp of fame, and before her downward slide into bulimia, drugs, and depression. Here she looks happy and healthy. Indented text is from the article.

“The first time I met Amy Winehouse was the day I shot her album cover,” photographer Charles Moriarty recalled in a video featured on Kickstarter. The year was 2003 and Winehouse was about to release her debut album “Frank.”

To capture the image, Moriarty and Winehouse wandered through back alleys and city streets, a bottle of white wine in hand while they snapped photos and apparently borrowed a passerby’s dogs. The image that would immortalize Winehouse’s first record shows her smiling obliviously in a pink, see-through T-shirt, walking a little black puppy on a leash. She looks young, silly, relaxed. Her signature black winged eyeliner is in its infant stages, peeking out from her upper lids.

Here’s the album cover, and below it are Moriarty’s previously unpublished photos:

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I’ll even forgive her for being photographed with a d*g

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“[The photos] are an important part of her life where she’s transforming from a young girl to a recording artist,” Moriarty told The Huffington Post. “She’s just about to release her first album. She’s experiencing brand new things for the first time. This small photographic moment captures that. I think it’s important. I think everyone should see it. I think everyone should be able to smile and remember Amy the way that I do.”

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When Winehouse passed away in 2011, Moriarty wasn’t sure what to do with the photos, many of which had never been published. “When Amy died I was approached by people to do various things, but to be honest it was a little too close to the bone and I was pretty upset at the time,” he recalled. “I really didn’t want them to be used commercially. It felt like an invasion of a private moment we’d had when we were younger, all of the sudden being brought out into the open just because this awful thing had happened. I didn’t want them to come to light that way so I held onto them.”

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Moriarty collaborated with book designer Sybren Kuiper to compile Winehouse’s photographs into a single volume, titled Before FRANK. “Kuiper allowed me to see the images outside of my own constructs. After many years, a fresh eye on the work was really a delight to see.”

Appropriately, “Amy” director Kapadia wrote the book’s foreword. It begins: “Over the years I have seen thousands of images of Amy, by brilliant photographers from all over the world, but Charles Moriarty’s photos stood out.”

The photographer, with the help of agency Just Friends, is currently raising funds to publish the book on Kickstarter. They’ve already surpassed their $21,249 goal, but Winehouse fans have until May 19 to donate to the cause. 

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Things changed when the photographer watched Asif Kapadia’s heartbreaking documentary “Amy,” pieced together from home video footage, live recordings and photos of Amy’s all too public life and death. The film captured dimensions of Amy not often publicized by the mainstream media — her sassy sense of humor, her immense compassion, her fanatical love of music, her fearlessness, moxie and self-doubt.  [JAC: Watch the movie!]

After seeing the film, Moriarty explained, “It was clear to me this side of Amy needed to be shown, that I needed to get them out into the open, and that a book would be the best way to do this.”

 

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Moriarty collaborated with book designer Sybren Kuiper to compile Winehouse’s photographs into a single volume, titled Before FRANK. “Kuiper allowed me to see the images outside of my own constructs. After many years, a fresh eye on the work was really a delight to see.”

Appropriately, “Amy” director Kapadia wrote the book’s foreword. It begins: “Over the years I have seen thousands of images of Amy, by brilliant photographers from all over the world, but Charles Moriarty’s photos stood out.”

The photographer, with the help of agency Just Friends, is currently raising funds to publish the book on Kickstarter. They’ve already surpassed their $21,249 goal, but Winehouse fans have until May 19 to donate to the cause. 

You can see the Kickstarter page by clicking on the screenshot below; it’s already exceeded its goal:

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New Title IX guidelines a disaster for colleges

May 16, 2016 • 1:45 pm

Note: This is not about the new Federal guidelines on transgender access to bathrooms. Please read the article before you comment!

A while back, the Obama administration’s Education Department informed American colleges that those persons accused of Title IX violations (e.g., sexual harassment and assault) should be judged by “preponderance of the evidence” versus the legal standard of “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”.  The letter wasn’t absolutely binding, but colleges fell in line, as they feared losing federal funds. (Title IX, by the way, was the 1972 regulation—and a good one, in my view—that colleges receiving federal funds should not be allowed to discriminate in any way on the basis of gender. Among its other salubrious effects, it gave a useful shot in the arm to women’s sports.) But the government has taken it further, and in an insalubrious way.

At the time, I thought it would be a disaster, for punishing students using guidelines very different from those used in the courts is an invitation for lawsuits. I also thought that behaviors as odious as sexual harassment and assault should be adjudicated by the court system, and if a student were found guilty, he or she could then be severely punished by the college. Colleges are not equipped to properly judge such matters, and using a standard like “preponderance of the evidence” makes their judgments even wobblier. University administrators and professors aren’t trained to act as judge and jury.

I do sympathize with victims who don’t want to go to the police out of various fears (being disbelieved, treated badly, and so on), but harassment and and especially assault are very serious crimes, ones that should be dealt with by the police and the courts. When they’re not, colleges tend to drop the ball over and over again. That leaves them open to lawsuits for improper conduct, and for violating students’ civil rights. If colleges do investigate, because a student simply won’t go to the police, then I think they should use the legal standard of “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” That makes the entire system equitable and eliminates at least some subjectivity from the process.

I mention this because someone sent me a Washington Post column by George Will about this issue (“Due process is still being kicked off campus“), and I had to agree with Will. (Yes, such is the fate of liberals these days—having to agree with conservatives because the Authoritarian Left is sometimes even more misguided.)  Will notes that mere accusations, even without a preponderance of evidence, is enough to trigger college action, and we know of such cases at Duke and The University of Virginia.

But the case Will mentions, which is covered by both The Denver Post and The Chronicle of Higher Education, shows what the new Title IX guidelines have produced: an accusation (by a third party), a suspension, and a lawsuit, even when there was no evidence that any violation was committed. Here are the facts from the Denver Post, beginning with a student seeing a hickey (you do know what that is, right?) on her friend’s neck. That eventually led to the suspension of the accused, Grant Neal, a student athlete at Colorado State University at Pueblo. In return, Neal has filed a lawsuit against the college (you can see all the documents here), as well as against the Department of Education, for violating his civil rights.

. . . a peer of Jane Doe’s in the Athletic Training Program reported the encounter as rape to CSU faculty after seeing a hickey on her neck, says the 90-page lawsuit filed by Denver attorney Michael Mirabella and New York City attorneys Andrew Miltenberg, Tara Davis and Jeffrey Berkowitz.

The lawsuit points out that the peer was not an eye witness to the sexual encounter and did not hear about it from either Neal or the woman.

DeLuna [Jennifer DeLuna, director for Diversity and Inclusion] notified Neal on Dec. 18 that he had been found responsible for “sexual misconduct” in violation of the university’s code of conduct.

His “unwarranted and severe” penalty was suspension for the remainder of Jane Doe’s enrollment at the college, the lawsuit says.

. . . Neal lost his football and wrestling scholarships, which damaged his future education, career, reputation and athletic prospects.

The lawsuit gives graphic details about several sexual encounters between Neal and Jane Doe. When later asked about the events, Jane Doe made it clear their relationship was consensual, the lawsuit said.

The supposed “victim” says she was not assaulted. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Our stories are the same, and he’s a good guy,” Jane Doe was quoted in the lawsuit as telling a university official. “He’s not a rapist, he’s not a criminal, it’s not even worth any of this hoopla.”

Why, then, was he suspended, and why did he lose his scholarships? Apparently because a third-party report of a hickey constituted “preponderance of evidence”.   Reading other reports, I can’t find any further evidence beyond the friend seeing a hickey, and if the supposed victim says that no assault took place, why was the accused convicted?

This is what happens when colleges, pushed by the Obama Adminstration, internalize a standard of guilt different from that used by criminal courts. That’s a conflict guaranteed to produce lawsuits.

As I said, I think that serious criminal charges should be tried by the courts, not by ill-equipped universities. A conviction in court gives a college every right to sanction the accused as hard as they can. But if there’s no court case, then colleges must adjudicate the same way the courts do, for what reason is there to judge criminal behavior by a less rigorous standard in college than in court? Can you have one standard of civil rights on campus, and another in society?

Readers can weigh in here, and I add that I am not questioning the Title IX statute itself, which I approve of, but the new addendum about how colleges should adjudicate violations.

 

Traffic delays at Kruger

May 16, 2016 • 12:30 pm

It’s hard to brain today, and things are hectic as they’ll begin renovating my office tomorrow (part of my retirement deal). Posting may be light as I have to move my tuchus next door, and, like a cat, I do best in familiar surroundings.

But here’s a nice traffic report:

h/t: Grania