Mehdi Hasan tries to destroy Pinker on Al-Jazeera

March 21, 2018 • 12:15 pm

I’ve been reading Steve Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, at the same time reading the many reviews of this book. While a few reviews have been positive, most are negative, often very negative (e.g., this one). (These don’t seem to have hurt the book’s huge sales.)  And I often feel that these reviewers have read a different book from the one I’ve nearly finished. They often accuse Pinker of neglecting issues that he actually deals with in the book, take his quotes out of context, or use anecdotal examples to refute a general thesis documented with lots of data.

One of these nay-sayers is Mehdi Hasan, a British journalist of Indian ancestry, a Muslim, and, as far as I can see, a Muslim apologist along the lines of Karen Armstrong (who’s a Muslim apologist but not a Muslim). Hasan’s also quite aggressive, as he should have been in this debate with Richard Dawkins, but not necessarily when he’s interviewing an author, as he does here during a 15-minute “interview” with Pinker on Hasan’s Al-Jazeera’s show.

Hasan’s nastiness about the book, unseemly in a journalist, is on view in the video below. Over and over again Hasan accuses Pinker of saying things he didn’t, and repeatedly interrupts his subject. He should at least have let Pinker discuss his thesis rather than having to respond to a barrage of hostile questions. Well, maybe this isn’t a Steve Paikin-like interview but a debate, but that’s not how it’s billed.

At any rate, Pinker keeps his cool (although you can see his dawning awareness of Hasan’s motives), and bests the interviewer. It’s similar to the discussion between Jordan Peterson and the “gotcha” Channel 4 interviewer Cathy Newman, who repeatedly tried to put words in Peterson’s mouth, and failed miserably to damn him (see here).  The one good thing about Hasan’s interview is that you can see the kind of criticisms leveled at Pinker, and how he responds.

Reader Luke, who sent me this link, had his own comment:

Mehdi Hasan has proven himself a dishonest journalist before, which I’m sure you’re aware of. In this interview, Hasan asks Pinker numerous questions, but before Pinker even has a chance to finish his answers Hasan interrupts. Pinker tries his best to rebut the interruption, but Hasan dishonestly condemns Pinker for his non-response before moving on to the next question. It gives the impression that Pinker has no answers for Hasan’s questions, while all the while, Hasan only has anecdotes and vacuous rhetoric. In fact, one of Hasan’s comments is: some enlightenment thinkers were racist; completely ignoring that enlightenment ideas have led to the last 200 years of progress.
All in all, this is a very disappointing interview, given that Pinker has much to say and the data to back it up. Some YouTube users have described this interview as worse than Jordan Peterson’s with Cathy Newman on the UK’s Channel 4, and I tend to agree. I’ve personally read Enlightenment Now (excellent as ever) and see much to disagree with Hasan’s misinformed statements.

Hasan once did a debate with Dawkins where he misrepresented and misquoted the Koran.

He professes to be an advocate of secularism, but seems to be against all Western and Enlightenment values. Dawkins later tweeted challenges to his statements. As always with live events, you can only check your facts after the event.

I do recommend Steve’s book, and its predecessor Better Angels. You might disagree with it, though he musters a ton of data in support of his thesis (the world is improving, not getting worse, and that’s because of reason, humanism, and science). But if you want to deny his claims of progress, or dispute the reasons for that progress, the onus is on you to read the book and see the data.

 

 

Nativist speaker Faith Goldy shut down at Wilfrid Laurier University

March 21, 2018 • 10:30 am

Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) in Waterloo, Ontario became infamous when it threatened action against grad student Lindsay Shepherd for showing in a short video clip of Jordan Peterson in a language class Shepherd t.a.’d, despite Shepherd disagreeing with Peterson’s views. (See my reports here.) Since then Shepherd has become a free-speech activist and somewhat of a media personality, though perhaps she hasn’t acted as wisely as she could.

Shepherd organized a series of talks at WLU on controversial speech (the “Unpopular Opinion Speaker Series”), and her first invitee was Faith Goldy, an anti-immigration nativist whom I’m comfortable calling a white supremacist. Wikipedia gives some details:

Goldy drew criticism in March 2017, when she posted on Twitter a video of herself in Bethlehem, expressing shock that she could hear an Islamic call to prayer in the city, and suggesting that “Bethlehem’s Christian population has been ethnically cleansed.”

In June 2017, Goldy broadcast on Rebel Media “White Genocide in Canada?”, analyzing the Canadian government’s foreign immigration policies with regard to the Third World and the effect of those policies on the demographic composition of Canadian society. She posited that the European population in the country was being replaced as a result. In response to the broadcast several corporate entities withdrew their financial support from Rebel Media.[19]

According to Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett, Goldy seemed to be working to provide mainstream respectability to the far right demonstrators in the course of her reporting on the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, arguing that they suggested a wider “rising white racial consciousness” in America and referring to a manifesto by white supremacist Richard Spencer, which Lett described as including “calls to organize states along ethnic and racial divides and celebrates the superiority of ‘White America,'” as “robust” and “well thought-out.”  These broadcasts, together with her interview on The Krypto Report, were central to the resignation of Brian Lilley from The Rebel, and Goldy’s own subsequent dismissal.

In December 2017, Goldy recited the white supremacist Fourteen Words slogan [JAC: the slogan is “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”] in an interview with alt-right YouTuber Millennial Woes and stated that she did not believe doing so was controversial.

Goldy is not exactly the person I’d invite to kick off a “controversial ideas” seminar, as she’s an out-and-out racist, but I suppose Shepherd, who characterizes herself as a liberal, could be using this as a test case. And, indeed, according to the CBC News, WLU refused to ban Goldy from speaking on campus (her topic was supposed to be “Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European Canadian Identity”):

Goldy previously worked for Sun News Network and The Rebel Media. She was let go from her job with The Rebel last August after she went on a podcast for the Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist website.

Laurier president Deborah MacLatchy issued an open letter to students, staff and faculty on Tuesday morning saying the school will not censor Goldy.

“I want to state very clearly that I personally and absolutely reject the ideas and values attributed to this speaker and that they are in no way aligned with or reflective of the core values of our university,” MacLatchy said.

“It is my sincere hope that the organizers of, and participants in, this event take seriously the responsibilities and accountabilities that accompany free expression and will engage in civil discourse that is free from hate.”

Well, that’s as good as can be expected.  But of course there were the usual calls by faculty and students to deplatform Goldy, rescinding her invitation, and the hashtag site #nonazisatlaurier was created to support this. As for Shepherd, she noted that the event was supposed to be a debate, but nobody could be found who wanted to debate Goldy. The talk was still scheduled, and Shepherd explained her views further:

Shepherd added she was looking forward to hearing Goldy speak because she wanted to understand why Goldy views the world the way she does.

“I certainly do not share most of Faith Goldy’s views. But does that make someone not worth listening to? No. I think we can all find common ground with some people and let’s actually listen to their arguments before writing them off,” she said.

“Just because I want to hear that, it doesn’t make me some kind of skinhead,” Shepherd said, noting there will be a question and answer period where those in attendance can challenge Goldy and her views.

“I actually don’t know where she stands on a lot of things, so it will be very useful for me to be able to ask her questions, too.”

Well, Goldy was deplatformed—not by the university but by the students, who pulled a common trick: setting off a fire alarm five minutes after the event was scheduled. Goldy didn’t get to say anything. A report by the CBC this morning gives details:

The talk was set to start at 7:15 p.m. ET. At approximately 7:20 p.m, a fire alarm was pulled and police evacuated the building, preventing anyone from entering the Paul Martin Centre.

Event attendees then moved to Veterans’ Green park, on the other side of campus, where Lindsay Shepherd, the organizer of the event, announced the talk was cancelled.

Shepherd, the co-founder of the campus group Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, said she’s “super disappointed” at the outcome.

According to Goldy’s Twitter account, the fire alarm was pulled before she was even introduced and presented on stage.

Here’s Goldy’s tweet; you can hear the alarm:

https://twitter.com/FaithGoldy/status/976242059660099584

Shepherd’s reaction:

“My view of these college leftists is more damaged than it used to be,” Shepherd said to CBC News, assuming the person who pulled the fire alarm was someone who opposed the talk.

“I had faith that we’d have a nuanced discussion where people can challenge the speaker at the end — obviously that was too much to hope for,” said Shepherd.  

More than 175 people wanted to attend Goldy’s talk, which extended the room’s capacity. Shepherd said she had to turn away an additional hundred.

And here’s Shepherd and Goldy speaking impromptu outside the venue:

Once again, I find the speaker’s views repulsive but also find the students’ deplatforming odious. Invited speakers allowed to talk by the University should not be shut down. If people were allowed to question Goldy after her talk, and demonstrate peacefully, which they were, then why is she so dangerous? Is expressing her views so injurious to Canada that she can’t be allowed to speak? I doubt it.

As happens so often, this involves the Left deplatforming the Right. I’d of course be equally opposed to the reverse situation, and will be glad to write about it if someone sends me news items about deplatforming of Left-wing speakers by conservatives. As the FIRE Disinvitation Database shows, though, nearly all college deplatformings and disinvitations over the past few years have been done by the Left. Our side should know better.

h/t: jekman

Losing their religion: The increasing secularization of Europe

March 21, 2018 • 9:15 am

An article in yesterday’s Guardian, based on a report by Stephen Bullivant—a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St. Mary’s University (London)—paints a picture of Europe losing its religion. Almost everywhere on that continent, young people are abandoning faith, which I’ve predicted will become moribund as one generation replaces another (click on screenshot to read the article).

I give the three figures from the piece, the first (and the one Bullivant concentrates on) surveying the proportion of young people (16-29) who identify as Christians, non-Christians but religious, or no religion (this could be a deism or “spirituality,” not necessarily atheism; the second showing the proportion of young folk going to religious services; and the last showing the frequency of prayer.


The plot below shows that Czech youth are the least religious, with 91% professing no religious affiliation. You could attribute that to its status as a former Communist state, but that can’t account for the country with the most religious youth: Poland, with only 17% having no religious affiliation. The UK, while largely secular, has 7% of youth identifying as Anglican, 10% who identify as Catholic, 6% as Muslims, and about 70% identifying with no religion. Surprisingly (at least to me), Germany and Switzerland show most people identifying with one religion or another. But even in those countries, the proportion who never or rarely attend a religious service is about 85% in Ireland, over 90% in Germany, and over 85% in Switzerland.

Further, it’s not clear that “identifying with a religion” means you actually believe its tenets. As the second and third plots show, in general fewer people actually practice religion (i.e., pray or go to church) than identify with a religion. I suspect that much of this “identification” is simply tribalism for the historical culture, as in Scandinavia. I, for instance, could say I identify with Judaism, though I don’t believe a word of scripture and never go to synagogue; it’s a purely secular identification.

As you see in the second plot, in no European country do more than 40% of the youth go to church once a week or more, with Poland being the outlier. Poland excluded, no country has more than 20% of its youth going to church at least weekly.

Bullivant—and remember, he’s a professor of theology—is reported to have said this about his data:

Religion was “moribund”, he said. “With some notable exceptions, young adults increasingly are not identifying with or practising religion.”

The trajectory was likely to become more marked. “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.

It’s curious that Bullivant appears to entertain some notion that Christianity might return to Europe. I doubt it; once it’s gone, it’ll be gone for good. Immigration of Muslims may boost religiosity to some degree, but Christianity is circling the drain in most countries.

More summary from Bullivant:

. . . According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them.”

. . . “The new default setting is ‘no religion’, and the few who are religious see themselves as swimming against the tide,” he said.

“In 20 or 30 years’ time, mainstream churches will be smaller, but the few people left will be highly committed.”

With respect to prayer, Poland is again an outlier, with 50% of Polish youth praying weekly or more, a bit more than go to church weekly or more.  About 35% of Irish youth pray weekly or more, but it’s less than 25% in every other country surveyed.

Now these data aren’t compared to earlier surveys using the same methods (if those surveys exist), but they don’t paint a picture of a particularly religious Europe. I don’t mourn the disappearance of faith, and I have no fear that it will lead to widespread immorality—the common but totally false picture painted by scared religionists.

h/t: Tom

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 21, 2018 • 8:00 am

We have two contributors today. First, some marine lovelies from Jacques Hausser in Switzerland. His notes are indented:

I’m just back from Britanny. Switzerland is a landlocked country and we lack close contact with the sea. Thus each spring we organize an optional two weeks internship on coastal ecology and faunistics at the Biological Station of Roscoff for the masters students in ecology and evolution. I started it forty years ago and I still happily contribute, ten years after my retirement. It is always an happy moment, turning up boulders, shoveling and sieving sand, helping students identify the collected animals – and also enjoying local seafood, cider and pancakes. Here, in a perfect taxonomic disorder, are some photos of our findings taken in the lab—I tried to suppress any  backgrounds.
Yes, it is an animal, and more, a mobile one. The rosy feather star, Antedon bifida, is a Crinoid, a very ancient class of the phylum Echinodermata (sea urchins and starfishes). It usually clings on the rock or on an alga with the longish hooks (cirri) under its central part. You can distinguish some of them between the ten arms.  But it is able to swim if necessary with alternate movements of its arms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2zzv8LHjcw). As with many marine animals (and unlike any terrestrial one), it is a suspension feeder: it catches small particles in the water and they are brought to the mouth along a ciliated groove in the underpart of the arms.
It doesn’t look like one, but the tiny broad-clawed porcelain crab, Porcellana platycheles, is a filter feeder. It maintains a water current by permanently  waving its mouthpieces, and filters its food with long setae (bristles). Its impressive claws are used only in territorial (and sexual ?) competition. Quite flattened, it lives mostly under stones. And, by the way, it is not a crab (Brachioura) but a relative of hermit crabs and squat lobsters (Anomaloura). Easy: only 3 pairs of visible walking legs and long antennae. 
Compare with a real crab, the hairy crab, Pilumnus hirtellus: four pairs of walking legs and very short, almost invisible antennae. This small, omnivorous species is found mainly in the holdfasts of laminarian algae and is probably very “misocrabic” or at least territorial: I have never found two of them in any given holdfast.
The smile of the sap-sucking slug, Elysia viridis, an Opisthobranch mollusc. Algae don’t have sap, as far as I know). It feeds on green algae, specially Codium, and, interestingly, is able to spare the chloroplasts of the alga and tosequester them in the cells of its back, where they continue to photosynthetize for the benefit of the slug. The “ears” are rightly called rhinophores (nose-bearers), they detect smell rather than sound. You can see the tiny eye just behind the left one. Although this individual is rather contracted, you can also distinguish the small iridescent blue spots that adorn the animal. 
I call it “Mister No body”. Nymphon gracile is a Pycnogonid or Sea spider, and actually a very remote cousin of spiders and scorpions, a Chelicerate (or even possibly a sister group to every other arthropod). It has so little space in his body proper that its digestive tract must expand itself into the legs. It is a rather eclectic predator, eating sessile prey like sea squirts, sea anemones and other hydrozoans, and even snail eggs. This one is a male: you can distinguish the faintly visible translucid ovigerous legs used to carry the eggs (yes, it is the male’s duty in this species).
It is mesmerizing to observe the movements of the tentacles of Eupolymnia nesidensis, a polychaete worm of the family Terebellidae. They seem absolutely autonomous, exploring every aspect of their environment, retracting, expanding, changing direction or sticking to the substrate with a very good imitation of free will. They are U-shaped in section, which forms a ciliated canal along which tiny particles of food are brought back to the mouth. The red “bushes” are gills used for the respiration, and between the gills and the tentacles you can notice a collar of tiny black eyespots. The worm lives in a self-made mucous tube glued under a stone and encrusted with gravel and sand.
It is not as spectacular as its exotic cousins we have recently seen on WEIT, but I nevertheless like the tiny Limacia clavigera, the orange-clubbed sea slug, is a nudibranch mollusk. It browse on sea mats like Electra pilosa and probably sequesters some toxic molecules from its prey into the yellow-clubed “cerata” each side of its body (a frequent habit in sea slugs with aposematic warning colors). It is able to autotomize these cerata to distract a would-be predator (examples of reduced cerata on the left side), but they regrow in a few days. Notice the rasp-like rhinophores and the three tiny yellow gills between the forelast pair of cerata. 
Tritia reticulata, the netted dog whelk (formerly called Nassa reticulata, Hynia reticulata and Nassa reticulata again – the lack of stability of the zoological nomenclature sucks). It is a necrophageous snail, the real vulture of the beach. With its long respiratory siphon, it looks like a vintage steam engine, but the siphon is very useful considering its habit of burying itself in the sand. It is able to detect any dead animal a long distance away (at least one meter in an aquarium) and reacts very quickly. Note that the eye is at the basis of the tentacle, not at the tip like in the terrestrial snails.

And reader Christopher Moss snapped some snowshoe hares in his Nova Scotia garden.  They’re changing color back to their warm-weather fur, so are appropriate to post today.

Two new visitors today, Lepus americanus, which I have not seen in the garden before. One is beginning to recover the brown hair of summer, and the other is still pretty much a pure white. They are sitting in the same spot, but are two different creatures! First the white one came along and had a sniff at some branches.

The the brown flecked one turned up. Lovely!
Playing hide and seek with me:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 21, 2018 • 7:00 am

Well, it’s Wednesday, March 21, 2018, and Spring is in its first 24 hours. That means it’s National French Bread Day, and, apropos, I’m having a baguette tonight. It’s also International Colour Day, World Poetry Day, and, in Poland and the Faroe Islands (!), Truant’s Day, when school kids play hooky.

News: A suspect in the Austin bombings is dead, apparently killing himself with another bomb in his car as police closed in. The deceased is described as a 24 year old white male; no name was given. Kudos to the police for tracking him down so quickly.

More news: Ringo Starr was knighted! (For longevity?) Here’s his announcement. Sir Ringo! (Or would it be “Sir Richard”?)

And today’s Google Doodle celebrates Mexican astronomer Guillermo Haro (1913-1988), noted for discovering and mapping nebulae and blue stars. Here he is among the stars:

It was a tame day for historical events, births, and deaths. On this day in 1556, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was executed for treason by burning at the stake. On March 21, 1804, the Napoleonic Code became the basis for French civil Law. On this day in 1871, journalist Henry Stanley began his trip to Africa to find David Livingstone. He found him in November of that year.  A day for evolutionists to remember: on March 21, 1925, Tennessee’s Butler Act was passed, prohibiting the teaching of HUMAN evolution (not evolution, as most people think) in Tennessee. That of course led to the Scopes Trial the same year, Scopes’s conviction, but a general victory for evolutionary biology.  On this day in 1935, the Shah of Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi, requested that all countries call “Persia” by its native name: Iran. And so it has become.  On this day in 1963, the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, in San Francisco Bay, was closed. It’s still accessible on a government tour, and I recommend you take it if you’re in San Francisco.  Finally, it was on March 21, 2006, that Twitter was founded. People have been squabbling on it ever since, but it has one use:

Notables born on March 21 include Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1867), Son House (1902), Éric Rohmer (1920), and Cenk “No Armenian Genocide” Uygur (1970). The only deaths of note on this day were Thomas Cranmer (1556; see above) and Pocahontas (1617).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is kvetching. I was a bit puzzled, but Malgorzata again came to the rescue: “Hili wants a definite answer. She doesn’t like ‘probably’. ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are proper words—not some some stupid ‘probably’.”

Hili: If I understand correctly, the winter is behind us.
A: Probably.
Hili: That’s a very stupid word.

In Polish:
Hili: Jeśli dobrze rozumiem, to zimę mamy za sobą.
Ja: Prawdopodobnie.
Hili: To bardzo głupie słowo.

Up in Winnipeg, Gus is chilling on the deck. His staff notes, “Here’s a Gus pic from yesterday morning. He’s on the deck,  which is wet from the bit of snow that was coming down. The blip on his face in the photo is a snowflake.” Note he’s wearing his harness and leash, as required by law.

This tweet came from reader Barry, who notes, “I’m surprised to see how long it took for it to read the riot act.”

https://twitter.com/_Thinker_Bell__/status/976101620562964480

Some tweets from Matthew. First, Millie the Mountaineering Cat! Be sure to watch the video with sound on.

Proud parents and their kittens:

I love ducks!

Really? There were marine sloths?

I believe I’ve posted this before, but you can’t see it too often:

A cosmologist discovers Mars—yesterday!

 

“Wedding Bell Blues”

March 21, 2018 • 6:30 am

I forgot to post a Laura Nyro song yesterday, as I was busy trying to find my ducks (it was cold, and they didn’t appear). If you were of music-appreciating age in the Sixties, you either loved Nyro (as did I) or ignored her. To my mind, this is Laura Nyro’s best song, and it’s also number one on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “10 essential Laura Nyro songs.”

Nyro wrote this song when she was just 18, and it was released the same year (1966) on her “More Than a New Discovery” album, packed full of great songs. As Wikipedia notes, this isn’t the song that Nyro intended to record:

Nyro wrote “Wedding Bell Blues” at the age of 18 as a “mini-suite”, featuring several dramatic rhythmic changes — a trait Nyro explored on future albums. It was to be recorded in 1966 for Verve Folkways label as part of what would become her More Than a New Discovery album. However, producer Herb Bernstein did not allow Nyro to record this version, which led to Nyro more or less disowning the entire album.

What was recorded was fairly similar in content and arrangement to the later, much more familiar, 5th Dimension version, albeit with a somewhat more soulful vocal line. It was released as a single in September 1966 and remained on the Billboard Pop Singles “Bubbling Under” charts segment for several weeks, peaking at #103.

It’s hard to believe this song didn’t go above #103, yet the version recorded three years later by the Fifth Dimension (hear it here), featuring the incomparable Marylyn McCoo, went to #1. I like Nyro’s better. Go figure.