Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Apparently so! Matthew sent me this strip from Existential Comics with the note, “You are Bad Cop.” (Click to enlarge; it’s gonna overlap with website text on the right.) I am sad. . . .
When I woke up this morning there was one notice of how the Perpetually Offended were acting, and then it multiplied through today, so now I have four instances and no time to write about them. I’ll just give brief notices about these four episodes, which combine to show that people are looking for any reason to call other people out. It’s sad that forgiveness can’t obtain in innocuous cases like these.
It’s a lovely dress on a lovely woman. So what’s the beef? The beef is that it was cold and she had her picture taken with men who wore coats against the cold. That has to be sexist, either on her part (objectifying herself), theirs (refusal to give her a coat), or the moviemakers (forcing her to show skin in the cold):
Jennifer Lawrence poses with her bundled-up colleagues, from left: director Francis Lawrence and actors Matthias Schoenaerts, Joel Edgerton and Jeremy Irons. (John Phillips/Getty Images)
More reporting:
An article in Jezebel had the headline, Please Give Jennifer Lawrence a Dang Coat, showing the actor’s co-stars, Joel Edgerton and Jeremy Irons among them, wearing large coats and scarves.
Similarly, Metro wrote that the men in the image are “nicely wrapped up bracing themselves against the chill of a bracing London winter, while Jennifer Lawrence is wearing a plunging thigh-split gown”. One tweet that called it “quietly depressing and revealing” received over 12,000 likes.
Other likes were accrued by intersectional tweets, like these from Helen Lewis, deputy editor of The New Statesman:
On to Canada’s beloved Prime Minister. Well, maybe Justin Trudeau overdid the Indian clothes on a trip to India, during which he and his family not only wore Bollywood style clothes, but made the “namaste hands”
Pictures from the BBC, which also dominates the reaction of people (I haven’t yet seen any claims of “cultural appropriation,” though of course they could easily be made here). Most of the reaction seems to be that these clothes are over the top, and they are. I dress in Indian clothes when I visit the country, but wouldn’t wear stuff like heavy gold-embroidered coats, which are more suited for either a Bollywood movie or an Indian wedding. But leave the poor family alone!
Still, Trudeau is wangling a Canadian-Indian trade deal, and may also be trying to get Indian movies filmed in Canada. He’s just trying a wee bit too hard; so we get stuff like this:
Is it just me or is this choreographed cuteness all just a bit much now? Also FYI we Indians don’t dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood. pic.twitter.com/xqAqfPnRoZ
That’s funny, but some of the commentary was more offended than funny. You can find it with a bit of Googling. Let’s move on.
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This isn’t quite as funny. As several venues report (e.g., here, here, here, and here, and yes, one of them is The Daily Fail, but other sources substantiate it), a smiley-faced cat adorning a package of diapers from Pampers (“nappies” to Brits) has enraged Muslims in India because the cat’s nose and whiskers look like they’re spelling out “Allah” in Arabic:
Vector of arabic calligraphy name of Prophet – Salawat supplication phrase translated as God bless Muhammad; Shutterstock Purchase Order: –
You have to be a Pecksniff looking for offense to even see a resemblance!
The lines of the whiskers, nose, mouth and left eye of the smiley cat, which appears on each nappy and on the brand’s packaging, allegedly bear close resemblance to the Islamic prophet’s name when written in Arabic or Urdu.
Members of the Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadat group lodged a formal complaint with police in the Indian city of Hyderabad on Tuesday over the alleged “insult” to Islam, as video footage emerged of activists burning packets of Pampers Baby Dry Pants in the streets.
In a formal letter to police, the group claimed that “name of Prophet (PBUH) can be seen printed” on the packet in Arabic “even with the bare eye”, adding that it had “hurt the feelings of the entire Muslim community”.
“Therefore we request your goodself to kindly immediately intervene into the matter forthwith and stop the sale and distribution of Baby Dry Pants of Pampers Company and take action against its manufactures [sic], arrest them and punish them,” the letter said.
One of the complainants, Shahnoor Khan, told Indian newspaper the Deccan Chronicle the group believed the company had “deliberately printed” the word on each nappy to “hurt the Muslim community” and spark community unrest.
“We are aware of the issue that some people are seeing the name of the Prophet on Pampers diapers, leading to unsettlement for some members of the Islamic community.
“We would like to clarify that this claim is not true. Our intent was never to hurt any individual or group’s religious sentiments or beliefs and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.
“We would like to clarify that the diaper shows an innocent animated representation of a cat. It shows a cat’s mouth and whiskers like it is commonly portrayed in drawings and cartoons across the world, especially by little children.”
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Finally, I’ll drop this here and move on. It’s from KATC.com in Louisiana (click screenshot to go there):
The world is going mad, I tell you!
h/t: Brian, John (whose comment was, “Is anybody left who isn’t nuts?”
The Wall Street Journal has a week-old interview with University of Chicago President Bob Zimmer (a mathematician); the topic is free speech and Steve Bannon. The piece below (click on the link) is paywalled but judicious inquiry might yield a copy—if you really want it.As I’ve noted before, Luigi Zingales, a professor at the Business School, invited Bannon here for a debate, and Bannon accepted. (Note: the WSJ says that Bannon is scheduled to speak “early next month,” but I don’t think that’s true, as I haven’t heard anything about that.) Students objected (not all of them), to their eternal shame, 100 faculty signed a petition asking for Bannon’s invitation to be rescinded, and (to more shame) a large number of alumni did likewise (see my coverage here).
Calls to de-platform Bannon run contrary to the University’s speech code—probably the most liberal in the U.S. Any professor or group who invites someone to speak, and that person accepts, has a right to have the person speak on campus, and a right that the speaker be neither de-platformed by others nor disrupted. Last year the faculty voted to impose sanctions on those students who try to disrupt speakers or keep them from talking.
Zimmer is a model of calm rationality, and I’ll just give a few statements he made in the interview with Tunku Varadarajan. At many universities, someone like Zingales would be called into the President’s or Provost’s office for a “chat.” Not here!
Mr. Bannon was invited to the university by Luigi Zingales, a finance professor. Would Mr. Zimmer ever contemplate having a quiet word with the prof and asking him to withdraw his invitation to Mr. Bannon? “I wouldn’t even think of it,” Mr. Zimmer answers, in a mildly but unmistakably indignant tone. And no, he won’t be attending the Bannon event. “We have many, many talks,” he says. “I’m really pretty busy.”
Mr. Zingales’s attitude is consistent with the norm Mr. Zimmer seeks to uphold. When I asked the professor by email why he extended the invitation, he replied that Mr. Bannon “was able to interpret a broad dissatisfaction in the electorate that most academics had missed. Remember the shock on November 9, 2016? Regardless of what you think about his political positions, there is something faculty and students can learn from a discussion with him.” Mr. Zingales, too, welcomed peaceable protests as a healthy exercise of free speech. “I admire the way our students have conducted their protests,” he wrote. “It speaks very well to the values that our university shares.”
Our antecedents:
In recent years, as colleges across America have censored unfashionable views, Chicago has also come to be known for setting the gold standard for free expression on campus. Mr. Zimmer, who became president in 2006, deserves much credit. He has been outspoken in defense of free speech and in 2014 even set up a committee—under the constitutional law scholar Geoffrey Stone —that produced the Chicago Principles, the clearest statement by any American university in defense of uninhibited debate.
Mr. Zimmer, a mathematician, says Chicago’s intellectual and moral strengths are “totally tied together.” He’s also quick to point out that its commitment to free debate precedes him, naming virtually every one of his predecessors as a guardian of openness. Mr. Zimmer created the Stone committee, he says, after watching free-speech struggles at other schools: “People were starting to be disinvited from campuses—speakers of some stature, in fact. You started to see this pattern.”
I don’t know much about our President (I met him once), but suspect that he’s a liberal (the odds favor this even if you know nothing about him); he makes a strong statement about not impeding immigration because it attracts talented people who improve the U.S. The WSJ being a conservative paper, the interviewer tries to get Zimmer to talk about identity politics. That’s a bit of a hot-button issue for a college president (but not for an emeritus professor!), so he handily deflects the question:
One could argue, perhaps paradoxically, that today’s campus activists are much more atomized as well. Identity groups push for their own particular agendas, often in absolutist terms: It matters to me more than anything else in the world that you call me “they,” not “she.” That’s not exactly a broad-based concern.
When I put this argument to Mr. Zimmer, he gently deflects: “Again, I’d go to the point that the main issue is—whether everybody is focused on one thing, or whether there are multiple groups focused on multiple things—that you get the same . . . kind of fervor, which says certain ideas should not be discussed and thought about. And that’s what the problem is.”
Well, to me this is politically astute, but a distinction without a difference. For it’s the very hierarchy of oppression associated with identity politics that makes those higher up on the ladder able to declare that some ideas (i.e., the ones they don’t like) shouldn’t be discussed or pondered. But censorship is the crux of the problem of identity politics, so Zimmer got it right.
At the end of the piece, the President discusses a new initiative he has: having conversations with high-school teachers about how to prepare college-bound students for an atmosphere of free speech.
. . . it would be very healthy, [Zimmer] thinks, for high-school teachers “to actually be thinking about this in a kind of systematic way.” He’s observed that “a lot of students are not prepared for this environment.” Some of that is inevitable, Mr. Zimmer believes, because “free expression doesn’t come naturally for most people. It’s not an instinctive response.” Young people need “to be taught it”—and it’s better if universities don’t have to start from scratch.
When Gal Gadot starred in the enormously successful movie “Wonder Woman,” Leftists at first saw it as a moment of women’s empowerment. Here we had a strong and independent superhero who was a woman—much like “Black Panther” is praised for empowering black children. But it didn’t take long for the approbation to wane. After all, Gadot is Israeli and, like nearly all Israelis, she had to serve in the IDF, the Israeli military. That’s a national requirement. Gadot didn’t kill anybody; she was a combat instructor.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before her nationality and service in the IDF eroded her status as feminist hero, for in the pantheon of intersectionalist Leftism, Israel lies at the bottom of the heap—just above old cis white males. Her luster (and that of “Wonder Woman”) among Leftists began to fade (see here and here).
Now, it seems, Gadot, since she’s way low on the Oppression Hierarchy, isn’t allowed to decry last week’s school shootings in Florida. One would think that her tweet below would have garnered approbation, and it did according to the hearts and retweets. But not everyone was happy.
Yes, the termites gnawed their way in, and, according to Everyday Antisemitism, the new social editor of Allure magazine, Rawan Eewshah, issued the following hateful response. “Child murderer”—seriously?
(I think this tweet has now been deleted. Good call!)
There are many more such reactions, but I needn’t go on. This reprises the old “blood libel” fiction of anti-Semites, and in my view reflects anti-Semitism. Does anybody think that Gadot endorses the targeting of children? Apparently some of the people above do, and they’re simply lying for the cause.
Let’s get this straight. Gal Gadot didn’t kill anybody when she was in the IDF. She did not kill any children. I highly doubt that she “relishes” watching children killed. The Israeli Army has killed Palestinian children in military operations, but it does not do so deliberately, despite the claims of the ignorant. It would be a public-relations disaster in the eyes of the world if Israeli solders were under orders to kill children; in fact, the opposite is true. Children do get imprisoned in Israel for terrorist acts or attempted murder or injury. Gadot had no part in this; her crime was solely to be Jewish, to be Israeli, and to be in the IDF. To Intersectionalists, that makes it hypocritical for her to react in horror when a shooter kills 17 people in a Florida school.
Well, let’s look at the shoe on the other foot. Hamas and Hezbollah, and other Palestinian terrorists, deliberately target and kill Israeli children. Want examples? Here are some:
The Itamar Attack in 2011(even in Wikipedia!): An Israeli civilian, his wife, and three of their children (aged 11, 4, and 3 months), were slaughtered by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The baby was decapitated and the children stabbed. The IDF tracked down the murders, who were tried. Many Palestinians celebrated the murders, even handing out candy and sweets in the street.
The murder of Hallel Jaffa Ariel, a 13 year old girl, in 2013. Mohammad Nasser Tra’ayra, the Palestinian killer who wished to be a martyr, stabbed Hallel to death in her bed. (You can see photos of the girl and the gruesome murder scene here.) Tra’ayra was killed when attempting to evade capture. He, too was celebrated for his deed; as Wikipedia reports:
The attacker’s mother praised her son as a martyr defending Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa Mosque and hoped others would follow in his path. A banner with pictures of Tra’ayra and the late Yasser Arafat was hung outside a building in the West Bank village of Tra’ayra’s family, and the family is eligible for $350 a month from a Palestinian fund for martyrs.
Here’s a long list of Israeli children killed by Palestinian terrorists; some were deliberately targeted, others were killed in suicide attacks, which of course are aimed at civilians. I suspect that if people take issue with this, Malgorzata can provide more examples in the comments.
The killing is bad enough, but when the murder of children is celebrated by Palestinians, as they so often do, that makes it doubly disgusting. Do Israelis shoot off fireworks and hand out sweets in the street when a Palestinian child is killed? Think again.
Now here is a Palestinian father taunting and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot his 3-year-old son. He even goads the kid to throw rocks at the soldiers. Note how the soldiers behave. I can’t help but think that the father, his comrades, and the person making the video actually wanted that child shot—so they could use it for propaganda. What kind of father would do this?
Who are the hypocrites? It is the intersectional Leftists who support Palestine (and their child-killing practices) and yet decry the shootings by Nikolas Cruz. What Cruz does resembles what Hamas, Hezbollah, and the terrorists named above do: they all deliberately target children. ‘
It is those who support Palestine, not those (like Gadot) who support Israel, who tacitly endorse the targeting of innocent children. If somebody lacks the moral standing to criticize what Cruz did in Florida, it is those who defend the actions of Palestinians. When was the last time you heard them complain about the murder of civilians, much less children?
From Switzerland, one of the world’s happiest countries (and champion in 2015), reader Jacques Hausser sends orthopterans. This is the second installment in a three-part series (the first is here), and it’s CRICKETS! Jacques’ notes are indented:
Like bushcrickets, aka katydids (infraorder Tettigoniidea), the crickets proper (Gryllidea) belong to the suborder Ensifera. Like bushcrickets, they have long threadlike antennae, and stridulate by rubbing one of their forewing (elytrae) on the other. But contrary to bushcrickets, they rub the right wing over the left one. And their feet consist of three tarsal segments only, instead of four.
May I introduce you to the real Charles Dickens’ “cricket on the hearth” ? The house cricket, Acheta domesticus, is mostly a commensal species across most of Europa, living in houses – traditionally in well warmed kitchen or in bakeries under the baking oven. However, in mediterranean regions and other warm places (in Switzerland, typically at the vineyard level), it can maintain wild or feral populations. Here is a male. Note the rolled hindwings protruding at the rear between the two cerci. The species is well known to herpetologists, being bred to feed various reptiles and amphibians – and recently it became a fashion food for humans too. I haven’t tried it.
A female of the same species. The ovipositor of crickets looks like a spear rather than like the sword of bushcrickets. Both pictures were shot in a white bowl, what allows to get the insect almost without background.
Like bushcrickets – and contrary to the grasshoppers (Caelifera)—crickets hear with their forelegs – thus the old joke is not entirely wrong. You can see the eardrum just under the knee.
Gryllus campestris, male, the field cricket. A flightless species with a big black rounded head. The male digs a burrow and in the warm summer afternoons and evenings, sits in front of it and sings to attract females. Like most species, they are very aggressive toward other males. In China, another species, Velarifictorus aspersus, is used in very popular cricket fights. Usually the animals are not wounded: the fight stops as soon as the loser retreats and the winner sings his victory song. Champions can reach several thousands of dollars, which is astonishing for pets living only up to three months. But of course champions are naturalized with due reverence after their short career.
A sad end… I don’t know the reason for the death. The animal looked intact, and the wasp (Vespula vulgaris) was certainly not the killer, only a scavenger.
The life span of field crickets run on two years – another difference with the bushcrickets in which only eggs survive the winter period. In autumn, old larvae or late born adults look for warm places to overwinter, and frequently try to go inside houses. Here’s a female larva of G. campestris; you can see the not-yet-grown ovipositor.
The smaller wood cricket, Nemobius sylvestris, shows the same behavior: I found this adult female in my workshop. A good opportunity to take a picture of an usually very active, very fast and very camera-shy species. The thin yellow mark on the head is diagnostic.
Good morning: it’s Thursday, February 22, 2018, National Sticky Buns Day. That means you have to sit in molasses! It’s also the Christian Feast Day of Eric Liddell, whom you might remember from the movie “Chariots of Fire.” Liddell, who became a missionary after college, died on this day in 1945 in a Japanese prison camp in China, malnourished and afflicted with a brain tumor. By all accounts, he was a metaphorical saint, even if he was religious. Remember that he wouldn’t run the 100 m race in the 1924 Olympics because it was on the Lord’s Day (Sunday)? But he won gold in the 400 m race on another day. Here’s that win:
On February 21, 1632, Galileo’s heliocentric book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published. He got in trouble with the Church for that, but of course it had absolutely nothing to do with religion—just ask Ronald Numbers. On this day in 1856, the Republican Party had its first national convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. How it’s changed since then! On February 21, 1889, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill that admitted four states to the Union: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington. In 1924, “Silent” Cal Coolidge became the first U.S. President to broadcast a radio address from the White House. On this day in 1980, in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, the underdog U.S. ice hockey team defeated the Soviet Union 4-3, a feat called the “Miracle on Ice.” I remember watching it live. The rivalry was keen; as they say: “Sports is war without weapons.”
Here are the game’s highlights:
On this day in 1997, British scientists announced the cloning of the sheep Dolly. Finally, exactly seven years ago today, New Zealand’s second deadliest earthquake struck Christchurch, killing 185 people.
Notables born on this day include George Washington (1732), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788), Robert Baden-Powell and Heinrich Hertz (both 1857), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892), Edward Gorey (1925), Ted Kennedy (1932), Steve Irwin (1962, killed by a stingray in 2006), and Drew Barrymore (1975). Those who died on February 22 include Stefan Zweig (1942), the “White Rose” trio of Christoph Probst, Hans Scholl, and Sophie Scholl (1943, beheaded by the Nazis), Felix Frankfurter (1965), Andy Warhol (1987) and Chuck Jones (2002).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus are inadvertently making trouble. Malgorzata explains:
Well, it was an “animal blockade”: one (Cyrus) is barring Andrzej’s access to the desk chair, and the other (Hili) is occupying the chair. Cyrus can be bribed (by a pat) so he will go away, but Hili just couldn’t believe her ears – she has no intention to vacate the chair. I hope you can see one Andrzej’s leg in the picture – he is trying to gain access to his computer.
A: May I sit down at my computer?
Cyrus: Pat me and then I’ll go on the sofa.
Hili: What did you say?
In Polish:
Ja: Czy mogę usiąść przy moim komputerze?
Cyrus: Pogłaszcz mnie, a potem pójdę na sofę.
Hili: Co mówiłeś?
Yesterday was Gusiversary: four years to the day when the young cat (estimated at 10 months old) was brought home from the vet after his frostbitten ears had been trimmed. His staff and he celebrated the day with porkchops and wine (as did I). Here’s Gus at the celebration, eyes fixed on the chop.
And a video of him playing with his food before eating it (apparently he always does this):
A tweet from Grania, showing once again that medieval artists couldn’t draw cats:
Also from Matthew, showing that raccoons’ status as Honorary Cats™ goes only so far (watch the video):
Some species are incredibly adept at making human habitats their own, such as bobcat, raccoon, & coyote. These animals that not only survive but thrive in suburbs and cities will be honored in the URBAN JUNGLE Division! #2018MMMpic.twitter.com/hofV7nxzu8
All religions? Who is he kidding? Graham was an anti-Semite, and why would the Jews miss him? Given that he thought all non-Christians—and those Christians who didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their savior—would go to hell, why would any non-Christian miss him? Trump could have been laudatory without that ridiculous statement.
As I’ve noted before, Luigi Zingales, a professor at the Business School, invited Bannon here for a debate, and Bannon accepted. (Note: the WSJ says that Bannon is scheduled to speak “early next month,” but I don’t think that’s true, as I haven’t heard anything about that.) Students objected (not all of them), to their eternal shame, 100 faculty signed a petition asking for Bannon’s invitation to be rescinded, and (to more shame) a large number of alumni did likewise (see my coverage here).
