Thursday: Special Hili dialogue—and a post by Hili!

July 20, 2017 • 6:30 am

Introduction by Jerry: It’s Thursday, July 20, 2017. Yesterday Hili became aware that Hiroko Kubota, who made my lovely embroidered Hili shirt, has just published her second book—and a new embroidered Hili was on the cover! (A copy is being sent to Poland.) Not only that, but Hiroko made a time-lapse video of her embroidering Hili, as well as another cat and a d*g. She is a wonderful artist in thread, and for a while would take orders to custom embroider your cat, dog, or anything else on a shirt, purse, etc. (she also makes the shirts). Now she’s overwhelmed with work, and her etsy shop GoGo5 notes that she is not taking current orders. You can, however, order her two books. The first one, neko shirt, featured some instructions as well as photos of her happy customers, their pets, and their shirts (including me!); the second is for professionals and tells you how to embroider cats. But her talent is special, and it would be difficult for even a professional to match her artistry.

Below is the cover of Hiroko’s second book, which so inspired Hili that she insisted, besides engaging in a dialogue about it with Andrzej, on writing a post about Hiroko—and of course Hili, for, like all cats, she’s a narcissist. Here are Hili’s own words:

by Hili

Hili: We have to show how my portrait is getting embroidered.
A: Hili, it isn’t seemly.
HilI: I’m only praising a great artist. Today the link leads to a story about Hiroko and her artistic embroideries.

We cats like balls of yarn. It’s worse with embroidering, but we like to watch it because sometimes a ball of thread falls off a lap. Some people are embroidering chasubles, others do birds, but I am going to tell you about Hiroko Kubota, who embroiders cats and dogs. Maybe you remember Jerry in a shirt with my portrait? It’s a beautiful portrait, isn’t it? It conveys my character very well.

Now Hiroko has published a book about embroidered cats, and just guess who is on the cover! You guessed it. There is even a video about the embroidering of my portrait. Fascinating! I have watched it many times.

Of course, Hiroko Kubota is embroidering other cats, too, and even dogs, but–what can I say?–my portrait is exceptional. I have to send her words of great gratitude.

Hiroko Kubota

The superb Superb Bird of Paradise

July 19, 2017 • 2:30 pm

The Cornell Birds-of-Paradise Project is a great website that contains all kinds of information about the 39 species in this fantastic group. There are videos and information about the sexual dimorphism in plumage and behavior, and other aspects of the birds’ biology, information about their evolutionary history and the people who study them, and general information about evolution and sexual selection—even a video on speciation. It’s a remarkable and informative site: the best place to visit if you want to see what are the most stupendous examples of sexual selection—and I’m referring not just to the male behavior, but to the female choice that drives much of it. It’s a rich resource for those who teach evolution.

Below is a 4½-minute video of the famous Superb Bird of Paradise (Lophorina superba), whose Cornell page is here. I like this video because it’s not just a “gee whiz–look at this!” presentation (you can see Attenborough’s shorter video of this species on a previous post), but one that shows how at least four different groups of feathers have evolved, and conspire, to create the “smiley face” appearance of the displaying male. There are also several evolved changes in male behavior, including jumping around to stay in front of the female and raising his bill to bisect the blue crown feathers.

After an evolutionist has gotten over her amazement, the first question that then arises is, “Why is the male bird doing this?” That is, what, exactly, is the female looking for that makes her not only drive the evolution of this display, but makes some patterns and behaviors more acceptable than others? Good genes? Some pre-existing sensory bias in the female?

In fact we know almost nothing about what drives this genre of “female choice” sexual selection. This means that, for the time being, we can only marvel at it, and at the power of natural selection—of which sexual selection is a subset.

h/t: Taskin

Why speech isn’t violence

July 19, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Four days ago I wrote a critique of psychologist Lisa Barrett’s argument that speech can be violence, an argument made in her New York Times piece “When is speech violence?” Barrett’s answer was that speech becomes violence when it causes sufficient stress over time that the body is damaged. She then proposed banning speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos because they supposedly have that effect. Among the counterarguments is that a talk by Milo is a one-time “offense”, not a persistent stress, that people can choose to avoid it, and if you’re that stressed out by Milo, you should just stop watching his videos or talks.

Further, lots of people stress themselves out when they could be learning to stay away from stressors that are avoidable (workplace harassment, of course, should be illegal, as it is along with threats), that many perfectly defensible words (like critiques of Islam) are described by people as “stressful”, and therefore could be banned under Barrett’s rules, and, finally, that if you construe speech as violence, then that gives you a justification of responding with physical violence, something that’s actually happened at Berkeley and Middlebury College.

Well, yesterday Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff  (henceforth “H&L”) address Barrett’s argument in The Atlantic in an essay called “Why it’s a bad idea to tell students words are violence,” and they make many of these same points. (I really should try to write, at least sometimes, for sites that pay!) But to be fair, their piece is far better than my throwaway post, with Haidt, a social psychologist, and Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), having deep knowledge of campus troubles and the psychology behind them.  Do read their piece.

H&L see two valid claims in Barrett’s argument and two inferences, drawn from those claims, that are invalid. The first valid one is that stress causes physical damage—something that’s long been known. The incorrect inference is that stressful speech is “violence”. (The correct inference would have been that stressful speech causes physical harm.) But then H&L go on to suggest that stressful speech also is largely avoidable, and you can train yourself to avoid being stressed out (they’ve suggested that incoming students be trained in cognitive behavior therapy, a good idea). They also argue forcefully that college students must and should learn how to not only listen to speech they find offensive, but learn how to counter it. I agree again.

The second valid point that H&L find in Barrett’s argument is that students “can grow from facing and overcoming adversity.” True. The invalid inference is one I made above: people like Milo, Charles Murray, or Christina Somers are not causes of chronic, body-damaging stress—unless you let them become that.

But then H&L go further than I in discussing the evidence that campus “safety” provisions like trigger warnings don’t work, and that the mental health crisis among campus students is growing, not diminishing. Students born after 1994, they say, show a rising spike in mental disorders. H&L say the Internet may be responsible for that, but don’t go deeply into the causes, which aren’t known anyway. They do argue that the “speech is violence” idea, and similar tropes, just make it worse:

We think the mental-health crisis on campus is better understood as a crisis of resilience. Since 2012, when members of iGen first began entering college, growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers. Previous generations of college students learned to live with such challenges in preparation for success in the far more offense-filled world beyond the college gates. As Van Jones put it in response to a question by David Axelrod about how progressive students should react to ideologically offensive speakers on campus:

“I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.”

This is why the idea that speech is violence is so dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence. A few days after the riot that shut down Yiannopoulos’s talk at Berkeley, in which many people were punched, beaten, and pepper sprayed by masked protesters, the main campus newspaper ran five op-ed essays by students and recent alumni under the series title “Violence as self defense.” One excerpt: “Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”

H&L wind up arguing that allowing what the courts construe as “free speech” is especially important on college campuses, which are crucibles for testing ideas, constituting a sort of scientific, Enlightenment-based experiment based on the premise that only unregulated speech can truly create a progressive society. No suppression of free speech, I think, has ever improved a nation.

Near the end of their piece, H&L quote from a 2010 decision of a U.S. Court of Appeals, in which judge Alex Kozinski noted the special urgency of maintaining free speech on campuses:

The right to provoke, offend, and shock lies at the core of the First Amendment. This is particularly so on college campuses. Intellectual advancement has traditionally progressed through discord and dissent, as a diversity of views ensures that ideas survive because they are correct, not because they are popular. Colleges and universities—sheltered from the currents of popular opinion by tradition, geography, tenure and monetary endowments—have historically fostered that exchange. But that role in our society will not survive if certain points of view may be declared beyond the pale.

The University of Chicago’s administration and faculty—though not all of its students—support that view. Everyone on a college campus should agree, unless you have the kind of authoritarian campus like Bob Jones University, where dissent is suppressed for the good of Christian doctrine.

No Darwin in Turkey

July 19, 2017 • 10:35 am

Nearly a month ago I reported that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his minions had mandated the removal of evolution from the secondary-school curriculum, with the head of the board of education saying that the subject was “debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.” Well, that’s a big fat lie, as evolution is not debatable or controversial, and it’s not too complicated for students over the age of about 10.

The real reason, of course, is that Erdoğan is slowly turning one of the world’s few truly secular Muslim-majority states back into a theocracy, and Islam in general doesn’t accept evolution. Many Muslims read the Qur’an literally, and it contains a creation story in which Allah created man suddenly, to wit:

“Verily We created man from a product of wet earth; then placed him as a drop (of seed) in a safe lodging; then We fashioned the drop into a clot, then We fashioned the clot into a little lump, then We fashioned the little lump into bones, then clothed the bones with flesh, and then produced it another creation. So blessed be Allah, the Best of Creators!” [23:12-14]

Now, according to Reuters, the change is in effect.  The new school curriculum, announced yesterday, has no evolutionary biology:

Turkey announced a new school curriculum on Tuesday that excluded Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, feeding opposition fears President Tayyip Erdogan is subverting the republic’s secular foundations.

The chairman of a teachers’ union described the changes as a huge step in the wrong direction for Turkey’s schools and an attempt to avoid raising “generations who ask questions”.

Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz said the main elements of evolution already underpinned the science curriculum, but there would be no mention of Darwin’s landmark theory until university.

“Because it is above the students’ level and not directly related, the theory of evolution is not part” of the school curriculum, Yilmaz told a news conference.

Of course not that many Turkish students continue on to university: estimates are only about a third of students finishing secondary school continue their studies. And evolution isn’t taught in every university. That means that most young Turks will never be exposed to evolution—unless it’s to the odious creationist lies of Harun Yahya.

The changes have been condemned—by brave people:

Opposition Republican People’s Party lawmaker Mustafa Balbay said any suggestion the theory was beyond their understanding was an insult to high school students.

“You go and give an 18-year old student the right to elect and be elected, but don’t give him the right to learn about the theory of evolution…This is being close minded and ignorant.”

. . . . Mehhmet Balik, chairman of the Union of Education and Science Workers (Egitim-Is), condemned the new curriculum.

“The new policies that ban the teaching of evolution and requiring all schools to have a prayer room, these actions destroy the principle of secularism and the scientific principles of education,” he said.

Speaking out against the Erdoğan government in this way is an act of courage. I suspect that these two men, if not arrested, will lose their jobs. And I need to go back to Turkey and give some public lectures on the fact of evolution. Turkish academics: I await your call!

Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera reports even more disturbing news of the metastasizing and repressive Turkish theocracy:

Six people, including the director of Amnesty International in Turkey, were arrested by a court order on Tuesday for “helping an armed terrorist organisation”, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency news outlet. [JAC: They had been detained and interrogated since July 5.]

They were among the 10 who were detained in Istanbul earlier in July during a workshop on Buyukada, an island near the city.

The group comprised eight Turkish human rights activists, one Swedish trainer and one German trainer.

The Istanbul court ordered the other four be released on the condition of judicial control.

Those arrested include Amnesty International Director Idil Eser, Gunal KurSun, Ozlem Dalkıran, Veli Acu, Ali Garavi ile and Peter Steudtner.

Idil Eser, the director of Amnesty International’s Turkey branch, is the group’s second top level official to be detained in a month [Amnesty International]
h/t: Barrie

Opponents of euthanizing newborns write in with strong opinions

July 19, 2017 • 9:00 am

Six days ago I wrote a post, based on a New York Times piece, arguing that the parents of newborns who were doomed to die, who had a “hopeless prognosis” involving unbearable suffering, or who would have to live their lives wedded to intensive care and respirators, should have the legal right—with appropriate ethical strictures and doctors’ approval—to end the lives of their newborns in a merciful way, perhaps with an injection. I gave my reasons for thinking this in my piece “Should one be allowed to euthanize severely deformed or doomed newborns?” My answer was a qualified “yes,” and in that I agree with philosopher Peter Singer.

Singer has been demonized for his opinion by both religious believers and also by handicapped people who argue that they wouldn’t have wanted to be euthanized as infants if they had the choice. Singer’s talks have picketed and disrupted, and people have even called for his firing from Princeton for merely suggesting the idea of newborn euthanasia. Yet I think that discussing this idea is very worthwhile.

Now I’m being criticized as well, and I expected it. Both the creationist Discovery Institute (in its organ Evolution News) and the conservative National Review have gone after my piece. In the former venue, Michael Egnor, who’s obsessed with me, blames my views on “materialism and Darwinism” (they’re not; they’re based on moral philosophy), compares me to the Nazi doctors who did odious medical experiments (he even shows a photo of them on trial), and says that NO euthanasia, nor even any abortions, can be morally justified. He does, however, allow “withdrawal of care” in terminal newborns because that differs from euthanasia:

There are situations in which continuation of heroic medical treatment (surgery, respirators, antibiotics, etc.) merely prolongs the process of dying, and in which it is ethical to withdraw such heroic care. I have done it many times (I’m a pediatric neurosurgeon). But the purpose of the withdrawal is not to cause death, but to cease interfering with the natural course of a disease, when no good can come of heroic treatment. That is a very different thing, morally and legally, from deliberately killing a child by injecting him with a lethal dose of potassium or a barbiturate.

I disagree with the morality bit, but won’t get into that now.

The National Review also linked me with Nazism, claiming that “Darwinism leads to infanticide acceptance” and saying that my scientific materialism leads people to reject evolution because I couple Darwinism “with anti-humanism and a moral philosophy that was judged a crime against humanity at Nuremberg.” Sorry, but I don’t advocate experimenting on babies or gassing and shooting innocent civilians.

I stand by what I said in my piece. Were I to rewrite my post, though, I’d add that it’s more than just religious people who object to Singer’s and my views on both assisted suicide of rational, terminally ill people as well as to euthanasia of desperately ill newborns. Yes, religious people are big objectors to these practices (and lobbied against assisted suicide when it was made legal in several states), but so are some disabled people who don’t base their objections on religious views. And I should have mentioned those arguments. But their objections haven’t altered my views on the value of discussing the issue of the euthanasia of newborns. And I still think that it’s justified in some cases.

Anyway, readers have written in strongly criticizing my views, and I’ll post some of their comments here rather than continue the discussion in a week-old thread.  I have approved their comments on the original site (or will as soon as I publish this), but have directed them here to continue the discussion. Feel free to continue it in the comments on this post rather than the other one.

“ritajoseph” wrote three comments:

In reply to zoolady.

No child is “essentially a vegetable”. Every child can and should be loved tenderly and cared for as long as she or he is alive. Where parents can’t afford basic care,families and communities must help them. It’s called human solidarity.

Financial difficulty is never an adequate excuse for killing a child.

**********

Permitting medicalized killing of the sick and the vulnerable who are viewed as financially burdensome sets a socially engineered trap, in which individual interests freely and legally gain access to a public resource (a health care system that provides unconditional specialized care for the suicidal or the seriously disabled or the terminally ill) and proceed to change it from unconditional palliative care to optional care together with the option of medically assisted suicide.

A tragedy of the commons will unfold as the terminally ill or their carers are pressured subtly to accept the cheaper swifter option. This will lead eventually to depletion of the shared resource—the end of a truly universal, unconditional system of care for the terminally ill. A gradual reduction of specialists, hospices, palliative care resources and research dedicated to the needs of the terminally ill is therefore a typical ‘externality’ – i.e., the unintended and negative consequence of private decisions that ends up affecting everyone.

*********

In reply to zoolady.

Why is assisted suicide not OK? Suicide and assisted suicide contravene the universal human rights principle of inalienability. Human beings cannot be deprived of the substance of their rights, not in any circumstances, not even at their own request.
There is a genuine need to enact positive laws respecting key human rights principles:
o The inherent right to life of the terminally ill and the suicidal is inalienable;
o The terminally ill and the suicidal have the right to recognition of their inherent dignity;
o The terminally ill and the suicidal have the right to security of person;
o The autonomy of “end of life choices” is limited by the duty to secure the rights of all;
o Human solidarity with the terminally ill and the suicidal must not be jeopardized.

Recommendations
(1) Advocacy materials promoting suicide must be more strictly controlled so that positive programs for assisting persons at risk of suicide can achieve their full potential.
(2) Education programmes emphasize the human person as the true source of human dignity and teach the inalienability of the inherent right to life.
(3) Funding for genuine palliative care, research and programmes should be increased so that best practice end of life care becomes available not as a “choice” but as a duty for all of us to provide and as a right for everyone who is in need to receive.

*********

And reader Bill Franklin said this:

You write:
“If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect… … then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born? I see no substantive difference that would make the former act moral and the latter immoral.”

Well, you are also *allowed* to abort a fetus for any reason. So do you also “see no substantive difference” between that and euthanizing an otherwise healthy baby who was born a week earlier?

If a woman could abort a fetus at 35-weeks because, for example, she no longer liked the father and did not want the child to remind her of him – why not the same choice if the father ends up arrested for unknown crimes a week post birth?

If not, does that mean you also subscribe to this apparently irrational/religious idea about acquiring a soul in the magic birth canal? As you say, “After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death” and “Since the newborn can’t decide, it’s up to the parents”…

*******

I have my own responses to these comments (e.g., Bill Franklin completely misunderstands my argument), but I have other things to write about today and so will let readers continue the arguments below. As soon as this goes up, both ritajoseph and Bill Franklin will be directed here.

All I can say is that it’s ridiculous to call someone a Nazi for suggesting an idea like this. By all means give your counterarguments, but avoid the character assassination,

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ homophobia

July 19, 2017 • 8:45 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “homo”, came with this note:

Today’s strip is inspired by something that happened at last week’s London Pride march.

What happened is that ex-Muslims at the march were accused of “Islamophobia” by the East London Mosque because they were carrying signs that indicted Islamic countries and mosques for demonizing homosexuality, which of course many of them do. Calling that out is not “Islamophobia”; but of course Islam comes with an “I’m offended!” card that allows you unlimited license to conflate anti-Muslim bigotry with criticism of Islamic oppression and doctrine.

Here’s a photo of the demonstration and some reportage by The Free Thinker:

About 20 CEMB [Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain] activists marched on Saturday with placards bearing a range of messages from “We’re here, we’re kaffir, get used to it” to “Allah is gay”. Several wore body paint across their chests depicting eyes crying rainbow-coloured tears.

Maryam Namazie, spokeswoman for CEMB and a Freethinker columnist, said the group was protesting the treatment of LGBT people in states under hardline Islamic leadership, such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Iran – where homosexuality is a capital offence.

Namazie told the Standard it was “apt” to name the East London Mosque on the placards.

At Pride, we were highlighting the 13 states under Islamic rule that kill gay men – 14 if we include Daesh-held territories.

Namazie said that the signs did not say “Fuck Islam” but “Fuck Islamic homophobia”, adding:

In my view Islam, like all religions, is homophobic. Why is it not possible to say this without fear of reprisal or accusations of Islamophobia?

She said:

Pride is full of ‘God is gay’ and ‘Jesus had two fathers’ placards as well as those mocking the church and priests and pope, yet hold a sign saying ‘Allah is gay’ – as we did – and the police converge to attempt to remove them for causing offence.

For Regressive Leftists, of course, “Islamophobia” is a far worse offense than homophobia. And that prioritization is itself offensive to real progressives. But on to Jesus and Mo, in which Mo expresses the hypocrisy of the excuse-Muslims “soft racism”: