Portland mayor tries to bar anti-sharia and pro-Trump rallies, ACLU corrects him

May 31, 2017 • 1:00 pm

We know about the unhinged racist, Jeremy Joseph Christian, who, after shouting slurs at two Muslim women in Portland, Oregon, then stabbed to death two men coming to the women’s defense. The man is being properly booked for murder, and sounds like he hates just about anybody who isn’t white.

In view of that incident, it’s perhaps understandable that Portland’s mayor is trying to stave off divisiveness by urging the government to deny permits to demonstrators who seem to be pro-Trump or anti-Muslim (actually, anti-sharia). But banning free speech isn’t the way to enforce a point of view. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) realizes that—they fought for the American Nazi Party’s right to march through the Jewish section of Skokie, Illinois—and I’m proud to have volunteered for that organization in the past. (They’re also the group I went to as a conscientious objector to initiate a lawsuit against Nixon and the U.S. government for calling us up for service illegally. They worked pro bono, and we won our suit.)

The Washington Post reports on the doings in Portland:

The mayor of Portland, Ore., is calling on federal authorities to cancel a pair of upcoming rallies organized by conservative groups, saying the city was still “in shock” after two men were fatally stabbed on a commuter train Friday while fending off a man shouting anti-Muslim slurs.

Mayor Ted Wheeler asked the federal government to revoke a permit authorizing a June 4 “Trump Free Speech Rally” in Portland’s downtown. He also called on the government to block a “March Against Sharia” that is scheduled for June 10 but has not received permits.

“Our city is in mourning, our community’s anger is real, and the timing and subject of these events can only exacerbate an already difficult situation,” Wheeler wrote in a Facebook post Monday.

He added that he had asked the organizers of the rallies, which he referred to as “alt-right demonstrations,” to cancel their events.

“I urge them to ask their supporters to stay away from Portland,” Wheeler wrote. “There is never a place for bigotry or hatred in our community, and especially not now.”

. . . The organizer of the “Trump Free Speech Rally,” Joey Gibson, sought to distance himself and his group, Patriot Prayer, from Christian, especially as reports surfaced that he appeared at the group’s other events. In a video posted to Facebook on Sunday, Gibson condemned Christian and said antifa protesters were trying to incite chaos at the upcoming rally by exploiting the attacks on the train.

“There’s going to be more intensity, there’s going to be more threats,” Gibson said. “They’re using the deaths of these two people and Jeremy Christian — they’re using it to get Portland all rowdy about our June 4 rally and it’s absolutely disgusting.”

Gibson urged his supporters to remain calm. “You throw one punch, you’re going to jail,” he said.

A Facebook page for the event says the rally will feature live music and “speakers exercising their free speech.”

The “March Against Sharia,” which Gibson is also involved in, says Islamic law “is incompatible with our Constitution and American values.” The event page calls on supporters who “stand for human rights.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon criticized the mayor’s attempts to shut down both rallies, saying the government can’t revoke or deny a permit based on the demonstrators’ views.

And they’re absolutely right. Here are some tweets from the ACLU of Oregon, correcting the mayor’s behavior:

I suspect that if there’s violence, it will be done by bike-lock-wielding ANTIFA members, but everything should be done to ensure that these demonstrations are peaceful.

Hoax or not a hoax? New paper on how “Intersectional quantum feminisms” fight the oppression of Newtonian physics

May 31, 2017 • 11:45 am

Okay, here’s a paper that appeared recently in The Minnesota Review, published out of Duke University. Is it a hoax or not a hoax? I’ll show the title (click on screenshot to go to the paper; the full reference and free link os at bottom), and then give some excerpts. 

First, I read this paper as best I could, but my eyes glazed over at the absolutely horrible postmodern writing, and it was hard to make out the paper’s thesis. Here’s part of the introduction:

I invest in Donna Haraway’s claim that “what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about” (quoted in Barad 2007, 42); that is, politics are about the hierarchies of what connections, or closenesses, are prioritized as bodily. All bodies are political gatherings, as what is understood as closely related, kin, the measured, congealing intersections of phenomena (social identity, histories, water, particles) considered legible/intelligible/singularized is always a political configuration, with systems and apparatuses (e.g., colonial sciences or clarity fetishism) set up to recognize these prioritized configurations/separations (a “cut together/apart” in Barad’s words [2010, 240]) naturalizing insidious assumptions and hierarchies of value. And so “connect[ing] what’s been dangerously disconnected” (Rich 1987, 214) is directly political. Re/cognizing the connective/constellatory bodies typically not understood as connected (e.g., across disciplines) allows for embellishing alliances not following rules of typically understood closeness or kinship (space, time, social category, eugenic lineage) while also not discounting differing mattering realities (steeped categorizations). And, possibly, deprioritizing particularly naturalized, fetishizing borders has potentials for destabilizing structures that enable hierarchical othering (which justifies sociopolitical oppression and material-discursive violence).

Her thesis seems to be that there is a kind of “quantum feminism” that overcomes the political hegemony of Newtionian physics, which itself is somehow ideologically unpalatable because it emphasizes the “binary” and thus creates “othering”, sexism, and similar us/them distinctions:

One of the most prominent and guiding sciences of that time was classical Newtonian physics, which identifies separated beings and absolute differences between particles and waves, space and time. This structural thinking of individualized separatism with binary and absolute differences as the basis for how the universe works seeped into/poured over/ is embedded in many structures of classification, which understand similarity and difference in the world, imposed in many hierarchical and exploitative organizational structures, whether through gender, life/nonlife, national borders, and so on.

Throughout the paper she uses quantum metaphors as well as the word “linearity”, applying them improperly to her view on gender politics. But somehow quantum mechanics is the key to unlocking oppression:

I refer to these allying strategies as a constellatory body called “quantum feminisms.” Hopefully, this locating-as-body can enflame some political closenesses that help shift apparatuses, allowing for energy, time, love, concentration to disperse and gather differently. That is, serve as a decent coalition, a relevant apparatus enabling conditions possible for thinking/mattering innovative transformative antioppression practices and helpful semantic/teleological tools and for checking the political salience of structures in work toward accountable, anti-oppressive transformation. I hope to unpack and highlight connectivities in which these quantum feminist posthuman tools can be explicitly relevant to anti-oppression struggles.

Look at this horrible writing! How can anybody stand to read it?

This is where the threat within feminist new materialisms gathers, as it works specifically to obstruct the abstract/material binary through (re)cognizing that which is considered metaphysical as also having mat(t)er(ial), agential intra-action. In operating away from ideas of abstraction and into materialization, teleological/metaphysical bodies/structures/phenomena/forces are acknowledged/intelligible as matter(ing), as spatializing materiality, systems, gatherings, technologies, prostheses, conglomerates becoming and holding space in/with/ through/among bodies a re-cognition I signify as metaphysicality.

I could go on and on. A few more bits should give you the bitter flavor of this piece, though perhaps not the meaning. Here she throws in “epigenetics,” a biological term:

It is not that a quantum understanding is opposed to identity politics but that it exactly operates with these differences, these concentrations. That is, metaphysical bodies are and can be recognized as differing constellations of closeness, alliance, and energy formation (agential cuts), and with this they are in mattering, diffractive, intraactive relations with the biopolitics of understood-as human bodies, racializations, affectivities. Identity works on a quantum level, it is not immaterial; neither are the spatializing bodies of history, stigma, economics, microphilia, and epigenetics.

And one more with a science-y flavor. I WANT YOU TO READ THESE!

In quantum understanding, these [strategies “need to end all forms of violence”] take familiar forms. These intersubjective, less hierarchical organizing structures are “a performance of spacetime (re)configurings . . . more akin to how electrons experience the world than any journey narrated through rhetorical forms that presume actors move along trajectories across a stage of spacetime” (Barad 2010, 240). They are intra-connective assemblages of gathering and degathering, diffracting, quantum (leaping) political constellations; quantum alliances. And the power in that is exactly what would threaten Western, Cartesian scientific systems of legitimacy and value (binary thinking, taxonomy, what have you). These intentional quantum-style political strategies that emerge, gather, and disperse, in which energy/people are in multiple movements/moments at once, exchange, have wavelike properties, simultaneously embed themselves as illegible to traditionalized subject-based understandings. And thus they are not legible in these understandings’ systems of authentification.

What is this annoying playing with words, with hyphening and neologizing? Is this the postmodernist “jouer” (playing) with words? Whatever it is, it’s damn annoying, and makes Stark’s paper very difficult to read. The science stuff, of course, is bullpucky, just a misuse of physics terms that Alan Sokal has decried so loudly.

I suspect her entire thesis could have been put into a single paragraph, but then it wouldn’t have been a whole paper. The point is so buried in garbage that I’m not sure there is a point. And that leads me to ask you:

IS THIS A HOAX PAPER OR NOT?

Answer below the fold (click on “read more”)

_______

Stark, W. 2017. Assembled bodies: reconfiguring quantum identities“. The Minnesota Review 2017 (88): 69-82. doi: 10.1215/00265667-3787402

Continue reading “Hoax or not a hoax? New paper on how “Intersectional quantum feminisms” fight the oppression of Newtonian physics” →

Update on Bret Weinstein, the demonized Evergreen State College professor

May 31, 2017 • 10:15 am

A few days ago I wrote about Bret Weinstein, a professor of evolutionary biology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington—a university hotbed of Regressive Leftism. After refusing to leave campus after the demands of students on the “Day of Absence” (in earlier years, students of color left campus on that day to engage in anti-racist activities, but this year they demanded that white people leave campus and white students don’t go to class), Weinstein was viciously defamed by students, who showed up at his class, and was called a racist. There were many demands for his resignation. It was a debacle, and embarrassing to the College. It didn’t help that the College President, George Bridges, appeared to be cowed by the students’ demands. Naturally, very few no left-wing newspapers or websites mentioned this incident.

Yesterday Dave Rubin did a live interview with Weinstein. I’ve embedded the video below, which is two hours long (it doesn’t begin till 3 minutes in). I haven’t yet watched the whole thing, but Grania has, and sent this summary—despite her broken left arm:

An interview with the beleaguered and much abused Bret Weinstein about the recent racial turmoil on Evergreen Campus surrounding the Day Of Absence. Weinstein comes across as a remarkably sane and fair person, never losing his compassion and understanding for others. A point of interest is where this recent spate of authoritarianism—and the subsequent tendency to anarchy comes from. As a footnote, ever the evolutionary biologist, Weinstein notes that the same thing that makes a mother love her infant can lead humans to view the outsider as the enemy; however he adds that we can control this once we are aware of it.

In the meantime, President Bridges has issued a statement, “Tolerance and respect show the way forward,” which shows he’s less of a coward than I thought. Although he doesn’t mention Weinstein, he seems to be highly critical of the treatment meted out by the spoiled and entitled students. However, I think the statement below is sufficiently ambiguous that the Regressive students could interpret it as supporting them (the “destructive course” could be seen as that of people like Weinstein, though surely Bridges intended it to refer to the students themselves).

At The Evergreen State College over the past week, we have had deep and sometimes intense exchanges among a group of students, faculty, and college administrators over equity and treatment of students. Some students on campus experience racism that interferes with their education. Others, including faculty, believe their freedom of expression is being restricted.

These are important issues. Discrimination of any form is not acceptable or tolerated on our campus. Free speech must be fostered and encouraged. We are an institution dedicated to learning. We must treat each other with respect and care. Every faculty member, student, and staff member must have the freedom to speak openly about their views.

Unless we continually seek to listen and to understand, rather than listening to react, we will not fulfill Evergreen’s mission to learn across differences.

We may disagree with each other. However, disagreement is one thing; dehumanization is another. Over the week, a few members of the Evergreen community have used traditional and social media to malign, mock, or misrepresent those with whom they disagree.

While the majority of students, faculty, and staff are fully engaged in the teaching and learning work of the college, a few are on a destructive course of action that hurts themselves and gives a distorted and false impression of our community.

This behavior is wrong and must stop. It does not represent us, and we will not allow it to define us.

Our students are as always Evergreen’s top priority. We must continue to support our faculty and staff, who are educators by intent, action, and example. Evergreen Police Services will remain an essential part of ensuring safety for all.  Campus remains open and classes are in session.

Conversations about equity and free speech will continue. These are incredibly complex issues to navigate. We at Evergreen have the courage to try. With tolerance and respect, my belief is that we can succeed, and continue to learn from each other.

In the meantime, Weinstein is still considered by police to be endangered, and has been advised to stay away from campus. Why doesn’t President Bridges do something about that?

h/t: Grania, Robert

More obscurantism connected with the “Conceptual Penis” hoax

May 31, 2017 • 9:15 am

Here’s a find tweeted out by James Lindsay, who, with Peter Boghossian, wrote the “conceptual penis” hoax paper.  That paper has gotten the knickers of Regressive Leftists in a Mobius-like twist as the ideologically ossified do everything they can to discredit the authors. (This, of course, comes from the increasing willingness of people to show that many papers in cultural and gender studies are intellectually vacuous as well as abysmally written.)

The original post (from reddit?) may itself have been a joke, but the passage is not; it comes from this article—in a journal that the RL’s admit is a good one (it was the one that initially rejected the hoax paper but passed it to a related journal).

Here’s the passage reproduced at the top of the tweeted-out post:

On the basis of this sex–gender distinction, a discussion concerning the character and psychogenesis of phallic masculinity, informed by psychoanalytic thinking and experience, is made possible (see ‘Masculinity as project’). My main point is that phallic masculinity is to be understood as a project, entailing a denial of our existential conditions such as vulnerability, transience and dependence. The psychoanalytic revelation of unconscious processes and unconscious intersubjective exchanges allows us to explain phallic masculinity as a repudiation of the feminine/motherly containment and a response to a humiliated, narcissistic ego. Interestingly enough, in the psychoanalytic disclosure of phallic masculinity one can find a connection to a phenomenological description of the masculine character. In a certain sense one can say that this is an occasion on which a meeting takes place between a psychoanalytic, motivational, explanatory intentionality and phenomenological, descriptive intentionality. I am thinking of Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas concerning the meaning of the fate of the male body in terms of transcendence (see fn. 16). The concept of transcendence will be further elaborated upon in the final section of this article, which deals with the alienating consequences of phallic masculinity, and where I will profit from phenomenological thinkers (most notably de Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young) and psychoanalytic thinkers (most notably Donald W. Winnicott).

You can read the whole paper, and then tell me if this is a substantive contribution to scholarship, obscurantist c.v.-burnishing, or some mixture of the two. I’ll have another post today with a paper that is either a hoax or a real one, and you get to guess.

Click to enlarge:

Readers’ wildlife photos (with extra science)

May 31, 2017 • 9:00 am

Reader and professor Bruce Lyon  at the University of California at Santa Cruz (America’s most beautifully-situated university) sent a science-y post about his latest work with sparrows. His notes are indented:

These photos on golden-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia atricapilla) follow up an early batch that Jerry kindly posted here.  Along with two of my former graduate students, Alexis Chaine and Dai Shizuka, I have been studying the winter ecology of these migratory sparrows for 14 years at the UCSC Arboretum. The previous post focused on color banding to follow individual birds and crown plumage variation, which the birds use as badges of status to settle contests over food. Today I will focus on the intriguing winter social behaviors we discovered in these birds, including singing in winter.

Below: Sparrows in the Mist. Sometimes it is foggy in Santa Cruz, which makes the search for our sparrows seem exotic. The location right on campus is not so exotic but it does mean that lots of undergraduates can volunteer on the project and get experience working on bird field project. The project also involves people from the community at large: the two women below have been assisting us for so many years that they are now an essential part of the project.

I recently had a bit of fun with the Sparrows in the Mist theme for a talk I gave last year. Of course, the phrase ‘in the mist’ was made famous in the movie about Dian Fossey’s work on gorilla social behavior in East Africa. Apart from the fact that we sometimes get misty conditions in the Arboretum, we discovered that the sparrows have much more complex winter social lives than anybody suspected— and, at least at a superficial level, some aspects of sparrow social organization are reminiscent of primate social organization!

The original Gorillas in the Mist movie poster:

Coming soon to a theater near you, Sparrows in the Mist:

The details of winter social organization of migratory songbirds is poorly understood. A casual visitor to the Arboretum would quickly notice that the sparrows spend much of the day foraging in small flocks. However, are these flocks stable so that the same birds always flock together? Or, are flocks just random collections of individuals from the population that happen to join in a flock for a meal? Below, a small flock of sparrows, two of which are banded:

Below: Another small feeding flock:

By studying color-banded individuals in a huge number of flock observations, we learned that the winter flocks are dynamic, often changing membership in the course of an hour or so. We then used ‘social network analysis’ methods to see if there were patterns to the flock dynamics. Dai Shizuka, now a professor at the University of Nebraska, did all of the network analysis and has become an expert in this area.

Below is an example of a social network from one year of our study. Each dot is an individual sparrow and the lines connecting pairs of dots represent flocks where the two birds were seen together in the same flock at least once. Line thickness indicates how often two birds flocked together, taking into account the total number of flocks they were seen in. Note that many birds are never seen together in a flock (e.g. pairs of dots not collected by a line). There are methods for determining whether social affiliations are random or whether there are clear social groups and couple of interesting patterns emerged from these types of analysis.

(1) The sparrows live in clear social communities. The individuals are color coded to show the four different communities. Flocks are not random gatherings but instead are mostly subsets of birds from the same communities.

(2) The communities are spatially distinct—different communities use different parts of the Arboretum, as seen on the right in the map of our study site that shows where the different colored communities occurred. Additionally, about 50% of the birds return after migrating to and from their breeding areas, and these birds almost invariably return to their same communities and socialize with any of their same buddies from the previous season that also survived. And they do this above and beyond levels predicted just by the fact that birds in the same communities tend to use the same areas. These birds are forming lifelong winter partnerships—best friends forever.

These findings indicate a surprising level of social complexity in the lives of these seemingly modest little sparrows—basic aspects of their ‘fission-fusion’ societies are similar to those described for some primates, including chimpanzees. However, unlike chimpanzees, we found no evidence that kinship plays any role in structuring the communities.

Whether our findings are unusual is unclear because so few species have been studied in the same level of detail. What is unusual though is the species’ diet—the sparrows eat a lot of grass, and they consume nectar as well. Herbivores (plant eaters) are usually large animals so it is a bit odd to have such a small animal eating grass. Perhaps their social organization is connected to their diet—a vegetarian diet may allow for high densities, which in turn would permit the formation of the communities we observed.

Below: Herbivores of the world unite—two sparrows and a rabbit all eating grass.

We are also studying winter song. The sparrows sing a lot in the fall—you know that fall has arrived on the California coast when you start hearing the golden-crowns singing. It is somewhat unusual for migratory birds to sing on their wintering grounds so we have been interested in figuring out who sings (not all individuals sing) and why. One possibility is that the singers are young males learning to sing—in a few species it is known that yearling males begin to practice their new songs in the fall. We rejected this hypothesis because it is mostly older birds that sing, not yearlings. Also we found that both males and females sing in winter, which is interesting because females do not sing in summer. Many birds sing to defend territories. Because the sparrows live in social groups, classic territory defense does not explain the singing, but defense of a group territory is a possibility. Song does appear related to social dominance because we found that singers are more socially dominant than would be expected based only on their plumage coloration.

One type of song interaction is particularly bizarre—two birds will sometimes have song duels that can last for hours. We call these events ‘tethering’ because two birds remain very close to each other while moving about, singing back and forth (typically <1 m), as if joined by an invisible tether.

Here is a video of two birds in a tether interaction:

We are not yet sure what these song duels are all about but we have a few possible explanations we are currently testing. We suspect that the singing might be connected to their interesting social organization, but that is mostly a guess at this point.

Finally, very recent advances in tracking technology allow us for the first time to figure out specifically where our birds breed, as well as their migration routes to and from the breeding areas. Just this year GPS tags became small enough to attach to a sparrow-sized birds (officially tags should not exceed 3% of the body mass).

Below: a GPS tag, weighing about 1 gram:

Below: The tags are attached to the bird with a backpack harness system with slightly stretchy loops that go around the legs. The tag itself lays concealed under the bird’s back feathers and the only evidence that the bird is tagged is a little antenna sticking out above the tail, as can be seen in the photo:

The tags can be programmed to take up to 80 very accurate GPS readings (<10 m) on times and dates of our choosing. It was fun trying to figure out the best dates to use for tracking migration routes and determine breeding areas. What is really astonishing is that with a 10-meter accuracy one could in principle get an estimate of breeding territory size (assuming the birds stick closely to their territories). The only downside is that we have to recover the tags to get the data— the tags get GPS information from satellites but do not themselves transmit any information to satellites. Based on our long-term survival rates, we can expect to get half of the tags we deployed back next fall. Here’s hoping that the birds have a great summer vacation!

Chicago! (and ducks)

May 31, 2017 • 7:00 am

Here are photos of the city skyline from my crib, the first taken last evening and the second at about 5 a.m. today:

Yesterday, when I made one of my three daily trips outside to feed the ducklings, I counted five instead of four! It turned out that another mother had just taken her new babies to the water—a brood of five. Now I have nine ducklings to feed, and believe me, what with competition between the mothers (they beat each other up) and from the hungry drake, it’s a nightmare! I will be bereft if any duckling doesn’t fledge.

The older brood:

The younger brood this morning (you can see the oatmeal I’ve been feeding them, which they greatly like):

Wedneday: Hili dialogue

May 31, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on the last day of May—the 31st (2017). It’s National Macaroon Day, but it’s also World No Tobacco Day, which I am not 100% down with because it demonizes the Habanos I love to smoke (2 or fewer per week). I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my occasional cigar.

It must have been a long day for the President, as Trump tweeted out this garbled thought at six minutes after midnight (yes, the tweet says 11:06, but papers report 12:06):

As the Washington Post noted, this mistake (the Donald surely meant “coverage,” but then what?) started a #covfefe site, including this tw**t:

And the New Yorker‘s television critic Emily Nussbaum waited for the Donald to finish his tweet. Waiting . . . waiting. . .  and then nothing:

and this:

On this day in history, Samuel Pepys recorded the very last event in his famous diary. You may not know that that diary was written in a kind of shorthand, with special phrases for passages of infidelity, masturbation, and so on. On May 21, 1859, Big Ben started keeping time in London. Exactly 30 years later we had The Great Johnston Flood in Pennsylvania, in which the failure of a dam killed 2209 people in the eponymous town. Finally, it was on this day in 2005 that the magazine Vanity Fair revealed that “Deep Throat” of Woodward Bernstein fame, a man who helped bring down Nixon, was Mark Felt, an FBI agent. Felt died three years later at 95.

Notables born on May 31 include Walt Whitman (1819), Clint Eastwood (1930), Joe Namath (1943), Brooke Shields (1965), and Colin Farrell (1976). Those who died on this day include the painter Tintoretto (1594), Billy Strayhorn (1967), Nobel-winning geneticist Jacques Monod (1976), Jack Dempsey (1983), Timothy Leary (1996), and Jean Stapleton (2013). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is directing the walkies (there’s a fork in the path at the end of the orchard):

Hili: We are turning to the right!
Cyrus: If you say so.
In Polish:
Hili: Idziemy w prawo!
Cyrus: Jak tak mówisz.
Lagniappe: Matthew sends us a tw**t showing a sneezing kestrel, almost certainly the first time you’ve seen this bird sneeze. It’s from the BBC’s “Springwatch” cams, which Matthew watches religiously (that’s a metaphor). The link to the live KestrelCam is here.