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.
Stephen Barnard is still fishing and traveling in New Zealand (sadly, our visits won’t overlap). He’s now moved to the North Island, and sent back a photo and a movie of the aquatic inhabitants.
Had an excellent first day fishing in North Island — caught about a dozen rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) this size, and lost a few more.
And a video he took:
New Zealand longfin eel (Anguilla dieffenbachii), also known by the sushi name unagi, one of my favorites.
And while we’re Down Under, reader Tony Eales from Queensland sent some photos of a native species—an aberrant fowl that’s the only species in the bird family Anseranatidae.
Magpie Geese (Anseranas semipalmata) are really cool. Aboriginal people from the top end of Australia love to eat them. I was once driving with a co-worker who had only recently for the first time moved to east coast from a remote northern territory community, and he was genuinely appalled at our driving past Magpie Geese colonies at roadside rest-stop ponds that were unmolested and uneaten.
They sit outside the main group of ducks, geese and swans in a monotypic family Anseranatidae, having split off before the K-PG extinction event. [JAC: This is the Cretaceous-Paleogene event that occurred about 66 million years ago. It was formerly known as the Tertiary-Cretaceous event—the one that supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.]. They are slowly moving back into their near continent-wide range after being much reduced in south and central Australia through over-hunting and habitat loss. As a child I knew them only from documentaries about the wild tropical north and still remember the shock of seeing my first Magpie Geese near my home city of Brisbane. Now they’re quite common wherever there’s permanent freshwater.
Good morning on a wet March 2, 2017, and a Thursday in the U.S. It’s National Banana Cream Pie day in the U.S., a decent pie when they use more bananas than custard, and thickly slather the top with real whipped cream. It’s also Texas Independence Day, when a handful of settlers in Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836.
Today’s news: Attorney General Jeff Sessions apparently lied to Congress during his hearings for his position, claiming that no Trump minion met with Russians before the election. Now he admits he met with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. (a possible spy) twice—the same official that Mike Flynn met with, leading to Flynn’s firing— but Sessions and the Russian didn’t discuss campaign issues. That was misleading at best and perjury at worst, and in my view should mandate Sessions’s resignation. In any case, the Trump follies continue, with barely a Cabinet nominee unsullied.
On this day in 1797, the Bank of England issued the first one- and two-pound notes. In 1859, this was the first day of the two-day “Great Slave Auction”, in which 436 humans were sold in Georgia to pay off a slaveowner’s debt. That was the largest auction of slaves before the American Civil War. On March 2, 1946, Ho Chi Minh was elected president of North Vietnam, and, exactly a decade later, Monaco gained independence from France. In 1983, compact discs were first released in the US (remember that?), and, on this day in 1995, Fermilab announced the discovery of the top quark.
Notables born on this day include Sam Houston (1793), Kurt Weill (1900), Dr. Seuss (1904), Desi Arnaz (1917), photographer Ernst Haas (1921), white-suited Tom Wolfe (1931), John Irving (1942), Karen Carpenter (1950, ♥), Laraine Newman (1952), and the consciously uncoupled Chris Martin (1977). Those who died on this day include John Wesley (1791), Horace Walpole (1797), D. H. Lawrence (1930), Philip K. Dick (1982), Serge Gainsbourg (1991), and Dusty Springfield (1999). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is practicing cat identity politics, co-opting the language of social justice warriors for her own selfish desires.
Hili: Check your privilege.
A: What privilege?
Hili: Well, for instance, the privilege of filling my bowl.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Hili: Sprawdź swoje przywileje.
Ja: Jakie przywileje?
Hili: No, na przykład przywilej napełnienia mojej miseczki.
(Foto: Sarah Lawson)
And we have big news of Gus from Winnipeg: he’s sleeping! His staff reports:
Here’s a pic of where he is. He’s spending a great deal of time sleeping on the blanket which is now on the ottoman. [Note: the blanket was a Christmas present to his staff member Taskin, but she’s never been able to use it since Gus coopted it.]
I’m a sucker for anything David Attenborough touches: he’s the real deal. One would think that his recitation of the old Louis Armstrong song “What a wonderful world” would be cheesy, but not for a second—not when it’s accompanied by clips from his BBC videos. The BBC One put this together, and it almost makes me tear up, for you know Attenborough believes it.
[JAC comment]: “I know that some readers say that chiropractic treatment has “helped” them, but the practice has no scientific basis, though …”
[Dinoff’s comment]: I am amazed at the level of ignorance when it come to supposedly highly educated people. Did I understand and read correctly that Chiropractic kills people that is a joke, if any profession has killed more people as a whole then perhaps you should take a good look at the medical as well as the pharmaceutical businesses. Your statements are so foolish and so infintile I question why you are in any position to state the scandalous statements that belched out of your big pie hole You are embarrassing and should never be permitted to voice any opinion but i thank god this is America where even the like of you sir the mentaly unstable have a right to speak there mind.
Well, if you Google the name Lee Dinoff, which he included in his post to be displayed, you’ll find that there’s someone by that name who’s a chiropractor in Georgia! At any rate, I’ll inform Mr. Dinoff when this post goes up, so, readers, say anything you want to him. I have to add, though, that I hope he learns to write. His grammar and spelling are a discredit to his “profession.”
A new National Public Radio (NPR) piece by Lynn Neary reveals something I didn’t know: some book publishers, especially those who put out children’s books, employ “sensitivity readers” to go over manuscripts and single out bits that might offend readers. The NPR piece can be accessed (both the audio and text) by clicking on the screenshot below.
This new business, which employs a bunch of specialists who vet particular genres of books, seems to go along with the climate of the times: times when the word “nigger” is expunged from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
. . . The use of sensitivity readers began as an informal practice, but it became more systematized with the creation of the website Writing in the Margins, which lists readers and their areas of expertise. [The list is here. I would recommend looking at it somewhat closely!]
The sensitivity readers cover the gamut of writing, but there does seem a surfeit of those interested in fantasy, science fiction, and mythology.
But of course there are those (I among them) who think that the “sensitivity readers” might be overly sensitive (and censorious), redacting ideas that might challenge people (not just children), or imposing their own ideology on the writer. Here’s one dissenter:
Writer Hillary Jordan is wary of that development. “If this is a source for a writer who has no other way to get it, then great,” she says. “But I feel that if it’s a risk management tool of some sort, I find that troubling.”
Jordan is author of Mudbound, a novel which has been made into a movie to be released this year. The story is told by characters who are both male and female, and black and white. Jordan says she was intimidated writing from the perspective of black characters, but a teacher told her you can’t be afraid of your own work. “Writing literature is inherently risky,” she says. “And the further you get from your own experience, the riskier it is. But no one can inoculate you against these risks because they’re part of the process.”
Jordan acknowledges that things have changed since her book was published almost a decade ago. People are more sensitive now, she says, but literature can’t come from a place of fear. “It comes from curiosity about how other people live; it comes from the desire to break down the barriers between us. And I just don’t know how you do that if you have someone looking over your shoulder and sort of coughing slightly to let you know when you’re off.”
Sensitivity readers reject the charge:
Jordan worries that what begins with good intentions can end in censorship, an idea sensitivity reader Dhonielle Clayton rejects. “I’m not in the business of censoring people,” Clayton says. “I’m in the business of checking to make sure what they’re doing does not have harm and repercussions for the people that they are writing about. Because people don’t realize the power of words and the power of bad representation — it can haunt people.”
But that is censorship, even if of a mild sort. After all, wouldn’t a good editor vetting a book sense if something is “off,” and then consult an expert (not necessarily a “sensivitity expert”!) to see if there’s some undetected slur, or some mistake? What worries me most is that this endeavor is designed to protect people from challenges to their thinking that constitutes the power of words—and it’s a generally good power. The sensitivity readers are trying to convert books into “safe spaces”, and that’s exactly what they should not be. And I’m absolutely sure that many of these readers have ideas of what ideas are “right” and what ideas are “wrong” and shouldn’t be represented. That is the danger. Could you imagine a social justice writer reading a book by Dave Rubin?
Whenever you see the phrase: “words can be hurtful,” especially in conjunction with speech or literature, run for the hills.
Dave Rubin may have been criticized for not challenging some of his “problematic” guests (e.g., Milo Yiannopoulos), but I think that criticism is largely unfair, for Rubin’s brief is to just let guests talk on the premise that unfiltered, un-reactive speech is useful in letting viewers see someone’s true opinion. And you may object to some of Rubin’s views, like his libertarianism. But one thing you can’t accuse him of is being mean, abrasive, or promulgating “hate speech”. He has one aim: to promote discourse between people separated on the political spectrum, hoping it will bring them together. Maybe that’s a vain hope, but it’s a noble one.
And having met Rubin, and been on his show, I can vouch for the fact that he’s a really nice guy (everyone agrees on this, from right to left), and is mild mannered and calm. Say what you will about Rubin, his talks are not going to incite violence. (Well, given today’s students, I may be wrong!)
So it’s especially galling that, according to The Tab, Rubin’s upcoming talk at the University of Southern California (USC) has been postponed indefinitely by safety concerns—by the Department of Public Safety (DPS). Rubin was invited to speak by the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL):
According to an email provided by USC YAL President Chad Lonski, DPS said that they would need to have two armed guards “trained in dealing with potential disruptions or protests.” YAL would have to front the costs as well. For two DPS officers, it would cost $67.50 and they would have to work a minimum of four hours. That’s a total of $540.
DPS’s Threat Assessment Detective determined that Rubin’s controversial history “may present security issues,” that a bag checker would not be able to solve. Rubin says he is a classical liberal thinker, though he has recently distanced himself from progressive liberals, who he refers to as regressive. In a recent PragerU video called “Why I Left the Left,” Rubin said that “the regressive left ranks minorities in a pecking order to compete in a kind of oppression Olympics.”
. . . At USC, Rubin will discuss how Democrats allowed Trump to win if YAL are allowed to follow through with the event or receive enough funding to pay for armed guards, Lonski said.
The Tab notes as well that Rubin, unlike Yiannopoulos, has no history of inciting violence or strident protest at his talks: Rubin’s recent talk at UCLA drew only a handful of protestors.
Here’s the 4½-minute Prager University video in which Rubin classifies himself as a “classical liberal”. You probably won’t agree with all of Dave’s sentiments, nor do I: I think that if you can’t force a baker to bake a cake for a gay wedding (and Rubin thinks that bakers should have that “freedom of religion”), then why can you force a baker to bake a cake for a Muslim, or a black person? He presumably agrees with the Hobby Lobby decision as well, and I don’t. (Note, though, that gay activist Peter Tatchell agrees with Rubin on the cake issue, though he objects to the messages sometimes put on the cakes, not that they’re ordered by gays.)
Regardless of whether you agree, though, can you really make the case that Rubin’s purveying “hate speech,” or that his appearances should be postponed or canceled? After all, he is raising questions that impugn not people but ideas, and his own ideas are surely worth discussing. It’s galling that today’s generation of students would find sentiments like those in the video above so disturbing that they would engage in violent or uncontrollable disruptions.
Apparently even the mildest criticism of today’s Left is considered “hate speech,” and that’s a sad state of affairs.
Well, compared to the damage our new President is likely to do to the country, this incident doesn’t count as much. But it’s a sign of how mean-spirited the administration is.
As you may know, Asghar Farhadi, an Iranian director, won the Oscar this year for Best Foreign-Language film for “The Salesman.” (I haven’t yet seen it, but it gets a 97% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) But this wasn’t his first win: he nabbed the same award for his 2012 movie “A Separation.” Here’s a man who knows what he’s doing.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government doesn’t share that view, at least publicly. As Reuters reports. the U.S. State Department’s official Persian language Twitter account initially congratulated Farhadi for his win, and then deleted the tweet. Why would it do that? Here’s one clue:
Farhadi boycotted the Oscars ceremony to protest Trump’s January executive order that temporarily banned entry to the United States by Iranians and citizens of six other Muslim-majority countries, and issued a statement criticizing the order. The ban was blocked by federal courts, although the administration is working on a new order.
Farhadi chose two Iranian-Americans – a female engineer and a former NASA scientist – to represent him at the ceremony. Anousheh Ansari, an engineer who was the first female space tourist, read a statement on Farhadi’s behalf calling the travel ban “inhumane.”
“Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for aggression and war,” Ansari said, reading from Farhadi’s statement.
According to screenshots circulating on Twitter, the @USAdarFarsi account posted a message around 1 a.m. EST congratulating Farhadi on the award, which was Iran’s second Oscar victory. The tweet was then deleted, although it is unclear exactly when.
“A congratulatory tweet was posted,” a State Department spokeswoman said. “We later removed the post to avoid any misperception that the USG (U.S. government) endorsed the comments made in the acceptance speech.”
. . . The @USAdarFarsi account, which launched in February 2011 and seeks to engage directly with Iranians, had previously tweeted messages about “The Salesman,” including on Jan. 24, when it noted its Academy Award nomination and sent best wishes to Farhadi.
That tweet, which is still online, was published days before Trump issued the travel ban that sparked Farhadi’s protest.
Umm. . . congratulating him for his win doesn’t mean endorsing everything he says, though in this case I agree with both Farhadi’s sentiments and his gesture. But the State Department could have been big enough to congratulate the man for his achievements (after all, aren’t we trying to be friends with Iran?) without a mean-spirited revocation of those congratulations.
Here’s the tweet captured by Steve Herman before it was deleted. I can’t read the Persian, but perhaps a reader can.
