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.
We continue with the “first hijabi to do X” trope, which doesn’t celebrate Muslim achievements so much as the wearing of a garment that symbolizes misogyny and female oppression. One sees little approbation for the achievements of Muslim women themselves, which in times like these should be applauded; one sees instead approbation for only those women who wear The Scarf. And this time it’s a double whammy: we see a “historic” achievement of wearing both a hijab and a burkini—by a Muslim contestant in a beauty pageant. The touting, of course, is loudest in the Huffington Post; click on the screenshot to see the article:
PuffHo’s puffery:
Halima Aden advanced to the semifinals in this weekend’s Miss Minnesota USA pageant, becoming the first-ever contestant in the competition to wear a hijab and burkini.
The 19-year-old Somali-American teen from St. Cloud, Minnesota, wore a hijab throughout the pageant’s entire competition, which included rounds devoted to evening gowns and bathing suits. The pageant’s announcer said Aden was “making history” as she took to the stage wearing a burkini.
Earlier this month, Aden spoke with The Huffington Post about the upcoming competition, and how she hoped her presence in the pageant would serve as an inspiration for Muslim and Somali girls.
“Not seeing women that look like you in media in general and especially in beauty competitions sends the message that you’re not beautiful or you have to change the way you look to be considered beautiful,” Aden said. “And that’s not true.”
But wait! Isn’t the hijab supposed to be there to prevent men from noticing your beauty? Why wear that, as well as the body-covering burkini, in a beauty pageant? Shouldn’t hijabis avoid these pageants—in which women are paraded around like so many cattle before the prying eyes of men—like the plague? As Aden said in a short video piece at PuffHo, “For me to compete, it’s like opening doors for so many girls.” But what kind of doors? Doors to be noticed as beautiful? Well, that’s just what the hijab is supposed to prevent.
The whole notion of “beauty pageants” repels me, but doubly so when the women participating are wearing clothes to make them not be noticed as beautiful.
Here’s a tw**t showing the “big cheers” given to Aden. When I saw this, and heard the self-congratulatory clapping that often comes from regressives, I immediately thought of this couplet: a play on the last two lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous poem “Spring and Fall“:
Think about the women that you laud, for
It’s really yourself that you applaud for.
Halima Aden starts off Miss Minnesota USA's swimsuit segment to big cheers from the crowd. Announcer: "She's making history tonight." pic.twitter.com/OUvbHv6xct
I’ve long complained about the bloated profits of commercial scientific publishers, which can be as high as 40%. That’s obscene if you realize that other companies which actually make a product make far less money, that the scientific publishers get that money by not only charging authors to publish there, but having their scientific papers refereed and improved by reviewers who are paid nothing. Those reviewers—and I’ve done plenty of gratis reviewing for journals like Nature and Current Biology, as well as for journals issued by less greedy publishers—are done out of a sense of “public service”. Profit-hungry journals like to play on our sense of duty and public service, all the while raking in huge profits by using scientists to do the journal’s job for free. And remember that these journals charge people for access to papers that are, by and large, funded by government grants—by the taxpayer. It’s reprehensible that the public who funds such research is denied access to the results of that research. (Some funding organizations, however, allow journals to charge for access for only one year. But even that is too much.) Commercial publishing of taxpayer-funded research is a travesty unless the profits, beyond those needed to pay salaries and run the company, are plowed back into more science.
But young scientists, who need to make their reputations by publishing in well-known journals like Cell and Nature, have no choice, for their hiring, tenure, and promotion often depend on what journals accept their papers. Sadly, many of the “high quality” journals are put out by greedy publishers. And it’s not just young scientists, either: organizations that hand out grants often look at where you’ve published your papers before deciding whether to give you further funds.
I’ve complained about this before, especially about the company Elsevier, one of the greediest scientific publishers around (see here). Eventually I, and 16,383 other scientists (the number is growing), pledged to do no more work for Elsevier until they adopted reasonable business practice instead of gouging scientists. Even editors have fought back: as I reported last November, “all six editors and 31 editorial board members of Lingua, a highly reputed linguistics journal that has the misfortune to be published by Elsevier, have resigned in protest of high library and bundling fees and of Elsevier’s refusal to convert the journal to open access.”
Want to know the obscene level of profits these companies make? From Sauropod Vertebrata Picture of the Week, we have a listing of the profits of well known technical scientific publishers. These are from 2012 and represent profits as a percentage of revenue:
Here’s a comparison of profits from various companies, including nonscientific ones, listed on Alex Holcombe’s blog in 2013:
As pointed out in the article I’ll shortly summarize, Elsevier made a profit of $1.13 billion dollars in 2014—1.3 times the entire annual budget of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
All this came to mind when reader Ursula Goodenough called my attention to a great new article on the American Society for Cell Biology website called “On publishing and the Sneetches: A Wake-Up Call?” (The “sneetches” are Dr. Seuss’s characters who are arbitrarily given green stars on their bellies—corresponding to scientists who publish in the “right” journals and thereby get special status.) The article is by two distinguished cell biologists from UC San Francisco, Peter Waller and Dyche Mullins, who are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more.
Waller and Mullins first point out the problem of the exploitation of scientists by publishers, describing an enlightening Gedankenexperiment:
Like our intellectual ancestors hundreds of years ago, we still conceive and execute the research, and we write our papers. But now with the advent of electronic word and image processing, we also create our own graphics, proofread our own text, and in some cases typeset it. More significantly, the Internet enables us to easily (and instantly) disseminate our work around the world. Publishers still help provide a measure of quality control by orchestrating the peer review process, but here again it is scholars who do the actual work of reviewing papers. It is thus surprising that despite the diminished (and arguably dispensable) role of the publishing industry, our community remains slavishly committed to century-old traditions that, we will argue, are illogical and in many cases exploitative and harmful to our community.
Of course Elsevier is only one example of several large for-profit publishers of scholarly journals. Members of the for-profit publishing industry subscribe to an ingenious business plan. In an insightful satirical essay, Scott Aaronson describes a fictitious computer game company built on principles similar to those of the for-profit publishing industry, exploiting its patrons to contribute their products and labor for free. In Aaronson’s imaginary scenario, game developers donate their games to the company because they need its “seal of approval” for their games to be recognized. Experts test and debug the games for free when told that it’s their “professional duty” to do so. So for only trivial investment in the products, the company can charge customers high rates for the games it now owns. Aaronson concludes: “On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous—a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not ‘rush to judgment’ by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense?
Their solution is to abandon these greedy publishers and publish under the model of those university and society presses that plow back profits into scientific initiatives. They also say that scientists and granting agencies need to abandon the use of journal titles as measures of scientific worth, a move I heartily approve. (As the authors note, “As long as the “gold-stars” associated with authoring papers in, for example, Cell and Nature, are—or even are just perceived to be significant drivers in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, Elsevier, Springer, et al. will remain untouchable forces.”) Waller and Mullins further recommend that all scientists send their work to non-profit venues that give the public and other scientists immediate online access to journals (e.g., PLOS and eLife). Funding agencies can demand the end of the year’s profit-moratorium on free access, and make that access free immediately upon publication. They note, properly, that the scientists who run and edit the journals are not our enemies: they (and reviewers) are often motivated by a sense of duty and a desire to keep published science of high quality. Our enemies are the greedy companies that employ them.
Finally, they argue that scientists should stop allowing themselves to be exploited by rapacious publishers:
What can we as individuals do to promote change? One obvious action that would help weaken the grip of the for-profit publishing industry on our community would be, whenever reasonably possible, to decline to provide our free labor. One of us (PW) for example, with very few exceptions that can be counted with the fingers on one hand, has not published in and not reviewed for any Elsevier journal for the last 13 years. What is most puzzling is a lack of more widespread anger in our communities regarding the degree of exploitation and abuse by for-profit publishing enterprises that we not only tolerate, but accept and support. Rather, as Scott Aaronson points out later in his article, “[w]e support the enterprise by reviewing and by serving on editorial boards without compensation, regarding these duties as a moral obligation.
And they show a proposed response to editors who expect us to work for free:
Box 1. Suggestion for a reply when asked to review for a for-profit journal. Note that the suggested rate for professional advice is a bargain. It would be very hard to find a lawyer to work for this rate for a for-profit enterprise.
Coincidentally, I was asked yesterday by one of the Nature journals to review a submission. I agreed, read the paper, and then noticed that the paper was tracked through the “Springer Nature Tracking System.” Springer? I wrote to the editor and asked if Nature was now affiliated with the rapacious Springer. I was told that “Springer Nature. . . formed last year through the merger of Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group and Springer, both commercial publishers.”
With that, I decided enough was enough. I wasn’t going to work for free to enrich either Nature or especially Springer, which is a gouger. I wrote this response:
Given that Springer makes at least 30% profits, and it is using, through the journals, reviewers and authors as free (and exploited) labor to swell its coffers, I’m afraid I must refuse to do my review, even though I’ve read the paper twice. Nature should, in these circumstances, remunerate its authors and reviewers instead of greedily sucking up profits for Springer. Given that you’re asking all of us to do this for free, I must decline to work further for Nature without remuneration. I have no doubt that you, [editor’s name redacted], and the other editors are doing your job because you care about science, and are trying your best to maintain the quality of our field; my decision is simply a refusal to work for a system that exploits scientists to make profits for a company.
I’d urge other scientists to avoid reviewing for Nature given its new affiliation, or at least to demand $400 per hour for reviewing, something that no journal will pay, of course. We can all do that, even while recognizing the pressures of our field that drives authors to submit their work to journals like Cell and Nature. It’s not hard, and you have nothing to lose—unless you think that reviewing for a journal will somehow help you publish there in the future (a vain hope, I think). And even if that hope is true, we shouldn’t be cowed by publishers who exploit scientists in the interest of their profits.
Yesterday the Guardian, which is becoming increasingly worthless except as a source of levity, published a piece by an anonymous author: “‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist.” When I first read it I thought it was a joke or a spoof, but knowing the Guardian’s penchant for regressive Leftism, of which this is a prime specimen, I decided it wasn’t a joke. You can be the judge; I’ll discuss it as if it were serious.
“Anonymous” first says that he was a liberal British white man of progressive sentiments who always found racism abhorrent. But then, against his will, he was sucked into a racist whirlpool: sent down the black “rabbit hole” of alt-rightism by going online after the Brexit “leave” vote. “Anonymous” avers that that his “liberal kneejerk reaction was to be shocked” when he encountered Sam Harris’s criticism of Islam, but the poor man then moved on to others on YouTube, including Milo Yiannopoulos. (As if Harris and Yiannopoulos were in any way comparable! I don’t even think they’ve interacted.) But even Milo was just a gateway drug to more toxic stuff: criticism of feminism, men’s rights activism, and so on. “Anonymous” saw himself becoming an alt-righter himself, and then one day he came to his senses:
For three months I watched this stuff grow steadily more fearful of Islam. “Not Muslims,” they would usually say, “individual Muslims are fine.” But Islam was presented as a “threat to western civilisation”. Fear-mongering content was presented in a compelling way by charismatic people who would distance themselves from the very movement of which they were a part.
. . . On one occasion I even, I am ashamed to admit, very diplomatically expressed negative sentiments on Islam to my wife. Nothing “overtly racist”, just some of the “innocuous” type of things the YouTubers had presented: “Islam isn’t compatible with western civilisation.”
She was taken aback: “Isn’t that a bit … rightwing?”
I justified it: “Well, I’m more a left-leaning centrist. PC culture has gone too far, we should be able to discuss these things without shutting down the conversation by calling people racist, or bigots.”
The indoctrination was complete.
Are you chuckling yet at the notion that criticism of religion is “right-wing” and a form of “indoctrination”? Well, hang on. For the author, after seeing the light, had to expiate his sins. As I think Peter Boghossian has noted, Regressive Leftism shares some of the traits of religion, including having the Original Sin of being a white male (or of criticizing Islam)—sins for which one must be deeply ashamed, confess to other Regressives, and then expiate by lashing oneself long and hard. And that’s the just what happened with “Anonymous”:
About a week before the US election, I heard one of these YouTubers use the phrase “red-pilled” – a term from the film The Matrix – in reference to people being awakened to the truth about the world and SJWs. Suddenly I thought: “This is exactly like a cult. What am I doing? I’m turning into an arsehole.”
I unsubscribed and unfollowed from everything, and told myself outright: “You’re becoming a racist. What you’re doing is turning you into a terrible, hateful person.” Until that moment I hadn’t even realised that “alt-right” was what I was becoming; I just thought I was a more open-minded person for tolerating these views.
It would take every swearword under the sun to describe how I now feel about tolerating such content and gradually accepting it as truth. I’ve spent every day since feeling shameful for being so blind and so easily coerced.
As you see, it’s deeply racist to vote “leave” on Brexit (a mistaken vote, I think, but not a racist one), criticize feminism, or ponder men’s rights. And it’s especially racist to criticize Islam.
What kind of world is that man living in, that he has to repudiate the idea (and lash himself for thinking) that “we should be able to discuss these things without shutting down the conversation by calling people racist, or bigots”? No, we must call these people racists and bigots. That, after all, is the ultimate weapon of the Regressive Leftist: the knowledge that other Leftists want to avoid at all costs being typed as a racist. If you use that word, they’ll more that likely shut up. But I’d like to know what’s racist about criticizing ideas.
But in the Church of Regressive Leftism, one can be forgiven, at least for a while, by confession. And so “anonymous” confessed to the Guardian‘s readers, and plans to confess to his wife:
. . . It’s clear this terrible ideology has now gone mainstream.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Online radicalisation of young white men. It’s here, it’s serious, and I was lucky to be able to snap out of it when I did. And if it can get somebody like me to swallow it – a lifelong liberal – I can’t imagine the damage it is doing overall.
It seemed so subtle – at no point did I think my casual and growing Islamophobia was genuine racism. The good news for me is that my journey toward the alt-right was mercifully brief: I never wanted to harm or abuse anybody verbally, it was all very low level – a creeping fear and bigotry that I won’t let infest me again. But I suspect you could, if you don’t catch it quickly, be guided into a much more overt and sinister hatred.
I haven’t yet told my wife that this happened, and I honestly don’t know how to. I need to apologise for what I said and tell her that I certainly don’t believe it. It is going to be a tough conversation and I’m not looking forward to it. I didn’t think this could happen to me. But it did and it will haunt me for a long time to come.
What a weenie!
Now does that sound like a joke to you? It would to normal people, but these people aren’t normal. Because of the cognitive dissonance they experience when two liberal values clash (concern for the underdog and concern for free speech and women’s rights), “anonymous” has been turned into a craven, sniveling joke who’s resolve his dissonance by throwing freedom of expression under the bus. The man can’t even distinguish between Sam Harris’s (and other people’s) criticism of Islam and the real Islamophobia that is bigotry against individual Muslims. Nor does he see that Muslims are not a race, but adherents to a particular faith, though of course their beliefs are diverse. Anonymous will confess to her wife (in a “tough conversation”; what kind of woman is that?) and say that it’s taboo to even consider that the tenets of Islam may be incompatible with Western civilization. Some thoughts must not be thought; some discussions must not be had. All that, of course, comes from fear that you’ll be branded a racist.
The article discredits itself, but the fact that the Guardian published it shows the dangers of Regressive Leftism. Those are the dangers of authoritarianism, of the suppression of free speech as “racist speech,” and the danger that, when these people get in positions of power, the Left will become afraid to discuss touchy issues lest they be branded racists and bigots.
Here’s some further expiation: “Anonymous” refused remuneration, probably as a further form of penance. Here’s the note at the end of his article:
We have some photographs of Tanzania by reader Joe Dickinson. He sent a previous set featuring lions, zebras, and their interaction (!), but I’ll put this set up first because it arrived just now and it’s easy to post. Joe’s notes are indented.
Here is a set to finish out Tarangire NP, Tanzania. More to come from Ngorongoro and Serengeti.
Tarangire claims to have the largest remaining population of African elephants (Loxodonta africana), although Chobe, over in Botswana, which we visited four years ago, makes the same claim. Anyway, here are some shots of the elephants.
And I’ll throw in a couple of my favorites from Chobe. This one has pulled up a bunch of grass and is cleaning it by swishing it in water. Removing grit saves wear and tear on the teeth.
This baby is too young to have learned to drink using its trunk, so it has to get its mouth down to the water.
And now for some antelopes. First, a male impala (Aepyceros melanpus).
And a Common Eland (Taurotragus oryx), the largest African antelope. [JAC: According to Wikipedia, though, the Giant Eland, Taurotragus derbianus, with a disjunct African distribution, is the largest antelope.]
It’s the penultimate day of November: the 29th, and it’s the year 2016, which means it’s National Chocolates Day. In honor of that, I’ve put some powdered cocoa into my latte to make it into a sort-of mocha. It’s also William Tubman‘s birthday, celebrated in Liberia, where he was that nation’s longest-serving President.
On this day in history, there was a particularly horrible event; as Wikipedia notes, “The crew of the British slave ship Zongmurders 133 Africans by dumping them into the sea to claim insurance.” The courts ruled that killing slaves was legal and the insurers indeed had to pay. If you have the stomach, read the entry about how women and children were shoved through the ship’s portholes to their deaths. One quails at how callous human nature was in those days, and marvels at how things have changed. In 1899, the FC Barcelona Association football club was founded, and, on this day in 1963, Lyndon Johnson convened the Warren Commission to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Notables born on this day include Louisa May Alcott (1832; see below), as well as her father Amos Bronson Alcott (1799). Also born on November 29 was the popular theologian C. S. Lewis (1898), whose book Mere Christianity I’ve recently read (thanks, Grania!), amazed that so many people found its arguments convincing. But of course they wanted to be convinced of a faith they already had, except for atheists like Francis Collins, who said they were converted by that mushy book. Finally, today’s the birthday of Kim Delaney (1961; ♥). Those who died on this day include Natalie Wood (drowned 1981; ♥). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, although an atheist cat, finds invoking religion convenient at times:
Hili: The basket fell over. Let me in otherwise I will be blamed.
A: And who knocked the basket down?
Hili: The Holy Ghost.
In Polish:
Hili: Kosz się przewrócił. Wpuść mnie do domu, bo będzie na mnie.
Ja: A kto go przewrócił?
Hili: Duch Święty.
And, in nearby Wloclawek, Leon exercises his hunting instincts:
Leon: I hunted down something furry. [Malgorzata says it’s a hat.]
And out in Winnipeg, where snow has blanketed the ground, reader Taskin sends a photo of a disappointed Gus, which has this caption:
All dressed up and nowhere to go:
Finally Google has a Doodle honoring Louisa May Alcott and her book Little Women, though it’s not animated:
Today’s Doodle portrays Beth, Jo, Amy, and Meg March, as well as Jo’s best friend Laurie, their neighbor. The March family of Little Women was based on Alcott’s own, and the coltish Jo was Louisa’s vision of herself: strewing manuscript pages in her wake, charging ahead with the courage of her convictions, and cherishing her family above all.
Once again we must turn to right-wing websites, the College Fix and Heat Street (corroborated from other sites), to find out how free speech is going down the tubes at many American Universities. In this case it’s Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts (home of Dan Dennett), which has been given a “red rating” by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for its speech code policy, a rating that means this:
A “red light” institution has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. A “clear” restriction is one that unambiguously infringes on what is or should be protected expression. In other words, the threat to free speech at a red light institution is obvious on the face of the policy and does not depend on how the policy is applied.
What happened at Tufts is dire. A student, Jake Goldberg, introduced a resolution asking for clarification of Tufts’ nebulous speech code policy. The punchline is at the bottom of his resolution (reproduced below), asking the University to more clearly spell out what kinds of violations of the speech code and email policy will be considered transgressions subject to college discipline. That, however, may be hard given the unclear nature of already-specified violations, including “taunting; slurs, epithets, or biased-fueled jokes; derogatory language or negative images,” as well as “speech that creates emotional harm; hostile or inappropriate language, inappropriate gestures, or hurtful words; and acts of intolerance and hate.” Clearly, punishing students for language that creates emotional harm, or uttering hurtful words, is going too far unless it already violates legal restrictions about harassment in the workplace. My own view is that schools should obey the University of Chicago’s principles of Free Expression while obeying legal strictures about harassment.
Here’s Goldberg’s resolution:
HeatStreet (the College Fix appears to be down at the moment) reports that this mild resolution was voted down by a the student senate—unanimously! (My emphasis in following).
Tufts student leaders did not agree. The student senate recently voted down the measure 26 to zero, with two abstentions, the College Fixreports. A number of student senators argued that the proposal “actually really harms students” because “clarity in itself is subjective.”
One student senator argued in a Facebook post, which she later deleted, that “a holistic process is needed to balance our right to free speech and everyone’s right to access their education free from discrimination.”
Student senator Nesi Altaras pushed pack on the suggestion that free-speech rights are the “best kind of rights,” because “there are other countries with free speech issues, and some countries handle them better than America.”
Another student senator, Ben Kesslen, suggested that Tufts students “instantly” began feeling “unsafe” upon learning of the resolution’s existence. “By passing this resolution, we [would be] making more students feel unsafe on a campus they already might not feel safe,” he said.
The safety card, often played by students who don’t really feel physically unsafe, always angers me. For everyone construes “safety” as “being safe from physical harm,” not “safety from having to hear things that upset you.” What kind of crybabies would instantly feel “unsafe” just by hearing of Goldberg’s resolution? And the complete unwillingness to even re-examine the speech code, or comport it with the First Amendment, bespeaks a disturbing undercurrent of authoritarianism among Tufts students.
Anyway, Goldberg was predictably vilified by his fellow students after he proposed this resolution. Here are some screenshots of Facebook posts directed at him:
To answer the title question first, my response is “I don’t know.” Most of what I’ve learned about the dispute between the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the government and private companies over the Dakota Access Pipeline has come from social media, which has been universally sympathetic to the Sioux. They, and other sympathizers and Native Americans, are protesting an incursion of an oil pipeline near their reservation (and on lands considered sacred by the tribe). The reason: not only the development on lands considered sacred (but largely in private hands), but mainly that a leak in that pipeline could threaten the Sioux’s drinking water. For several months the Sioux have been peacefully protesting the decision, with the local police and company employees fighting back. It’s been reported that police fired tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and perhaps water cannons at the protestors, as well as setting attack dogs on them, all of which seems unconscionable given that the Native Americans and their supporters were engaged in civil disobedience, and could have been arrested without the use of these nefarious weapons. The use of everything but water cannons, which has been contested, seems undeniable.
A New York Times interacting map shows the course of the pipeline, which runs from Stanley, North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois, shows its long course and giving a capsule history of the project and its critics (click on screenshot as well):
The pipeline, all but built, is meant to ship crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. Built almost entirely on private property, the pipeline crosses ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, passing less than a mile from the tribal reservation. Tribe members fear contamination of their drinking water and damage to sacred sites. They are trying to persuade the federal government to deny permits allowing the pipeline to cross the Missouri River near their reservation. Here’s a short version of the map:
Because most of the social media I follow is Leftist or progressive, it’s all been sympathetic to the Sioux and antagonistic to the government. But venues like the New York Times have also published editorials favorable to the protestors (e.g., here and here). My sympathies, then, were all with the Native Americans trying to protect their lands and well-being. It was like going back to the Sixties, when peacefully protesting blacks and civil rights workers were hit by water cannons, tear gas, police dogs, and cops on horses, images that helped bring passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I still think that civil disobedience should be met by the authorities with civil response, like carrying the protestors as gently as possible to paddy wagons, but now I’ve seen a counter-piece (granted, an op-ed) about the pipeline protests published by a reputable paper, the Orlando Sentinel. The Sentinel, while a conservative paper, has, according to Wikipedia, endorsed the Democratic Presidential candidate in three of the last four elections: Obama, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.
The opinion piece, called “What those Dakota Access pipeline protestors don’t tell you,” claims that the intransigence of the government and pipeline companies were much overrated and exaggerated by the Native Americans. Here are some excerpts, all quotes from the article (as are the bullet points). Note that the article is by Shawn McCoy, an economist who is probably a Republican, as he worked for Mitt Romney’s campaign. Here’s how the piece begins:
With the help of celebrities and professional activists, protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota have attracted international attention. The shouting and violence have drawn sympathy from people who are hearing only one side of the story — the one told by activists. Were the full story to be heard, much, if not all, of that sympathy would vanish.
The activists tell an emotionally charged tale of greed, racism and misbehavior by corporate and government officials. But the real story of the Dakota Access Pipeline was revealed in court documents in September, and it is nothing like the activists’ tale. In fact, it is the complete opposite.
The record shows that Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, spent years working diligently with federal, state and local officials to route the pipeline safely and with the fewest possible disruptions. The contrast between the protesters’ claims and the facts on record is stunning.
And its claims:
“Protesters claim that the pipeline was “fast-tracked,” denying tribal leaders the opportunity to participate in the process. In fact, project leaders participated in 559 meetings with community leaders, local officials and organizations to listen to concerns and fine-tune the route. The company asked for, and received, a tougher federal permitting process at sites along the Missouri River. This more difficult procedure included a mandated review of each water crossing’s potential effect on historical artifacts and locations.
“Protesters claim that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to consult tribal leaders as required by federal law. The record shows that the corps held 389 meetings with 55 tribes. Corps officials met numerous times with leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which initiated the lawsuit and the protests.
“Protesters claim that the Standing Rock Sioux pursued meetings with an unresponsive Army Corps of Engineers. Court records show that the roles in that story were in fact reversed. The corps alerted the tribe to the pipeline permit application in the fall of 2014 and repeatedly requested comments from and meetings with tribal leaders only to be rebuffed over and over. Tribal leaders ignored requests for comment and canceled meetings multiple times.=
“Typical of the misinformation spread during the protests is a comment made by Jesse Jackson, who recently joined the activists in North Dakota. He said the decision to reroute the pipeline so that it crossed close to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s water intake was “racism.”He did not mention, possibly because he did not know, that the company is paying to relocate the tribe’s water intake to a new spot 70 miles from the location of the contested pipeline crossing.”The pipeline route was adjusted based on concerns expressed by locals — including other tribal leaders — who met with company and Army Corps of Engineers officials. The court record reveals that the Standing Rock Sioux refused to meet with corps officials to discuss the route until after site work had begun. That work is now 77 percent completed at a cost of $3 billion.”
The article concludes, “Pipeline protesters may have a tight grip on media coverage of the pipeline, but they have a demonstrably loose grip on the facts. The truth — as documented not by the company but by the federal court system — is that pipeline approvals were not rushed, permits were not granted illegally, and tribal leaders were not excluded. These are proven facts upheld by two federal courts.”
The Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN) is a partnership of entities from the agriculture, business, and labor sectors aimed at supporting the economic development and energy security benefits associated with infrastructure projects in the Midwest. With the domestic energy sector in the midst of an unprecedented boom, the methods by which energy resources are safely transported from “field to market” have never been more important to our nation’s economic well-being, or to our pursuit of energy independence.
So MAIN’s contentions might also be questioned on the grounds of bias. But remember that the other side, too—the Native Americans—are pushing their own narrative. It’s when our sympathies are most engaged by such a narrative that we must be the most skeptical, because all of us are subject to confirmation bias.
The New Yorker has a more sympathetic article that, while not dealing with the issues above (and leaning heavily on claims of the Sioux), does note that the pipeline was supposed to cross the Missouri River near Bismarck, North Dakota, but was rerouted near tribal lands lest a leak ruin Bismarck’s drinking water. That’s reprehensible, for it simply moves the danger from white people’s land to Native American land.
I’m not claiming that all the points in these counter-pieces are correct. And I still think the protestors have been treated abysmally, as have Native Americans in general. I’m generally opposed to the idea of oil pipelines near water sources or ecologically sensitive areas, though I don’t know any other way to efficiently deliver fuel. But if you argue against the points raised above, I ask you to not impugn the sources, but come to grips with the “facts” that they adduce, even if you don’t like them (rather, especially if you don’t like them.) It’s possible that the truth may not be exactly what the emotive pictures on Facebook suggest it is.
At any rate, the issue may soon disappear, as the Army Corps of Engineers has ordered the main protest campsite (and focus of all the attention) closed by December 5. At that time protestors will be arrested and removed.
