Celebrities and influencers call on social media to remove anti-trans “hatred”

June 28, 2023 • 10:00 am

GLAAD was founded in 1985, with the acronym standing for Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. As Wikipedia notes, the organization has now extended its coverage to transsexual and bisexual people.  That’s presumably why the organization will remain “GLAAD” without the full name being used.

GLAAD (/ɡlæd/[1]) is an American non-governmental media monitoring organization. Originally founded as a protest against defamatory coverage of gay and lesbian demographics and their portrayals in the media and entertainment industries, it has since included bisexual and transgender people.

Yesterday, a whole pile of celebrities and “influencers”, as well as “allies,” posted a demand on the GLAAD site for social media moguls (Zuckerberg, Musk, etc.) to stop allowing disinformation and “hate speech” against trans people on their sites. I wholeheartedly agree with nearly everything on the list of demands, which you can read by clicking below). But I have two significant objections. First, read the statement (you’ll be impressed by the list of supporters):

Here’s the content that the signers want censored by companies like Facebook and Twitter:

  • Content that spreads malicious lies and disinformation about medically necessary healthcare for transgender youth. As described above, such harmful content from high-follower hate-based accounts has resulted in extraordinary real-world harms.13 Specific mitigations on such disinformation must be developed (for instance akin to election and COVID-19 mitigations and rules).
  • Accounts and postings that perpetuate anti-LGBTQ extremist hate14 and disinformation,15 in violation of platform policies, and which target trans and LGBTQ people, including baseless and malicious disinformation of LGBTQ people being threats to children (e.g. the anti-LGBTQ “groomer” conspiracy theory16). Such harmful and dangerous lies must be more effectively moderated and mitigated.
  • Dehumanizing, hateful attacks on prominent transgender public figures and influencers. Online attacks against LGBTQ organizations and individuals are on the rise.17 A recent report from GLAAD, UltraViolet, Kairos, and the Women’s March shows that 60% of LGBTQ people feel harmed not only from direct harassment and hate, but from witnessing harassment against other LGBTQ community members such as celebrities and public figures.18 Directing hate against LGBTQ public figures is a common vehicle for expressing general anti-LGBTQ bigotry. When your companies maintain policy loopholes that allow such hate, this perpetuates harm against entire communities.
  • Anti-transgender hate speech, including targeted misgendering, deadnaming, and hate-driven tropes.19 For example, Media Matters, GLAAD and others have identified multiple YouTube videos — which have accumulated millions of views — that bully, harass, and misgender trans people. In each video, prominent anti-trans pundits use YouTube to demean, target, and misgender young people, their parents, and public figures20 in videos saturated with blatant anti-trans rhetoric. These videos remain active despite these violations having been reported by Media Matters, GLAAD, and other organizations to YouTube.

My first qualification is about “hate speech.”  My view is that, as far as possible, social-media outlets should adhere to the First Amendment principles of free speech, while recognizing that, as private companies, they don’t have to.  But I’m in favor of the open discourse that the First Amendment provides.

Note, though, that the Amendment does not protect all speech: it disallows threats to people, speech intended to promote imminent lawless action , false advertising, fraud, and defamation.  FIRE gives a list of exceptions, noting that “hate speech” and online “harassment” (but not harassment in the workplace) are protected categories of speech.  I’m not sure why, if you take the First Amendment view, transgender people should be protected from legal speech while other groups like Jews, Muslims, or any minority, are not.  (As a First-Amendment hard-liner, and a secular Jew, I am perfectly happy to have people make anti-Semitic remarks on social media, including denying the Holocaust or even, like the Scottish dog, raise their paw when the owner says “gas the Jews”.) But of course I reserve the right to answer that nonsense on the same social media.

Given the tremendous variation in what people think of as “hate speech” which is also legal speech, nobody should be immune on social media from “hate speech”—except the form that violates the First Amendment. For crying out loud, P. Z. Myers called me an “asshole” on his blog the other day, and I’m fine with that, though I won’t engage in the kind of puerile name-calling that occurs during his daily Two Minutes Hate.

But what worries me about this particular issue is that some justifiable discussion of trans matters might fall under the nature of “hate speech” or “disinformation about medically necessary healthcare for transgender youth”, and it this discussion should not be censored on the grounds that it engenders hate.  I’m thinking in particular of criticism of “affirmative care”, which to me includes not just a therapeutic rush to confirm whatever gender identity a young person claims, but also the rush to give gender-dysphoric children puberty-blocking hormones.  This is because the efficacy of “gender affirming therapy” (henceforth GAT), as contrasted with conventional therapy with an objective and empathic counselor has not been demonstrated, and GAT almost invariably leads to hormones: first blockers and then either testosterone or estrogen. (And sometimes surgery.) We know that most gender dysphoric children who aren’t given GAT will resolve their issues, most often either resuming their original gender or becoming gay. In both cases. the possibly damaging effects of hormone therapy and surgery are avoided. Of course some of those children will go on to become transgender, and assuming that they are of age (say 16 or 18) when they decide to take hormones, that is their decision.

But the manifesto above assumes that GAT is always the way to go. At least that’s what I take from the desire to ban “Content that spreads malicious lies and disinformation about medically necessary healthcare for transgender youth.”  Who determines what is “medically necessary” for youth? The assumption here is that transgender youth (including those who are gender dysphoric and feel “trapped in the wrong body”) require medical healthcare. Yet there’s a lot of debate about that, and that debate should not be censored, even if you think social media needn’t adhere to the First Amendment. These issues are ongoing throughout the West, and Europe has dealt with them differently from the U.S., taking a more wait-and-see approach.  Calling for caution about these matters until the data are is is not transphobia.

And there is this claim in the text leading up to the list of demands given above. The bolding is mine.

This disinformation and hate, inadequately moderated on your platforms, plays an outsized role in the sharp increase in real-world anti-transgender targeting and violence.9 As documented by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in 2022,10 this is particularly the case when it comes to the online extremists leading proactive coordinated campaigns of hate and lies about gender affirming healthcare for trans youth.11 Despite the fact that every leading medical and psychological association affirms the safety and necessity of gender affirming healthcare for trans people, including youth, inflammatory disinformation falsely asserting that this healthcare is dangerous is allowed to fester on your platforms because it drives clicks and profit. Trans youth and their families and care providers are being endangered by your negligence, causing many families to flee their homes.

It may well be that all the American associations assert that gender-affirming healthcare is “safe and necessary”, but there are many physicians who dissent. More important, entire European countries have not embraced that affirmation, but are worried about the hormonal aspects of GAT as possibly harmful in the long term, and are using things like puberty blockers only in clinical trials. This is now the case in the UK and Sweden,  while puberty blockers are being strictly limited in places like Finland, Norway, and France.  And just yesterday Ireland’s national health service board (the HSE) ordered a review of puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.

As the Atlantic noted,

But doctors do not agree [with American claims that GAT is necessary] , particularly in Europe, where no treatments have been banned but a genuine debate is unfurling in this field. In Finland, for example, new treatment guidelines put out in 2020 advised against the use of puberty-blocking drugs and other medical interventions as a first line of care for teens with adolescent-onset dysphoria. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare followed suit in 2022, announcing that such treatments should be given only under exceptional circumstances or in a research context. Shortly after that, the National Academy of Medicine in France recommended la plus grande réserve in the use of puberty blockers. Just last month, a national investigatory board in Norway expressed concerns about the treatment. And the U.K.’s only national gender clinic for children, the Tavistock, has been ordered to close its doors after a government-commissioned report found, among other problems, that its Dutch-protocol-based approach to treatment lacked sufficient evidence.

Last November, the NYT reviewed the evidence for the harms vs. the value of puberty blockers, concluding that we just don’t have enough data to pronounce them safe and irreversible. Another NYT article by Emily Bazelon last June highlighted the “deep divisions” in America’s medical community about gender-affirming healthcare.  Here’s an excerpt from Bazelon’s piece.

Taking puberty suppressants (or hormones) for gender affirmation is “off-label,” meaning this specific use of the medications is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Off-label prescriptions are common and don’t imply anything improper, but there may be less research about the drug’s effects. If young people continue on to hormone treatments, puberty suppressants “probably” compromise fertility, especially for trans girls, Stephen M. Rosenthal, a pediatric endocrinologist at the gender center at U.C.S.F. who is on the group for the SOC8 chapter on hormone treatments, explained in a review last year for Nature Reviews Endocrinology. The medication can also prevent bone density from increasing as it typically would, and while levels returned to normal in trans boys who went on to hormone therapy, they remained low in trans girls who did the same, according to a 2020 study from the Amsterdam clinic. Little is known about the impact on brain development. “The relative paucity of outcomes data raises notable concerns,” Rosenthal wrote in his review. But he has no hesitation about prescribing puberty suppressants to kids who are deemed ready for them at his clinic. “The observed benefits greatly outweigh the potential adverse effects,” he said.

The problem is that we don’t have a good handle on the “potential adverse effects.” That’s why they’re “potential.”

(See my post on her article and the ACLU’s enraged reaction to Bazelon’s piece).

I’ll draw to a close by saying that the two NYT pieces alone would be considered “hate speech” by the GLAAD manifesto above, yet they’re objective discussions of GAT, both affirming the need for more data before we start a widespread practice of prescribing hormones to kids with gender dysphoria. This is not transphobia, but a necessary and essential debate that has to take place, along with acquiring data, before making GAT any kind of gold standard or requirement for treating gender-dysphoric children. Calling for bans on such discussion is not only misguided, but potentially harmful.

Finally, Jesse Singal has tweeted his take on the manifesto above:

In the response from GLAAD, two physicians are mentioned, and you might want to look up their records. They—especially Turban—are known for being wholehearted advocates of GAT.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the Jews

June 28, 2023 • 9:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “spread,” has a short note appended:

That explains everything!

Here’s one of the Sunnah (second only to the Qur’an in authority) in which the Prophet is reported to have cursed the Jews—and Christians, too!—on his deathbed:

On his death-bed Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) put a sheet over his-face and when he felt hot, he would remove it from his face. When in that state (of putting and removing the sheet) he said, “May Allah’s Curse be on the Jews and the Christians for they build places of worship at the graves of their prophets.” (By that) he intended to warn (the Muslim) from what they (i.e. Jews and Christians) had done.

Sahih al-Bukhari 3453, 3454
Book 60, Hadith 121

Yup, all it takes is the existence of Jews!

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 28, 2023 • 8:15 am

Thank Ceiling Cat that four or five readers came through with photos and promises of sending some imminently. We’re safe for a while!

Today’s batch of bird photos comes from Paul Edelman of Vanderbilt University. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Birding in Tennessee during the summer can be hard work.  It’s hot, humid and often rainy.  And the pickings can be slim.  Nevertheless there are a number of interesting birds that summer here and occasionally I can photograph them through the sweat dripping down my brow.  All of these photos are taken recently in local parks–Radnor Lake, Shelby Bottoms and Bell’s Bend–using my trusty Nikon D500 and Nikkor 500mm f5.6 lens.

The two most common warblers I see are the Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas) and the Prairie Warbler (Setophaga discolor).  The Prairie Warblers are usually out on branches and twigs, but the Yellowthroats tend to hide in low brush where they are more easily heard than seen.  This one was more accommodating than most.

Common Yellowthroat:

Prairie Warbler:

In the open areas I see Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens) and large numbers of  Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea) singing from the tops of bushes.  Higher in the trees the occasional Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus)  will come out of hiding.  Also up in the trees are Orchard Orioles (Icterus spurius) and Scarlet Tanagers (Piranga olivaceaI).

Yellow-breasted Chat:

Indigo Bunting:

Yellow-billed Cuckoo:

Orchard oriole:

Scarlet Tanager:

Around the lakes I see Green Heron (Butorides virescens) and deep in the woods are the Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) strutting their stuff.

Green Heron:

Wild Turkey:

One final note: in a bit of self-promotion, I have posted these and many other bird photos on my web site:  pauledelman.smugmug.com to which your readers are invited.  Comments welcome!

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 28, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings on Wednesday, a Hump Day (“ਹੰਪ ਦਿਵਸ” in Punjabi), June 28, 2023. It’s National Tapioca Day, and I have to admit that I love the stuff. It’s the little balls that distinguish it from plain pudding, and I like them even more when they’re enlarged and put in “Bubble Tea”.

Boba / Bubble tea. Homemade Various Milk Tea with Pearls. Source.

It’s also International Body Piercing Day, INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY, and Tau Day. The explanation:

In 2001, Bob Palais published π Is Wrong, where he said pi (π) should not be used for the circle constant—the geometry of a circle expressed in a single number. Instead, he called for tau (τ), which is equal to 2π, or roughly 6.28318, to be used instead. Whereas π compares a circle’s circumference to its diameter, τ is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius. This means the measurement of the circumference of any circle is about 6.28318 times its radius. 2π is used quite often in mathematics, and proponents of tau say it would be much easier to simply replace that symbol with τ. In general, mathematicians write equations about circles using its radius as well, not its diameter.

In American date format, today is 6/28, an approximation of τ.  Unfortunately, while you can celebrate March 14 as Pi Day by baking a pie, there is no tau to bake.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 28 Wikipedia page.

Wine of the Day:  Patricia Green Cellars in Oregon is famous for their Pinot Noirs, but they’re often pricey. And this is one of them, which appears to go at present for about $84, but I didn’t pay anything near that since I bought it at least six years ago. I certainly paid less than half that, but I did want to try one of their high-end pinots.

This was spectacular. And even though it’s 11 years old, the cork crumbled, and I had to decant it through a cloth and a wine funnel to get rid of sediment and bits of cork, it was not by any means over the hill. In fact, I can’t imagine this wine getting better. It’s perfectly balanced, smooth (like a velvet blanket on the tongue) and with a pronounced cherry aroma. It is SO delicious, and improved after one day in the bottle. (I had it with chicken, rice, and broccoli.)

The reviews on the Internet are scarce, but some by amateur wine lovers point out its ability to open up after decanting. (Decanting is an underrated practice!)

What can I say? This is the best American pinot, by far, that I’ve ever had. But it’s gone, and virtually impossible to buy (and at $84 it’s out of reach). Just remember “Patricia Green” when you are looking for pinot noir. Oh, and this one had a wee bit of the “barnyard nose” of great Burgundy.

Da Nooz:

*The terse legal news From Ken:

SCOTUS just issued its decision in Moore v. Harper rejecting the fringe “independent state legislature” theory.

The vote was 6-3, with the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented. You can access the opinions here.
From the WaPo:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the theory that state legislatures have almost unlimited power to decide the rules for federal elections and draw partisan congressional maps without interference from state courts.

The Constitution’s Elections Clause “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a 6 to 3 decision.

The dissenters were Clarence Thomas (praised by Glenn Loury!), Gorsuch, and Alito.

The decision was praised by Democrats and voting rights advocates, more for avoiding what they thought would be a radical change than for establishing new law. But maintaining the status quo has been seen as a victory in a court that has often gone the other way. And just recently, the court agreed that Alabama should draw a second congressional district in which Black voters could be empowered to elect a candidate of their choice.

The case at hand came from North Carolina, and under the theory advanced by its Republican legislative leaders, but rejected by the court, state lawmakers throughout the country would have had exclusive authority to structure federal elections, subject only to intervention by Congress.

The “independent state legislature theory” holds that the U.S. Constitution gives that power to lawmakers even if it results in extreme partisan voting maps for congressional seats and violates voter protections enshrined in state.

. . . If the ruling had gone the other way, the case could have had a major influence on results in the 2024 election. It has drawn attention in part because of the nation’s polarized politics, in which former president Donald Trump and his allies are still advocating to overturn the 2020 election, and the midterms showed that control of Congress can depend on the drawing of congressional district lines.

The Republicans want to gerrymander the hell out of their states so they can keep down non-white voters, and the Court rules that Republican legislatures can’t do that if it violates their states’ laws.

*One thing I think we liberals can count on with this conservative Supreme Court is that it will uphold the speech bit of the First Amendment—though not necessarily the Establishment Clause. And so they have done, by a vote of 7-2, with the regular dissenter Thomas joined by Barrett as the two who lost:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed the conviction of a man who made extensive online threats to a stranger, saying free speech protections require prosecutors to prove the stalker was aware of the threatening nature of his communications.In a 7-2 ruling authored by Justice Elena Kagan, the court emphasized that true threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment. But to guard against a chilling effect on non-threatening speech, the majority said states must prove that a criminal defendant has “disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined in part by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, agreed with the outcome but expressed concern about the risk of cracking down on speech that is unintentionally threatening. She worried that the ruling could lead, for instance, to a high school student going to prison for sending another student violent music lyrics.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented from the majority, with Barrett writing that the standard set by the court on Thursday gives “preferential treatment” to a broad range of threatening speech and makes it more difficult for law enforcement to address actual threats.

“A delusional speaker may lack awareness of the threatening nature of her speech; a devious speaker may strategically disclaim such awareness; and a lucky speaker may leave behind no evidence of mental state for the government to use against her,” Barrett wrote. “The Court’s decision thus sweeps much further than it lets on.”

I was actually in this situation, with a delusional nutjob (probably drunk as well) leaving scary messages on my office answering machine at regular intervals. When I tried to report it to the cops (I knew the guy’s name and address), they said they couldn’t intervene unless there was an explicit threat. (I never got to the point of having to show that this guy was actually aware that he was threatening me, which he never did explicitly. Regardless, I think the court made the right decision.

*Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has arrived in Belarus, so there’s no mystery about where he is, but the NYT argues that the man had reached his apogee and is on the way down.

The Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin arrived in Belarus on Tuesday, the Belarusian state news media reported, ending days of speculation over his whereabouts after he called off a weekend uprising that marked the most dramatic challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule in two decades.

Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Putin praised his security forces in a grandly choreographed speech that portrayed the rebellion as a heroic episode for the Russian state. In a series of appearances three days after the mutiny, Mr. Putin appeared to be trying to seize the initiative, indirectly warning of consequences for officials who helped Mr. Prigozhin enrich himself at the country’s expense. He also thanked the Russian military for having “essentially stopped a civil war,” state media reported.

The Russian authorities dropped an investigation into Mr. Prigozhin and members of his Wagner group over the armed rebellion. The group was preparing to hand over military equipment to the Russian Army, state news media reported, as the Kremlin mounts a concerted effort to move on from the mutiny.

Seriously? Prigozhin is going to give its military equipment to the Russian Army? Forgive me if I have trouble believing that. Without equipment, Prigozhin and the Wagner group are moribund.  And that’s what another piece in the NYT says:

Well before Yevgeny V. Prigozhin seized a major Russian military hub and ordered an armed march on Moscow, posing a startling and dramatic threat to President Vladimir V. Putin, the caterer-turned-mercenary boss was losing his own personal war.

Mr. Prigozhin’s private army had been sidelined. His lucrative government catering contracts had come under threat. The commander he most admired in the Russian military had been removed as the top general overseeing Ukraine. And he had lost his most vital recruiting source for fighters: Russia’s prisons.

Then, on June 13, his only hope for a last-minute intervention to spare him a bitter defeat in his long-running power struggle with Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu was dashed.

Mr. Putin sided publicly with Mr. Prigozhin’s adversaries, affirming that all irregular units fighting in Ukraine would have to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense. That included Mr. Prigozhin’s private military company, Wagner.

Now, the mercenary chieftain would be subordinated to Mr. Shoigu, an unparalleled political survivor in modern Russia and Mr. Prigozhin’s sworn enemy.

Perhaps he is finished. If he hands over his military equipment to Russia’s army, we’ll know that’s true.

*The Justice Department has ruled that Jeffrey Epstein was able to kill himself in jail because of negligence and misconduct by the jail staff.

A pattern of negligence and misconduct by staff at a federal jail in New York gave disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein a perfect opportunity to kill himself in his cell in August 2019, the Justice Department’s watchdog said in a report pointing to chronic problems within the beleaguered federal prison system.

Despite a suicide attempt by Epstein just weeks earlier, staff at the since-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan in the hours before his death didn’t assign him a cellmate, neglected to search his cell, failed to conduct their rounds and gave him extra bedding that he used to hang himself, the report said. Surveillance cameras around the unit where Epstein was housed were turned on but broken, so they captured no video of the area the night he died.

The jail was short-staffed, poorly managed and ill-equipped to manage suicidal inmates, the report said. One staff member assigned to supervise Epstein had worked 24 hours straight by the time the accused sex trafficker was found dead in his cell.

. . . Epstein’s suicide—a determination made by a medical examiner and confirmed by the inspector general’s probe—laid bare a federal prison system beset by understaffing, leadership issues, inmate violence and other problems. The agency is responsible for running more than 120 facilities with roughly 160,000 inmates.

By all accounts he was guilty as hell, and, at 66, would have been sentenced to up to 45 years in prison: a life sentence accompanied by disgrace. It’s no surprise that he did himself in, but the victims are denied their day in court.

*From Phys.Org, reader Gregory sends a headline that gets the “no shit!” award. I mean, could it have been otherwise given that we’re reading this?

Click to read:

Actually, the headline isn’t as bad as it sounds as there are some non-obvious results.  What the authors found was that placental mammals (the group we belong in) were in existence before the Big Asteroid Hit, contradicting others who said that placentals evolved after the hit:

Fossils of placental mammals are only found in rocks younger than 66 million years old, which is when the asteroid hit Earth, suggesting that the group evolved after the mass extinction [the “K-Pg mass extinction“]. However,  has long suggested an  for placental mammals.

In a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, a team of paleobiologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Fribourg used statistical analysis of the fossil record to determine that placental mammals originated before the mass extinction, meaning they co-existed with dinosaurs for a short time. However, it was only after the asteroid impact that modern lineages of placental mammals began to evolve, suggesting that they were better able to diversify once the dinosaurs were gone.

Primates, the group that includes the human lineage, as well as Lagomorpha (rabbits and hares) and Carnivora (dogs and cats) were shown to have evolved just before the K-Pg mass extinction, which means their ancestors were mingling with dinosaurs. After they survived the asteroid impact, placental mammals rapidly diversified, perhaps spurred on by the loss of competition from the dinosaurs.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is uber cynical:

Hili: Pandemic.
A: A new one?
Hili: No, as old as the world, a pandemic of absurdity.
In Polish:
Hili: Pandemia.
Ja: Jakaś nowa?
Hili: Nie, stara jak świat, pandemia absurdu.

********************

 

From reddit via Peter:

Laws apply to everyone 🫡
by u/Physical-Theory-5829 in cats

 

A biology meme from Matthew. Both of these species are supposed to be in the line of descent (or close to it) of whales from artiodactyl ancestors. Indohyus is an earlier form.

Did you know that most recently manufactured Jeeps have a hidden animal on them? It’s true!  From Jesus of the Day:

 

Masih hasn’t tweeted in several days, but Titania is back on Twitter:

From Malcolm. Oy, poor kitty!

SEE UPDATE: From Barry: Here’s Roseanne Barr, who’s Jewish, unleashing what seems to be of the worst anti-Semitic tirades I’ve heard. HOWEVER, as several readers point out in the comment, she’s making a sarcastic comment about the tendency of social media to engage in censorship.  See the longer video posted by Malgorzata in the comments.

From Ana, daughter of reader Jez:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I tweeted. The “selections” always make me feel dreadful:

Tweets from Matthew. First, an obstacle course for a jumping spider (salticid). The reward is a cricket, which it finally gets.

Okay creationists, explain those vestigial wings! (The species description is here.)

What do you call a group of Nautilus (Nautilii?):

The Smoky City

June 27, 2023 • 2:31 pm

When I walked to work this morning, I noticed that several other early risers on the street were wearing masks. I had no idea why. Was Covid back?

It turns out that our Canadian friends have finally gifted our city with the effluvium of their wildfires: a ton of smoke in the air. In fact, the news reports that Chicago right now has the worst air in the world.

Canadian wildfire smoke pouring into Chicago has made its air quality the worst in the world Tuesday.

The World Air Quality Index ranked Chicago as the worst for air quality, with Minneapolis, Dubai, Detroit and Delhi rounding out the top five. Chicago’s air is labeled an “unhealthy” 200 by the index.

The National Weather Service blamed the conditions and low visibility on the wildfire smoke that has wafted down from Canada and impacted large regions of the United States. The service suggested limiting prolonged outdoor activities.

The funny thing is that although it’s a bit hazy out, I don’t smell smoke at all. My sniffer may be insensitive, but it hasn’t been in the past.  The Washington Post says this:

Visibility in the city was down to two miles, with smoke reported in the observation from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The Weather Service expects visibilities of 1 to 3 miles across the region for much of the day.

“You can literally smell the smoke in the air today in Chicago from the Canadian wildfires,” wrote a Twitter user.

It’s warm and partly sunny out, and normally I’d be able to see the skyscrapers of downtown from my crib. They’re six miles away. But now this is what I see: bupkes.

I guess I should stay inside, though I walked home for 25 minutes at a rapid pace and didn’t feel wheezy or anything.

Our dorm ducks

June 27, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Yes, a mother and ten ducklings are marooned on the garden plaza connecting two dorms here, and I was called as the Duck Rescuer to deal with them. Our plan is to let them grow up on the plaza, as there’s plenty of space, shrubbery and lawns, as well as a cement area, and we will ensure that they’re fed and watered until they’re able to fly (they cannot jump off the plaza as it’s surrounded by a high wall). There are no students here, so there’s nobody to disturb them. Facilities and a kindly worker in the dorm are looking after them when I can’t get in—which is most of the time.

So, meet Maria and her ten ducklings (there were ten when I first saw them, so none have disappeared). “Maria” was the name of the grandmother of the woman at Facilities who alerted us to the brood and is helping us,

As a duck rescuer once told me, “Ducks are really good at finding safe places to nest, but not so good at finding safe places to nest near water.”  This is the case here, but we’re giving the babies plenty of water to splash around in.

Ten—count them—ten.

Ceiling Cat help me—I do love my ducks!

And they’re in very good shape. Look at those full crops!

Of course Amy is still incubating her brood on a Regenstein Library window ledge, and we’ll have to figure out how to deal with the hatchlings when they jump to the ground to be with mom.

The end of affirmative action

June 27, 2023 • 10:45 am

Here’s a prediction that’s a no-brainer: this week the Supreme Court will override the Bakke decision and rule that race-based school admissions are unconstitutional. (Several states, including California, have already done this.) This will leave schools in a quandary, since nearly all universities have declared that they’re in favor of “diversity” (they mean ethnic diversity), but they’ll no longer be able to attain it using race as one criterion for admission. (Bakke prohibited “quotas”.)

The title of the article below, from the Free Press, is a bit misleading, as we already know what will happen: schools will try to do an end run around the Court’s ruling by eliminating or downgrading indices of “merit” like grades or test scores, and concentrate intead on “holistic admissions”, a backet of intangibles that includes skin color, ethnicity, and “personality”.

And it’s the “personality” issue that ultimately brought this case to the Supreme Court. Investigation of Harvard’s admissions policy revealed that assessment of personality scores was used, probably deliberately, to lower the apparent “merit” of Asian American Applicants. As the article below notes:

A 2018 analysis of 160,000 applicant records uncovered during discovery in the suit showed that Asian Americans, while outperforming every other group on academics and extracurriculars, received low marks from Harvard admissions officers when it came to personality traits—lowering their odds of admission. Asian American students were consistently deemed less “likable, courageous, kind, and respectable.”

That this method was invidious was revealed by showing that when applicants were interviewed in person by Harvard alums or other university people, their scores were not lower than those of other groups.  They were lower only when Asian Americans were assessed on paper by admissions officers who never met them. To me, this gave little doubt that there was deliberate discrimination going on here, though two sets of Federal courts unaccountably ignored this and ruled for Harvard. An appeal took the case to the Supreme Court.

As I’ve said before, affirmative action is a tough one for me.  I am pretty much a merit-based admission person, but I don’t want to see colleges—especially “elite ones”—devoid of people of color. There’s something about the “optics” of that situation that bothers me.  We are a multicultural and multiethnic America, and that should be reflected in higher education. On the other hand, I don’t favor using “holisitic” admissions, which, in the Harvard case (and probably others) led to palpable racism against Asian Americans.  One solution I’m gravitating towards is class based admissions, which acts to give up a leg to all the socioeconomically disadvantaged regardless of ethnicity, and it’s legal.

I do not, however, favor lowering the merit bar so much that people unqualified to attend a college get in. After all, there are tons of colleges with widely varying admission standards, there are also technical colleges, and, as John McWhorter claims, perhaps not everyone needs to go to college. But in effect, there’s higher education for everyone.

At any rate, this article tells you what you really know: “holistic admissions” is in the offing. Click to read

Quotes from the piece are indented. The article begins by recounting what UC Berkeley did to boost diversity after affirmative action was banned in California, first by university rules and then by law:

Ultimately, the task force concluded that, to achieve racial diversity and not violate University of California policy, it had to deemphasize quantitative yardsticks like grades and test scores and focus on other things. “The prevailing opinion was that if we focused on these qualitative assessments of a person’s interests, lived experience, that would contribute to the diversity of students,” Carson said.

The task force’s conclusion was borne out when, in the spring of 1997—after affirmative action had been prohibited at the University of California but before Boalt could implement the task force’s recommendations—the numbers of minority students admitted to the law school plummeted.

That year, the number of black students admitted to Boalt declined from 9.2 percent the year before to 1.8 percent. Latino admits dropped from 4.2 percent to 2 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Asian American students jumped from 15.5 percent to nearly 19 percent, and that of white students, from 57.3 percent to nearly 68 percent.

Which made the task force’s proposal all the more urgent.

Within a few years, admissions officers across the country started to call the new ideas “holistic admissions” or “holistic review.” It sounded more palatable than affirmative action, but really it was a way of achieving the same outcome without saying so explicitly.

Over the past three decades, colleges across the country—public and private—have adopted this approach in an effort to boost their student bodies’ racial diversity.

“Holistic” now includes as a criterion “lived experience”:

Yvonne Berumen, the vice president of admissions and financial aid at Pitzer College, east of Los Angeles, shared Green’s perspective. “One of the most important things in the admission process is the lived experience,” she said. “Race is a part of that.” (“Lived experience,” affirmative action critics said, is like “holistic admissions” or “diversity.” It’s a way of signaling a preference for black and Latino students, while not appearing to be discriminatory.)

If schools are barred from taking all that into account, Berumen said, “it would really change the demographic landscape of higher education.”

The “Green” above is Sonia Green, a black student at Duke, who makes no apologies for using “lived experience” as a criterion:

Green said that the old, meritocratic way of determining who gets into elite universities was actually discriminatory. “Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,” Green said. “By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.”

She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.”

But the problem with this is that ethnicity is not a great indicator of “lived experience”. Does a well-off Nigerian student, or a black student from a middle-class home, have the same “lived experience” as, say, a kid from an impoverished home on Chicago’ South Side? I doubt it, yet I don’t doubt that race will be an important component (if not the only component) of “lived experience.”  Green’s view seems to be that there is a relevant commonality of the communities that black student grew up in that should give them a leg up in admissions.  Well, you can make the argument that ethnicity is a good index of lived experience, but you don’t need it if you use socioeconomic status, combined with merit, as criteria for admissions.

Further, the “holistic” route was exactly what was used to keep Jews out of places like Harvard in the earlier 20th century:

In the 1920s, he recalled, Ivy League schools introduced “holistic admissions” to keep out high-achieving Jewish newcomers—only then they simply called them quotas. The much revered Harvard Man (or, for that matter, the Yale Man or Princeton Man) was a type: WASPy, athletic, well-connected, well to do.

After World War II, the old antisemitism gave way to the new meritocracy, which emphasized quantitative metrics like the SAT and grade point average to ensure that discrimination against Jews or any other unwanted minority wouldn’t rear its ugly head.

One asks: why do we consider it odious to have used holistic criteria to keep Jews out of schools, but perfectly fine to use the same criteria to keep Asian Americans (or whites out of schools)? You can respond that “discrimination like that is okay if it allows for more blacks and Hispanics to get into college,” but the whole problem is moot if you use socioeconomic criteria, which of course are correlated with ethnicity, but not perfectly. And to me, the imperfect correlation makes the whole process fairer, for there are disadvantaged people in every group.

The article winds up by noting that Asian Americans are pretty divided on the “holistic admissions” issue, but are gradually moving against this kind of affirmative action as they’re gravitating more towards the political right. In fact, as a new YouGov poll reveals, “considering race at all in the admissions process is viewed as unacceptable by 65% of Americans, while 25% say race should be allowed to be considered among other factors. About half of Democrats (48%) and Black Americans (47%) reject allowing colleges to consider race in admissions decisions.”

The graph:

I didn’t realize that so many Americans were opposed to any consideration of an applicant’s race. Surprisingly, 9% more black and 34% more Hispanics oppose using race as even one of several criteria. Even 8% more Democrats oppose affirmative action than support it. (The gap, of course, is much larger among Republicans, who don’t differ much from Independents.

Well, the decision will come down, perhaps today but almost surely within a week. Affirmative action will be dead, singing with the Choir Invisible. And colleges are already plotting workarounds.  This will involve devaluating data like grades and test scores, and more “holistic” admissions. But I don’t think that, in the future, universities will be able to get away with what Harvard did: using bogus “holistic” criteria to achieve the ethnic mix they want.  Let’s just think about to socioeconomic status, with more consideration of measurable “merit” and less “holism”.

h/t: Rosemary, R.