Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 20, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings on Caturday (shabbos for Jewish felids), May 20, 2023, and National Quiche Lorraine Day. This tasty and deeply unhealthy dish was known outside the Lorraine region of NW France only after the 1950s:

It’s also Armed Forces Day, Flower Day, International Red Sneakers Day, National Rescue D*g Day, World Fiddle Day, World Whisky Day, Emancipation Day, Josephine Baker Day (declared by the NAACP for her civil rights activism), World Bee Day  and World Metrology Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 20 Wikipedia page.

Today’s Google Doodle is a “spot the axolotl” animation (these amphibians are critically endangered, living only in freshwater in the Valley of Mexico). Travel along the lake floor and, when you spot one, click. If you get enough photos right, you win!  Click to go to the game:

Da Nooz:

*There’s only a bit more than a week left until the U.S. hits its debt limit, and until yesterday things looked as if there would be a rapprochement between Biden and the Republicans that would stave off a default. Now things have hit a snag again.

Negotiations between top White House and Republican congressional officials over a deal to raise the debt limit hit a snag on Friday when a G.O.P. leader in the talks said it was time to “press pause,” complaining that President Biden’s team was being unreasonable and that no progress could be made.

It was a setback in the effort to avert a debt default before a June 1 deadline, though it was not clear whether the delay was a tactical retreat or a lasting blow to chances of getting an agreement.

The halt came one day after the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus declared that Republicans should cease negotiations with Mr. Biden and insist on their debt limit legislation, which demanded steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the federal borrowing cap and is a dead letter in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The abrupt announcement of a pause also came just a day after Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters that he believed negotiators could reach a deal in principle as early as the weekend. But on Friday Mr. McCarthy and his deputies sounded a starkly different tone, saying that White House officials were refusing to come their way on spending cuts.

. . .“We’ve got to get movement by the White House, and we don’t have any movement,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol not long afterward. “We’ve got to pause.”

He hinted that a major sticking point was over how to cap federal spending. House Republicans passed a debt limit bill last month that would raise the nation’s borrowing limit into next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels for a decade.

It’s getting down to the wire, and I’m hoping that, given the gravity of this situation, the desire to compromise outweighs a partisan fight for “victory.”

*Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance, and a short speech, at Thursday’s PEN America Gala, and I’m very glad that he’s able to do this. He even had some booze!

Salman Rushdie walked onstage at PEN America’s annual gala on Thursday night, his first public appearance since he was stabbed and gravely wounded in an attack last August at a literary event in Western New York.

His appearance at the gala, which had not been announced, was a surprise. But no surprise, to those who know him, was that he began his speech with a joke.

“Well, hi everybody,” Rushdie said, as the crowd at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan greeted him with whoops and a standing ovation. “It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also an option. I’m pretty glad the dice rolled this way.”

His remarks, just a few minutes long, in accepting an award for courage may have been uncharacteristically terse. But Rushdie, who lost sight in one eye because of the attack, was his voluble self during the cocktail hour, for which he had slipped in through a side door before taking his place for a red-carpet photo op.

Flashbulbs popped. And as the crowd began to notice him, friends headed over for handshakes and hugs.

“I just thought if there’s a right thing to chose as a re-entry, it’s this,” he said in an interview. “It’s being part of the world of books, the fight against censorship and for human rights.”

Here’s a photo with the caption from the NYT:

Salman Rushdie, whose appearance at PEN America’s gala was not publicized beforehand, was greeted by the crowd with a standing ovation.Credit: Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.

What’s a bit ironic about this is that six PEN America members refused to show up at this gala in 2015 when Charlie Hebdo was getting a “courge” award. Their reason? Because the French magazine was making fun of Islam, held by “marginalized people”. Well, that’s why Rushdie was given a fatwa that was supported by many in the West.

*Here are three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: The suburbs are back.” Speaking of PEN:

→ Masha Gessen resigns from PEN Board: Prestigious literary group PEN America was hosting their annual World Voices Festival of International Literature and decided that Russian dissident writers were still too Russian to attend. So they canceled the Russian writers panel. The writer Masha Gessen, one of those Russian dissidents, resigned as vice president of the PEN board over it. Anyway, it’s a typical mess. Amid bad publicity PEN apologized, calling it a big misunderstanding. I’m all for helping the Ukrainians and am pro–Team America World Police, but liberal America’s intensity on this war has gotten to the point where we’re going to have to watch out for suburban dads terrorizing local pierogi joints.

I disagree with PEN, which is woke, but I also disagree with Bowles’s ire towards “liberal America’s intensity” about the war.

→ Because the culture war was getting boring: The LGBTQ advisory group of Massachusetts is recommending that the commonwealth expand child abuse laws to include “the withholding of gender-affirming care for LGBTQ youth.” (H/t Wesley Yang for finding that.) Tasking child protective services with taking children away if they’re not immediately put on hormone therapy will surely calm the conversation around this.

Meanwhile, Texas Children’s Hospital said they would stop performing hormonal and surgical interventions on gender nonconforming children but has not stopped, according to a City Journal investigation. And The New York Times, in attempting a takedown of pediatric patients who detransitioned, accidentally confirmed that 15-year-old girls are getting mastectomies.

→ MeToo is out: There were a few years when the focus of modern society was on women and the slogan was #BelieveWomen and make them feel safe and comfortable. Now, #MeToo is #done.

Case #1: The group of sorority sisters in Wyoming who are suing their sorority for allowing a biological male who occasionally IDs as a woman to join, alleging that the new member had a boner while they changed clothes. The villain in the modern telling? Those girls! (Also I will say, the “transwoman” here doesn’t seem totally legit, as it were, in that they haven’t changed the sex on their driver’s license, haven’t had surgery, and apparently rarely even wear women’s clothes. I’m gonna need to see a little more effort before you can go full Kappa Kappa pillow party.)

Case #2: In Seattle, a city official who is a rape survivor didn’t want a convicted repeat sex offender to serve on the homelessness council but was overruled this week. The new line: believe none of these crazy ladies! They’re being a little touchy, don’t you think? A little. . . hysterical?

*In his Weekly Dish column, “The Queers versus the homosexuals,” Andrew Sullivan takes a look at what the “queer movement,” including transgender activists, has done to the gay and lesbian movements, and he doesn’t like it. First, he argues that “queers now run the gay rights movement, and adds:

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. . . .

To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement. (For a longer, piercing reflection on the takeover, read historian Jamie Kirchick’s new essay in Liberties. For a discussion of the homophobia of the new queer activism, see Ben Appel’s excellent essay in Spiked.). . .

Gay hook-up apps now include biological women seeking gay men and straight men looking for chicks with dicks. “NO MEN” some profiles now say — on what was once a gay man’s app. There are fewer and fewerexclusively gay male spaces left. Lesbian bars? Almost gone entirely. Lesbians themselves? On their way out. Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant. (Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: “I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.” We are going backward, not forward.)

Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.

. . . The queers regarded any therapy exploring other possible reasons for a child’s transgender identity — autism, family breakdown, abuse, bullying — as “conversion therapy,” and have made it illegal in some states. But the original Dutch study on which this entire medical regime stands specifically excluded any child with any other mental health challenges. It’s not as if the queers ignored the original safeguards, or didn’t know about them; they just consciously threw them away.

. . .You might imagine that, given this record, the queers would go out of their way to reassure us, to show how tight the safeguarding is, how they screen thoroughly to ensure that gay kids are not swept up in this. But they regard the very question of whether gay kids are at risk as out of bounds. Children are regarded as the ultimate authority on their own treatment: not the doctor or the parents, but the child.

Here’s a queer activist writer, Masha Gessen, saying that one thing “should be off limits” in this debate:

[In the NYT] there’s a [paraphrased] quote from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay journalist, who says, Well, maybe these people would’ve been gay—implying they’re really gay and not really transgender. That really clearly veers into the territory of saying ‘These people don’t exist. They’re not who they say they are.’ So that’s why it’s so painful.

No it doesn’t. It’s perfectly possible to believe that transgender people exist, but that children may not know who or what they are before they’ve even gone through puberty.

. . . But we have to be insistent that the gay experience is distinct and different and not intrinsically connected to either queer ideology or the trans experience. We have to demand that children’s bodies — gay, straight, trans, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming — be left alone. And we must do all we can to make sure that the trans-queer revolution does not result in what it seems to be moving toward: the eradication of homosexuality from public life.

He goes on to claim that this kind of activism is driving gay men and women away from liberal politics. I’m in no position to evaluate that, but Sullivan does make some credible claims.

Oh, and a bit of self-aggrandizement: from the “Money quotes” for the week section:

“White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways. P.S. Nature is amazing. P.P.S. Sex is not binary,” – Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American. The sparrows have just two sexes, as Community Notes corrected. Jerry Coyne has a beaut of a piece on this.

*If you’re into good but inexpensive red wines, and who’s not, then have a look at the WSJ’s article “Italy’s Best Bargain in Red Wines Now“.

What’s your favorite bargain red? That’s a question I’ve fielded many times, and after a recent tasting I have a new reply: Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

Produced in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, a good Montepulciano d’Abruzzo can cost as little as $9, though many cost more and tend to be, correspondingly, more complex. I hadn’t tasted much Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in recent years, but the 15 bottles I bought, priced between $9 and $28, were, with a few exceptions, so good that I will definitely be buying more.

. . .I’ve never been to Abruzzo, but I’ve heard it described in such captivating terms that I’m determined to rectify that fact. San Francisco-based restaurateur and wine director Shelley Lindgren is a big fan who’s visited Abruzzo seven times and described it as “hauntingly beautiful.” Although the region has long been undersung and overlooked, Lindgren thinks that thanks to the heightened quality of Abruzzo wines and the beauty of the region, it’s “having a moment and deservedly so.”

Lindgren said that Montepulciano d’Abruzzo wines are always among the bestselling by-the-glass offerings at both of her A16 restaurants, in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.

Author Lettie Teague recommends five wines between $9 and $26, and here’s one that intrigues me:

And how can the lush, aromatic 2021 DeAngelis Montepulciano d’Abruzzo cost a mere $12 a bottle? It seems the DeAngelis family, whose winery is located in Marche, just across the border from Abruzzo, maintains a long-term contract to buy organic Montepulciano grapes from a great Abruzzo source.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are philosophically sardonic:

Hili: even narcissuses wither with time.
A: But they do not stop thinking highly about themselves.
In Polish:
Hili: Nawet narcyzy z czasem więdną.
Ja: Ale nie przestają o sobie dobrze myśleć.
And a lovely picture of Baby Kulka with a caption:  “In case anybody has any doubts, this picture was, of course, taken by Paulina.” (In Polish: “Gdyby ktoś miał wątpliwości, to zdjęcie jest oczywiście zrobione przez Paulinę.”)

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

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Now That’s Wild!:

From Beth:

From Masih, more punishment for protesting:

From Barry. Cat: “I was just checking the wall.”

From Malcom. INCOMING!

From Ricky Gervais, the world’s most disgusting selfie:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, mother and child gassed upon arrival:

From Dr. Cobb, who’s on his way home from the USA. A medieval hybrid:

Digging through Francis Crick’s papers in La Jolla, Matthew found a reference to his own Ph.D. advisor:

Ah, Vonnegut:

New college admissions scam

May 19, 2023 • 12:00 pm

This article at ProPublica  (also co-published at the Chronicles of Higher Education) recounts what I consider a “scam” because it seems to be a largely unethical way to get students into college. Now that affirmative action is about to go down the drain, and standardized tests like the SAT are becoming more and more optional (the two issues are connected), canny entrepreneurs are developing new ways to give students college-worthy credentials.  But it sounds dubious to me.

Click to read:

Here’s how it works:

A.)  A company arises that promises to help students get into college by having them get some research published. (Real published research by high school students is rare).  They charge huge fees: from several thousand dollars to more than $10,000.

B.) Usually the companies pair a student with a “mentor”, a professor or graduate student who can help the student cobble together a paper.  (As you can imagine, many–but not all–of these papers are not of high quality.)  The “mentors” are paid huge fees for this: up to $200 per hour, far higher than graduate student wages)

C.) A publication is founded that will consider and accept papers written by high-school students (as you might guess, the ideas and writing itself often comes from the “mentors”).  Here’s one of them: the Scholarly Review. These journals also show “preprints”, unreviewed manuscripts that a student can put on their college-application c.v. There are many of these journals, and, unfortunately, some are connected with the very companies that charge students for getting mentors to help them write papers for college applications. Looking at the link will give you an idea about what counts as “publication.”

As you can imagine, many of these journals aren’t very selective, and publish papers with no reviews and no corrections. As the article says, “Almost any high school paper can find an outlet,”

D.) The papers are then touted on college applications. They do seem to help, but of course few evaluators are able to find time to read the papers, much less assess the research. Overall, it does burnish an application, though a lot of the burnishing is bogus. Given the stiff competition to get into good schools, though, parents are willing to pay high fees for the “service.”

E.) As it’s even harder for foreign students to get into American universities, there’s a lot of money to be made getting students overseas to “publish”. Here’s one company in India:

A short walk from India’s first Trump Tower, in an upscale neighborhood known for luxury homes and gourmet restaurants, is the Mumbai office of Athena Education, a startup that promises to help students “join the ranks of Ivy League admits.” An attendant in a white uniform waits at a standing desk to greet visitors in a lounge lined with paintings and featuring a coffee bar and a glass facade with a stunning view of the downtown skyline. “We all strive to get things done while sipping Italian coffee brewed in-house,” a recent Athena ad read.

Co-founded in 2014 by two Princeton graduates, Athena has served more than 2,000 students. At least 80 clients have been admitted to elite universities, and 87% have gotten into top-50 U.S. colleges, according to its website. One client said that Athena charges more than a million rupees, or $12,200 a year, six times India’s annual per capita income. Athena declined comment for this story.

Around 2020, Athena expanded its research program and started emphasizing publication. Athena and similar services in South Korea and China cater to international students whose odds of getting accepted at a U.S. college are even longer than those American students face. MIT, for instance, accepted 1.4% of international applicants last year, compared with 5% of domestic applicants.

A former consultant said Athena told her that its students were the “creme de la creme.” Instead, she estimated, 7 out of 10 needed “hand-holding.”

For publication, Athena students have a readily available option: Questioz, an online outlet founded by an Athena client and run by high schoolers. Former Editor-in-Chief Eesha Garimella said that a mentor at Athena “guides us on the paper editing and publication process.” Garimella said Questioz publishes 75%-80% of submissions.

Athena students also place their work in the Houston-based Journal of Student Research. Founded in 2012 to publish undergraduate and graduate work, in 2017 the journal began running high school papers, which now make up 85% of its articles, co-founders Mir Alikhan and Daharsh Rana wrote in an email.

Last June, a special edition of the journal presented research by 19 Athena students. They tested noise-reduction algorithms and used computer vision to compare the stances of professional and amateur golfers. A survey of Hong Kong residents concluded that people who grew up near the ocean are more likely to value its conservation. Athena’s then-head of research was listed as a co-author on 10 of the projects.

Publication in JSR was “pretty simple,” said former Athena student Anjani Nanda, who surveyed 103 people about their awareness of female genital mutilation and found that they were poorly informed. “I never got any edits or suggested changes from their side.”

As colleges abandon indices of merit (this is of course a way to accept students who would not get in using traditional merits), and go to “holistic” evaluation, this kind of scam will become more and more common. For you can include anything that makes you stand out as “holistic”, and money-grubbing  people will find a way to take advantage of that.

h/t: Steve

Oxford students try to deplatform Kathleen Stock and punish the university group inviting her

May 19, 2023 • 9:45 am

Kathleen Stock was a professor at Sussex until she was forced to resign after being harassed and ostracized for her views on gender. I don’t know much about her except she’s a serious and honored scholar with views that are opposed by gender activists, and that is sufficient reason to defend Stock’s right to free speech. That right includes the right not to be shouted down or deplatformed if she has a valid invitation to speak.  But that appears to be difficult if you’re involved in the gender wars.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about her:

Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.

Her views on transgender rights and gender identity have become a contentious issue. In December 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of services to higher education, a decision which was subsequently criticised by a group of over 600 academic philosophers who argued that Stock’s “harmful rhetoric” contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. In October 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex.  This came after a student campaign took place calling for her dismissal and the faculty trade union accused the university of “institutional transphobia.”  A group of over 200 academic philosophers from the UK signed an open letter in support of Stock’s academic freedom.

An OBE is not to be taken lightly! Stock is also a “gender nonconforming lesbian”.  As far as I can see, her views align with those of J. K. Rowling, questioning the rights of transgender women only insofar as they encroach on essential rights that devolve only on natal women.  And, again as far as I know, she left Sussex because, in view of the harassment, bullying and pervasive calls for her to be fired, she did not feel safe on campus, the University administration didn’t lift its finger to defend her. In view of this ostracism, Stock got panic attacks and suffered a mental breakdown. Unable to do her job, she therefore left Susses. Apparently, Stock’s academic freedom did not outweigh her “harmful rhetoric” or right to not be harassed.  Here’s a bit from a Guardian article about her:

In a lengthy interview with BBC Woman’s Hour, Kathleen Stock claimed the student protests grew out of hostility from other academics. She said a lack of support from her colleagues and the unions led her to resign.

“There’s a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say and instead of getting involved in arguing with me, using reason, evidence, the traditional university methods, they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students, or they go on to Twitter and say that I’m a bigot.

“So thus creating an atmosphere in which the students then become much more extreme and much more empowered to do what they did,” Stock said.

Stock said her “personal tipping point” came after Sussex’s branch of the University and College Union responded to a protest against Stock on campus in early October by calling for a university-wide investigation into transphobia.

“It was when I saw my own union branch’s statement, which basically backed the protesters and implicitly made it obvious that they thought I was transphobic and accused Sussex University of institutional transphobia,” Stock said.

“When union committee members basically back intimidation against you as an employee, then that’s a bit of a blow.”

Again so long as her views are debatable—which they are, as the dons below emphasize—Stock should be given the right to be heard, not be deplatformed, and above all be heard by those who oppose her.

I asked Emma Hilton about Stock, and got this response (quoted by permission):

Now Kathleen writes and teaches at University of Austin. And speaks publicly, like at Oxford. She recently debated at Cambridge, and one of the students on her side of the debate spent half of his talk blasting her. I was in Italy with her a couple of months back. She’s warm, funny as hell, great company and it’s just unreal that the image of her as a monster was allowed to take hold.  

No matter whether you agree with her views, and even in view of Britain’s lack of a First Amendment, it’s wrong to try to deplatform Stock. But this, according to the Torygraph article below, is precisely what Oxford students tried to do when Stock was invited to debate at the Oxford Union, the university’s famous debating society.  That she is just one of several people involved in a verbal to-and-fro is not sufficient for the protesting students.  One side of the debate cannot be allowed to be give ! These students are immature, acting like children stoppering their ears when they hear something they don’t like. Worse: they are trying to stopper other people’s ears!

Click to read. If the article is paywalled, I found an archived version here:

The attempt to deplatform her  has been fought by 40 academics (see Dawkins’s tweet below), and this attempt has been connected with the Oxford Student Union (different from the Oxford Union) voted to sever ties with the Oxford Union, which would deny the latter a booth at the fresher’s fair that’s essential in recruiting students. From the Torygraph:

Oxford dons have warned students that freedom of speech is at risk as a trans row engulfs the university.

More than 40 academics – including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian – have intervened in support of a planned appearance at the Oxford Union by Prof Kathleen Stock, a leading feminist, in a letter to The Telegraph.

In the biggest row to erupt at the university since Rhodes Must Fall, students have tried to cancel Prof Stock’s talk – claiming that she is transphobic for her view that it is fiction to claim “transwomen are women”.

It comes amid a spate of free speech rows at universities featuring speakers with gender-critical views – including attempts by the University of Bristol to ban the public from a feminist society talk and activists at the University of Edinburgh preventing a screening of a women’s rights documentary.

The view that “transwomen are women” is certainly a debatable one; we’ve debated it here. It can be construed in several ways: are transwomen equivalent to biological women, and should be called “women”; do they have all the rights and privileges of biological women, most notably the “right” to compete in sports against biological women, or to be incarcerated in women’s prisons? And so on.  Society desperately needs to thrash out these issues because, given the skyrocketing rate of transitioning—particularly from biological men to trans women—the issues are only going to get more pressing.

Here’s Richard’s tweet, and I’ve put the faculty letter below, adding the signers below the fold. There’s also a student letter here.

More from the Torygraph:

The letter from the Oxford dons is one of the most significant interventions by academics in recent controversies over free speech on campus.

They say they possess “a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right”, but are united in their belief that “universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”.

The letter adds: “Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting.

. . .The row at Oxford first erupted in April when the university’s LGBTQ+ society said it was “dismayed and appalled” that the debating society had “decided to platform the transphobic and trans exclusionary speaker Kathleen Stock”.

It accused the Union of “disregarding the welfare of its LGBTQ+ members under the guise of free speech”.

The Junior Common Rooms of Christ Church, St Edmund Hall, St Anne’s and St Hilda’s have backed the LGBTQ+ society and passed motions calling for her invite “to be rescinded in support of the trans community”.

The row escalated last week when Oxford’s Student Union (SU) voted to sever ties with the 200-year-old debating society, accusing it of having a “toxic culture of bullying and harassment”.

The move would prevent the Union from having a stall at the freshers’ fair, which is an important source of membership sign-ups that fund the university.

But there is some hope:

The Union has said that the talk with Prof Stock will go ahead despite planned protests. It will set up “welfare spaces” to help students cope with the gender debate.

The university said it “does not support the no-platforming of any lawful speech at university events or on university premises”.

It is understood that trustees of the SU have written to the Union and could reverse the move to ban the debating society from the fresher’s fair after the university sought to understand the decision and uphold its free speech duties.

The faculty letter is below, with the list of signers (given in the Torygraph) below the fold. Note that the letter emphasizes the diversity of political views among the dons, and is basically a simple defense of free speech and of the right to debate controversial issues,  as well as a condemnation of the Student Union for punishing the Oxford Union.  I can’t see anything objectionable about the letter, or about Stock’s appearance, particularly because it’s a debate, Jack, and one side is given the opportunity to go after Stock’s views.  It appears that many extreme gender activists have reached the point where they believe that anyone who disagrees with them should be censored.  Here’s the faculty letter:

Sir,

We are academics at the University of Oxford, possessed of a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right. We wholeheartedly condemn the decision of the Oxford University Student Union (Oxford SU) to sever its ties with the Oxford Union (the Union) after the latter’s refusal to rescind an invitation to the philosopher and gender-critical feminist Kathleen Stock.

Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting. Whether or not one agrees with Professor Stock’s views, there is no plausible and attractive ideal of academic freedom, or of free speech more generally, which would condemn their expression as outside the bounds of permissible discourse. Unfortunately, the position of her opponents seems to be that Professor Stock’s views are so illicit that they cannot be safely discussed in front of an audience of consenting and intelligent adults at the main debating society at the University of Oxford. If this were the case, it is doubtful that they could be safely expressed anywhere – a result that, as her opponents are no doubt satisfied to find, would amount to their effective prohibition.

Fortunately, it has become clear that the Union’s capitulation cannot be secured by the usual methods of moralistic browbeating and social censure. However, Oxford SU is now threatening its financial model by seeking to prevent the Union from having a stall at future freshers’ fairs. This is dangerous territory. Universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument. To resort to coercion and financial threats when unable to secure one’s preferred outcome in debate would represent a profound failure to live up to these ideals.

Universities must remain places where contentious views can be openly discussed. The salient alternative to this, one apparently favoured by many of Professor Stock’s opponents, is simply unacceptable: a state of affairs in which the institutions of a university collude to suppress the expression of controversial, but potentially true, viewpoints in an effort to prevent them from becoming more widely known.

Signed:

h/t: Emma

Click “read more” to see the academics who signed.

Continue reading “Oxford students try to deplatform Kathleen Stock and punish the university group inviting her” →

Spot the hawk!

May 19, 2023 • 9:00 am

This “spot the. . . ” post comes directly from Matthew, who probably took it himself. Can you spot the hawk? It’s not too hard. I’ve put the photo below so you can enlarge it, and the reveal will be at noon Chicago time.

Please don’t put the answer in the comments so that others can try. But you can write “Got it” or something similar if you spotted the bird.

Spot it!

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 19, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today’s batch of photos (please send yours in!) comes from reader Joe Baldassano. His notes are indented, and you should click on the photos to enlarge them.

Joe’s intro:

Recently I took a trip to the following national parks: Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, Petrified Forest National Park, AZ, Saguaro National Park, AZ and White Sands National Monument, NM.

Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

Photo of Sand in the valley which extends high up on the hills:

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve protects the tallest dunes in North America… and a whole lot more. The park and preserve contain ecosystems ranging from wetlands to forest to tundra—each supporting specially adapted plant, animal, and insect life. (Source: National Park Service)

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

Photos of the Cliff Dwellings (A & B):

The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.  The Ancestral Puebloans lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. (Source: Wikipedia)

Petrified Forest National Park, AZ

Photos: Walking Path through the forest, and then a Fallen Petrified Tree

Get up close to petrified logs by wandering along trails in the park’s southern section. The Petrified Forest was formed from these ancient trees, given the scientific name Araucarioxylon arizonicum, and have morphed from wood to almost solid quartz, taking on colors from iron, carbon and manganese. The Crystal Forest, Giant Logs and Long Logs trails loop past petrified wood deposits, huge logs and even an ancient log jam. Interested more in ancient fauna than flora? The Rainbow Forest Museum has paleontological displays of prehistoric animal skeletons. (Source: state of Arizona visitor’s Guide)

Saguaro National Park, AZ

Me standing in front of a large cacti to show size:

Rainbow over a walking trail through the park (a very lucky shot):

A cactus, showing the landscape.

Tucson, Arizona is home to the nation’s largest cacti. The giant saguaro is the universal symbol of the American west. These majestic plants, found only in a small portion of the United States, are protected by Saguaro National Park, to the east and west of the modern city of Tucson (Source: state of Arizona visitor’s Guide)

White Sands National Park, NM

Visitors sleigh riding on the sand as if it were snow (I’m told this is a regular pastime for locals):

Sun beginning to set over the sand covered landscape.

Rising from the heart of the Tularosa Basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders – the glistening white sands of New Mexico. Great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert, creating the world’s largest gypsum dune field. White Sands National Park preserves a major portion of this unique dune field, along with the plants and animals that live here. (Source: National Park Service)

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 19, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, the “TGIF” Day. It’s May 19, 2023, and National Devil’s Food Cake Day. Why is it called “Devil’s Food cake?” There’s an article to be written about it based on this Wikipedia entry:

Devil’s food cake is a moist, rich chocolate layer cake. It is considered a counterpart to the white or yellow angel food cake. Because of differing recipes and changing ingredient availability over the 20th century, it is difficult to precisely qualify what distinguishes devil’s food from the more standard chocolate cake. However, it traditionally has more chocolate than a regular chocolate cake, making it darker in colour and with a heavier texture. The cake is usually paired with a rich chocolate frosting.

Devil’s food cake was invented in the United States in the early twentieth century, with the recipe in print as early as 1905

It’s also Endangered Species Day, Jerusalem Day, NASCAR Day, National Bike to Work Day (I walk), National Pizza Party Day, World Family Doctor Day, Malcolm X Day (he was born on this day in 1925, and was assassinated 39 years later), National Asian & Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and Hepatitis Testing Day.

When I was in college, The Autobiography of Malcom X was must reading. Here’s the scene from the eponymous Spike Lee movie showing the moments leading up to his assassination. This is a fantastic scene, not only for the rolling take, but because they use the best soul song ever recorded (A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke). The movie should have won an Oscar. Denzel Washington plays Malcolm X, and for that he did win Best Actor.

 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It’s been disclosed that Dianne Feinstein, 89, was sicker than we thought—but still refuses to leave the Senate.

When she arrived at the Capitol last week after a more than two-month absence recovering from shingles, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, 89, appeared shockingly diminished.

Using a wheelchair, with the left side of her face frozen and one eye nearly shut, she seemed disoriented as an aide steered her through the marble corridors of the Senate, complaining audibly that something was stuck in her eye.

Ms. Feinstein’s frail appearance was a result of several complications after she was hospitalized for shingles in February, some of which she has not publicly disclosed. The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially debilitating complication of shingles, according to two people familiar with the senator’s diagnosis who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

Characterized by swelling of the brain, post-shingles encephalitis can leave patients with lasting memory or language problems, sleep disorders, bouts of confusion, mood disorders, headaches and difficulties walking. Older patients tend to have the most trouble recovering. And even before this latest illness, Ms. Feinstein had already suffered substantial memory issues that had raised questions about her mental capacity.

The grim tableau of her re-emergence on Capitol Hill laid bare a bleak reality known to virtually everyone who has come into contact with her in recent days: She was far from ready to return to work when she did, and she is now struggling to function in a job that demands long days, near-constant engagement on an array of crucial policy issues and high-stakes decision-making.

This is ineffably sad, even worse than RBG hanging on when she had cancer. For at least she could function, and Feinstein, bless her Democratic soul, cannot. She had a great career, and this is a terrible way to end it. There’s hard work to be done in the Senate, the close divisions mean that all hands need to be on deck, and it’s time for Feinstein to hang it up. (She already said she’d retire at the end of her term next year.) Should she do so, a replacement would be appointed by California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

*The Washington Post reports that at least seven states have enacted laws that can imprison librarians who provide certain books to kids. They don’t even have to be pornographic books!

Librarians could face years of imprisonment and tens of thousands in fines for providing sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” books to children under new state laws that permit criminal prosecution of school and library personnel.

At least seven states have passed such laws in the last two years, according to a Washington Post analysis, six of them in the past two months — although governors of Idaho and North Dakota vetoed the legislation. Another dozen states considered more than 20 similar bills this year, half of which are likely to come up again in 2024, The Post found.

Some of the laws impose severe penalties on librarians, who until now were exempted in almost every state from prosecution over obscene material — a carve-out meant to permit accurate lessons in topics such as sex education. All but one of the new laws target schools, while some also target the staff of public libraries and one affects book vendors.

One example is an Arkansas measure that says school and public librarians, as well as teachers, can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they distribute obscene or harmful texts. It takes effect Aug. 1.

But what is a harmful text? None of the states (the censorious ones are shown below) specify either that or the definition of an “obscene” text. Is The Catcher in the Rye (an oft-banned book) in either category? Who knows? I agree that there should be policy, for surely you shouldn’t give Frank Harris to a 6 year old. But prison?  That’s way too strong a punishment. And, of course, there’s the omnipresent question, “Who decides?” In this case, it’s apparently the courts, whose judgements will differ from state to state.

I’m betting this map of book banning jibes nicely with the map of states that severely restrict abortion.

*The ivory-billed woodpecker has long been thought defunct, but it refuses to lie down. I’ve reported on sightings of it in recent years, but none of these have been confirmed. Now there’s a new paper in Ecology and Evolution that again purports to give evidence for the bird. The Wall Street Journal reports on the fracas, but scanning the paper, I’m not convinced that the species is still extant. The photos and sightings might well be the smaller but similar Pileated Woodpecker. Others think so, too, and it’s important because the government is set to declare the ivory-bill extinct, which would save a lot of money. (People will keep looking on their own, of course.)

Ornithologists and researchers cite recent, grainy images of what they say suggests the ivory-billed woodpecker is indeed still alive.

Others are pushing back, saying it is time to move on.

“A suggestive video is not good enough,” says John Dillon, a past president of the Louisiana Ornithological Society and a member of the state’s rare-birds record committee.

Mr. Dillon argues that all the time and money the government is spending on this woodpecker could be put to better use restoring wetlands and protecting wildlife that is irrefutably still alive.

He isn’t trying to ruffle any feathers here, but says, “There’s not a lot of difference between finding the bird or proving that Noah’s ark was real.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has collected more than 200 comments on its proposal to end the woodpecker’s endangered-species status, and along with it, the funding to protect the bird’s habitat and population recovery.

. . .In moving to declare the bird extinct, the agency cited the decline of its forested habitat and the woodpecker’s estimated 10-year lifespan, which would make the likelihood of its survival low, given the last clear, undisputed sighting was decades ago.

The wildlife service noted that supposed sightings of the bird have been reported in recent decades. But it added there was no objective evidence, such as a clear photograph, to demonstrate it lives on.

A final decision is expected this spring.

Birders have repeatedly combed the small area where the habitat is suitable for this bird, but no clear evidence has emerged. My view is the one expressed in this song:

*The Free Press has a good essay (“Miracles and madness: Israel at 75“) on the founding of Israel, and on the profound problems it now faces, written by rabbi and author Daniel Gordis. There’s a good take on the serious issues of internal division, but it’s too long to summarize, so I’ll just post a bit of history and a video clip.

Seventy-five years ago this week, the art museum in the young city of Tel Aviv—which then had less than 200,000 inhabitants—was packed for an unusual ceremony. The Jewish community of Palestine (known as the yishuv) was about to perform a resurrection: 36 men and one woman were about to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, ending almost 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness, and reestablishing political sovereignty in the Holy Land for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE at the hands of the Romans.

There is a brief film clip of David Ben-Gurion—the man who had led the yishuv for more than a decade and would soon become the new state’s first prime minister—proclaiming with a tremulous voice, “We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

Those who have heard that clip dozens of times may well have never asked themselves what might seem an obvious question: Why is it that we only hear the “We hereby declare” portion of Ben-Gurion’s reading the Declaration aloud? Why not the rest? And nothing else from the proceedings?

The only moving picture camera around belonged to a cinematographer who owned a company that produced weekly newsreels. At the last minute, the government-in-waiting commissioned him to film the momentous occasion, but he had only four minutes of film in stock to cover a ceremony that was expected to last a half-hour—there was not enough film to record a moment that would alter the history of the Jewish people, and in some ways, much of the world.

Ben-Gurion therefore arranged to signal him at the most important points in the proceedings to indicate when the camera should roll. After the ceremony, though, the new state’s press handlers cut up the film into four parts and sent them out to various news agencies for use in newsreels. As a result, less than a minute of the original movie survived in Israel.

The clip showing the declaration of Israel’s independence:

Scarcity was hardly the nascent country’s only problem: even in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, international support for the creation of a Jewish state was tepid at best.

Just six months earlier, in November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly had voted—by the slimmest of margins—to create two states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab. A majority of two-thirds was required, and in the days leading up to the vote, it was far from certain that the Zionist delegation had the votes.

Today, it is virtually impossible to recapture the tension in the room. The vote took only three minutes, but what was at stake was nothing less than the future of the Jewish people. Resolution 181, commonly known as the “Partition Plan,” passed—but barely. The vote was 33 in favor, 13 opposed, and 10 abstentions. Matters would soon get more ominous: on April 3, Sir Alan Cunningham, then serving as the British high commissioner to Palestine, wrote in his weekly intelligence briefing, “It is becoming generally realized. . . that the United States [sic] aim is to secure reconsideration of the Palestine problem by the General Assembly de novo.” Merely four months after the vote, before Israel even existed, the United States was spearheading a move to undo the resolution. But Harry Truman, sensitive to the potential electoral costs of reversing the U.S. position, at first wavered but then stood by America’s original stance in favor of partition.

Both the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine were disappointed by the borders the UN allocated to them, but while the Jews agreed to the plan, the Arabs rejected it. They made clear that if a Jewish state was created, they would attack it. When, six months after the UN vote, in May 1948, the British were about to depart Palestine, the leadership of the yishuv had to decide whether to act on the UN’s endorsement of the idea of a national home for the Jewish people and declare statehood. There was nothing easy about the decision. If they did not declare independence, the opportunity might never return. If they did, five neighboring Arab states had vowed to annihilate them.

Israelis thought the chance that the Arab armies would destroy the new state was about 50/50, but nevertheless, the Jews persisted. The article goes on to relate what the victors accomplished.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s words are enigmatic:

Hili: We have a problem.
A: What problem?
Hili: Reality has caught up with us.
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy problem.
Ja: Jaki?
Hili: Dogoniła nas rzeczywistość.
And a photo of Szaron by Paulina:

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

From the Now That’s Wild FB page:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy on FB:

From Ant.  I’ve learned that the majority of animal photos on the Internet are manipulated, often when it comes to color but sometimes they’re completely bogus, like this one that was going the rounds:

From Masih, three sentenced to death for protesting a woman beaten to death for not wearing her hijab properly. Oy!

From Luana, a new woke term! Petro-masculinity!

A penguin parade from Malcolm. How can you not find these birds adorable?

From Barry, who says, “I would love to know what the bird thinks it’s doing here”:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a five-year-old girl, gassed upon arrival:

And this is a real movie made of a victim before she died—the first such movie we’ve had on this site:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, still in La Jolla. First, a lovely spider:

Fortunately, these kittens were rescued:

I’ve never heard of such cinemas! Eating popcorn would be off limits, I bet.