Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
One problem with Bari Weiss and some of her acolytes is that they’re religious. I don’t hold that too strongly against them, but a journalist believing in religious dictates is a journalist who doesn’t care about evidence. It’s a journalist who falls prey to the bane of journalism—confirmation bias.
But a secular case for Christianity? Why not a secular case for Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism? It turns out that you could make a similar argument for all religions, but it’s an argument that involves gutting Christianity of everything that characterizes it: in particular, the belief that Jesus came to earth as God/The Son of God, was crucified and resurrected, and this story, taken as true, affords all who believe it the chance for eternal life. Author Tim DeRoche, instead, makes the “little people” argument for Christianity: he avers that even if the story isn’t true, the myth is good for the well being of yourself and society.
Click to read (if you subscribe; it may be paywalled otherwise):
DeRoche is described on the site this way:
Tim DeRoche is the bestselling author of Huck & Miguel, a modern-day retelling of Huck Finn set on the LA River. He is also the author of A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools. His third book publishes in 2022.
I won’t dwell on his piece very long. DeRoche was brought up religious, drifted away from Christianity, and then returned to the faith when he married a “devout Christian”. That got him thinking about the religion and whether he was, indeed a true Christian, especially because that he didn’t fully buy into the Christian myths of crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation. But he was married to a Christian and going to church. What could he do?
He joined online communities that call themselves Christians, but not because they accept the Christian mythology. Rather, they are “Christian” for three reasons:
a.) Christianity helps you find meaning in your life. I won’t deny that this is true for many; it’s just that I prefer to find meaning without relying on stories whose veracity I doubt. And of course there are the downsides of religion, too numerous to mention.
DeRoche:
This community is where you’ll find the parkour artist Rafe Kelley, an avowed rationalist, interviewing Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox icon carver, talking about “bridging the mythological and scientific worldviews.”
It’s where Paul Vander Klay, the pastor of a dwindling Dutch Reform congregation in Sacramento, amassed over 20,000 YouTube subscribers by doing hours and hours of commentary on the biblical lectures of nonbeliever Jordan Peterson—much to the chagrin of some leaders of his denomination.
It’s where the Catholic Bishop Robert Barron engages with the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on the failure of our institutions—including our Catholic ones—to help people find meaning in their lives.
Lots of folks in the Meaning Crisis community do not believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on this day, Easter Sunday. But everyone is willing to listen across the chasm of faith and try to understand the root causes of our current discontent: the political rancor, the economic insecurity, the lack of trust in institutions, the mental health crisis, the collapse of the birth rate.
But the root causes of our current discontent are secular ones. It’s not clear to me how Christianity (or faith itself) can deal with those “root causes”, much less the discontent they produce. It might make you forget them, or, as Marx posited, help the desperate and downtrodden find solace in the presence of a heavenly father and the promise of better life to come (“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”). But if, like DeRoche, you don’t believe in that stuff—in heaven or maybe not even in God—what solace do you get?
b.) Christianity helps you live a better life.
Just as any serious Christian thinker must contend with the dark history of Christians persecuting others in the name of their faith, every serious secular thinker has to contend with the fact that these stories—from the Hebrew Bible on through the New Testament—seem to contain a tremendous store of wisdom about how to live a good life and build a healthy society.
Two responses: The Bible also contains a lot of stuff that would worsen life: like the need to leave one’s family to follow Christ, or about how not to strike your slaves the wrong way, or about how women should not speak. To pick and choose the “wisdom” you use to lead a better life requires a winnowing process that, as we all know, presupposes a non-Biblical and secular point of view.
Second: secular humanism contains a lot more wisdom about how to life a good life and build a healthy society. If you want to do those things, don’t read the Bible, read the great secular ethical philosophers of the past and present, whose views are based not on superstition but cogitation and reason.
I needn’t point out the divisiveness of Christianity or of other religions, for DeRoche does that above. The question is whether the world would be better off now had religions never existed. I can’t prove that it would be—though that’s what I think—but neither can DeRoche prove that it wouldn’t be.
c.) Christianity’s rise is correlated with moral improvement in the world.
And most everyone, Christian and secular, is willing to contend with realities that our modern culture has chosen to ignore. Namely, that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the most successful meme in the history of the world. And the spread of that meme over the last 2,000 years has largely been correlated with decreasing levels of slavery, war, crime, poverty, and general suffering.
Of course, the spread of the “Islamic meme” over the last 1500 years has also been correlated with moral improvement, though most of that moral improvement, as Steve Pinker documents, has actually taken place in the last couple centuries.
But do I really have to inform DeRoche that correlation is not causation, and a lot of things have happened in the last several millennia? The rise of rationality, science, transportation, commerce, democracy, and communication have also been correlated with moral improvement, an indeed, those features might indicate a genuine causal relationship. This is the case that Steve Pinker makes in his two books The Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now. (For a short read on his case for reason and secularism as pivotal in morality’s advance, go here or here.) Pinker makes the opposite case from DeRoche, and Steve actually has data and arguments, not just correlations.
I won’t go on, but I will say that I’d love to hear Pinker debate DeRoche on the subject: “Resolved: Christianity is the main cause of moral improvement in humanity.”
Here’s an exchange I had with a reader in the comments section of my recent post, “Curmudgeon sees John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ as a harmful song.” I was surprised that there were nearly 100 comments on what I thought was a pretty uncontroversial post. But one never knows what can get readers worked up:
I stand by my reply: any paper aspiring to credibility has to give more than one political viewpoint in its op-eds (granted, the Wall Street Journal is close to just one), and a few conservative columnists in the NYT does not make for an objective, much less an un-Woke, newspaper. What makes me accuse the NYT of wokeism is the way it slants its news reporting, letting a “progressive” liberal ideology seep into the news itself. Its coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, with a clear bias towards Palestine, is one example. What happened to Bennet and McNeil are two others.
And yet another (or rather, several) is mentioned by Andrew Sullivan in the second part of Friday’s Substack column: “The NYT’s deliberate disinformation“. This refers to the tendency of the NYT to downplay race when a criminal proves to be black, but to emphasize race when the criminal is white and the victim black or a “person of color”—especially if the paper can find a “racist” or “white supremacy” angle. This is so clear in the NYT that I need hardly point it out. The reason, of course, is to indict whites for racism but avoid indicting blacks for racism—a clear double standard, but one reflected in the Woke definition of racism as “prejudice plus power.”
Sullivan’s main example is the recent subway shooting, with ten victims, by a black man who was apparently motivated by hatred of white people. (He also appears to be mentally ill.) The NYT didn’t mention that the suspect was black until it had written twenty-one news items about the killing, and even tried to twist the suspect’s words to make it seem that he was a white supremacist.
Sullivan:
A mass shooting earlier this week was the worst incident on the New York City subway system in 40 years. The man who committed the attack has an extraordinary voluminous record online of his views, which add critical context to his motivations. And if you wanted to know what those views were, the one place you would be unable to find it was the New York Times. In fact, you found out far more about this NYC terror attack in the pages of London newspapers.
Why? The answer, it seems to me, is simple. Frank James is black. And the NYT treats crime very, very differently depending on the race of the suspect. If a white man had perpetrated this act of terror, and had online rantings about how much he hated blacks, we would be in Day Four of analysis of how white supremacist hatred fuels violence. Imagine if a white man had been yelling the following racial expletives in the streets before shooting up a subway station: “Fuck you and your black ass too, you black racist motherfucker” “Slant-eyed fucking piece of shit.” “You’re a crime against fucking nature, you Spanish speaking motherfucker.” But James said exactly that — if you replace the word “black” with “white” in the first quote.
James is obviously mentally unwell. But what’s notable about him is that this derangement is fused with black nationalism and separatism, and hatred of whites. His vicious insults against black people are because they refuse to see the genocidal motives of white people. . . [JAC: Sullivan goes on to give examples of James’s racism.]
But wait! There’s more:
But here’s the kicker: the NYT kept all of this from you. They excised the black nationalist background, and made it seem as if his railing against his fellow blacks proved he was not driven by 1619 ideology, and was just an equal opportunity hater. In the body of their reporting, it took two full days — after at least 21 news items comprising more than 14,000 words — to note in writing that the dude is African-American at all. Here’s the line they finally coughed up to summarize all this context:
The videos he posted frequently devolved into outbursts of homophobia, misogyny and offensive comments about Black people, Hispanic people and white people. Mr. James, who is Black, directed much of his hatred toward Black people, whom he often blamed for the way they were treated in the United States.
Notice how they manage to invert his actual ideology. They make him seem like a white nationalist! They first highlight his homophobia and misogyny (they are minor themes in the record), and never call him a racist. (Even CNN, NBC News, and MSNBC called the rhetoric “racist.”)
Finally:
Now remember how the NYT covered the Atlanta shootings. There they invented a narrative of white supremacist anti-Asian hatred out of thin air — when there was nothing anywhere in the record to suggest it — and posted nine separate stories framed around that hate-crime narrative. This week, they bury reams of readily available evidence that the shooter was largely motivated by anti-white hatred, and had absorbed the prevailing CRT narrative. And still not a single op-ed or editorial on the terror attack, despite multiple opinion pieces in each of the NYC dailies. NYT: All the news that comports with CRT! Everything else buried deep.
Are these kinds of crime rare, as Nikole Hannah-Jones insisted this week? Of the 218 arrests for hate crimes in New York City last year, 103 were of African-Americans — 47 percent, compared with 24 percent of New York’s population. I wonder if James will be prosecuted as such. Or if “hate” only counts for some races and not others.
As far as I know, nobody (including the police) has yet turned up any evidence that the Atlanta “spa shootings,” in which Robert Long killed eight people, six of them Asian women, was a hate crime targeting Asians or motivated by Long’s hatred of Asians. The motivation seems to be Long’s cognitive dissonance between his Christianity and his “sex addiction” to frequenting massage parlors, in which customers would be sexually serviced by Asian women. He was not charged with a “hate crime” when he was given life without parole. And yet despite the existence of no anti-Asian bias, people brought it up anyway, so eager are they to find evidence of race hatred. Even Wikipedia says this after dispelling a racist motive for the killings:
Some noted the ethnicity of six of the victims, who were Asian women, amidst an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, or characterized the shooting as a hate crime. Some experts have said that race cannot be ruled out as a motive because of the fetishization of Asian women in the U.S. Long said that his actions were not racially motivated.
“Some noted” indeed! People “note” all kinds of unsubstantiated things. And of course we can’t completely “rule out” the existence of the Loch Ness monster, despite concerted and fruitless attempts to find it.
What we see here is the desperation of some to paint a racist victim narrative. Now it may be true that Long’s act sparked other anti-Asian attacks that were motivated by racism, but that’s not the issue. The issue is what motivated Long himself, and the NYT did all it could to paint this as a hate crime. Indeed, one could conclude that the NYT itself was responsible for a wave of anti-Asian hate crime by painting Long’s attack as one example. The existence of “copycat crimes” is well known.
Why did the NYT slant the news in both cases? Because it’s woke. It has bought into the victim narrative inherent in Wokeism combined with the view that minorities can’t really be racist or commit racist hate crimes because “racism equals prejudice plus power.” Under that mantra, members of racial minorities simply can’t be racist.
No rational person would buy that claim. Anybody who hates people simply because of their ethnicity is a racist. The “power” bit is an add-on to excuse minorities from being racist. The NYT’s valorization of minorities is also seen in the fact that its news section capitalizes “Black” but not “white” when referring to race, and the paperhas offered the lamest of excuses (see also here and here) for this disparity. (The Washington Post capitalizes both.)
If a paper is objective, it does not paint a racial narrative when there is no evidence for one, as in the Asian spa murders. And it does not downplay a racial narrative when there is one, as in the NYT subway killings. If you engage in this kind of doublethink, you are simply causing more racial division—as well as misleading readers by obscuring the truth.
This kind of narrative goes against any vision of treating members of different groups the same way. An objective newspaper wouldn’t do what the Times did. And it does this over and over again (as do other media). There is no credible explanation beside Wokeness.
And I hate myself for doling out $4 a month to subscribe to this paper. But the fact is that it remains the best liberal paper in the U.S., and I’m a liberal. But the Wokeness repeatedly irritates me, as you can see from reading this website.
It’s Sunday, and that means bird photos from John Avise. Today’s batch is from the sub-Antarctic, and there are some lovely birds here. John’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Falklands and South Georgia
If you ever decide to visit Antarctica, I strongly encourage you to consider booking a voyage that includes the Falklands and South Georgia in its itinerary (in addition to the Antarctic Peninsula). This is especially true if you are a bird lover, because many avian species can be found on these sub-Antarctic islands that do not occur in Antarctica per se. This week’s batch of pictures shows several such bird species that I photographed while ashore on our ship’s several landings in the Falkland Islands or South Georgia. Most of these birds were new for my “Life List”.
Evans said he searched for the best example he could find of Southern Jewish humor. He told the story of a Jewish storekeeper in a small town who was approached by the Christian elders to show solidarity for their Easter holiday.
Mr. Goldberg was chagrined but when Easter came, after sunrise services on a nearby hilltop, the mayor, all the churchgoers, and the leading families in the city gathered in the town square in front of his store. The store had a new sign but it was draped with a parachute.
After an introduction from the mayor, at the appointed hour, the owner pulled the rope and there it was revealed in all its wonder for all to see: “Christ Has Risen, but Goldberg’s prices remain the same.”
I’ll be here all year, folks.
It’s National Cheeseball Day, one of the worst foods to become a popular entertainment snack in the Fifties. Would you like to dig into this?:
Wine of the day: I drank this Arterberry Maresh Dundee Hills Pinot Noir ($30) with a pork chop dinner. I don’t remember when I bought it, but since it’s 2019, it has to be recently. The reviews were good, which presumably motivated the purchase. I think most people would agree that the first whiff smells like raspberries.
The first half bottle was good but not great, the main problem being a lack of guts. I like some stuffing in my wine, but although Pinots aren’t heavy like cabernets or syrahs, this one was extraordinarily light.
On the second day, however, it had improved substantially.. It hadn’t gained stuffing, but had “cohered”: it was somehow much fruitier and tastier. To paraphrrse Shakespeare, “The wine was gentle, and the elements so mixed in it, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a wine!'”
Stuff that happened on April 17 include:
1492 – Spain and Christopher Columbus sign the Capitulations of Santa Fe for his voyage to Asia to acquire spices.
1521 – Trial of Martin Luther over his teachings begins during the assembly of the Diet of Worms. Initially intimidated, he asks for time to reflect before answering and is given a stay of one day.
This painting of Luther was painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1529, when Luther was alive, and presumably reflects that he looks like:
The Diet of Worms:
And here’s the only extant handwriting of Luther: his autograph draft of “Vater unser im Himmelreich“, a hymn that he wrote:
He has that big bridge named after him, and was the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America. here’s the track of his 1524 voyage:
The Verazzanno-Narrows Bridge, which features in the movie “Saturday Night Fever,” was the longest suspension bridge in the world from 1964-1981.
1907 – The Ellis Island immigration center processes 11,747 people, more than on any other day.
Here are some people arriving in 1908 (among the arrivals around that time were my maternal grandfather and grandmother).
1961 – Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
Sirhan’s been in jail ever since—over 50 years. He was granted parole in August of last year, but the governor of California blocked his release. Here’s his mug shot after his arrest. He’s now 79.
2021 – The funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, takes place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
Notables born on April 17 were few, and include:
1896 – Señor Wences, Spanish-American ventriloquist (d. 1999)
Remember him? If you do (he was usually on the Ed Sullivan show, as he is here), you’re a geezer! Rewatching this, I don’t think he was a very good ventriloquist, at least in the technical sense. Watch his lips move!
She went all the way from Juliet in the famous movie directed by Zeffirelli to a 2003 television movie playing Mother Teresa. Here’s the early movie, when she was just 15; This is at the end when the star-crossed lovers die. I have to say that although this is Shakespeare, the filmed death scene is pretty cheesy.
1967 – Liz Phair, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
Those who, like Jesus, rose from the dead on this day include:
1790 – Benjamin Franklin, American inventor, publisher, and politician, 6th President of Pennsylvania (b. 1706)
Here’s a portrait of Franklin clearly painted from life: painted by by Joseph Duplessis in 1778 (Franklin, who spent much time in France), died in 1790.
This is in fact the portrait of Franklin on the American $100 bill:
1988 – Louise Nevelson, Ukrainian-American sculptor and educator (b. 1900)
1990 – Ralph Abernathy, American minister and activist (b. 1936)
1998 – Linda McCartney, American photographer, activist, and musician (b. 1941)
Márquez won the Nobel Prize largely from his great book One Hundred Years of Solitude, which mesmerized me when I read it. That was many years ago, so I should read it again. I just discovered that the first edition in Spanish (below), can cost $38,000 and upwards. It must have been issued in a small run, as it came out not that long ago (1967).
News:
*Here’s today’s depressing headline in the NYT (click screenshot to read):
And the news summary:
The port city of Mariupol was on the cusp of falling on Sunday, a significant advance for Russian forces in their bid to capture Ukraine’s southeastern coast, though one that required nearly two months of bloody warfare and came at a staggering cost to Ukrainian civilians.
Russia said on Saturday that its forces had surrounded a remaining group of Ukrainian fighters who were holed up in a Mariupol steel plant. “The only chance to save their lives is to voluntarily lay down their arms and surrender,” said Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, according to the state news agency Tass.
Zelensky spoke about the besieged city:
In a late-night address, President Volodymyr Zelensky said conditions in Mariupol remained “as severe as possible” and were “just inhuman.” His remarks came hours after Russia said it was poised to complete the capture of the besieged city, and after he acknowledged that Ukraine’s forces held only a small part of it. He continued to plead for military aid and said he was also open to “a negotiating path” forward. “Military or diplomatic — anything to save people,” he said.
*The Washington Post reports that the Russians gave Mariupol a deadline of this morning to surrender or be killed. There was of course no response. It seems clear that the city will be lost, and I still think Kyiv will be, too. (At this moment the Russians are shelling the suburbs again.) There is no good end for Zelensky except a personal one—if the Russians let him live. I am no pundit of course, just a superannuated scientist jawing about politics, but my guess is that if Zelensky doesn’t cut a deal with the Russians, the whole country will fall. Putin is in a subdued rage, and he’s not going to give up now. As for the armies, yes, the Russians got bogged down, but in the end it’s a matter of numbers.
In previous installments, we excluded Biden from the list, suggesting we’d probably have a true primary only if he didn’t run. But we increasingly need to consider the possibility that, if he does run, he won’t have the field to himself — and that he might not be the most likely nominee, all things considered.
Joe Biden
Pete Buttigieg
Kamala Harris
Elizabeth Warren
Amy Klobuchar
Roy Cooper
Sherrod Brown
Cory Booker
Gavin Newsom
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
This list doesn’t excite me, though I like Mayor Pete, but too many of the candidates are “progressives”, and I consider them unlikely to be elected. It’s too early to even prognosticate, of course, but you’re welcome to comment on the list. BIden, of course, would be over eighty when he took office—the oldest Prez we’ve ever had.
*One of the main reasons for the high price of healthcare in America is the soaring coast of prescription drugs. Why are they so much higher here than elsewhere? One reason, says the NYT editorial board in an op-ed yesterday, is the U.S. patent system, which is structured so that drug companies can keep their patents going by simply making a tweak that adds years of protection from competition. And the patent system also discourages innovation. The op-ed recommends these reforms of the Patent Office. I’ll give one quote:
Enforce existing standards. “
The problem is these rules are poorly enforced.
The pharmaceutical industry is a good example. Nearly 80 percent of the drugs associated with new patents between 2005 and 2015 were not new. But the issue is not confined to drugmakers. The Theranos debacle, to take just one other example, was touched off by officials who granted scores of patents for a device that had never been built and that turned out not to work. The company was able to secure those patents without disclosing almost any technical information about its product.
Improve the process for challenging bad patents.
Eliminate potential conflicts of interest.
Collaborate with other agencies.
Let the public participate.
*Animal break: The two giant pandas at Washington’s National Zoo were feted yesterday in honor of the 50 years since the zoo has had pandas (not the same ones!). I remember when they got the first ones (named Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, as I recall), and I fought the crowds to see them. There are three now: mom, dad, and their cub, and they got a celebratory cake.
The “cake” was made from frozen fruit juice, sweet potatoes, carrots and sugar cane and it lasted about 15 minutes once giant panda mama Mei Xiang and her cub Xiao Qi Ji got hold of it.
I’d eat that! There’s more:
The National Zoo’s most famous tenants had an enthusiastic breakfast Saturday in front of adoring crowds as the zoo celebrated 50 years of its iconic panda exchange agreement with the Chinese government.
Xiao Qi Ji’s father Tian Tian largely sat out the morning festivities, munching bamboo in a neighboring enclosure with the sounds of his chomping clearly audible during a statement by Chinese ambassador Qin Gang. The ambassador praised the bears as “a symbol of the friendship” between the nations.
Pandas are almost entirely solitary by nature, and in the wild Tian Tian would probably never even meet his child. He received a similar cake for lunch.
A photo from the AP with its caption. Look at that cake! I’m trying to find a video to embed or link to, but so far I’ve come up dry. If you want to see a 2-year-old panda in San Diego devour a similar cake, go here. (I do wish pandas were kept in the wild and not put on display in zoos.)
Giant pandas Mei Xiang, left and her cub Xiao Qi Ji eat a fruitsicle cake in celebration of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, 50 years of achievement in the care, conservation, breeding and study of giant pandas at The Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, Saturday, April 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
*Over at the New York Times, writer Esau McCaulley tells us “What Good Friday and Easter mean for black Americans.” There’s no expectation, of course, that the day would mean similar things to different groups, but McCaulley’s Great Notion is that it means that black people will be resurrected in their “black bodies”, and so Heaven will be integrated from the get-go. No raceless souls up there!
It’s common, even in Christian circles, to think of the afterlife as a disembodied bliss in a paradise filled with naked baby angels tickling the strings of harps as our souls bounce from cloud to cloud. But Christianity has never taught a disembodied future in heaven. Our beliefs are more radical.
. . .Jesus’ resurrection has implications not just for his body, but for all bodies subject to death. Christians believe that what God did for Jesus, he will do for us. The resurrection of Jesus is the forerunner of the resurrection of our bodies and restoration of the earth. There are endless debates and speculations about what type of bodies we will have at the resurrection. Will we all receive the six-packs of our dreams? Will we revert to the bodies we had in our 20s? I do not find these questions that intriguing. What is compelling to me is the clear teaching that our ethnicities are not wiped away at the resurrection. Jesus was raised with his brown, Middle Eastern, Jewish body.
When my body is raised, it will be a Black body. One that is honored alongside bodies of every hue and color. The resurrection of Black bodies will be the definitive rejection of all forms of racism.
How does he know this? Because when Jesus came back after death, his disciples recognized him, ergo he looked pretty much the same. But of course they wouldn’t have recognized him had he come back as an Inuit or a sparrow. Since God can do whatever he wants, he resurrected Jesus (who is also God) in the body that could prove the resurrection. This does not mean that everyone will be resurrected and then go to heaven with their ethnicity preserved. Or, if it is, what about their disabilities and ailments? What age will the resurrected body be? McCaulley can’t tell us that, but he’s sure he’ll come back a black man, not just a black soul, but with the proper views and pigmentation. This is a prime example of using religion to pretend to know something you don’t.
. . .
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s mind is awhirl:
A: What are you puzzling about?
Hili: About infinity of different possibilities.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym się zastanawiasz?
Hili: Nad nieskończonością różnych możliwości.
A picture of Karolina on the windowsill with a caption:
Natasza washed the windows and Karolinda concluded that she, too, had to jump on the window sills.
In Polish: Natasza umyła okna, Karolina uznała, że ona też musi po parapetach skakać.
And a photo of Szaron:
From Jean:
From the Freedom from Religion Foundation:
From Nicole:
Speaking of kites, I thought at first that this was a kite, but this tweet from reader Barry shows it’s a SNOOPY DRONE:
From Ken, who notes, “The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, seems unclear on the Passover/Hanukkah distinction”. My retweet:
Umm. . . it's not Chanukah! Reynolds probably just did a Google image search for Jewish holidays and put up the first thing she saw. At least she got the religion right! https://t.co/9KgIShCAZH
From cesar: This is what happens when you stop prosecuting shoplifters or make it a trivial offense not worth the police’s time. And it’s happening in Chicago, too. Now California isn’t the whole U.S., but this is where we’re heading:
Every item in this SF Walgreens is under lock and key.
There’s practically nothing you can buy without having to call an associate to unlock something.
He was trapped in a sewer pipe, rescued, and is now here to say that Ukrainian kittens will never give up the fight. His name is Micky. Photo: Animal Rescue Kharkiv. ❤️🇺🇦🌻 pic.twitter.com/QdLsO2ikSp
Tweets from Matthew. We’re several days past the anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, but this story remains amazing:
110yrs ago today Titanic sank. A stoker, Arthur John Priest, survived. He swam through icy water to a lifeboat. He had already survived a collision aboard its sister ship, Olympic. He went on to survive the WW1 sinkings of Alcantara, Britannic (Titanic's other sister) & Donegal pic.twitter.com/FxnW0uHApG
The article below appears in the liberal magazine American Purpose, and is written by a liberal author (Jonathan Rauch, who is also gay). It deals with a question that many of us have: how can we support transsexuals without having to buy into some of the claims we consider excessive (those involving sports, the claim that “transexual men (or women) are men (or women)”, the widespread urging to adopt phrases like “pregnant people”, and so on?
I think everyone here supports the notion that transsexual people deserve consideration, civility, and equal moral and civil rights, with a very few exceptions involving stuff like sports and rape counseling. But if you adhere to any exceptions, you’re called “transphobic”. You must believe that transsexual men are to be regarded exactly the same as biological men, and the same with transsexual women. If you don’t, you get vilified as a transphobe.
When I write about transsexuality, I get more pushback (mostly private emails) than I do when writing about any other topic. And that despite my argument for equality of transexuals in nearly every realm of activity, my vow to use proper pronouns, and so on. The issue is that I don’t go along with every single demand of transsexual activists, like bridling at using the term “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”.
Well, vilifying is free speech of course, and I’ll take the consequences of what I say. But what I’m concerned with is reconciling what I think of as a liberal viewpoint with a rejection of the more extreme claims of transsexual activism. If you want to support the transsexual community, I’m asked why would you want to use a person’s preferred pronoun—even if it conflicts with the person’s biological sex—and yet quail at the use of “pregnant people” in a Washington Post headline. Isn’t that hypocrisy?
Rauch has written a good piece on the issue, one informed by his experience in the gay community. Click to read:
Rauch sees parallels between the gay liberation movement and the trans liberation movement in two respects. First, there should be equality between cis people and trans or gay people in nearly every respect:
I should put my own cards on the table. I’m a sixty-one year-old homosexual male. I’m an outsider to the trans movement, but until fairly recently—like most gay Americans—I’ve seen the trans movement as an extension of our own. I believe trans people deserve equality in all its meaningful respects.
I’m also well aware that many of the same arguments which were used against gay people are now being deployed against trans people.
But the other parallel involves the extremists in both movements whose views and authoritarianism have turned off Americans, holding back (as Rauch claims) moral progress:
But I also see a different and more disturbing historical parallel. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian rights movement (as it was then called) came under the sway of left-leaning activists with their own agenda. They wanted as little as possible to do with bourgeois institutions like marriage and the military; they elevated cultural transgression and opposed integration into mainstream society; they imported an assortment of unrelated causes like abortion rights. To be authentically gay, in their view, was to be left-wing and preferably radical.
A loose collection of gay and lesbian conservatives, libertarians, and centrists watched with growing concern. We thought that the activists were dangerously misguided both about America and also gay people’s place in it. We resented their efforts to impose ideological conformity on a diverse population. (In 2000, a fourth of gay voters chose Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.) We saw how they played to the very stereotypes that the anti-gay Right used against us. We knew their claim to represent the lesbian and gay population was false.
And so we pushed back.
You can read about the pushback in his piece, for we’re concerned today with extreme transsexual claims and demands. And here my views are coincident with Rauch’s, though he argues them must more cohrently and persuasively than I’m capable. So let me quote him:
A few domains that are sex-specific, such as women’s sports and prisons, require differential treatment based on biological sex. Issues involving medical transitions for children are just plain difficult and require more and better research. But those issues are narrow in scope, and the political system, the medical profession, and civil society are more than capable of working through them, if allowed to do so in a minimally politicized way.
As Helen Joyce argues in her book Trans (2021), radical gender ideology (or gender identity ideology, as it’s also called) is a horse of a different color. It is not at all the same as trans rights. Nor is it any one thing: It’s a conceptual mess, propounding some ideas that make sense (gender is socially conditioned) but also wild claims, such as that (as Joyce writes) “depending on its owner’s identity, a penis may be a female sex organ.” I take its central claims to include these:
· Trans women are women and trans men are men, no difference, full stop;
· Human gender and sex are social constructions and are not a binary but on a continuum, so concepts like “male” and “female” are relative and subjective;
· Gender and sex are chosen identities, and an individual’s declared choice can never be doubted or challenged;
· Denying or disputing any of the above is violence.
Even if you don’t agree me that the first three propositions are false and the fourth is intolerant, you might concur that they are not the only or best way to think about transgender civil rights. Rather, they are extrinsic notions that escaped from academia and attached themselves, limpet-like, in the same way that left-wing politics parasitized gay rights a generation ago.
Rauch thinks that these extreme demands are counterproductive, and I can’t reject that claim out of hand. Almost anything like this is fuel for Republicans, and while we shouldn’t tailor our beliefs so they don’t offend Republicans, neither should we say what we don’t believe so that we aren’t called “transphobic” by transsexual people or “progressive” Democrats.
And here, then, is Rauch’s solution, which is likely to appeal to many people of good will who nevertheless can’t buy into the “trans men are men” (and the same for women) mantra.
Insisting that it’s always hateful to draw distinctions based on biological sex in sports, prisons, and medical training strikes most of the public as nutty, unfair, and dangerous. The backlash that is forming will harm trans people, gay and lesbian people (who are already caught in the undertow), and everyone who hopes for candor and compromise. Radicalism makes the only path forward—social negotiation tailored to diverse situations—unattainable.
The first step out of the radicalization trap is what’s already happening: decoupling trans civil rights from radical gender ideology by recognizing that they are not at all the same. You can support the former and reject the latter. The excesses of activists, along with books and articles like Joyce’s, are bringing about that realization. But a second, equally important step remains: the emergence of an integrationist, accommodationist, and reality-based transgender center, led by trans moderates who have had enough. Only they can take back their movement. I can say from experience that once they do, they will win, and so will the country.
So why do I argue for moral and civil equality for transsexual people but reject the term “pregnant people” for “pregnant women”? For two reasons, I suppose. One is that I’m a biologist, and realize that “pregnant people” obscures the fact that only biological women can get pregnant —and obscures it in the interest of an ideology. (It’s a similar distortion to denying that human sex is almost completely binary rather than a spectrum.) But “pregnant people” and similar terms also erase a group of people—in this case, biological women, for “biological woman” really is a class distinct from “transsexual women”. Indeed, it is the biological dichotomy that leads people to transition between the sexes in the first place. They are born as one members of one biological sex, but feel like members of the other one. (As for the intermediates, like those who feel that they’re members of both sexes, or of a different gender entirely, that doesn’t change this argument.)
To see an example of a transsexual who is “moderate”, read Rauch’s opening about Giselle Donnelly.
I often count on readers to send cat-related news or items, but that didn’t happen when I was gone, and I didn’t expect it to. The result, though, is that today the Caturday Felid post will be thin. If you see something cool and related to moggies, send me the link.
First, from boingboing, a cat reviews a toy. This is a short video:
If you’ve got your eye on a $25 Pop N’ Play “interactive” toy for your kitty, you might want to check out this cat’s scathing review of it first. No words were needed.
Here’s a television review of this toy. The review is also bad. Don’t waste your money! Whoever designed this overengineered it, and may know very little about cats. Didn’t they field-test it?
Lagniappe: This grumpy moggie doesn’t like cups stacked on him. Conclusion from this and the video above: cats prefer to avoid plastic and paper cups. Perhaps that’s why they’re always knocking them on the floor.
I’m not going to try to put up a “Readers Wildlife” post every morning, as it’s time-consuming and sometimes I don’t get enough contributions. Still, I don’t intend to discontinue the practice, as we have some very good photographers out there, and it’s also a chance to learn some biology. So I invite readers to send good photos for the “readers’ wildlife section.” Photos aren’t limited to wildlife, but can include travel photos, “street photos” or anything that’s attractive and interesting.
Putting together a “readers’ wildlife” post is much easier if the readers follow certain “submission Roolz”. If you want to send photos, try to adhere to the following protocol. I’m putting these up because I want to have one place where readers can go to see how to send their photos (I will probably make this into a “page” to go in the left sidebar.)
a. Where to send them: click on the “About the Author” link at the upper right of the main page. This will take you to another page, and on it, under “contact information,” you will find my email address, and that’s where you send the photos. Here’s what to click on to get started:
Then click on the next page where the arrow is:
b. Please provide good photos. If you’ve hung around this site a while, you know that we have some good photographers. I don’t expect professional quality submissions, but the photos should be fairly high quality and high resolution, show some detail of the organims depictd (except for landscapes, of course), and certainly not out of focus. Check what’s been posted in the last month to get an idea.
c. Number of photos: for a single reader’s submission I prefer between 8 and 15 photos. A dozen is a good number. But if you have fewer, that’s okay; even one photo is fine if it’s a good one, for I can save the “small” submissions and later combine photos into multiple-reader posts.
d. Ideally, I’d like for the photos to be attached to the email (max 20Gb per email, but you can send two or so). To make sure I don’t screw up the posting, try to give each photo a number and match that with its description in the text. PLEASE do not sent photos as a website link from which I have to download each picture separately, as that takes a lot of time.
e. With the photos, please send a Word document (if possible, including a brief introduction (where the photos were taken, when, etc.) and then a list of captions number with the name of the species or item. For example:
1.) This feisty raccoon (Procyon lotor) was photographed chowing down on blackberries.
2.) The same day, a female kestrel American kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) was having its own lunch: a recently-caught house sparrow. (Passer domesticus).
Then I would put photo #1 under the #1 description, and so on. The already-posted examples will show you how I do it. If you want to provide links for the animals, by all means feel free; I usually add links if the photographer doesn’t.
Note that in the description above, each species is identified by both its common name and its Latin binomial. If you don’t know either, that’s okay, just give the genus if you know it, or say that the species is unknown. But if you know the common name, please look up the Latin binomial as well (and don’t forget the italics!). Please add a link to a site describing the species (Wikipedia is fine).
Please try to avoid putting the text in the body of the email; it is much easier for me to post when I can use a Word document and coordinate with numbered photos. Also, text in emails sometimes is hard to format properly. But if you cannot put the text in Word, I will tolerate it in an email.
f. Photos should be your own, or, if not, must be properly credited. Wikipedia will give you credit information, but if you take photos from other places, you must get permission to post them and credit them properly in your submission. I am not responsible for photos that are posted without proper permission and/or credits.
g. Finally, if you want to throw in a small amount of extra text, say a description of your camera equipment or methods, that’s fine. Readers often enjoy reading about those things.
Example: The shore was full of marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus), and you had to be careful where you stepped!
Then click on the next page where the arrow is:
