May 27, 2022

Took my daughter to kindergarten this morning/why this is personal

She'd been a bit difficult this morning. She dawdled at getting dressed. She resisted efforts to feed her breakfast, get her to brush her teeth, and do other parts of her morning routine. She really wanted to play - and when she did, it was with a toy ukelele that drives her mom and me to the point of insanity.

So I was feeling a bit frustrated and grumpy when I drove her to school. (It's raining, so she couldn't ride her scooter.) She hopped out and started to cross the street before I could help her across.

Once in the school, I got back in my car. Then I noticed it -

The name of the school, right over the front doors.

That's one of the first things they show you when reporting on a school massacre - the name of the school, whether on a sign in front or over the door.

And it occurred to me that I had no business being frustrated with my daughter.


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None of the elementary or high school shootings has ever directly affected me. None has taken place in a town where I lived (though I did often pass through Uvalde en route from Austin to the Big Bend area in grad school), and no one I know has ever been directly impacted.

But I can't say that for college shootings - and it's why these K-12 shootings feel personal regardless.

On November 1, 1991, a graduate student at the University of Iowa killed four people in the physics building (Van Allen Hall), then walked over to an administrative office in a different building and shot two more people, killing one and leaving the other paralyzed. He then shot himself.

This was during my third year of graduate school at UT-Austin. I was in my office putting together a poster presentation for an upcoming meeting. (This was in the days before Photoshop and Illustrator, so I was cutting printed photos with scissors and pasting them to the posterboard.) It was fairly late at night. NPR broke its program to announce the shooting.

I got my BS at the University of Iowa, and I had taken some physics classes. So this was very jarring news.

I spent the night unable to sleep, worried that one of the professors or TA's I knew in the Physics and Astronomy department was one of the victims.

The following morning, I grabbed the newspaper - this was before online news was really a thing - and read the article.

None of the victims in Physics and Astronomy was someone I knew. So I kept reading, and my whole being stopped still when I came across the name of the secretary who'd been wounded - Miya Sioson.

I knew her.

We'd taken some classes together. I went out with her roommate once in sophomore year, though I actually had something of a crush on Miya. We were friends.

By all accounts, Miya had a good, meaningful life in spite of her full paralysis below the neck. She passed away a few years ago, but not (so far as I can tell) from anything related to the shooting.

This really affected me. It still does.

Many people will tell you that there are moments when everything seems to stop, and they remember every detail. When it comes to this particular event, there are two such moments - the one where I first heard the announcement on the radio, and the other when I saw Miya's name in the newspaper.

Not looking for pity or sympathy or anything. Nothing really happened to me, at least physically.

Anyway - that's all.

May 26, 2022

regret about previous post/question about mental health care and political views

First - earlier today, I posted a comment suggesting that we withhold judgment on the officers in Uvalde who appear to have done little to nothing useful for 40 minutes while the shooter was in the school.

I stand by the sentiment I shared - that we should be careful in calling people cowards without knowing the full facts of the situation. I also stand by my argument that many of you missed this point. I never, at any time, said the officers were courageous. In fact, I never said they weren't cowards. I merely said that I didn't know, and that I could envision situations in which officers might hold off before charging after a shooter in a school building.

A lot of you took exception to that. I still think some of those who did failed to really understand my point, which was not about defending the police or declaring them faultless, but about learning what actually happened before armchair-quarterbacking what other people did. I've seen the same videos and read the same news articles, and I didn't think they carried enough information to really form a solid opinion. Maybe I'm overly careful about such things, but I've had friends who became police officers, which gives me some sense that not all of them are overtly racist nutjobs who just want to shoot things up. (Though too many clearly are!)

Anyway - I do regret that some of you were angered by what I wrote. And I have to say, having done some more research, my views are starting to move closer to the "these cops are worthless" end of the dial and a bit further from "these cops were being careful and deliberate."

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Second - I have a serious question about the mental health angle of this discussion.

I do not, in any way, buy into the argument that the central issue of these mass shootings is mental health. I accept that mental health is a serious part of the problem, but so is the easy access to the kinds of semiautomatic firearms that allow people, mentally ill or not, to kill large numbers of other people in a short amount of time. No one needs an AR-15 to protect themselves or their families, the whole "tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants" schtick only works if the tyrants aren't better armed than you (and if the "tyrants" really are tyrants in the first place), and one can hunt or target-shoot with a rifle less capable of causing mass casualties.

That being said -

I'm not a fan of relying on anecdote, but when it comes to the relationship between household politics and mental health treatment, anecdote is all I have.

My 12-year-old nephew has very serious behavioral problems. He's been expelled from multiple schools for violent behavior, including his kindergarten when he stabbed a teacher with a pencil. He's also injured his mom (my sister), with whom I have very little contact for a list of reasons I'd rather not discuss here. And on top of that, he's had multiple suicide attempts.

No one seems to know what, exactly, is going on with my nephew. His diagnoses change more frequently than the seasons. It's ADHD. But then, it's not - it's dissociative personality disorder. Then, it becomes Asperger's (which I don't for a minute believe). And then it's back to ADHD, and something else after that. Is it an organic mental health problem? A personality disorder? A developmental problem? Who knows?

Why do we not know? Largely, it's because of his parents. My sister has never really held a job that carries health care benefits, so he's never had any sort of consistent psychiatric or psychological treatment. I suspect a lot of it comes from my sister's "research" on the internet.

his father - a gun-nut who wears a hat from the "National Gun Rights Association," which I think exists because some gun enthusiasts decided the NRA was too pinko - refuses to get him any sort of treatment on his own. Not wanting him "labelled" and all of that. Nothing that a little discipline won't fix. And he refuses to get rid of his guns, even though the number 1 predictor of whether someone contemplating suicide will succeed in that decision is the presence of a gun in the home.

My sister and her ex are both WAY over on the political right. Trump was tolerable, even if he wasn't quite right-wing enough. That their side of things opposes every sort of government action that would make mental health treatment easier to find and more affordable never seems to cross their minds.

My nephew did spend a brief time in an in-patient facility, so he's been seen by actual psychiatrists at least once. But he wasn't there long, and I doubt any follow-up instructions were respected. (From what I heard, he was in the facility at the order of a court following some sort of violent outburst.)

I lot of my friends are parents, and they're all open to getting help for their kids if they need it. Very, very few of my friends are Republicans, and those that are tend to be either (a) old-school New York-type Republicans who are actually conservative and not right-wing, or (b) high school acquaintances who found me on Facebook. So my sample is very low - but based on that small sample, including my sister and a couple of people who somehow completed a high school education without actually learning anything, right-wing people are less likely to get help for their children.

Is what I'm observing based on a skewed distribution of examples, or is there really something to this? Because this could be important - the people calling for better mental health screening might be the least likely to see the need for it under their own roofs.

Honest question here. I could be dead wrong about this. I don't work on humans - I work on crocodiles. They have only two emotions - indifferent and enraged - and their behavior is pretty much the same regardless. So my ability to actually make pronouncements on human mental health is very minimal.

April 20, 2022

to my fellow academics in Florida, which has just crippled the tenure system

De Santis just signed legislation in Florida that makes it easier to fire tenured faculty at the state’s public colleges and universities. I’ve pasted a link to a news article about it below.

To my friends at public universities in Florida - please accept my sympathy. I'm sure I speak for a great many academics here. To have such an ignorant loudmouth for a governor is bad enough, but this legislation (which may not survive a court challenge, as I explain below) is a disgusting insult. Your state government may not respect you, but your colleagues do.

I offer a sincere willingness to help in whatever way I can. I know getting another academic position can be difficult, especially for those of us in more senior positions. My wife is at a university in a neighboring state. That means I commute 3 to 4.5 hours, depending on traffic and construction, twice each week. If I wasn’t a fifty-something full prof, I might stand a chance at getting a position in her area. Alas, I’m a fifty-something full prof and, thus, not competitive in open searches against younger PhDs who can promise a far longer period of productivity. But I’m willing to bet there will be universities out there delighted to cannibalize the Florida public university system for talent, including mine.

One possible bright side - as implied above, there's a good chance some of this bill will be tossed out by the courts. The law can be applied to new hires, but it probably violates existing faculty contracts. Not an expert on contract law here, and I could be completely misunderstanding the situation, but if I was in Florida, I'd be reaching out to an attorney.

But far more importantly, it reveals yet again how tenure is misunderstood. It can be described as a "lifetime appointment," but only in the way judge appointments are "lifetime appointments." Faculty with tenure are not in bulletproof positions. We can be fired for cause, just like everyone else.

It bothers me that Republicans use this as a wedge issue to divide labor organizations from the Democrats with whom they’d normally align. Why should professors get lifetime job security when we can lose our jobs any time the economy goes south or some numbskull manager makes a bad business decision? That this derives from a greatly oversimplified understanding of the tenure system hasn’t been easy to correct.

(Which brings up a related question – where the hell was the business community in Florida when this bill came up? Bills like this come up in my own state all the time. They rarely get out of committee, and the one time it did, businesses across the state mobilized to defeat it. They know the value of higher education when it comes to innovation, and they want educated employees. They want the public higher education system to be strong, and they know that killing tenure would weaken it. Surely businesses in Florida understand this as well as those in the Upper Midwest.)

We often hear that tenure allows freedom to follow what may be unpopular research or pedagogy. It does, but it goes beyond that. What it allows is *consistent* freedom to engage in academic endeavors. If we had to redirect our efforts every time the university's leadership changes, we wouldn't accomplish anything. Can you imagine what would happen if university presidents threatened the jobs of anyone not expressing their personal views on climate science? Human sexuality? Public health? History? Or if they took a dim view of research that didn’t have obvious immediate benefits to anyone in particular? That’s what the tenure system prevents.

Appointed judges are a great analogy. They're given lifetime appointments so they don't all get fired and replaced with ideologues every time the White House or governor's residence changes hands. That would create legal chaos, with previous decisions overturned every few years. We see value in these lifetime appointments because it advances the interest of consistent justice.

And for the upteenth time - no, we professors aren't trying to indoctrinate young adults into leftist ways of thinking. (Most of us aren’t, at any rate.)

Some of this "leftist" thinking isn't a matter of opinion. It's physical reality. When I teach about evolution or climate change, I'm not expressing a biased opinion - I'm providing factual information. Those who teach about sexuality may be telling us things that run counter to certain religious beliefs, but they're not telling us these things to advance some sort of "woke" culture (whatever the f-word that means); they're telling us these things because a substantial amount of research is revealing them.

Seriously - if a scientific discovery contradicts your opinion, the problem is with the opinion. Facts can't change to accommodate them. Scientific facts are scientific facts, and we're not going to pretend there's a legitimate fact-based counterargument where it doesn't exist just to create a false sense of "balance."

I've heard the same anecdotes as the rest of you - some conservative student somewhere feels oppressed by the progressive environment at their institution. Opportunities were denied, term papers were graded poorly, opinions were suppressed- stuff like that. Ever wonder why these claims appear in the news media? Partly, it's because cases in which right-leaning students really were mistreated are rare. They're newsworthy when they happen because they're not the norm.
In the vast majority of such purported cases, it's not that conservative students are being bullied or censored. It's that they're encountering diverse communities and people with different political views for the first time in their lives. If their opinions are to the very far right (Q-type stuff), they'll be a minority not because universities shun such students, but because those holding such extreme views are the minority.

Anyway – I just want my colleagues in Florida to know you haven’t been forgotten.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2022/04/19/desantis-signs-bill-limiting-tenure-at-florida-public-universities/

April 2, 2022

in defense (sort of) of Will Smith

I do not, in any way, condone Will Smith's decision to strike Chris Rock. At all.

Had the police gotten involved, I would not have been upset. He assaulted someone. That's a violation of the law.

It's also not my place to forgive. That's up to Chris Rock.

But in this case, I'm not going to condemn Smith for this one action. He remains, in my eyes, a great actor, and although I remain somewhat disappointed in him, I don't plan to write him off.

1. That the joke Chris Rock told about Jada Pinkett Smith didn't justify an assault goes without saying. Nevertheless - had I been Will Smith, I'd have been pissed off, and the thought of popping Chris Rock in the mouth would have crossed my mind.

My wife was the target of a focused bullying campaign at her former workplace. I've been in the room while her integrity was impugned behind her back. Although no one was hit, I certainly defended her, usually with language that would have earned the exchange an R rating. So I say all of this having been in situations similar in some respects - not all respects by any means, but some - to what Will Smith encountered.

Does this betray a level of latent toxic masculinity on my part? Maybe. I don't know. I'm not a psychologist. The animals I work on have exactly two emotions - indifferent and enraged - and they behave the same regardless. But I was also bullied very badly until midway through high school, and I react strongly when I see people being needlessly put down, as Jada Pinkett Smith was.

I've also embraced the progressive ideal of condemning jokes directed against people who are dealing with medical conditions, as Jada Pinkett Smith is. Had I been her husband, I'd at least have said something.

I've generally been a fan of Chris Rock, but frankly this particular joke was beneath his talent, and he should have apologized the moment he saw that the joke's target was offended.

It's not a matter of a man assuming women are incapable of defending themselves in situations like this. It's a matter of speaking out against an attack directed toward a loved one.

2. There are "apologies," and there are apologies. What Will Smith has said ever since the incident isn't one of those "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" non-apologies. He acknowledged what he did was wrong and that it caused harm beyond the person he hit. He hasn't shifted any of the blame to anyone else, so far as I can tell. He's taken ownership of the incident and indicated a willingness to ensure it doesn't happen again.

I've seen people try to minimize his apology. "He's only sorry he got caught" and such. Again, not a psychologist here. I cannot assess another person's mindset. But the apologies he's provided in public appear genuine, and at the very least, they're an example others who cross the line should follow when expressing contrition.

3. In general, I'm not a fan of condemning someone for one lapse of judgment. Obviously, there are exceptions. Some acts are so egregious that they cannot be so easily set aside. That, or they reveal a level of internal depravity suggesting that the lapse of judgment may not have been a one-off event.

I'm reminded of the joke about a farmer who complains about not being remembered for the barns he helped built, the leadership he showed when his community was hit with a natural disaster, the willingness he showed to help teach younger farmers, the wonderful and accomplished children he raised, or the prosperity he worked hard to make for himself. "Am I called Fred the Barn-Builder? Fred the Civic Leader? Fred the Dad? Fred the Teacher? Fred the Hard-Working Farmer? No. You fuck one goat, and...."

Like I said, what Will Smith did was wrong. But I'm not willing to set his whole body of work aside because of it.


I'd also like to make a point for those who think this really isn't a big issue worth discussion on DU. First - I, and many others, are capable of following more than one news item at a time. I've kept track of global events beyond this. Second - I'm probably not the only one here who suffered from severe and constant bullying as a kid, nor am I probably the only such bullying victim here who felt a certain level of triggering from the incident at the Oscars. For some of us, this isn't just celebrity gossip.


anyway, my opinions. They're worth exactly what you paid for them, I suppose.

March 28, 2022

Something I've noticed on social media -

As far as I’m concerned, Will Smith and Chris Rock should both be ashamed of themselves.

I said this on Facebook and immediately noticed something - there was a disparity in the responses. Most of my friends agreed with me, but a handful - all of them high school acquaintances to whom I’m not very close - disagreed. They put the blame all on Will Smith. One of them even stated that he found Rock’s joke to be funny. When I pointed out that ge was basically mocking someone for a medical condition, he replied with ‘it’s not life-threatening, and she and her husband should lighten up.’

Those who said things like this are all Trump voters.

I hear this all the time from the right - people are too sensitive and should learn to take a joke.

It’s what my teachers told me as I was bullied severely up through mid-high school. Suck it up and all that.

A large part of the voting public now openly condones bullying as a normal approach toward life.

March 13, 2022

Why I'm not panicking about Dan Patrick's push to end tenure in Texas.

Bills to end tenure at public universities show up in state legislatures with great regularity. They appear in my own state's legislature annually. Only once did it get out of its first committee hurdle, and it didn't go very far beyond that, in spite of having a governor and legislature far enough to the right that they clearly want us to be an exclave of Texas or Florida. And the current lieutenant governor of Texas appears determined to end public higher education tenure in his state.

Such bills allow right-wing legislators to appeal to a lot of people, many of whom aren't necessarily aligned with such legislators in other ways. Why should professors get lifetime guarantees of employment when ordinary blokes don't? Especially when these arrogant, elitist professors are wasting their time and taxpayer dollars on worthless "research" and sticking their noses in the lives of everyone with their liberal indoctrination?

It's actually comparatively easy to debunk such statements. Applied research gets nowhere without basic research that, at first, may seem to have no practical benefit. Our lifetime appointments are similar to those of judges, and the reason is the same - we don't want to see massive faculty turnover whenever the governor's office switches parties. And yes, tenured professors can be fired.

But these points, however valid, don't always seem to take hold.

And yet very few anti-tenure bills even make it to the floor for a vote, much less pass.

There are a couple of reasons for this. So, yes - as a tenured faculty member at a public university, and as an alum of the Texas public university system (MS and PhD from the University of Texas), I am concerned about these bills, but not really panicking.

1. Businesses, by and large, like the tenure system. They want universities to promote innovation. Anything that might drive the best and brightest from the higher education system - which tenure will do (see below) - will be opposed by businesses that rely on what higher education provides.

The reason anti-tenure bills never go far in my own blood-red state is because, as soon as they start picking up any sort of traction, business lobbying groups go apeshit. This is especially true of the tech sector, which is even more important in Texas than in my current digs. It's also true of the oil and gas industry, which relies on research at public universities to improve exploration and extraction technology. (I know this for a fact, because my department at UT-Austin was one of the premier departments for such research. Many of my office-mates were headed for jobs in the oil industry. It's also why tenure is most likely safe in Oklahoma and Louisiana.)

A lot of these businesses are also aware that those they recruit from out of state will want to see a robust public university system for their own kids when they're old enough.

I'm serious about this. Businesses will mobilize to prevent Patrick's social science windmill-tilting from hurting their bottom line.

2. The closest we've come to actually eliminating tenure was in Wisconsin, which didn't end tenure per se, but which weakened it substantially. The result was the loss of several prominent faculty members and massive expenditures to retain faculty who were about to bolt. It's still having an impact on hiring at Wisconsin's public universities. It's a good bet the Texas legislature, no matter how far up the ass of the Orange-Skinned Eater of Other Peoples' Boogers* who occupied the White House until mid-January 2021, won't want to repeat that mistake.

Yes, we've got to be vigilant. This could, indeed, go badly if we aren't. But it's not yet time to panic.





*I've got a very creative 6-year-old daughter. She comes up with the best insults.

March 10, 2022

editors, reporters, tyrannosaurs, and dirty professional secrets.

Last week, we were all treated to the news that Tyrannosaurus rex, everyone’s favorite dinosaur, was actually three distinct species. This was according to a paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, though associated news reports suggested the idea was “controversial.”

I think this incident reveals a lot about weaknesses in the peer-review system and the way the media report scientific developments. I’d like to discuss these with y’all’s indulgence.

First, my qualifications – I’m a professional vertebrate paleontologist. My career has largely been devoted to crocodyliforms (crocodiles, alligators, gharials, and their extinct relatives), but after finishing grad school, I spent time as a post-doc at a large natural history museum working on a very infamous tyrannosaur skeleton. I won’t divulge much more except to say this particular theropod’s common name rhymes with “due” and that they shouldn’t have hired me. They should have hired a priest. I still say it screams when you throw holy water on it.

Anyway –

The paper arguing that T. rex is three separate species is terrible. Awful. Laughable. One of the worst papers I’ve ever seen in the peer-reviewed literature. It makes mistakes the average undergraduate with one or two biology or historical geology courses under their belt would know to avoid. There are portions that actually qualify as “unintentionally funny.” It demonstrates nothing, when one considers the actual evidence we have.

A lot of us are still trying to figure out how, exactly, it got through peer-review. I know one person who submitted a review, but the recommendations in that review were ignored. We don’t know if the celebrity status of the lead author – not an academic, but an accomplished and well-known (if iconoclastic) paleoartist – influenced the editors, or if someone on the editorial team knew the authors. It wasn’t published in an open-access journal, so the whole “pay to play” scenario is very unlikely to be the case. It’s entirely possible the authors submitted this to multiple journals until they found one willing to run it. But whatever the reason, this was a lapse of editorial oversight. The paper should never have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

This highlights a problem we academics understand, but the general public generally does not – that, to corrupt a quote from Winston Churchill, peer review is the worst possible form of editorial oversight, except for all of the alternatives that have been tried from time to time. Peer review is run by fallible human beings. It’s no better than the fallible human beings involved. It's something of a dirty secret that no one's tried to hide, but which hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention.

I’ve heard people equate peer review with censorship, but in fact, it’s a whole lot easier to get bad research into the peer-reviewed literature than to prevent something cutting edge and controversial, but prescient, from being published. In fact, it’s gotten much, much easier because of the proliferation of journals, and especially of open-access journals in which authors pay a publication fee, in recent years. Some open-access journals are legit, but a lot of them aren’t – they’ll publish anything just so long as the author pays up.

But even without this, peer review has its limitations. I encounter this all the time in my own little field because of its cross-disciplinary nature. Papers using molecular data to work out the relationships and divergence timing of crocodylians are regularly published. They often make basic mistakes in using the fossil record to calibrate rates of evolution, or they make comparisons between their results and outdated paleontological work. There’s nothing nefarious about this; the authors, in these cases, were trained as molecular biologists and don’t really have the background in paleontology needed to fully grasp the literature. These are honest mistakes, not rhetorical gymnastics. (We paleontologists, by contrast, usually have some training in molecular biology and can swim through their literature reasonably well.)

The problem is with the editors. Papers on molecular systematics are usually reviewed by other molecular systematists. It doesn’t dawn on the editors that it might be good to have the manuscript reviewed by a paleontologist. Papers that could have been excellent are diminished because of some honest mistakes a reviewer should have caught.

There are other reasons peer review fails. Sometimes, it’s because some of us are assholes. They may feel threatened by something written by a younger scholar that challenges their work. Or they may be sexists, bigots, racists, or some other species of dirtbag. If they have some sort of clout, they can submit an unnecessarily harsh review that kills the manuscript. And because some fields are small, it may be impossible to avoid such fuckwits as reviewers.

Peer-review can, indeed, fail if a manuscript contradicts the consensus. But if it does, this is rarely because it bucks consensus. It's usually because it doesn't have enough support to do so. Wegener's theory of continental drift (which, granted, was presented before peer review was a thing) was rejected not because it ran against common wisdom, but because the evidence he marshalled, though interesting, wasn't enough to shift opinion. That he had no mechanism to drive it didn't help. (He actually thought continents plowed through oceanic crust. In fact, oceanic and continental crust move together.) The consensus shifted when a sufficient volume of new observation met a workable mechanism. Geologists weren't closed-minded; they just didn't see enough to force a revisit of the paradigm.

Some journals use a double-blind system for peer review, but in my experience, it generally doesn’t work. Our fields are fairly tight; it’s all but impossible to remain anonymous. Most authors can figure out it’s my review whether I sign my review (and I usually do) or not. And an established jerk is going to go nuclear on a paper challenging their work no matter who the authors are.

I’m not saying we should abandon peer-review. We need some sort of quality control in science, and this seems to be the best we can manage. But the mere fact that a paper was peer-reviewed doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reliable. We must all keep this in mind.

The T. rex paper also laid another phenomenon bare – the way reporters try to convey what looks like exciting science.

News reports uniformly expressed that this paper had generated “controversy.” In fact, the only controversy it’s generated is how, exactly, it got through peer review. Scientifically, it’s been more or less universally rejected by experts in the field. But news sources can’t get much traction from “bad paper elicits dismay from professionals.”

I wasn’t contacted about this particular paper, but I’ve been asked for comments before. Reporters are cool with disagreement, but what they want is something like “this is so cool! We have to re-write our textbooks!” As long as you include something like that, you might get quoted and, just maybe, a qualifier will squeak through.

I’m pretty sure reporters in this case were shocked at what they encountered. Every single person they called for a comment said what I would have said – that this is an awful paper, it doesn’t demonstrate a damned thing about tyrannosaurs, and it shouldn’t be given air time.” They were literally unable to get “cool” or “re-write the textbooks.” So they went with “controversial.”

And you know the worst part? It’s entirely possible that T. rex might be divisible. I HIGHLY doubt it’s divisible into more than two, and it’s extremely unlikely either of these would have co-occurred. That could be a cool study. It would involve a modern approach to variation and a thoughtful approach to the nature of species. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened with this paper. We’re learning some lessons, but this isn’t one of them.

(And no, I'm not going to do that study. Crocodiles are objectively better than dinosaurs - we don't need special effects to see them eat people. I've got plenty enough to do with them.)

March 7, 2022

What Putin's war will cost Russia

Chechnya. Ingushetia. Dagestan. South Ossetia. Most of the Caucasus, in fact. Some are de facto independent. I'm sure leaders in these regions are paying attention to the effictiveness, or lack thereof, of the Russian Army in Ukraine.

And if I was Russian, I wouldn't get used to Crimea being a part of Russia on a map.

March 4, 2022

Probably going to get in trouble here (university building names, eugenics, and Nazis)

As many of you know, Montana State University-Billings is going to rename a building named after its first president, Lynn Banks McMullen, because he is now known to have spoken in favor of Nazi eugenics policies.

Although I’m going to add some context around McMullen’s statements, I am NOT defending what he said. Not even close. It was bigoted, repugnant, and ignorant. I fully support MSU-Billings’ decision to re-name this building. Adding context, in this case, no more justifies what he said than adding context can justify slave ownership prior to the Civil War. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

That being said, some context –

I’m concerned that people are focused on only one aspect of what McMullen said – namely, that he approvingly acknowledged Nazi German policies in 1935. He did, but leaving it at that oversimplifies the situation, and it does so in a way that prevents us progressives from learning an important cautionary tale – that just because anti-scientific attitudes are more closely aligned with the Republican Party today, liberals are not immune to the allure of pseudoscience, and we must remain vigilant to ensure neither we nor our political allies never again follow such a dark path. For we were once leaders on some parts of that trail.

McMullen’s comments were directed in support of eugenics – the idea that we could improve the human condition and society in general by encouraging people with desirable characteristics to have children and discouraging, or even preventing, those lacking these characteristics from doing so. This arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, followed by its merger with the new science of genetics (the “modern synthesis”), began to take root in intellectual circles.

This may be a distinction without a value, but although the quotes I’ve seen attributed to McMullen decry what he saw as the mixed blessing of immigration – that not everyone who came here was good and virtuous – I couldn’t find anything explicitly anti-semitic. I’m not saying he wasn’t anti-semitic; only that I couldn’t find anything demonstrating that in what he said. It’s entirely possible he was, and that I simply haven’t found the right quote. But his support for Nazi German eugenics wasn't necessarily anti-semitic, either, because eugenics in Germany in the 1930’s wasn’t single-mindedly directed at Jewish people. Sterilization and euthanasia were being applied to those deemed mentally ill and/or physically handicapped. It’s possible McMullen was expressing agreement with this, and not with anything explicitly racist or antisemitic.

The moral repugnance of this idea is self-evident, but it also arose from a very deeply flawed assumption. When it came to such things as criminality, intelligence, mental illness, and anti-social behavior, the nature-vs-nurture pendulum was way over on the nature side. One’s behavior and intelligence were seen as largely the product of your genes. If you tended toward criminal activity, you were a born criminal. If you want fewer criminals, the reasoning went, make sure those who would pass along criminality-promoting genes didn’t contribute to future generations. Fewer children being born to criminals meant fewer criminals and, thus, less crime.

This is, of course, straight-up bullshit. A lot of what was targeted for eugenic elimination had far more to do with poverty and institutional racism than biology. But too many people at the time believed otherwise.

This almost certainly arose from the ambient bigotry surrounding those expressing these thoughts, but it also reflected the newness of evolutionary biology and genetics. They were the Next Big Thing! The internet was supposed to level the information playing field back in the 1990’s. Nuclear power was going to make energy too cheap to meter back in the 1950’s. There was no end to what electricity and magnetism might achieve in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which led Mary Shelley to suppose a collection of sewn-together body parts could be jump-started to life. Same thing.

As a result, many states passed laws intended to further the cause of eugenics. In their extreme, they mandated forced sterilizations for certain classes of people - and these sterilizations actually happened. At least three states that I know of have agreed to pay reparations to those who were forcibly sterilized under these laws.

Given the correlation between race, poverty, and the social problems arising from poverty, you’d suspect that such laws were mostly in the Jim Crow South- but they weren’t. They were passed all over the US. And this is because much of the early impetus behind eugenics came not from racists or reactionaries, but from the intellectual left.

Many of these people were operating from a sense of improving society. They either blinded themselves to the inherently racist core of their ideals or found some way to accommodate it. They might argue, for example, that by preventing people of color with criminal histories from having kids, they were promoting the progress of races often thought to be at some sort of lower evolutionary status. It’s scientific bologna, but it wasn’t an uncommon perspective for a progressive prior to the Second World War.

By no means was eugenics limited to the left. Those who openly embraced white supremacy obviously weren’t interested in improving anything beyond their own goal of keeping the white power structure in place. It also found favor among ardent imperialists and social Darwinists. (Indeed, the seeds of eugenics predate the publication of Origin of Species; Thomas Malthus, whose arguments on reproductive excess influenced Darwin, would have been called a social Darwinist had they not been published 11 years before Darwin was born.)

But it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that, like the most virulent science denialism of today, eugenics was an exclusively right-wing concept.

Progressives did eventually abandon eugenics. Partly, it’s because the nature-nurture pendulum was moving toward nurture. But it’s also because the world saw what can happen when eugenics is taken to an extreme when the facts of the Holocaust came to light. The moral consequences of eugenics were shoved in their faces.

I actually cover this point in my large-enrollment undergraduate courses. I state that although there is nothing inherently anti-scientific about conservatism, and although there are certainly anti-scientific attitudes to be found in some liberal circles, the Republican Party is far more beholden to its anti-scientific constituents than the Democratic Party. We don’t see too much effort by Democrats to abolish all forms of animal-based research, foods made from transgenic crops, or market-based approaches to conservation and sustainable use that actually work. But laws preventing the teaching of what modern science teaches us about evolution, climate, human sexuality, and public health? From Republicans? All the bloody time.

But I also make the effort to point out that while conservatives have the harder row to hoe these days – they have to bring their party away from leaders who deny physical reality – us progressives aren’t excused from vigilance. The history of eugenics is a big part of that. It happened to us before. It can happen again.

Anyway – MSU-Billings is doing the right thing by renaming that building. But let’s understand the full context of the reason to ensure dead concepts stay dead.


ADDED ON EDIT: In case anyone accuses me of both-sides-ism, that's nowhere near what I'm saying. In fact, there's a profound difference between the kind of anti-science we see on the left and on the right. Left-wing anti-science is usually expressed as opposition to some sort of application of science. Right-wing anti-science is steeped in denial of the underlying science itself. I might disagree with a fellow progressive over the safety of GMO crops, but we would both agree on how evolution, hybridization, and gene splicing actually work. A right-wing blowhard is likely to deny that evolution even happens.

We also see more concentrated efforts on the right to distort scientific reality to support a policy opinion. Hard-core abortion opponents frequently claim, for example, that abortion increases breast cancer risk. Except that it doesn't.

And like I said, the Republican Party is wholly in the thrall of those who refuse to accept the world around them for what it is.

March 1, 2022

Ukraine is teaching the world how to do psy-ops.

I don't know if it's coordinated or if it's individual Ukraine servicemen working on their own, but their use of social media to send messages to attacking Russians, while letting the whole world listen in, takes the whole concept to a new level. It's a work of collective art.

Partly, I think it's because Ukrainians understand their enemy. We haven't understood ours since perhaps the First World War.
And Ukrainians certainly understand Russians more than Russians appear to understand Ukrainians.