Why Evolution is True Feed

It’s time for Caturday again.

First, from Cole and Marmalade, we have, yes, a page devoted to chirping cats. You can find anything on the internet.

Click to read:

An excerpt:

People absolutely love it when cats do the funny sound that’s become known as ‘Ekekek.’ We usually call it chattering, the strange sound that cats often make when they see a bird from the window. Others call it chirping, similar to trilling. They often do it when they see another cat outside.

Sometimes, they do it for no apparent reason at all, like Jugg below!

Video by Cole and Marmalade featuring our own Jugg of Jugg and Zig Zag:

The chirping is also known as “machine-gunning,” and is often seen when a cat spies a bird outside the window:

More videos of cats making “that noise”:

. . . and cats chattering en masse:

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Here a cat bullies a husky, going for the d*g’s ears and muzzle. As you expect, the d*g doesn’t like it. But the husky doesn’t try to hurt the moggy.

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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a gold mine of Dutch art, is most famous for housing Rembrandt.  And I’ll be going there in about two weeks. The museum itself, though, has put up a post showing ten of its most popular cat paintings, which you can see by clicking below. I’ve singled out five.

Detail from “The Fall of Man” by Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, 1592 (full painting here).  This is apparently the most popular depiction of a cat in the museum.

Cornelis van Haarlem, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“Children Teaching a Cat to Dance“, by Jan Steen, painted 1660-1679. A detail is below; the cat clearly doesn’t like it:

Detail:

“Dog and Cat Dancing”, attributed to Adriaen Matham after Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, 1620 – 1660. Source, Rijksmuseum site.

Cat by Anselmus de Boodt (1550-1632). From rawpixel.com:

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip (1821-1909), “Kittens at Play”. I’m not sure this one is in the Rijksmuseum, but other cat paintings by the artist are.

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Lagniappe:  In footage captured from a ring camera, a cat fights off black bear:

h/t: Matthew

Today is part 2 of photos of a part in southern Africa from reader William Terre Blanche; this is the second of two installments (the first is here).  His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. I begin by quoting his introduction from yesterday:

Here are some photos from a visit last year to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park  (Kgalagadi means “place of great thirst” in the San Language).

This vast wilderness reserve used to comprise two separate game parks, the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (South Africa) and the Gemsbok National Park (Botswana) separated by an unfenced border. However, in a historic 1999 agreement, South Africa and Botswana joined forces to create the world’s first trans-frontier nature reserve, the Kalagadi Transfrontier Park. It covers an amazing 38,000 km², an enormous conservation area across which the wildlife flows without any hindrance.

The Park is famous for its magnificent black-maned male lions, as well as an abundance of raptor species, but the beautiful desert landscape and unique atmosphere is probably what draws most return visitors there (myself included).

In December 2023, I had the privilege of spending almost 2 weeks in the park, and these are just some of the many photographs taken there (apologies, mostly birds, again..).

Three-banded Plover (Charadrius tricollaris)  These can often be seen using the typical plover run-stop-search method of foraging at any suitable body of water. The area had unusually good summer rains last year, and these pretty little birds were often seen:

Violet-eared Waxbill (Ureaginthus granatinus).  An almost impossibly brightly coloured little bird, they are actually quite common in the Kgalagadi, but the vibrant colours never ceases to amaze me whenever I come across one of them:

Sociable Weaver (Philetairus socius).  One of the most iconic sights of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is the massive communal nests of the Sociable Weaver. Colonies of up to 500 birds build these nests in trees, telephone poles and sometimes rock faces. The nests are built entirely out of grass, and each pair builds its own nest chamber:

Northern Black Korhaan (Afrotis afraoides). Their raucous kraak-kraak-kraak call is often heard long before they are seen! Spends most of the day on the ground, searching for food which is mostly insects and occasionally small reptiles:

Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus).  The world’s fastest land animal and Africa’s most endangered big cat. This female was presumably calling for the young, although I unfortunately never got to see them:

Urikaruus Wilderness Camp.  There are 3 main “Restcamps” inside the Park, plus a number of so-called Wilderness Camps. There are normally well off the beaten track, and mostly only reachable by 4×4 vehicle. There are no facilities whatsoever at these camps, so you have to be completely self-sufficient during the time spent there:

Male Lion (Panthera leo).  I spent a couple of nights at the abovementioned Urikaruus Wilderness Camp, and on the second morning was awakened at around 04:30 by a male lion roaring right under the room where I was sleeping (next to my car, in the picture below). This was at the same time exciting and terrifying, but one of the memories that will stay with me for life.

After a while he started moving away, and I was able to get a photograph of this magnificent animal:

Lioness:

Cubs.  On another occasion I spotted a single female lion lying in the shade of the tree a small distance from the road. After a couple of minutes she started calling, and these two cubs appeared from a nearby bush to join her. I can only assume that she had hidden them there, and after determining that the area was safe called them out into the open.

The British medical journal The Lancet has become infamous for being woke (its editor is beyond redemption), and is most infamous for the cover below.  As I once said, its wokeness makes it the British version of Scientific American, though it deals with original research and is entirely (or supposed to be entirely) medical in nature.

The journal has just become a bit more infamous by publishing a glowing paean to “Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges” (is “knowledge” suppose to be plural here?), seemingly making the knowledge of indigenous people coequal to the knowledge produced by modern science. In other words, it’s adopting what seems to be the national policy of science education in New Zealand.

Click to read; it’s free (the pdf is here). The authors are from Uganda, Canada, Tanzania, New Zealand (of course), the U.S., and Canada:

The main message, besides the boilerplate about oppression, is that indigenous people have knowledge that is essential in helping us solve not only the problem of global warming, but also “health discourse.”

Now you know that’s not really true. While indigenous people may have some observations bearing on the effects of both human health and especially global warming, it’s up to both national politics and international science to address global warming. (I don’t have much confidence they’ll remedy the problem.) And it’s up to modern medicine to deal with health issues. We’re way beyond the days of herbal cures and chanting. To say that indigenous “knowledges” is not only important, but “the optimal way forward” (see below) is to indulge in hyperbolic and performative rhetoric.

But let me give a few quotes.

Indigenous Dene Elder Francois Paulette from northern Canada talked about climate change at the 2015 Parliament of the World Regions and warned “Your way of life is killing my way of life.”
He ended his speech with the words: “Rise! It’s time to stand up for our future.”More than 8 years after this speech, an estimated 68% of the Northwest Territories, Canada, which includes the Dene Peoples territory, was evacuated due to 238 wildfires. Communities lost their homes and hunting and food-foraging areas and were exposed to poor air quality for months on end. Elder Francois’ words still ring true today for many Indigenous Peoples around the globe. We are still far away from the world understanding the impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities and the need to move towards efficient and comprehensive action for planetary health.

 

Indigenous Peoples have experienced historical and ongoing colonialism, ecocide, epistemicide, racism, and severe marginalisation and are disproportionately affected by poverty and reduced life expectancy.Yet despite these challenges they continue to protect and steward about 80% of all the remaining biodiversity on Earth. For Indigenous Peoples, every day is Earth Day, with the basis of their lives underpinned by a healthy relationship with the planet and extensive Indigenous Traditional Knowledges (ITK) developed over millennia. However, Indigenous leadership within planetary health practice to shape research, policy, and practice is still challenged by a multitude of factors.

It’s simply not true that indigenous people steward 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. First of all, the reference seems to be talking only about Australia. Second, the reference appears to show that 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity occurs in areas occupied by indigenous people. There’s no evidence I can find that the locals are “stewarding” that biodiversity beyond the statement, “This highlights how indigenous communities have mastered how to live alongside nature in a way that other communities have not.” It seems that living in areas with biodiversity is equivalent to “stewarding” that biodiversity. But we know that’s not true. In many cases indigenous people have destroyed biodiversity, like the extensive burning of natural forest by the Māori or the burning of prairie by Native Americans not to preserve it, but to get food, as well as their mass slaughter of bison by driving them o0ver the cliffs. That killed far more animals than they can use. What kind of “stewarding” is that?

ITK is also extolled for its “practical knowledge”; and indeed, that’s where it excels: understanding the place and rhythm of where food grows, how to catch that food, how to make stuff that one needs to live (knives, baskets, and so on). But ITK is not equivalent to modern science in many ways that are important: ITK is not generally driven by hypothesis testing, double-blind congrolled experiments, statistics, an atmosphere of doubt, and so on. While ITK is a bag of practical observations, modern science is a bag of tools for finding out stuff.

The article also has the obligatory denigration of “western” science, too, and a denial that indigenous “ways of knowing,” contain more than empirical fact. But in fact ITK, like New Zealand’s Mātauranga Māori, comprises far more than practical knowledge, including religion, mythology, traditional stories, superstition, morality, and guidlines for living. My bolding below:

ITK is increasingly informing climate and biodiversity solutions.  Although this is positive for Indigenous recognition, Indigenous Peoples who hold this knowledge are not usually directly involved in leading such efforts due to structural marginalisation. Implementation movements need to ensure that Indigenous Peoples and their rights are platformed first and foremost within any discussion around ITK. Additionally, ITK is often deemed myth or legend, or faces erasure within western-based institutions, despite it being replete with practical understandings of ecology, meteorology, and the relationship to the environmental rhythms gained over generations of observation and experimentation. Scientific disciplines, including within the medical and health sciences fields, therefore continue to largely marginalise ITK and there are expectations that it should conform to a western standard of evidence as the sole grading rubric of validity—a demonstration of the continuing effects of colonisation.

Well, yes, we need to bring as many voices as possible within science, but by “voices,” I don’t mean “ethnic groups”. I mean we should cast the net as wide as possible looking for scientific talent, and if we find a bit of practical indigenous knowledge to help move science forward, well, so much the better. But in the end, the statement in bold gives away the authors’ desire to “decolonize” modern science: “western standards of evidence” are apparently not the only standards of evidence for judging knowledge. But if they aren’t, what other standards should we use?  Tradition, superstition, and so on? Modern science is simply a toolkit of methods used to ascertain what is true. And there are no other ways to find out what’s “valid” beyond that. (I’m using “science” as “science construed broadly” here, as, for example, what a mechanic does to find out where the problem is in a car.) If the authors think there are ways of knowing beyond this, let them tell us. As it is, you won’t find a single example in this article besides the unsubstantiated claim that indigenous people “steward” 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

It’s hard for me to go on, as this article suffers from the diagnostic problem of all such sacralizations of indigenous knowledge: a lack of examples of how indigenous knowledge has contributed to modern knowledge. A few anecdotes will not suffice. After all, the National Science Foundation has just allocated $29 million to establish a “Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS)”, and there had better be substantial payoff to justify that kind of dosh.

The article goes on, but the ideas are familiar: because indigenous people were oppressed and treated badly (often true!), their “knowledges” should be seen as almost sacred, but certainly very valuable, and coequal to “western” science. But if you look at the advances that modern science has made in just 150 years in physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, none of them would even be possible with indigenous knowledge. Yet that knowledge is to be considered highly important, and, without it, say the authors, science is blinkered:

Without meaningful engagement and data representation, Indigenous initiatives are sidelined or neglected. Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges should not just be “considered” within climate change and health discourse and practice, which is typically the case now, but platformed as the optimal way forward.

Platformed as the optimal way forward? What does that mean? Why can’t ITK just be “considered”?  Finally, we hear once again the notion that ITK is one of two essential eyes in science’s way of finding knowledge (I believe this metaphor comes from Canada’s First People):

 Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers need “to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” for the survival of our planet. We need to understand that Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au (I am the river, and the river is me).

You see how both eyes are considered necessary and coequal to move science forward? I don’t think that’s the case.  Indigenous ways of knowing can, as I’ve said, add practical knowledge to what modern science has found, but it’s by no means a coequal “eye.” And I don’t understand why I have to adopt the mantra that the river is me to study hydrology. After all, I never learned much about genetics from thinking “I am the fruit fly, and the fruit fly is me.”

I’ll regard indigenous knowledge as more important when its promoters start giving us examples—real examples, not anecdotes about catching eels—of how it has made, or can make, important contributions to empirical knowledge.  We shall see what the NSF’s $29 million produces.

Yay! It’s the University of Chicago’s turn to experience pro-Palestinian pandemonium! Tents on the quad! Occupation of buildings!  I was feeling left out since the kiffeyeh-clad and Hamas-loving members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hadn’t shown up here for a couple of weeks, but I did predict that they were up to something big. At first I thought it would be a demonstration during convocation, which is on June 1, but it turns out I was a month too late: the demonstrations are apparently planned for May 1 (May Day!).

This information, which of course could be erroneous but looks real, was obtained by someone who infiltrated an SJP chatgroup here, and dug up a lot of information about their plans. The details are given in an article in the conservative student paper here, The Chicago Thinker, I’ll give the text and some revealing screenshots:

Startling group chat messages exposed by the Chicago Thinker reveal that on Wednesday, May 1, Students for Justice in Palestine at The University of Chicago (SJP UChicago) plans to emulate recent protests at Columbia University. It becomes the latest development in a wave of protests at colleges across the country, including Yale and New York University, as tensions around the Israel-Hamas war rise.

At UChicago, SJP protestors are aiming to take over the university’s Main Quad and camp out for an extended period. A Telegram group chat details their plans to occupy campus buildings and get arrested for trespassing in order to draw attention to their cause. The demonstrations will last “at least for… two nights.”

The texts also reveal that National Students for Justice in Palestine is playing a crucial role in organizing the protest. Members of the group are offering media support and are sharing experiences from their involvement in the events at Columbia.

Below are some mediocre-quality screenshots of chat messages from the Thinker as well as an “onboarding form” for prospective protestors.  The first entry comes from a National Students for Justice in Palestine member, showing what we already knew: the protests across the U.S. (SJP has 200 campus branches) is coordinated by the National SJP organization.  I always wonder who’s funding this group.

“PYM” in the second note is the Palestinian Youth Movement, apparently also involved. Since many of them are not students, there will clearly be some trespassing if this takes place. Note to campus cops: be sure to check IDs.

If you want to camp out, or help in other ways, SJP asks you to fill out this “onboarding form”:

More:

SJP UChicago’s strategy takes further inspiration from similar events at California State Polytechnic University, where students barricaded themselves in a university building on Monday evening. Police have been unable to remove them and the occupation has forced administrators to temporarily close the university, meaning students are to enter school buildings for classes or work. Students occupying the building published advice for other protestors. Leaders in the SJP UChicago group chat summarized these points and are encouraging people to replicate them.

“1. Occupying buildings is more effective

2. Being in buildings gives us lots of materials (tables, unhinged doors, chairs) to use as barriers

3. We’d be a lot more defenseless and easy to scatter if we occupy the quad

4. Being inside frays the police across the building and its entrances 

5. Could also be more comfortable for campers bc shelter, bathrooms, water, etc 

6. Come prepared with goggles, gas masks, etc.”

But of course occupying buildings is about the worst thing that students can do in terms of future punishment, and classes will be in full swing on May 1.

Here are more screenshots from the chat. It looks like the paper’s leak will deprive them of the discretion they desire, and someone’s going to be banging their head on the fifth-floor cubicle. (Of course, this all may be an elaborate ruse, but I suspect that SJP is going to do this some time.  After all, the Chicago branch doesn’t want to be left out!

And the final bit:

According to a statement from UChicago published on December 21, 2023, in the wake of the Rosenwald Hall SJP sit-in, “University policies protect the right to protest while making it clear that demonstrations cannot jeopardize safety or disrupt the University’s operations and the ability of people in the University to carry out their work.”

Multi-day building occupations violate this policy and present a significant threat to all students on campus.

SJP UChicago has organized multiple “orientations” and “trainings” to equip members for the protest. Among themselves, they demand “DISCRETION” regarding members’ identities and plans.

Here’s another “scoop,” this time from an upcoming demonstration at Princeton, the subject of an article in the National Review. The instructions bear some similarity to the ones in the chat above, no doubt because SJP National is spreading advice and information.

Huge SCOOP by @abigailandwords for @NRO:

Princeton students are planning an encampment.

A recruiting document shows they know they’re breaking the rules but don’t expect serious consequences.

They say they “have a trained security team, pro bono legal support, and ‘faculty… https://t.co/CefmoGQFii pic.twitter.com/P8dv7BNe9R

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) April 24, 2024

An excerpt from the National Review story on Princeton:

Princeton University students are preparing to establish an anti-Israel protest encampment, according to documents obtained by National Review. The students claim to have pro bono legal support and trained security. 

A draft of a press release titled “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment Demands” states that the “goal” is to “put pressure on the Princeton University administration to divest and disassociate from Israel, and to call attention to the University’s active contribution to ongoing genocide and human rights catastrophe.”

The group is demanding that 1) Princeton call for an immediate cease-fire and “condemn Israel’s genocidal campaign,” 2) commit to full transparency in its investments 3) dissociate and divest its endowment from direct and indirect holdings in companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign, occupation, and apartheid policies,” 4) divest from private fossil-fuel companies 5) disclose and end research funded by the Department of Defense 6) “refrain from any form of academic or cultural association with Israeli institutions and businesses 7) “cultivate affiliations with Palestinian academic and cultural institutions” and 8) stop sponsoring and facilitating programs like Birthright Israel trips and Tiger-Trek Israel, and relations with the Tikvah Fund.

. . .National Review obtained a message sent by an organizer affirming the plan to continue with the demonstration. 

“Many of you have probably seen the email from VP Calhoun. We want to begin by affirming that this action is still on, and we will not be deterred,” the organizer wrote in a group chat. “This is a partial bluff. No university that has arrested or suspended students have done so without multiple warnings. These would be incredibly bad optics for Princeton and the email is a strategic move to weaken us.”

“We have multiple criminal defense attorneys on call ready to support us and work through any arrests that may ‘occur.’ We have people committed to jail support as well,” the organizer wrote, adding that “‘arrest’ is not the same as ‘pressing charges.’” 

Multiple criminal defense attorneys on call! These are clearly not public defenders, who are not “on call.” So who is paying for all this?  The President of Princeton issued a statement about the planned disruptive demontrations, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to tolerate them if they’re disruptive.

At any rate, as I want to highlight two things I wrote. First, in a recent post called “J’Accuse”, I recounted four instances in which SJP and its confrère organization, UChicago United for Palestine, held four illegal demonstrations on our campus. In only one of them (a sit-in in the admissions office) were students punished, but the “punishment” was risible (they were arrested for trespassing, but then for some murky reason the city dropped the charges, and then the University simply asked the arrestees to write a “my demonstration experience” essay, which turned out to show the students doubling down on their protest). In the other incident, SJP deplatformed a group of Jewish students who were having a demonstration in the Quad, and the Jewish students levied a formal complaint against SJP. In response, the University did virtually nothing, just putting it on record that the SJP organization had transgressed and gave the group an “official warning” that would be considered if SJP transgressed again. Big whoop!

In the two other demonstrations, a “die-in” in a campus eatery and the blocking of the administration building, the university did nothing. There were cops and administrators there, but, as I was once told by one of them, the University is loath to “lay hands” on demonstrators.

What this all adds up to, of course, is that illegal protestors face no real deterrent to continued actions here. Indeed, SJP has said that are NOT deterred, and will continue their activities, legal or not.

Apropos of that, let me emphasize again that I’m all in favor of SJP, or any other student group, conducting legal protests on campus. We are, after all, the premier “free speech university,” though our national ranking on free speech by FIRE dropped in a year from #1 to #13. But freedom of speech demands, at least on campus, that speech be conducted in the proper “time, place, and manner,” and that here you cannot deplatform other speakers or interfere with the normal functions of a university.

A camp-in and sit-in on May 1 violates many of these structures. I would suggest that the administration, which apparently already knows about these plans, gird its loins and for once get ready to levy meaningful punishments on those who endanger free speech and academic access. There is no other way to deter future disruptions.

In a January 24 letter to the main student newpaper, the Chicago Maroon, I asked, “Should Students for Justice in Palestine be a Recognized Student Organization?” If they proceed with this planned demonstration, the answer would clearly be “no.”  The proper punishment for illegal “camp-ins” or sit-ins is expulsion of SJP as an RSO from our University, plus the arrest and suspension of demonstrators.

Will this happen? My guess is “no.”  Our administration has shown little taste for cracking down on illegal demonstrations, perhaps because they don’t want national attention. (In addition, if we suspend foreign students, they lose their visas and have to leave the U.S., depriving the University of the large tuitions that such students pay.)  Still, I suspect that donors are paying attention, too.

But the main point is that if we are to retain any reputation as a free-speech school, we cannot allow others to disrupt speech and the academic activities of our campus. In the end, it is our reputation for free inquiry, unimpeded by those who shout down others, bang drums, and generally disrupt campus life, that us gain a national reputation.

All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be in the President’s shoes now, because he’s got some hard decisions to make. For the entire academic community of America will be watching.

Oh, and if the campers think that their charade will persuade the University of Chicago to divest from Israel, they’re dead wrong. Our investments are kept secret from all but the trustees, and they’ve never bowed to protests. The demonstration will be, as nearly all of them are, performative.

An anonymous author (presumably Canadian) has written this piece for Times Higher Education, and it’s clear why he or she doesn’t want their name given. If that was publicized, the person would never be able to get any academic job in Canada.  Below are the two job ads from the University of Waterloo to which the anonymous author objects (click to find them). Note that there are two positions in computer science, but both reserved for those who self-identify as “minoritized” people, including Two-spirit people. What are those? The U.S. Indian Health Service defines them this way:

Traditionally, Native American two-spirit people were male, female, and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two-spirit people. In most tribes, they were considered neither men nor women; they occupied a distinct, alternative gender status.

I had thought these were simply indigenous people, but they seem to be non-binary indigenous people. So the first position is for people whose sexual identity doesn’t conform to their natal sex (I assumed that “identify as women” meant transwomen, but since “trangender” follows that, it could mean natal females as well. And the other job is for a minority, but a “racialized” minority, which means “not women”and nobody white”. I’m not sure whether Asians count as “members of a racialized minority.”  They are in a minority, and they are thought of as a race, so perhaps they would be. Canadians can weigh in here.

Regardless of how you interpret the requirements, it’s clear that these ads are targeted only for “minoritized” individuals. (Women in computer science stubbornly remain a minority, perhaps not because of structural sexism).

 

And here’s the anonymous article (click to read):

The author wants to apply for these jobs but since he or she (I’m guessing it’s a “he” since women could apply for the first job) simply isn’t qualified.  Excerpts:

The intention behind these postings is not malicious; rather, it aims to correct historical injustices. The attempted correction, however, only adds to the injustice of discrimination.

Why is academia so equivocal about making a universal condemnation of discrimination?

The author gives three reasons. First, the ad implicitly aims to correct bias, but underrepresentation of groups in a field, as you should know well know by now, need not automatically imply systemic bias. As the author says, it could reflect “differences in sex or culture” that “influence interests, behaviours or priorities.” I am pretty sure this plays a role in the underrepresentaiton of women in computer science.

Second, such ads, by assuming that the oppression reflects a hierarchy of bigotry, “perpetuates the false and dangerous idea that scars are passed down through generations, as if modern-day French children should cultivate hatred towards Germans because of the world wars.” He/she believes that the ads perpetrate a view of society as an eternal power struggle à la postmodernism. Well, that may be partly correct if underrepresentation reflects lower qualifications based on historical discrimination, but one can still wonder whether that should be rectified by ads like these, which list identity as the first criterion for application (presumably merit will be considered later).

Third, the author claims that “debate is stifled.”  I’m not sure what that means, but presumably the mere appearance of these ads justifies discriminatory hiring. As the author notes,

While intellectual and cultural diversity enriches humanity, equality in dignity unites us in a spirit of fraternity. Discrimination violates this moral equality, fosters resentment, undermines social cohesion, instrumentalises individuals and conveys the fatalistic and wrong idea that one’s path is determined by one’s ethnicity or gender. These severe consequences are wishfully thought to be dodged when discrimination is given a different name. But they are not.

Finally, the author tacks on another problem: those who are hired may be under the self-stigma of realizing that they got their job because of racial or sexual identity, not because of merit. This fact is of course the case for many minority hires, but I’m not sure if those hires are constantly tormented with this kind of self-doubt, though I know from testimony that some are. The author favors a “colorblind” approach to hiring, i.e., prize merit over identity.

I agree that the ads are objectionable, and they’d be illegal in the United States. Still, I favor a form of affirmative action, which is gradually taking shape as a belief that when candidates are pretty equally qualified, you can hire (or admit) the minority candidate more than half the time.  But even that is now illegal in the U.S., though of course schools will practice it anyway by getting around the “tick a box” prohibition. But no, there should not be jobs completely reserved for people who have a certain race of gender identity

I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.

In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.

And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”)  Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.

The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.

I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.

The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.

First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:

Excerpts:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!

Excerpts:

What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.

. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.

. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.

. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”

. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.

From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”.  Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”.  Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:

Excerpts:

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

. . . Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.

From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:

An excerpt from the above:

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!

Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)

Excerpts:

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:

Excerpts:

In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.

The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.

. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.

Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.

Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other.  He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling.  The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”

The latest strip from Jesus and Mo, called “nerds”, came with the email note, “Don’t take the red pill! Or is it the blue one? I can never remember.”

To Mo, it’s “Allah all the way down”:

Today’s photos are black-and-whites sent in by Jim Blilie. His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Another set here of black and white images.  Some are scans of color images, and are noted.  I am continuing to enjoy reimagining some of my color images in black and white.

First, a shot of Summit Lake in Jasper National Park, Canada, September 1981.  A figure in a landscape.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a December 1988 shot of skiing in the Cascade Range (back when my knees would do that).  These places are all now grown over with trees and no longer really skiable.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot taken in Lincoln Park in Seattle in March 1990 after a rare sea-level snow fall.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot of the Mount Saint Helens crater, 10 years after the eruption, in March 1990.  Taken the old-fashioned way, from a Cessna 172 that a friend was piloting.  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot of Nilgiri North in Nepal, taken in the summer of 1991.  Taken with my old Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens at 200mm, f/5.6 and 1/500s (I remember the entire sequence of choices leading up to this photo as ai watched the clouds drift into place).  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot from along the Seine in Paris in May 1992.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is another shot from May 1992 in France:  Sully sur-Loire chateau.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Another shot from France; but much more recent:  Paris in 2010.  I call this, “Before the Rush”.  Waiters relaxing before the dinner opening.  (Pentax K-5 and a telephoto lens, not sure which one.)

Figures under Double Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, June 2013.  (Pentax K-5 and almost certainly the same telephoto lens as the above photo):

Next is a shot from Badlands National Park in South Dakota from July 2013:

Finally, an image of a sunflower from Shawano County, Wisconsin, August 2023.  (Olympus m4/3 camera):

Some of these photos were taken during my bicycle tour around the world in 1990-92.

Equipment:

Pentax K-1000, ME Super, and LX cameras
Various Pentax M series and A series lenses
Pentax K-5 digital camera and various Pentax D lenses
Olympus OM-D E-M5 mirrorless M4/3 camera and various Olympus and Lumix lenses
Epson V500 Perfection scanner and its software
Lightroom 5 photo software

The Oxford English Dictionary, my go-to source for definitions, has this one for “consciousness”:

But there are other definitions, including sensing “qualia” (subjective conscious experience like pleasure or pain), or “having an inner life” involving self-awareness.  But it’s hard to determine under any of these definitions whether an individual of another species—indeed, even an individual of our own species—is conscious.  We think that other humans are conscious because we’re all built the same way, and we’re pretty sure that other mammals are conscious because they appear to feel pain or pleasure, and are built in a mammalian ground plan. But when an earthworm reacts when you poke it, is it feeling pain and having a subjective experience, or is that an automatic, built-in response to being poked that is adaptive but isn’t mediated through conscious experience?

I’m not going to get into the thorny topic of consciousness here, but I do feel that the more an animal is conscious (whatever that means), the more we should take care of it and avoid hurting it. (This of course is a subjective decision on my part.) It’s probably okay to swat mosquitoes, but not to kill a lizard, a duck, or a cat. (I tend to err on the “assume consciousness” side, and am loath to even swat mosquitoes.)

Researchers themselves have arrived at similar conclusions, for there are increasingly stringent regulations for taking care of lab animals. If you work on primates or rats, you have to ensure your university or granting agency that your research subjects will be properly treated, but those regulations don’t apply to fruit flies. But whether members of another species are conscious in the way that we are (well, the way I am, as I can’t be sure about you!), is something very hard to determine. The “mirror test“, in which you put a mark on an animal’s forehead, put it in front of a mirror and see if it touches its own forehead, is another test used to determine self awareness. The article below describes several other ways scientists have approached the question.

At any rate, according to Nature, a group of scientists have signed short joint declaration (second link below) saying that we need more research on consciousness and that the phenomenon may be present “in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”  They add that knowing whether an animal is conscious should affect how we consider its welfare, which seems correct. The letter (or petition) doesn’t really define “consciousness”, but the Nature blurb about it does. Click the link below to read that blurb:

An excerpt:

Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies.

Armed with such research, a coalition of scientists is calling for a rethink in the animal–human relationship. If there’s “a realistic possibility” of “conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal”, the researchers write in a document they call The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. Issued today during a meeting in New York City, the declaration also says that there is a “realistic possibility of conscious experience” in reptiles, fish, insects and other animals that have not always been considered to have inner lives, and “strong scientific support” for aspects of consciousness in birds and mammals.

As the evidence has accumulated, scientists are “taking the topic seriously, not dismissing it out of hand as a crazy idea in the way they might have in the past,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and one of the authors of the declaration.

The document, which had around 40 signatories early today, doesn’t state that there are definitive answers about which species are conscious. “What it says is there is sufficient evidence out there such that there’s a realistic possibility of some kinds of conscious experiences in species even quite distinct from humans,” says Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, and one of the signatories. The authors hope that others will sign the declaration and that it will stimulate both more research into animal consciousness and more funding for the field.

And Nature says that the group has a definition of consciousness, though I can’t find it in the short declaration:

The definition of consciousness is complex, but the group focuses on an aspect of consciousness called sentience, often defined as the capacity to have subjective experiences, says Birch. For an animal, such experiences would include smelling, tasting, hearing or touching the world around itself, as well as feeling fear, pleasure or pain — in essence, what it is like to be that animal. But subjective experience does not require the capacity to think about one’s experiences.

This is as good a definition as any, I think, but determining whether another animal is even sentient is nearly impossible; all we can do is look for signs of sentience, like a dog howling if you kick it.  But if a protozoan heads for a source of food, is it having a subjective experience of “here’s food”?  Unlikely; protozoans don’t have brains and this is probably an inbuilt adaptive reflex. But there are tons of species intermediate in potential sentience between protozoans and mammals, and how do we decide whether, say, a fish is sentient? (I’ll tell you that scientists have ways of approaching this, but no time to go into it now. But the article has some interesting descriptions of these tests.) And of course most people think that octopuses are sentient.  Some even think that fruit flies are sentient!:

Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences,” says Bruno van Swinderen, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who studies fruit flies’ behaviour and who also signed the declaration.

Some suggest that dreams are key components of being conscious, he notes. If flies and other invertebrates have active sleep, “then maybe this is as good a clue as any that they are perhaps conscious”.

Well that’s stretching it a bit, but who knows? And some people weigh in with the caveat I mentioned above: acting as if you’re conscious may not mean that you’re conscious, for consciousness produces adaptive behavior, but so does natural selection, which has the ability produce adaptive reflexes not mediated by consciousness but look like consciousness.

We have a hard problem, then, and that’s reflected in the declaration itself, which is below. You can see the whole thing as well as its signers by clicking on the screenshot:

And the text of the document:

Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

I don’t recognize many of the signers, and I’m surprised that Peter Singer, who surely agrees with the declaration, didn’t sign it. But I think more signers are being added.

At any rate, I can’t disagree with what the document says, but the interesting problems are both philosophical (on the ethical side) and scientific: what do we mean by consciousness, and, once that’s agreed on, how do we determine if a member of another species is conscious? Or, upon rethinking what I just wrote, perhaps we don’t need a definition of consciousness, but simply a set of empirical observations that we think are signs that animals are suffering. But that itself involves some philosophical input. It’s all a mess, but one thing is for sure, we should avoid causing unneeded suffering to animals, and we shouldn’t kill them just because we don’t like them. Even a lowly ant has evolved to preserve its own existence, and to what extent can our selfish desires override that consideration?

As the classic ending of many scientific papers goes, “More work needs to be done.”

h/t: Phil

Well, you can write off yet another organization dedicated to promoting free expression. First the ACLU went down the tubes, followed by the SPLC, and now PEN America, a group of American writers dedicated to promoting free expression, has canceled a ceremony because the writers want PEN to take a stand on an ideological issue: Israel, say many of its members, is committing genocide, and they are demanding that PEN America take that position. And PEN America crumpled, canceling an upcoming event.

No matter that the issue is debatable, and no matter that the real committers of genocide, those absolutely dedicated to destroying a people, are Hamas, which has sworn to kill all Jews and eliminate Israel. Now that is genocide. But PEN members don’t care what Hamas is doing.  The claim of Israeli genocide is not a “truth”, and many of us (including me) disagree, as do many PEN members. But a vocal group of these “free expression” writers insist that their organization call for a cease fire and accuse Israel of genocide.  Doesn’t that count as something that chills free expression, and associates an organization for such expression with a specific ideology?

You may recall that a similar dubious position was taken by some PEN members in 2015, when six members refused to attend a banquet—and 145 writers signed a protest letter—all because PEN America was going to give a “freedom of expression award” to Charlie Hebdo after many of the magazine’s writers and artists were killed.  That’s even more of a no-brainer, because, yes, Charlie Hebdo, in the face of threats, continued to mock everything, including all religions. But it was their liberal satire of Islam that did them in, with 12 Charlie Hebdo employees shot by Muslim terrorists. Protesting a “courage” award for Charlie Hebdo is ridiculous.  But such is PEN  America.

Here’s the group’s mission as stated on their “about us” page:

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

Are they protecting free expression by canceling a ceremony because of a misguided assertion about Israel? And what they say is laughable (read below):

Click the headline to read, or find it archived here:

A few excerpts:

The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel and led nearly half of the prize nominees to withdraw.

The event was set to take place on April 29 at Town Hall in Manhattan. But in a news release on Monday, the group announced that although the prizes would still be conferred, the ceremony would not take place.

“We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,” the group’s chief officer for literary programming, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, said in the release.

“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”

In recent months, PEN America has faced intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 people dead, according to health officials there.

In a series of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America support an immediate cease-fire, as its global parent organization, PEN International, and other national chapters have done.

In other words, the writers have demanded (using Hamas statistics, of course) that PEN America take a political position. They are demanding that a group dedicated to free expression take an “official” position that would tend to chill expression and associate PEN with an ideological stand.  And if PEN doesn’t, then the writers are going to take their ball and go home.  They are demanding, in other words, that the group broach any kind of institutional neutrality that it may have—and it should have some since it’s dedicated to free expression.

More:

In March, a group of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar, announced that they were pulling out of next month’s World Voices Festival, one of PEN America’s signature events. And over the past several weeks, growing numbers of nominees for the literary awards, including Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe and Esther Allen, announced that they were withdrawing their books from consideration.

In a letter that PEN America leadership received last week, 30 of the 87 nominated writers and translators (including nine of the 10 nominees for one prize) criticized the group’s “disgraceful inaction” on the situation in Gaza, accusing it of “clinging to a disingenuous facade of neutrality while parroting” what the letter characterized as Israeli government propaganda. The letter also called for the resignation of the group’s longtime chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, and its president, the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, along with that of the group’s executive committee.

And here’s the dumbest statement of all:

“PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree,’” the nominees stated. “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Well that’s just wrong. I bet I could find many “writers of conscience” who do disagree on the “fact” that “Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people”.  If Israel was, all Gazans would have been dead for a long time, but the population of Gaza has grown like gangbusters. And we know that Israel doesn’t just go into Gaza for no reason and kill civilians. It responds only when it’s attacked, and tries to limit damage to Hamas terrorists or their military assets.  It’s clear that the IDF wants to eliminate not Palestinians, but members of Hamas. Has any other country sent truckloads of humanitarian assistance, like food and medicine, to an enemy state? Or warned people where and when it was going to attack? Those are real “facts”! But they don’t matter, for these PEN morons claim that they already know the truth.

The reader who sent me this article added the following:

I chortled to myself. It would be funny that fiction writers so self-confidently assert a fiction to be a “fact” if it wasn’t sad that they’re likely driven by anti-Israel animus to do so. Anyway, while PEN tried to push back in its own statement upholding free expression, their awards ceremony has now been derailed by self-righteous nominees who want free expression shut down in service of propagating grotesque lies.

And yes, PEN America did push back, but it still truckled to the ideologues. From the NYT:

That letter [from the 30 nominees] drew a brief but forceful response last week in which the organization described the war in Gaza as “horrific” but challenged what it said was the letter’s “alarming language and characterizations.”

“The perspective that ‘there is no disagreement’ and that there are among us final arbiters of ‘fact and fiction’ reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Charter and what we stand for as an organization,” the organization said in a statement.

The second paragraph is spot on, and admirable. So why did PEN cancel the ceremony? Maybe some of the nominees won’t show up, but either they can get their award in absentia or they can be dropped because they don’t favor free expression.  I really don’t care. What I do care about is that yet another one of America’s bastions of free expression has turned cowardly, violating its own charter in the face of loud and misguided ideological demands from writers.

If the PEN Charter really does stand for institutional neutrality, then the organization should conform to it. Writers are of course welcome to express their own views, but the organization itself should not be the arbiter or promoter of those views.

If you got ’em, send ’em in, please!

Today we have photos by Dean Graetz of Australia. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Aussie backyards have some cool stuff, especially the birds!

A Southern Hemisphere Backyard

Here is a sample of the inhabitants of our backyard in Canberra, Australia.  Mid-March, at latitude 35°S, is a time of rapidly shortening daylength, and of harvesting the fruits of a coolish Summer.  Our non-native garden shrubs (Buddleia davidii, aka ‘Butterfly Bush’) are popular attracting this new and hard to identify, visitor.  We think it is a ‘Brown’, or Heteronympha species:

A large butterfly with a 10 cm wingspan, this female Orchard Swallowtail (Papilio aegeus), is always eye-catching, and always harassed by ever-present Cabbage White butterflies:

The common Meadow Argus (Junonia villida) which, after enjoying a nectar feed, often unhurriedly suns itself on our warm garden pathways, adding colour in two places:

The also common, and charmingly named, an Australian Painted Lady (Vanessa kershawi) choosing feed on a desert wildflower (Xerochrysum sp.) which we also grow as another inducement for butterflies.  All the butterfly photos were shot from a 3-5m distance with zoom lenses:

A pair of aged adult Crimson Rosellas (Platycercus elegans) feeding on our neighbour’s tall shrub.  These parrots are everyday sightings in Canberra gardens that are not far from surrounding native woodlands where they breed as hollow nesters:

A juvenile Crimson Rosella in the process of changing its dull green plumage to the bright reds and blues of the sexually mature adult.  The coloured feather contrasting patches are so sharp that these birds enjoy the common name of ‘Patchworks’:

An adult Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhyncus violaceus), sex not obvious, having enjoyed a vigorous bath now eyeing the photographer.  At age 7 years, a male bird will change from this khaki plumage to a brilliant blue-black glossy version, build a bower in a grassy woodland, decorate it with blue objects (same colour as its eyes), such as flowers, clothes pegs, bottle tops.  The purpose is to attract, court and mate with numerous females.  Hard to believe?  Go here to watch:

A juvenile Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) now regularly arrives and sits patiently surveying our back yard for any living food items, such as lizards, mice, or snakes.  These birds readily habituate to hand feeding by the lonely to become a mendicant friend for life:

An adult male Australian King Parrot (Alisterus scapularis) enjoying the last of an unripe pomegranate in a neighbour’s tree.  The dark lower beak is staining.  These are frequent visitors to Canberra at this time of the year.  Being predominantly fruit eaters – their favourite is cherries – has required nearby fruit growers to cover their entire orchards with parrot (and hail) proof tents:

Close by, and part of a family flock, was this juvenile female King-Parrot, elegantly holding an unripe olive with toe and beak.  They skillfully rotate each olive with their blunt tongue to flense off all the edible flesh.  To us, hard green olives are unappealing, but this female ate steadily for about 15 minutes before flying off with a noticeably full crop:

The college protest post has exhausted me for today, not only because reading this stuff is psychologically debilitating, but also because I’m preparing my talks for Amsterdam. Tomorrow I’ll try to resume regular posting, but for now you get a penguin video as lagniappe.

These happen to be Emperor Penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri), which live on sea ice, so I never saw them on my jaunts to Antarctica.  When they’re six to seven months old, after parental feeding has ceased, they trek en masse to the ocean to begin feeding and starting their life as free-living animals.  This National Geographic video shows them making an unusual jump into the sea from fifty-foot ice cliffs.

This reminds me of the mallards at Botany Pond who build their nests two or three stories off the ground. In that case, when the chicks hatch they have to make a perilous leap to the ground below (next to the water), egged on by the quacking mother who has flown to the ground. They are naturally apprehensive, but one chick is brave enough to jump and the others follow. (I’ve never seen a duckling injured in the leap.) These penguins seem to make successful leaps, too, and once one has made it the others follow. They’re like the proverbial lemmings! I hope they don’t land on each other.

The photography is marvelous.

In his latest Real Time monologue, Bill Maher discusses pedophilia, how it’s exacerbated by the media (including Disney), celebrated by parents who dress up little kids as adults, and even excused by progressives. His take on “Drag Queen Story Hour” is pretty funny.

Money quote: “I’ve said it before wokeness is not an extension of liberalism any more it’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite.”

He then goes on to gender, suggesting that teaching six-year-old kids about gender is a form of “entrapment,” making them do something they otherwise wouldn’t. He’s gonna get in big trouble for that one!

This has its funny bits, but it’s one of Maher’s more serious pieces, bearing on the possible indoctrination of kids into “nonbinary” roles by peers and teachers.

A while back I posted about my cinemaphilic nephew Steven’s nominees for the “Golden Steves,” which he humbly presents as a better alternative to the Oscars. As he says,

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:

1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.

2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.

3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.’

Click to read and see all the winners.

The nominees for the “big” categories are below, and I’ve put in bold the winners. Remember that there are eight categories below but 12 on the original list, so I’ll put the four extra winners at the bottom.

Best Picture

Afire
All of Us Strangers
Anatomy of a Fall
Killers of the Flower Moon
May December
Trenque Lauquen

Best Director

Laura Citarella, Trenque Lauquen
Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers
Todd Haynes, May December
Christian Petzold, Afire
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall

Best Actor

Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Benoit Magimel, Pacifiction
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Franz Rogowski, Passages
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Michael Thomas, Rimini

Best Actress

Jodie Comer, The End We Start From
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall
Natalie Portman, May December
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One

Best Supporting Actor

Jamie Bell, All of Us Strangers
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Charles Melton, May December
Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actress

Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Merve Dizdar, About Dry Grasses
Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers
Anne Hathaway, Eileen
Rachel McAdams, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Non-Fiction Film

Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob)
Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin)
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)
Our Body (Claire Simon)
To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja)

Best Foreign Language Film

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

And the other winners:

Best Screenplay–Adapted: All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)

Best Screenplay–Original: Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)

Best Animated Feature:  Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)

Best Original Song: “Live That Way Forever,” The Iron Claw (Richard Reed Parry, Laurel Sprengelmeyer)

Here’s that best original song:

I guess I’ll have to see “May December” as it took home three Golden Steves. My moviegoing has been thin in the past year, and I know nothing about this movie save that it got a 91% Critics Rating (but only a 65% Viewers Rating) on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s the trailer, showing the costars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

 

A recent announcement from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tells us something we knew was coming: the Biden Administration is walking back the improvements in Title IX made by Betsy DeVos. (Yes, it was one of the few good things done under Trump.) The original rules, which bear on how colleges adjudicate sexual misconduct, were put in place by Obama, then rolled back and made more fair by DeVos, and now Biden’s reverting the law to the Obama standards, which are palpably unfair because they take away rights from the accused that are in place in real courts.

You can read several of my posts on this issue here, but this one details the changes.  I believe they’re not yet finalized, but are nearing completion. It’s not yet clear whether this document, which is heavy on “gender identity”, will permit transgender females to compete athletically against natal females. The rules don’t seem to be finalized, but I’ve heard that Biden is holding off until after the election before allowing the athletic thing, since trans “inclusion” in women’s sports is opposed by most Americans.

You might also want to read Emily Yoffe’s Free Press piece criticizing Biden’s proposals (which are now law), as well as her other pieces on the issue cited at the bottom of her article.

If FIRE opposes something, I’m usually on their side, and I certainly am this time. These changes in regulations, as you’ll see below, are part of Biden’s increasing wokeness, and deny those accused of sexual misconduct of a fair hearing.  Biden will have the accused lose their right to contest the allegations against them in a live hearing, to cross-examine those who accuse him (yes, it’s usually men), and will allow a single person to be the original investigator of the charges, the adjudicator of the charges, and the jury who gives a decision. How fair is that? There are other changes, too, and if you have the time you can read all the rules here in a 1577-page document.

Here’s the FIRE summary:

Today the Department of Education released troubling new rules on how colleges investigate campus sexual misconduct allegations. The bottom line: Students who find themselves in a campus hearing are now less likely to receive a fair shake.

If reading this feels like déjà vu, you’re not alone.

For years the government has politicized college students’ rights under Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Bureaucrats play political games, taking away student free speech and due process rights during one presidential administration, then restoring them in the next.

Fairness shouldn’t be politicized. Campus hearings should be fair for every single student — accused and accuser alike. But these new rules deprive students of fundamental rights that help investigators uncover the truth in the most serious types of campus misconduct cases, including those that concern sexual misconduct.

The rules:

• Eliminate the right to a live hearing to contest the allegations.
• Eliminate the right to cross-examine one’s accuser and witnesses.
• Weaken the right to be represented by lawyers in campus sexual misconduct expulsion proceedings.
• Require colleges to adopt a definition of sexual harassment which will inevitably be used to censor constitutionally protected speech.
• Allow for the return of the “single-investigator” model, in which a single administrator serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury.

“Justice is only possible when hearings are fair for everyone,” said FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley. “Rather than playing political ping-pong with student rights, the Department of Education should recognize that removing procedural protections for students is the exact opposite of fairness.”

Colleges and the government should not team up to deprive students of their rights. And no one should implement policies that make uncovering the truth in cases of serious misconduct even more difficult.

Riley Gaines has been an outspoken advocate of allowing only natal women to compete in women’s athletics. Here’s her take on the new rules, though, as I have no energy to plow through 1577 pages, I haven’t checked her assertsions:

The Biden Admin has just officially abolished Title IX as we knew it. Now, sex = gender identity.

In a nutshell, the new rewrite means:
– men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women
– men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc
– men could be… pic.twitter.com/JfQVI9Yfph

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) April 19, 2024

I’ll still vote for Biden, but he’s making it harder and harder. But even with this change that makes adjudication of sexual misconduct an unfair process, he’s still miles and miles ahead of Trump. If I get too fed up, I simply won’t vote for President, which in this Democratic state won’t affect the presidential results at all.

h/t: Luana

I suppose this counts as Readers’ wildlife today, as we’re dealing with the primate H. sapiens.  We have videos and photographs from a demonstration in Chicago.

Yesterday my colleague Peggy Mason (like me, an atheistic Jew) went downtown to get pick up her repaired watch, and ran smack into a huge pro-Palestinian demonstration around Michigan Avenue. These protests occurred widely across America yesterday, perhaps in solidarity with the entitled demonstrators squatting, snacking, and shouting on the campus of Columbia University (see this morning’s Hili Dialogue and the tweets below). I’ll first show two videos taken by Peggy and then add a group of her photos. First, her words:

This is just beyond anything I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.  I was downtown today and there was a huge pro-Palestinian march on Michigan Avenue.  Also huge police presence walling them in.   Signs included anti-Zionism≠Anti-semitism, which is obviously not true here or in London or anywhere.  Next to that sign was a throwback to the Elders of Zion – “Their god is CAPITAL and God is our Witness.”

The people in the march appeared to be quite pleased with themselves.  There was no opposition to them.  Tourists ignored them.  I had no clue what I could do as a single person.  I did nothing but take pictures for Jerry.  I just don’t see how we return to comity and civility.

And two videos.  First, the cops keep the demonstrators in tight order.

More shouts. I can’t make out the words beyond “Genocide Joe”, but readers can help with that and other chants.

 

And some photos. Note in the first one the claim that anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism, which of course is an excuse to be anti-Semitic. I disagree with the slogan anyway, as to oppose an established country now, formed as a homeland for Jews expelled or demonized elsewhere, and long after the Holocaust made its existence necessary, is to say that you don’t think the country should exist—that it should be eliminated (and perhaps merged with Palestine, with dire results), or the Jews should be deported from Israel. Either way it’s anti-Semitic, so these protestors are flatly making a false statement.

Notice the blood libel here: the sign that says “Their God is Capital, and God is our witness.”  That’s simply the old claim that Jews worship money, and it’s a poster I hadn’t seen. This is the kind of stuff, in conjunction with things like the London police driving away people who look “openly Jewish” (see this morning’s Hili Dialogue), that makes me believe that the protests are moving from being anti-Israel to being anti-semitic.  Note also the “From the River to the Sea” poster.

Sundry other photos by Peggy:

This kid is doomed to being propagandized:

Of course I don’t deny these people the right to demonstrate and say whatever they want. (I’m pretty sure they had a permit.) What I am saying is that their speech is both hateful and scary, and not a good portent for Jews.

Truly, these people want to see Israel gone, wiped off the map—by “any means necessary.”  And the nature of chants and slogans is changing. As I said this morning, at Columbia you can hear stuff like, ““Remember the 7th of October” (and they’re happy about that), followed by “Ten thousand times”.  They are happy about the 7th of October attack, and they want it to happen again and again! It’s no coincidence that this is precisely what Hamas says. I can’t help feeling, and it chills me to the marrow, that many of these protestors think that Hamas did a good thing on October 7th.  After all, they say, they are no real “civilians’ in Israel, and that apparently includes babies, who are just infant colonizers.

You will not convince me that all these people want is a peaceful and terror-free coexistence between Israelis and Arabs.  They are in favor of getting rid of Israel, and you know what that means.  Meanwhile, things at Columbia are heating up last night and this morning, and the slogans appear to be in Arabic. Some tweets:

I am not sure, as the tweet below avers, that all the people in the video are “terrorists or “openly supporting terror,” which seems very hyperbolic.  I am putting up the first tweet just to show you how academia has become ideology.

This is the Chabbad Rabbi (!) and a group of Jewish students being scared off of @Columbia's campus. pic.twitter.com/VdAlJ5G3V1

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) April 21, 2024

Look at the epithets hurled at the rabbi and the Jewish students as they’re followed off campus. Click the button but read the epithets at the bottom of the screen. They’re clearly anti-Semitic, e.g. “Go back to Poland.” And the second tweet points out Jews as “targets”.  What else could that mean?

Here's a terrorist directing the Hamas' military wing al-Qassam Brigades to target and kill Jewish students at @Columbia.

(ironically, she misspelled "al-Qassam". Do your homework) pic.twitter.com/cLMAUyhGMj

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) April 21, 2024

You can read about Nerdeen Kiswani at the Anti-Defamation League.

Here's another one of their leaders, praising the October 7th massacre ("the Al-Aqsa Flood") and lauding
Hamas terrorists who raped, tortured, murdered, and kidnapped thousdans of civlians as "the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every… pic.twitter.com/OznpFA5YZQ

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) April 21, 2024

From Andrew Sullivan’s new Weekly Dish piece, “Katherine Maher is not a liberal“, criticizing the new CEO of National Public Radio:

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Dan Dennett died yesterday, and I still can’t believe he’s gone, though he’d used up a good portion of his nine lives in a series of cardiac events.  His NYT obituary can be read by clicking the screenshot below, or you can find it archived here.

The subheading seems to me a bit inaccurate. For one thing Dennett certainly did not think religion was an illusion, though he’s quoted saying that below. Perhaps he thought it was a delusion, but he certainly took it seriously as a human behavioral phenomenon, even though he was an atheist. What the subheading means is that he thought the idea of god and its concomitants were an illusion, but that is not all that religion comprises.

More important, Dan certainly did NOT believe that free will was a fantasy: Dan was a compatibilist who didn’t believe in libertarian free will, but wrote two books and several other papers and half of another book defending the idea that free will was not a fantasy, but that we did indeed have it: it was, he said, simply different from what most people thought.

Dan and I disagreed strongly on Dan’s compatibilism (Sam Harris disagreed as well), but free will being a fantasy? Nope.

Finally, yes, Dan concentrated on natural selection as the only process that could produce the appearance of adaptation, but didn’t deny, as I recall, the fact that genetic drift could cause some evolutionary change. (For a rather critical review of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by my ex-student Allen Orr, go here.) But Dan concentrated on adaptations, including human behaviors, because the appearance of design, for centuries imputed to God, is what really demands explanation.

(*Note the misplacement of “only” in the subheading; it should appear after “explained,” not after “could”. Where are the proofreaders?)

At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the NYT that is more accurate than the subheading:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

And on free will:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

First of all, the notion of a separation between mind and body is not “outdated”: a huge number of people believe in libertarian free will: that your mind alone can, at any given moment, allow you to make any one of two or more choices. It’s outdated among scientists and philosophers, but not among the general public, as surveys have shown.

Further, “random decisions” aren’t really random to either libertarians or determinists. Even Libet-like experiments show that what you do is to some degree predictable using fMRI, and is probably entirely predictable if we had a complete understanding of the brain. No determinist argues that decisions are “random”, as they’re based on the pattern of your neurons produced by your genes and your environment. And libertarians would argue that decisions aren’t random, for if we were we’d have no ability to predict what anybody we know does. Finanly, determinists don’t claim that individuals aren’t liable for their actions. They are liable, but not in the way that most people think. If somebody murders someone else, we don’t just let him go and say, “well, he wasn’t responsible for the killing.”

Do note that Dennett is credited with believing something that I always maintained: he favored compatibilism, at least in part, because of “belief in belief”: without belief in some kind of free will, he said, society would fall apart (he said that at least twice):

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

But if religion is also thought necessary by some (not Dennett) as necessary to maintain a stable, society, then why is free will TRULY necessary to maintain a stable, functioning society? Perhaps our feeling of free will is necessary for that, but, like religion, that’s a delusion that we simply can’t avoid feeling. I function very well even though I’m a hard determinist, even though I feel like I have a choice. And, in the last sentence, I don’t think one can characterize Dan’s view of free will as an “illusion”. He argued strenuously for a form of free will that was not an illusion.

But I digress. Dan was an important figure in bringing philosophy and Darwinism to educated readers. How often do philosophers produce bestselling popular works?  Yes, he could be wrong, and the force of his personality led some to adopt what I thought were erroneous ideas (like “we have the kind of free will worth wanting”), but more often his arguments were cogent, important, and vividly expressed.

And Dan was a nice guy, one who befriended me when I was just a stripling. One thing missing from the NYT piece—and something I hope they’ll add—are quotations from Dennett’s friends and colleagues. Where, for instance, is an assessment by Richard Dawkins? I expect that will appear on Richard’s Substack site, but we needed some quotes for the NYT obit. Here’s Richard’s tweet about Dan’s death:

Dan Dennett was a great philosopher, skilled with words, images, thought experiments & intuition pumps. But unlike many clever philosophers (to borrow from PB Medawar) he had something important to be clever ABOUT, namely science. Much more yet, he was a dear friend. So very sad.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 19, 2024

You can find other obituaries at the Torygraph, at Ars Technica, and at the Daily Nous, which is short but has a recent video interview, which I put below. And I’d recommend reading his recent autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking.

 

There will be more obituaries to come.

Here from the WaPo we hear about a special area (not really an island) near Shanghai where stray cats are sequestered. If you see the video below, you’ll see they’re better off there–people come to feed them amd adopt them–than roaming the streets. Click to read (archived free here, or go to a shorter article here).

An excerpt:

The happiest place on Earth for cats might just be here, on Cat Island, a feline playground just a few miles from Shanghai Disneyland. While humans whoop and whirl at the latter, the 400-plus kitties who call Cat Island home rest in the shade of specially constructed grass-covered play tunnels or loll about in pagodas. They cross a wooden bridge to stalk through pear orchards, the intrepid among them even venturing into the horse stable.

The pampered residents here were once strays in downtown Shanghai, a city of 25 million people and somewhere between 400,000 and 1.5 million stray cats. But efforts are underway to stem the exploding feral population in the metropolis and find homes for at least some of the newly neutered cats

Cat Island’s entire population is up for adoption. Many at “cat cafes” in the city do a similar thing: Provide a space where people can befriend and potentially take home a neutered, if shy, kitty.

There’s no equivalent of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in China. Instead, it’s left to grass-roots organizations like these to step in to save cats — from the streets, or from people who think they’re better off culled.

“Cat adoption has become quite popular in recent years, especially among the younger generation,” said Erica Guo, owner of all-rescue cat cafe More Meow Garden.

. . . and you can adopt the island’s cats, as (according to the article) cats are becoming more and more popular as pets in China:

At the end of 2022, a few months after Shanghai’s longest lockdown ended, a government-affiliated nonprofit foundation opened the 130-acre Shanghai Pet Base facility, which encompasses Cat Island.

It is concentrating on trapping and neutering strays, then returning them to the communities where they were found. When that’s not possible, they’re rehomed to Cat Island.

“This is what we are able to do, here and now,” said Zha Zhenliang, the foundation official responsible for Cat Island and the Pet Base. “We hope every [apartment] compound can have their own ‘cat island’ of a safe place for the cats to be,” and their feeders can operate openly, he said. Feeding strays can be a controversial activity, resulting in conflict between cat lovers and neighbors who just want them culled.

To adopt a Cat Island cat, people must first trek to the remote, grassy site outside Shanghai — a semirural location chosen to avoid angering neighbors — then complete a pet-care course and have their home inspected by video call for suitability. The precautions mean adoption numbers are barely denting the problem: In 18 months, only 130 cats have moved to new homes.

Here’s a 4½-minute video showing what the “island” is like. The cats seem pretty well taken care of.

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From Bored Panda we find a selection of fifty cat memes. Click below to read; I’ve selected a few for your delectation:

From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek From catsweek

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Here’s a heartening tale from MPR News of a lost cat found after going missing for more than a month. Click below to read or click the link in the first sentence:

The story:

“Lost trucker cat. Help me get home, call my team. Leave tuna for me,” reads a poster with a white and gray cat posted around St. Cloud.

At 2 a.m. on Jan. 17, “Tom the lost trucker cat” jumped out of his owner’s semi truck at the Pilot/Flying J truck stop off exit 171.

“He took a few steps, turned back and gave me one last look,” Owner Angel Anthony Garcia said. Tom was gone.

Garcia and his wife, Tom’s other owner Marie Sanchez, searched for him as long as they could without success. Garcia had to deliver a truck full of apples to Virginia and the deadline was approaching.

They made the difficult decision to leave and hoped that someone would find him. Garcia posted about him in a local Facebook page.

Oh, man, I wouldn’t have abandoned that cat. But here’s the poster, labeled as a “courtesy photo”; I like the “please feed” bit:

But he was found!

Jan Peterson was scrolling Facebook and saw Garcia’s post about Tom. She reached out to Garcia and Sanchez and told them she wanted to help. This isn’t her first time looking for a lost pet, she has helped many families through Facebook find lost animals.

She contacted her community and set up a Facebook group for Tom asking for tips. She put up signs, posted on social media and wished for the best.

Forty days had passed with no sign of Tom. At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, Peterson’s husband woke her up.

“I think somebody found Tom!” he said.

She ran out of bed to find the Facebook post and there he was. A sweet, slightly dirty, gray and white cat.

When Garcia and Sanchez got the call he was okay, they were speechless.

“It was devastating to me because he is the light of my life,” Sanchez said. “Knowing he survived, knowing that he was found, oh my gosh, I can’t even tell you, I am so overwhelmed with joy. I can’t wait to get to him.”

Tom was found by Jeremiah Moe at a metalworking shop in Sauk Rapids, 9 miles from where he went missing.

Here’s the FB post asking if this was the right cat. He looks as if he had a rough time:

The end of the tail. But if the owners truly love Tom, why haven’t they gotten him yet?

Peterson retrieved him and brought him to Rice Vet Clinic where Dr. Kayla Schmitz took over. He had lost about half his weight, was dehydrated and a little roughed up. He was given fluids and cleaned. After being missing for more than a month, he showed little impact of the Minnesota climate.

On his journey it is likely he ran into wildlife, including predators, and the Mississippi River. While we may never know what Tom did for all those days, it is clear he was determined to survive.

Now he is staying with a foster home until his owners can come retrieve him. Funds are tight for Garcia and Sanchez. They are trying to get a truck load they can drive that will run through Minnesota so they can get Tom, but they haven’t heard about any opportunities yet. They said they will get to him as soon as they are able to.

“Get to him as soon as they are able to”? Is that love?

A bit more:

Peterson credits the community in his rescuing.

“It was the whole community … they really went out of their way to watch for him at night. They would check and say, ‘I went here today, I didn’t see him, but I look for him every night before I go to bed.’ It was that kind of dedication.”

Sanchez said Tom never would have been found without the residents of St. Cloud.

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Lagniappe: A music-loving moggie perched on the piano, soothed by a lullaby.

h/t: Barry, Ginger K.

Today we have some noshing birds by reader Thomas Stringfellow. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

The photos were taken in July 2011 below the dam at Lake Barkley in Kentucky, and feature our old friend the Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax mycticorax) having lunch at the all-you-can-eat buffet. This is a remarkable place for many species of birds, and photographing them is made easier because they are largely habituated to humans.

The order obviously tells a story; I especially like the drink at the end to help wash down the fish.

Camera details: Nikon D3 camera shot in aperture priority mode, Nikkor 400 mm f/2.8 telephoto lens with a Nikon 1.4x teleconverter.