How can Douglas Murray lecture on antisemitism in Amsterdam, the very city that deplatformed several of us simply for having sympathy for Israel, which wasn’t a topic of our scheduled discussion? Maarten Boudry tells me that for the video below “he was invited by a right-wing party, so the rabid anti-Israel activists have no clout there.”
Yes, Murray is a conservative, but on the topic of Israel he’s on both the money and on the morality. That’s why many dislike him, though he’s been demonized for other reasons, like his distaste for immigrants coming to the West. I won’t discuss that here, as the video below doesn’t deal with that. If you’ve heard Murray on this topic before, there’s not much new, but I listened anyway.
If you click on “notes” at the youTube site after expanding the details, you’ll get a link to a transcript that goes along with the video. I actually listened to this rather than read it, as I like Murray’s eloquence. The lecture itself ends at 36:15, and then there are 24 minutes of audience questions, which Murray writes down and then answers. Here’s a near-comprehensive list:
Is it possible to defeat Hamas?
How do we get the ball rolling to get rid of antisemitism?
What are the psychological sources of antisemitism?
Should we stop using the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” or “pro-Palestinian” given that there is not really a Palestinian people or country?
Given that the people of Iran are pro-Israel but its regime is the biggest source of anti-Israel weapons and support, what do we do?”
Why are the countries of Spain and Ireland vehemently anti-Israel while other European countries are more sympathetic to the country?
What can we do to make the silent majority about Israel “rise up”?
What do you think about Europe defending Western values?
What about Russia and China and other countries attacking Western values?
I can’t resist calling attention to his barb about Greta Thunberg, and why she’s the Nordic equivalent of a rōnin, a samurai without a master. The analogy starts at 47:14.
h/t: Bat
Our previous provost, Daniel Diermeier, became Chancellor (i.e., President) of Vanderbilt University, and that was a great loss to us. Since he went to Vandy, he’s enforced prohibitions against trespassing and illegal violations of free speech (building occupations), and also adopted both the Free Speech Principles and the Institutional Neutrality that he experienced at the University of Chicago. I wish he were our President now, as he’s doing a bang-up job at Vandy.
Harvard recently tried to go institutionally neutral, too, and it did a pretty good job, as I wrote about here and here. But Diermeier finds one problem with Harvard’s neutrality that eluded me. It’s important, as it involves university investments—the object of much rancor these days. Diermeier identifies Harvard’s blind spot in the following WSJ article (it isn’t archived, so ask if you want a pdf):
Click to read:
Actually, the article makes two points. First, it explains why institutional neutrality is importantin a clear and succinct way (the Kalven Report is much longer):
In explaining institutional neutrality and why it’s important, most proponents point to the 1967 Kalven Report from the University of Chicago. At the report’s heart is the assertion that neutrality is necessary for maintaining conditions conducive to a university’s purpose. The report points out that universities and their leaders risk stifling debate when they stake out official positions. Moreover, when a university or its administrative units take a political stance, it invites lobbying and competitive advocacy by various campus constituencies, which turns the university into a political battlefield and erodes its unique purpose—promoting the pursuit of knowledge and truth.
Taking official positions also erodes the university’s commitment to expertise. Recognizing and rewarding deep knowledge, and making sharp distinctions between experts and nonexperts, is part of a university’s reason for being. When university leaders make declarations on issues they know little about, often in haste, they compromise that reverence for expertise. Even in the rare case where leaders are domain experts, they should avoid making official statements to keep from chilling debate.
He also points out a semantic issue that, comparing Harvard’s neutrality with Chicago’s, is a distinction without a difference:
Oddly, the two co-chairs of the Harvard faculty working group that recommended the new policy wrote in a recent op-ed piece that “the principle behind our policy isn’t neutrality.” Instead, they seek to further “values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise.” There is little to distinguish those values from those of the Kalven Report.
Sorting out these semantics can be left to future historians of academia. The important thing is that Harvard agrees the duty of the university is to be a forceful advocate only when it comes to its core functions—and to be silent on other matters.
The recent op-ed by two Harvard professors who confected their neutrality report, an op-ed that I criticized in the first link above, appeared in the NYT, and can be found archived here. The op-ed was quite a bit different from the proposed policy. But the policy is what’s in force.
BUT. . . . somehow neutrality went out the window at Harvard when it comes to investing, about which Harvard refuses to explicitly affirm institutional neutality. Diermeier says this:
Yet although Harvard’s change of heart is encouraging news for higher education, its new policy makes a crucial omission that is at the core of the current controversy on campuses.
Students at universities nationwide have called on their institutions to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. According to the Harvard working group co-chairs, it didn’t “address, much less solve, the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio.” Its members classified divestment “as an action rather than a statement” and thus treated the question as “outside our mandate.”
This is a distinction without a difference. Whether you call it an action or a statement, politically or socially motivated divestment plainly violates institutional neutrality because it requires a university to choose a side in a debate unrelated to its core function, thus signaling that there is only one acceptable way to think about the issue.
When a university’s portfolio manager makes the considered and consequential decision to divest from a company because its stock seems overvalued, this is legitimate fiduciary oversight. But divesting because an entity does business with the Israeli government is a clear violation of institutional neutrality. A university’s investment goal should be to maximize the rate of return, which means more funding for faculty research and student aid.
Institutional neutrality firmly supports a university’s purpose. So after an era when universities have been quick to issue position statements on the political controversies of the day, it is good that they are getting out of that game. It is a university’s job to encourage debates, not settle them. But for any university policy prohibiting political statement-making to be comprehensive and effective, it must address and discourage politically driven divestment.
This is why any university aspiring to institutional neutrality must not make an exception of investments, which could lay the university open to all kinds of moral, political, and ideological pressures from both within and without the school. Calls for universities to divest from Israel, which are ubiquitous, should not be heeded—and they often aren’t. The same goes for Palestine or any kind of call for divestment driven by other than pecuniary considerations. Diermeier’s explanation of why investments should also be institutionally neutral is important, and those who want universities to be neutral should read it and absorb it. That includes Harvard.
I wonder how much money it would take to lure Diermeier back to Chicago, where he should, in my view, be promptly installed as President.
At our current level of knowledge, many exoplanet findings take us by surprise. The only atmospheric chemistry we can see with clarity is Earth’s, and we still have many unanswered questions about how our planet and its atmosphere developed. With Earth as our primary reference point, many things about exoplanet atmospheres seem puzzling in comparison and generate excitement and deeper questions.
That’s what’s happened with GJ-3470 b, a Neptune-like exoplanet about 96 light-years away.
Astronomers discovered the planet during a 2012 High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) campaign. The campaign was searching for short-period planets orbiting M-dwarfs (red dwarfs). When it was discovered, it was called a hot Uranus. It doesn’t take an astrophysicist to figure out why that term has fallen out of favour, and now it’s called a sub-Neptune planet.
GJ-3470 b is about 14 times more massive than Earth, takes 3.3 days to complete one orbit, and is about 0.0355 AU from its star.
New research presented at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society and soon to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that the planet’s atmosphere contains more sulphur dioxide than expected. The lead researcher is Thomas Beatty, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“We didn’t think we’d see sulphur dioxide on planets this small, and it’s exciting to see this new molecule in a place we didn’t expect since it gives us a new way to figure out how these planets formed.”
Thomas Beatty, University of Wisconsin, MadisonGJ-3470 b’s atmosphere is well characterized among exoplanets. The JWST has aimed its powerful spectroscopic eyes at the planet and revealed more detail than ever. Spectroscopy examines the light from its star as it passes through the planet’s atmosphere, revealing its chemical constituents.
Sub-Neptunes like GJ-3470 b are the most common type of exoplanet detected. Astronomers have detected carbon and oxygen in two of them, TOI-270d and K2-18b, which are important scientific results. But in GJ-3470 b’s atmosphere, astronomers also detected water, methane, and, more significantly, sulphur dioxide (SO2).
“The thing is, everybody looks at these planets, and often everybody sees flat lines,” said Beatty. “But when we looked at this planet, we really didn’t get a flat line.”
Finding SO2 was a surprise because GJ-3470 b is the smallest and coolest exoplanet to have the compound in its atmosphere. Image Credit: Beatty et al. 2024This is the coldest and lightest exoplanet with sulphur dioxide in its atmosphere. The finding is significant in the effort to understand the different ways that planets form and evolve. The sulphur dioxide probably comes from chemical reactions in the atmosphere, as radiation from the nearby star tears hydrogen sulphide molecules apart, freeing the sulphur, which then bonds to oxygen, forming sulphur dioxide.
The amount of sulphur dioxide is also surprising. There’s about one million times more SO2 than expected.
“We didn’t think we’d see sulphur dioxide on planets this small, and it’s exciting to see this new molecule in a place we didn’t expect since it gives us a new way to figure out how these planets formed,” said Beatty, who worked as an instrument scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope before joining the UW–Madison faculty. “And small planets are especially interesting because their compositions are really dependent on how the planet-formation process happened.”
Astronomers found sulphur dioxide in WASP-39b, a hot Jupiter. But it’s 100 times more massive and two times hotter than GJ-3470 b. It forms the same way on both planets.
This image shows what the powerful JWST found in WASP-39b’s atmosphere. It was the first exoplanet where carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide were detected. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)“On both planets, SO2 is produced through photochemistry on the planetary daysides: light from the star hits the top of the atmosphere and breaks apart sulfur-bearing molecules, and then the sulfur-atom wreckage from those photon/molecule collisions recombines with other molecules in the atmosphere and forms into SO2,” Beatty told Universe Today.
Beatty and his co-researchers tried to identify the pathways that could create SO2 through recombination. But the planet’s coolness led to dead ends.
“Identifying the correct recombination pathways was an important part of understanding SO2 on WASP-39b – but these predicted effectively zero SO2 on a planet as cool as GJ 3470b,” Beatty told Universe Today. It turns out that the atmospheric metallicity allows it to happen.
“As a part of these observations, we determined that the high metallicity of GJ 3470b’s atmosphere (it’s about 100x more metal-rich than WASP-39b) can drive SO2-producing reactions at much lower temperatures,” Beatty explained in an email exchange. “Put another way, we realized that all of the ambient water and carbon dioxide in GJ-3470 b’s atmosphere make the recombination process to form sulphur dioxide much more efficient than on larger giant exoplanets like WASP-39b.”
Astronomers can’t piece together a planet’s formation history without a complete account of its atmospheric constituents. With a complete list, they can start to tell the story of its formation. “Discovering sulfur dioxide in a planet as small as GJ 3470 b gives us one more important item on the planet formation ingredient list,” said Beatty.
But there’s more to the planet’s story than the SO2 and other atmospheric chemicals. It follows a polar orbit, which is a strong clue that the planet has been bullied out of its original orbit. It’s also extremely close to its star and has likely lost much of its atmosphere, blown away into space by the star’s powerful stellar wind. It may have lost 40% of its atmosphere.
“That migration history that led to this polar orbit and the loss of all this mass — those are things we don’t typically know about other exoplanet targets we’re looking at,” Beatty said. “Those are important steps in the recipe that created this particular planet and can help us understand how planets like it are made.”
The post Sulphur Makes A Surprise Appearance in this Exoplanet’s Atmosphere appeared first on Universe Today.
Nature, perhaps the world’s premier science journal, has, like most of its kind, gone woke. Nowhere is this more obvious than its abandoning of science articles in favor of ideological ones, so it’s undergoing convergent evolution with not only its competitor Science, but also Scientific American.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the essay below, which is not only science-free, but wholly about semantics. And useless semantics to boot, at least to my eye. The whole purpose is to introduce a new term, “gender modality,” which, the authors say, will be of great help to people who don’t identify as “male” or “female”, and keep them from being “erased”. The thing is, the other terms that fall under this rubric already exist, so grouping them as aspects of “gender modality,” a term whose definition is confusing, adds nothing to any social discourse that I can see. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Click below to read; you can also find it archived here.
The usual caveat applies again: people of non-standard gender, including transgender people, deserve nearly every right—and certainly every moral and legal right—as well as every civility, as people of the two standard genders. (My exceptions, as usual, include sports, where one is incarcerated, sex-specific shelters for the abused and rape counseling.) That said, let’s proceed to the semantics.
The authors are promoting the term “gender modality” because it was invented by the first author, Florence Ashley, whose page says she is “metaphorically a biorg witch with flowers in their hair.” Dr. Ashley is a transwoman who uses the “they” pronoun.
The term gender modality was coined in 2019 by one of us (F.A.) in response to frustrations felt as a trans bioethicist and jurist with the limits of existing language (see go.nature.com/3×34784). The term has since been used by transgender communities, clinicians and policymakers to describe the realities of trans communities and the heterogeneity of trans experiences.
So what is the definition of the term? Here it is (bolding is mine):
A person’s gender identity is their sense of gender at any given time. By contrast, gender modality refers to how a person’s gender identity relates to the gender they were assigned at birth (see go.nature.com/3×34784). It is a mode or way of being one’s gender.
The best-known gender modalities are ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’, but the term allows for other possibilities, such as ‘agender’, which includes those who do not identify with any gender, and ‘detrans’ or ‘retrans’ for people who have ceased, shifted or reversed their gender transition. The term also makes space for gender modalities specific to intersex individuals, gender-questioning people, people with dissociative identity disorder and people with culture-specific identities (see ‘Many ways of being’). Gender modality serves a similar purpose to sexual orientation, which describes a facet of human existence and makes space for orientations beyond gay and straight.
Well, this is confusing. First of all, I reject the notion of “gender assigned at birth”. The proper term here is SEX DETERMINED AT BIRTH. Once again, like so many gender ideologues, the authors think that sex is not a binary, but represents some point on a spectrum that doctors “assign”. But sex is a reality, not a semantic, socially constructed invention, and, using the gametic definition for “biological sex”, 99.82% of humans (and surely an equally high percentage of other animals) fall into the classes “male” or “female” depending on whether they have the developmental equipment to make small mobile gametes or large, immobile ones.
Leaving that aside, I still can’t quite understand how “gender modality” differs from “gender identity”. Doesn’t “agender” or “intersex” refer to a person’s sense of how they feel? If not, what does it mean to say that those two terms “refer to how someone’s gender identity relates to the ‘gender they were assigned at birth'”? In fact, neither of those terms say anything about what sex someone was determined to be at birth. Those terms, and the ones the authors list below as “gender modalities”, leave the question of “gender assigned at birth” undetermined, so the notion of “relating how you identify with what you were determined to be at birth” seems meaningless. For example, here’s the list they give of these terms.
You’ve probably seen many of these terms before, and they all refer to people’s sense of who they are. In fact, you can simply eliminate the term of gender modality and just use the identities themselves, perhaps—as in complicated cases like “two spirit identities”—with some necessary explanation. If you’re asked by a person or on a questionnaire, “Are you transgender?” You can either say “yes” or “no”, or explain how you identify (in many cases you ‘ll have to do this).
For some reason, the authors, who simply reiterate only part of a list of gender identities, but call them gender modalities, think that the “gender modality” term itself can improve the work of scientific researchers in three ways:
First, scientists can expand the gamut of gender modalities included in questionnaires given to participants, to capture a broader range of experiences than those represented by the binary of cis and trans. Formulating new categories, adapted to the study design, will enhance the validity of the research7,8. It could also improve response rates and reduce the likelihood of people dropping out.
What they’re really saying is that sometimes, for some purposes, it’s useful to use gender identities to avoid “erasing” people. (Yes, they use that term, saying that using the wrong term will “erase gender trajectories and experiences”. No, they don’t get erased: you still have yours!) It’s just that if it’s important to researchers to know these things, then you they have to ask specifically how you feel about yourself. Using the word “gender modality” instead of “gender identity” adds nothing to this endeavor.
Number two:
The second way in which researchers can use gender modality to improve their work is by using it to refine how they phrase questions or discuss results.
By reflecting on gender modality, researchers can better ensure that participants feel respected, and can avoid assigning gender modalities that conflict with participants’ identities. Recognizing gender modalities beyond cis and trans is a matter of justice. In some studies, offering write-in opportunities can help participants to feel respected despite the nuances of their experiences not being captured. But it could be as simple as using ‘gender modality’ instead of ‘gender identity’ or ‘transgender status’ in a table heading, because the last two terms can be seen as inaccurate or marginalizing.
If gender identity is important in a study (and realize that this applies only to humans and gender identity isn’t relevant for every study involving sex), then by all means use in a write-in option, which to me, given the number of “gender identities” available (there are over 100 now!) seems necessary in any case.
The key to this paper lies in the second paragraph above: getting people’s gender identity correct is a matter of “justice”, and by that they mean “social justice”. Well, sometimes it is important, in which case you must use the write-in option (given 100d+ different gender identities, ticking boxes won’t work. Or if both biological sex and gender identity are important, here’s a questionnaire I suggest.
Biological Sex
Male
Female
Other (please explain)__________
Gender identity
Male
Female
Other (please explain)__________
That should take care of everything.
“Advantage” number three is like number two, but is about civility rather than justice:
Finally, researchers can use gender modality to think more meticulously about what it is that they are really trying to capture in their study.
Linguistic gaps abound when it comes to our ability to describe trans people’s experiences. For instance, discrimination against trans people is often described as discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Although this shorthand might be workable, it is not entirely accurate. If a trans woman is fired for being trans, should we say that her gender identity was targeted when she has the same gender identity as cis women? Although her gender identity was part of the equation, it would be more accurate to say that she was discriminated against on the basis of her gender modality. Gender modality, not gender identity, is what distinguishes trans women from cis women.
No, what distinguishes trans women from cis women is their biological sex, not “modality rather than identity”. Adding “modality” here doesn’t change the legal case, which is this: someone was fired because their gender identity didn’t match their biological sex. As you can see, this whole mishigas comes from the authors’ refusal to use the word “sex”, which does not appear by itself in the whole article (it shows up a few times in words like “intersex”).
The authors say this at one point: “Not everyone is male or female.” Well, only one out of 5600 persons is not, and they’re exaggerating that number, as many do, thinking that it somehow empowers those of different gender identity. But biological sex is a scientific term with a well-understood meaning, and those who feel that they don’t conform to the “male” or “female” stereotypes still have a biological sex, but sense their nonconformity with the stereotypes associated with that sex. That’s fine, and they can explain their feelings to anyone they want—if explanation is important. (Like race, gender identity has become someone’s single most important characteristic.) In fact, I think that everyone who has a gender identity different from male or female would explain the differences in a unique way, so explanation is nearly always imperative.
Towards the end, the authors sort of admit that using the term “gender modality” isn’t a big fix:
Gender modality is not a panacea. Rather, it is one piece in the toolbox of those who engage in research involving human participants, whether in the medical, biological or social sciences. Its power lies in what people make of it. Our hope is that researchers and others will play with it, stretching it and exploring its full potential. Rather than foreclosing the evolution of language, gender modality welcomes it.
“Its power lies in what people make of it.” Well, I don’t make anything of it; it seems to me identical to “gender identity”. And I’m not going to “play with the term.” That suggestion itself shows the postmodernism inherent in this view.
The most important aspect of this article to me is this: Why on earth did one of the world’s best science journals publish it? The answer is undoubtedly this: Nature is virtue signaling, publishing an article on semantics to cater to gender activists. It’s progressive, Jake! But it also demeans the journal. Just think: there could have been three pages of real science in its place, science from which you could learn something. Did you learn anything from this article beyond the fact that Nature is falling prey to ideology?