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The recent scandal at Guernica magazine was deeply embarrassing to me despite not having any involvement in or even awareness of the magazine.  This is because I know that if I had known about it I would have been inclined to support and endorse it on the basis of its description alone and so the dishonourable behaviour of its entire editorial team reflects on my judgement even though I never had the “opportunity” to make that error. And when I say “entire” I do mean to include both those who quit rather than make a coherent objection to the article as well as those who remained and caved to the pressure to unpost it.

Source: Bring Back The Culture of Debate! – by Ross Barkan

One answer to a Quora question about JKRowling goes as follows:

It isn’t what she herself has said, although she’s been generally insulting and has displayed great ignorance by denying the fact that the Nazis destroyed scientific literature about trans people. The problem is that she has publicly supported TERFS who *have* said bad things – people who approve of the murder of trans people (I’ve seen one here on Quora blaming Brianna Ghey for her own murder), and who want to have armed male guards in women’s loos to shoot any trans woman who tries to be in the same space as cis women.

Part of Rowling’s problem boils down to her inability to count. Yes, a very small minority of trans women are bogus and/or predators (I used to know one: they do exist). A small minority of lesbians are also sexual predators, and some teenage girls will sexually attack other females as a form of bullying, and even rape them with implements. The risk of an individual trans woman being a predator probably is higher than the risk of an individual cis lesbian or straight teenage girl being one, but since the number of cis lesbians and straight teenage girls is *enormously* higher than the number of trans women, they’re where the threat lies, if you want to get worked up about already very small dangers.

By getting hysterically fixated about a statistically tiny risk, TERFS have set the cause of women’s liberation back 50 years, making it seriously dangerous for any cis girl to appear anything other than fluffy and girly, or for any old woman to grow a moustache.

One can support the ideas of the Model T and Volkswagen without endorsing the other ideas of their promoters. The sins of the latter are of course so well known that any sign of approval of anything he did is suspect, but it is still quite possible for someone to endorse Henry Ford as belonging to the pantheon of great industrialists without being assumed to share (or consciously overlook) his racial views. So I still wonder if it is clear that JKR has ever supported the approval of murder of trans people, or the idea of having “armed male guards in women’s loos to shoot any trans woman who tries to be in the same space as cis women”.

Actually, I suspect that public washrooms are a non-issue for most of those who are often identifed as TERFs, but that their concern is more with places where they might have to disrobe in the open, and in the case of people who have been sexually assaulted with penises with wanting to have some guarantee that the person counselling them does not have one.

And with regard to the last paragraph in that answer, I have been told that what many feminists object to is not the existence of trans women but the suggestion that any girl who appears anything other than fluffy and girly, or who does not feel the need to eliminate any sign of facial hair, must accept the “reality” that she is actually a trans man.

Source: (1000) Claire Jordan’s answer to Can you specify the exact words Rowling says that’s transphobic and explain exactly why it is without saying it’s a “dog whistle”? Please don’t assume it’s “just so clear” because it isn’t to a large amount of people. – Quora

I expected to like this (more than 2 years) old piece by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff on the way opposing viewpoints seem to dig themselves deeper and deeper into extremes of overreach. But I was surprised to find in it yet another example of such overreach – one which may provide some insight into how these things often arise.

The section that bothers me is what strikes me as an overly defensive reaction to some readers of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’  who sent them “hate mail” for allegedly perpetuating the “Charlottesville Hoax” which is how some supporters of DJT characterize the response to his reference to some “very fine people” on both sides at that awful event.

Haidt and Lukianoff acknowledge that it would be wrong to say that “Trump called neo-Nazis and white nationalists very fine people.” But then they go on to say

But that’s not what we wrote. We wrote: “With those three words—‘very fine people’—the president showed that he was sympathetic to the men who staged the most highly publicized march for racism and antisemitism in the United States in many decades.”

Now it may be true that Trump was sympathetic to those organizers, or just that he wanted them to think he was; but neither is unequivocally shown by what he said – unless he used those words in reference specifically to the organizers rather than just to some of the attendees (who may have been potentially decent people motivated by a misguided sentimental attachment to a historical figure about whom they had been misinformed and/or whose evil aspects they were turning a blind eye to).

They go on to say more about Trump’s references to a permit without confirming that he knew that it had been obtained by a “prominent white nationalist”, and to the lack of disorder at the previous night’s rally (whose truly racist nature he may be able to claim he was not yet aware of).  These comments could well be part of a more complete argument for the case that Trump was indeed tacitly supporting the racist elements but they don’t support the claim quoted above that the words ‘very fine people’ (applied to “some” of the participants) are themselves sufficient.

Source: The Polarization Spiral (from the ‘Persuasion’ community on Medium)

It may seem to Palestinians that Western outrage over the murder of foreign food delivery workers is placing higher value on our own ethnicity than on the other victims. But it is more that by seeing the targeting of an aid convoy whose content is readily verified we are now better able to assess  the frequency of “misidentified” civilian targets in general and to understand that with or without an explicit mandate the IDF practice is indeed much closer than we might have realized to killing anything that moves without regard to any proper assessment of threat. (The killing of their own escaping hostages and of the medical team assisting a trapped child could have been just a small fraction of a vast number of interactions, but the number of aid workers killed in this and other incidents is much more clearly seen to be a shockingly high proportion of those on the ground.)

But it is probably still overreach to apply the label of genocide to the Israeli government as a whole. The problem is with establishing “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religions group, as such“. Accidental indiscriminate destruction as a side effect of the intended elimination of a political subgroup may almost certainly be a war crime but it does not necessarily qualify as genocide.

Source: IDF investigation shows mistakes and violation of protocol, officers disciplined – The Washington Post

What’s more, the grievance and resentment at the heart of Trumpist nationalism in America is in some ways quite similar to the mentality of Putinist nationalism in Russia: One obsesses over losing the culture war and being disrespected by the “elites”; the other, over losing the Cold War and being disrespected by the West. Perhaps this explains other similarities in the two mindsets, from the penchant for provocation and in-your-face defiance of norms to the affinity for conspiracy theories.

Source: When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin

Apparently FortisBC is being sued over ‘deceptive’ marketing tactics regarding so-called Renewable Natural Gas.

I haven’t seen what Fortis is actually offering or claiming, but capturing methane from waste dumps makes sense (and is renewable in the sense that the methane is being produced continuously by ongoing biological processes).

Ideally it might just be sequestered underground, but so long as people are still burning methane from the ground it makes sense to replace some of that supply with the recaptured stuff.

If the captured methane is more expensive to produce than that from the ground then it makes some sense to encourage people to choose to pay a premium for it. But it makes more sense to have a proper carbon tax on the ground-pumped stuff, with a lesser tax on the recovered so that using the recovered is actually cheaper for the consumer.

Source: FortisBC sued over ‘deceptive’ marketing tactics – Vancouver Is Awesome

One doesn’t “besiege” a site that is not resisting. So the question that comes to mind here is who is returning fire and how did they get in to “defend” the hospitals?

Source: Israeli forces besiege two hospitals, kill dozens in new Gaza attacks, Palestinian medics say – The Globe and Mail

and this on the after effects.

John Polkinghorne’s  Quantum Theory – a Very Short Introduction is a decent enough introduction to quantum theory, but might have been even better if 30% shorter.

The first two chapters are a pretty good introduction to the historical motivation and some basic features of the theory. But the third chapter is more problematic – perhaps in part because it is discussing philosophy rather than physics, and in philosophical discussions it is easier to misinterpret and/or misrepresent the opinions of others.

On pp42-43 Polkinghorne alludes to an “error” that some claim to have discovered in the work of John von Neumann, but many others read vN as not having ever actually made the claim that is found to be wrong.

On page 45 he makes the incorrect assertion that “the electron’s magnet can only point in two opposing directions”, when in fact the magnetic moment of the electron can be measured (and found to be nonzero) along any axis we like. What is true is that for  whatever direction we choose to measure, there can only be two possible observed values, which will be seen with probabilities depending on how the electron was prepared (eg on what previous measurement it has been subjected to); and this more correct statement is actually sufficient to motivate the subsequent discussion of “collapse”, so perhaps that error can be overlooked.

I don’t think Polkinghorne says anything particularly wrong or unfair about most of the approaches to the measurement/collapse issue, but as an advocate of the ‘Irrelevance/RelativeState’ school/sub-school I find it odd that he considers “seems very odd” to be a serious objection to an interpretation of Quantum Theory. Surely we all agree that, compared to our natural intuition, quantum theory is indeed “very odd”. Also I think he misses the point that the predictions of any human theory of physics are about what a human observer will see, so we should not be surprised that it’s also true of quantum theory; and the relative state approach does not actually depend on consciousness per se, as it can be applied more generally for states of one part of the universe relative to another regardless of whether or not the “observing” part corresponds to a conscious entity. And to call what is perhaps the most widespread approach among physicists “abhorrent to the mind of the scientist” is a bit presumptuous – as is the misuse of “treason of the clerks” to refer to an attitude of philosophical restraint when the term was originally used with regard more to the opposite.

When he gets back to proper physics in Chapter 4, I think the content is a pretty good summary of what is going on, but I start to have issues again in Chapter 5.

In particular the claim on p.79 that “the majority view leads to the conclusion that measurement on 1 produces an instantaneous change at 2” is, I think, false. Although the Bertelmann’s socks analogy does not in fact resolve the more sophisticated conundrums related to Bell’s inequality, it does show how the existence of a correlation does not necessarily imply any transmission of effect. And the spurious “produces an instantaneous change” language is especially odd since Polkinghorne does end the chapter pretty well clarifying that no FTL information transfer is enabled by quantum correlations.

Finally, while I don’t really find anything to object to in the more philosophical Chapter 6, neither do I see it as adding anything useful to our understanding of the physics.

Many (but not all) anti-genocide protests are themselves genocidal (in the opposite direction), so opposing those protests does not imply endorsing what they are protesting against.

And failing to recognize the genocidal aspects of an entity’s behaviour is not the same as being pro genocide.

Source: (1000) Alan Cooper’s answer to Why are there so many staunch pro genocide Israel supporters? Why do they oppose anti-genocide protests? – Quora

The life of Scandinavian writer Victoria Benedictsson, who achieved literary stardom under a male identity as Ernst Ahlgren and then committed suicide apparently due to unrequeited love for a man, is quite a fascinating story.

But it seems odd that in an essay (by a woman) suggesting that the story of that life was “stolen” by August Strindberg (as source material for one of his plays) we see mention of the titles and dates of various works by Strindberg (and other male authors) but only vague allusions to all but one of the many widely praised Benedictsson/Ahlgren works – including the novelized diaries that she left to a male friend, who published them in portions over the next 30 years, and which became a bestseller, which though not identified by title is described in the essay as “forceful as” (you guessed it) an explicitly named Strindberg novel.

Source: The woman behind Strindberg’s Miss Julie and her male alter ego | Aeon Essays

This makes things so much clearer (and more acceptable) to me.

According to Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the I.H.R.A. “definition”, its main intent was more to identify things as warning signs of possible antisemitism than as de facto evidence of actual antisemitism. And interpreted that way, as opposed to as a list of prohibited opinions, I could well agree with it.

Holding Israel to a higher standard than some other nations is often a sign of semitophilic respect rather than the opposite, but it is also often just an excuse for giving vent to pre-existing hatred. So, it’s certainly legitimate to include it as a sign of the need to look more deeply.

But the wording of the I.H.R.A. “definition”, and its claim to be such, definitely encourage what Stern would identify as its current misuses.

A much better version is provided by the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) and I am disappointed that Stern has not signed it, nor has he formally repudiated the I.H.R.A. definition.

This is especially odd given his recent observation that asking whether something is or is not antisemitism is the wrong question. “The question is, Why is this so binary that we want to label it this way or that way?”

Source: The Problem with Defining Antisemitism | The New Yorker

Nancy Mace claimed that she was being “shamed” as rape victim when George Stephanopoulos asked her how she could support Donald Trump after seeing the result of the E Jean Carroll lawsuit. But Stephanopoulos made no reference to Mace’s personal history in either his question or the subsequent argument. If he was “shaming” her it was for her support of someone found to be a rapist (albeit only in a civil trial where the criterion for proof is just on a “balance of probabilities” rather than to the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard of a criminal conviction). And any shaming of victims was by Mace herself when she belittled Carroll’s complaint on the grounds that she had been unexpectedly pleased that the amount of punitive damages awarded was vastly greater than what she had claimed as actual damages.

Source: Nancy Mace says she was ‘shamed’ as rape victim by George Stephanopoulos – The Washington Post

All sides in politics these days seem to think that it is a good idea to include and endorse any argument or “evidence” that appears to support their own cause, no matter how stupidly outlandish or unreliable the purported argument or evidence may be. Such overreach should be counterproductive by virtue of undermining the credibility of the presenter among potential supporters, but sadly it seems too often to actually get taken up by them (while rightly bringing ridicule from the other side) and so just ends up further entrenching both sides in ever more ridiculous positions.

A recent example occurs in this WaPo article about far-right anti-LGBTQ2S+++ activist Chaya Raichikcle, where it is alleged that she “pushed the false accusation that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats”. If that allegation is true, then of course the accusation (which I think we can all agree is certainly false) would indeed be an example of overreach by Ms Raichikcle. But I strongly suspect that it is in fact the reverse, and that the overreach is by WaPo author Taylor Lorenz in that the purported accusation was merely a joke.

Source: Libs of TikTok has become a major presence in Oklahoma’s schools – The Washington Post

A Quora questioner asks: How do you solve the Twin Paradox if everyone (including the waypoint) is co-moving at the get-go? But what’s with the “if” in this question? And what do they mean by the word “co-moving” other than perhaps stationary with respect to one another?

The standard version of the Twin “Paradox” starts with two twins, who are obviously “co-moving” in that sense at birth, and a distant star which is also “co-moving” (ie stationary with respect to the twins). Then at some point one of the twins travels to the star and back (usually with unspecified periods of acceleration and mostly constant speed in both directions).

Any correct application of Special Relativity predicts that when they re-unite the traveller is younger. The age difference can be calculated in terms of any frame of reference and (for any specified acceleration history – including that of instantaneous speed jumps) the answer is always the same so there is no real paradox.

The alleged “paradox” arises only in the mind of someone who notices that the traveller perceives the homie to have been ageing more slowly during the constant-speed legs of the trip and then just ignores the fact that the traveller also perceives a sudden rapid ageing of the homie during the turn-around. (During that turn-around the traveller feels the force of acceleration and so is aware of being in a non-inertial frame, whereas the homie feels no such forces. So the situation is definitely NOT symmetrical.)

Source: (1001) Alan Cooper’s answer to How do you solve the Twin Paradox if everyone (including the waypoint) is co-moving at the get-go? – Quora

This essay suggesting that “it’s time to replace the genetic blueprint idea” seems to be confounding the genome itself with its expression. For while the genome as a whole only implicitly and incompletely specifies the overall structure and behaviour of an organism, it does basically comprise a library of what are almost literally (and certainly much more than figuratively) actual blueprints for component proteins which fit together like a jig-saw puzzle (though perhaps one with more than one “solution”) to create parts including organelles and ribosomes which open successive volumes in the library and continue the process of expression to construct ever more complex parts which eventually culminate in the entire organism.

So, although I empathize to some extent with the political motivation here, I think that, as often happens, the desire to correct an overly simplistic interpretation has through its own overreach led to a less than credible attack on the basic validity of the metaphor.

Source: Why it’s time to replace the genetic blueprint idea | Aeon Essays

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/wp-content/uploads/Godel-Basic-Theorems-and-Their-Implications-1.pdf

In addition to his amusing “proof” of the existence of God, Kurt Gödel also argued for belief in an afterlife in letters written to his mother. But I don’t share the view, expressed by Alexander T Englert in this Aeon Essay, that “because the correspondence was private, he did not feel the need to hide his true views, which he might have done in more formal academic settings and among his colleagues at the IAS”.  On the contrary I suspect that he knew well that the arguments were not valid and just used them as a comfort for his mother to alleviate her distress – probably not at death itself but at the fact that they lived far apart and he was unwilling to travel to see her.

Source: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death | Aeon Essays

While there needs to be a broad campaign emphasizing that Trump is a threat to the rule of law it should be something that Joe Biden actually refrains from making any comment on so that he can remain above the perceptions of mere name-calling and muckracking. Rather he should continue to focus on policy differences and economic performance.

Source: Joe Biden Makes Saving Democracy the Center of His Campaign | The New Yorker

I agree that the idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ is Eurocentric, and that in versions which imply that pre-Eurocolonial Africa was simple and homogeneous it is insultingly vacuous and wrong. But Africa is not alone in being so insulted, and on the other hand many students of ‘precolonial Africa’ as well as the similarly misnamed ‘precolonial America’ and (to a lesser extent) ‘precolonial Australia’ and (to a greater extent) ‘precolonial Asia’ do indeed recognize the diversity of those cultures and histories.

Also, I find it a bit ironic that the other side of that Eurocentric misnaming is the implication that colonialism is a uniquely European invention; as in fact all those pre-Eurocolonial histories are replete with instances of colonial and other imperialism – many of which give Eurocolonialism a substantial run for its money as being the most offensive.

Source: The idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ is vacuous and wrong |  Essays