Star Wars Day Special: Waitress promised Toyota, gets Toy Yoda, sues

May 5, 2019 – 2:45 pm

In honor of yesterday being Star Wars Day, we present this hilarious but true story from a while back. This woman would have a good case unless the company represented IN PRINT that the winner would get a “Toy Yoda.” Apparently, they didn’t, and even implied (see below) that that the Big Prize was indeed a vehicle. Ergo, the suit was settled for an undisclosed amount/car. The manager said it was an April Fools joke, but I think he bit off more than he could chew.

She looks pissed off!

This took place in the early Oughts, judging from this entry on the University of Las Vegas Law Site.

My only question is this: if Ms. Berry was working at Gulf Coast Wings, why on earth would they identify her as a “Former Hooters waitress” in both places?

 

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in contest | Comments (14)

Muslim society dismisses Islamist school video as “an unintended mistake and an oversight”

May 5, 2019 – 1:30 pm

Here’s a short and brand-new article from Philly.com about the video I posted this morning, a video showing young children at an Islamic Center spewing hatred and bigotry.

Yes, they should indeed investigate how this happened, and while they’re doing it they should take steps to prevent the further hate-brainwashing of young Muslims. But really, how could this highly choreographed scenario, complete with a script, be “an unintended mistake and an oversight”? Maybe somebody wasn’t paying attention, which accounts for the “oversight”, but what about the “mistake” part?

Oy gewalt!

h/t: Malgorzata

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in anti-semitism, Muslims behaving badly | Comments (14)

Inclusion via exclusion: Andrew Sullivan critiques segregated housing at Williams College

May 5, 2019 – 12:00 pm

The middle bit of Andrew Sullivan’s latest “Intelligencer” column at New York Magazine calls out Williams College and similar colleges that practice or propose to practice segregated housing—now given the convenient euphemism of “affinity housing”.  I’m pleased that Andrew got the idea for this section from reading this website (see below), but even more pleased that Sullivan puts the weight of his pulpit and his intellect against segregated housing. (Let’s call it what it is.) A screenshot from Sullivan:

He adds this, all of which I’ve written about before, but not with Sullivan’s panache, which is on display here:

Segregation as the pathway to integration seems to be the argument, a point with some uncomfortable precedents dating back to before Brown v. Board of Education. The student group demanding this recently announced on its Instagram page that “the administration expressed general support for affinity housing and together we came up with a pilot program for affinity housing that was feasible given the avenues of change at the college.” If you want to see how this kind of transformation happens, check out this video of a student council meeting on April 9 discussing whether there should be funding for racially segregated events at “Previews,” when prospective students visit the campus to check it out. At around the 45-minute mark, two students enter the room, ranting and swearing as they insist that their demands for the programs be met. They were, of course.

As I’ve reported before, there are ample sociological data suggesting that people get along better when they get to know each other. Segregated housing erodes that ability. Sullivan adduces additional data, and though the results aren’t 100% uniform, the upshot is that priming students with “color blind” rather than “multicultural” (i.e., identity-politic) approaches tends to make students more aware of ethnic differences and imbue them with stronger stereotypes about different groups. Sullivan concludes this from these studies:

. . . the more focus you put on race, the more conscious people are of it as a valid and meaningful distinction between people, and the more likely they are to reify it. At today’s diversity-driven campus or corporation, often your first instinct when seeing someone is to quickly assess their identity — black, white, gay, Latino, male, trans, etc. You are required to do this all the time because you constantly need to check your privilege. And so college students — and those who hire and fire in business — are trained to judge a person instantly by where they fit into a racial and gender hierarchy, before they even engage them. Of course they’re going to end up judging people instantly by the color of their skin. Social justice has a strict hierarchy of identity, with white straight males at the bottom. It is, in fact, a mirror image of the far right’s racial hierarchy, which puts white straight men at the top.

. . .In other words, teaching people to see other races as completely different from one’s own may encourage us to define others by stereotypes.

When the deep tribal forces in the human psyche are constantly on alert for racial difference, we run the risk of exacerbating racism. So we face the prospect that anti-racism could facilitate what it is attempting to destroy. It wouldn’t be the first time that a well-intentioned experiment has backfired.

Back to Williams College. Recent demands for segregated housing at that ritzy institution came from an Authoritarian Leftist group at Williams called CARENow, which sent a list of demands to the president and trustees, one of which was for segregated housing:

3. Improve community spaces and establish affinity housing for Black, queer, and all other minoritized students.

Note that the housing is to be segregated not just by race, but by sexuality and god knows what other criteria define “minoritized” status. (Note too the use of the neologism “minoritized”, which, contrary to the word “minority”, implies that somebody is doing oppressive “othering”. But, as biology professor Luana Maroja argues, this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least at Williams.)

Now after the first year, Williams students have the right to share dorm space with other students of their choice, which leads to a form of self-segregation. I have no strong objections to that policy, though I think it may have inimical effects on “inclusion.” What I object to is a university designating living space for any group that others cannot inhabit. That is a form of segregation that, as Sullivan says, is touted as a pathway to integration. Does anybody really believe that?

On the designated date—President Maud Mandel is nothing if not compliant to the demands of protestors—the President issued a response to the demands on her official website (click on screenshot below). I’ll note in passing that Mandel, buying into the protestors’ rhetoric, uses the word “minoritized” five times.

I won’t go into her responses to the protestors’ many demands, as it’s a long document, but I do want to give her response to the demand for segregated housing. First of all, she seems to be open to it. Second, she vociferously claims that it’s not really segregated (my emphasis).

Another area of the residential life discussion that has attracted widespread attention is the idea of affinity housing. College leaders have been in constructive conversations with students leading this cause. In discussion with them, we have stressed the importance of embedding our conversations in the wider discussion around residential life that will be a central feature of the Strategic Planning process. Doing so will also enable us to collect relevant data from other schools to inform our thinking. In this spirit, the working group will consider the idea of a pilot along with other possibilities. We do want to pause and recognize that, at the time of writing, some students involved in the affinity housing and other efforts are being subjected to unduly harsh media and social media attention that misrepresents affinity housing as “segregation.”

In reality, people on campuses across America already opt to live together based on various shared interests and identities: French language students, film studies, Christian fellowship students, vegetarians, hockey players, etc. The question is not whether such an idea is valid in principle, but how to reconcile in practice the impulse toward free association with Williams’ commitment to a diverse living community. Any pilot that is considered should take these questions into account, as well as looking at the successes and struggles of comparable efforts elsewhere. But we believe such questions should not be a bar to exploring the idea in the course of strategic planning.

Note that Mandel implies that “the impulse towards free association” is at odds with “Williams’ commitment to a diverse living community,” but that’s not true. Williams is in fact committed to a community that has racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity, but not to a community in which individuals from different groups are encouraged to mingle. If ever a college is deliberately balkanized, it’s Williams.

Mandel needs to read Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which points out how unpalatable policies can be softened simply by giving them different names.  Exactly how, President Mandel, is “affinity housing”, which separates groups of people based on their ethnicity or sexuality, different from segregated housing?

And yes, of course people on campuses across America already live with others of like minds/interests/pigmentation. That is okay. What is not okay is to mandate segregated spaces where others aren’t allowed. That idea is NOT “valid in principle.” Can you imagine a Southern segregationist making similar arguments in favor of racial segregation, either at colleges or in communities? After all, that is “white affinity housing.” (Note Mandel’s clever omission of “ethnicity”, “sexuality” and “race” from the list of “shared interests and identities.”)

Once again we see a double standard: it’s okay to segregate students by race so long as the students of color are the ones who can exclude others. It doesn’t work the other way around (and shouldn’t!). All such forms of mandated segregation are odious and, rather than being inclusive, are divisive.

For years Williams has resisted the notion of such segregated housing, and good for that. Now, however, the school is on the verge of capitulating to the demands of neo-segregationists like CARENow. Williams depends heavily on the donations of rich alumni to finance it: it has one of the largest per (student) capita endowments in America. I hope that those alumni are paying attention to how their money is being used.

h/t: cesar, Simon

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in Authoritarian and Regressive Left, Authoritarian Left, authoritarian leftists, college students behaving badly, Colleges acting badly | Comments (24)

American Muslim children get radicalized

May 5, 2019 – 10:35 am

I’ve written repeatedly about how children in some Middle Eastern countries are conditioned to hate both Jews and Israel from a very young age—an age far too low to be able to parse questions of politics and justice. This is state-sanctioned brainwashing, and reminds me of the South Pacific song “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Have a look at these lyrics, which are especially apposite today:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

Many Muslim communities specialize in this kind of teaching, and, sadly not just in the Middle East. It also happens in the U.S., where Muslims are supposed to be far more integrated in local society than they are elsewhere. That’s surely true in general, but nevertheless stuff like this goes on. As MEMRI posts on this link, we have radicalization in Pennsylvania:

On April 22, 2019, the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly) uploaded a video of an “Ummah Day” celebration to its Facebook page in which young children wearing Palestinian scarves sang: “Glorious steeds call us and lead us [to] the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The blood of martyrs protects us… Take us, oh ships… until we reach our shores and crush the treacherous ones… Flow, oh rivers of martyrs!” A young girl read a poem praising martyrs who sacrificed their lives for Palestine, and she asked: “Will [Jerusalem] be a hotbed for cowards?” Another young girl read: “We will defend [Palestine] with our bodies… We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”

MAS Philly belongs to the Muslim American Society (MAS), which has 42 chapters in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. MAS’ website says that its mission is to “move people to strive for God-consciousness, liberty and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity,” and that its vision is “a virtuous and just American society.”

Here’s a video from the Ummah Day celebration. These kids can’t be more than eight or nine years old:

Part of the transcript:

Take us, oh ships, until we liberate our lands – until we reach our shores and crush the treacherous ones […]

Blow, oh winds of Paradise – flow, oh rivers of martyrs! My Islam is calling, who is going to heeds its call? Rise, oh righteous ones! […]

Girl 1: Our martyrs sacrificed their lives without hesitation. They attained Paradise, and the scent of musk emanates from their bodies. They compete with one another to reach Paradise. Will Jerusalem be their capital city, or will it be a hotbed for cowards? […]

Girl 2: We will defend the land of divine guidance with our bodies, and we will sacrifice our souls without hesitation. We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque. We will lead the army of Allah fulfilling His promise, and we will subject them to eternal torture.

Chop off their heads? Martyrs? Liberate our lands? Kids this young shouldn’t be parroting this stuff!

 

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in brainwashing, Muslims behaving badly | Comments (29)

Once again, John Staddon maintains that religious morality is superior to secular morality

May 5, 2019 – 9:00 am

John Staddon and I have been having “words” in Quillette. It began with Staddon’s piece “Is Secular Humanism a Religion?“, a question he answered in the affirmative, even though secular humanism violated two of Staddon’s three defining traits of religion. I thus responded both here and then in a rebuttal in Quillette, “Secular Humanism is not a religion“.

Now Staddon has written a short reply to my critique, also in Quillette. See below; you can access it by clicking on the screenshot:.

First, Staddon denies that he ever claimed that secular humanism is a religion. That’s just not true, as you can see not just from his original title (which, he claims, was “misleading” and was chosen by Quillette), but also from the very first sentence of his article: “It is now a rather old story: secular humanism is a religion.”  Apparently the man cannot read his own piece! Or perhaps he reads it like he reads his Bible, picking and choosing the parts that support his argument while ignoring the rest.

But leave that aside, for in his new piece Staddon wants to emphasize the main point of his first piece: that, like religious ethics, secular ethics are based on faith and cannot be “proved”:

. . . in no case are secular commandments derivable from reason. Like religious “oughts” they are also matters of faith. Secular morals are as unprovable as the morals of religion.

In fact, Staddon sees religious morals as superior to secular ones because they rest on religious stories, stories that he admits are myths. But at least religious morals rest on something. Secular ethics, so he claims, are based on nothing:

My argument is simple: religions have three characteristics: spiritual, mythical/historical, and moral. Secular humanism lacks the first two and is often quite critical of these aspects of religion. But they are largely irrelevant to politics. Hence the truth or falsity of religious myths is also irrelevant, as are Coyne’s disproofs of the existence of God. The fact that religious morals are derived from religious stories—myths in Mr. Coyne’s book—does not make them any more dismissible than Mr. Coyne’s morals, which are connected to nothing at all. In his own agnostic terms, all are matters of faith.

. . . In other words, in all the ways that matter for action, secularists and religious believers do not differ.

I’m not going to give my counterarguments here, as I’m putting them in a short piece in Quillette, but I’ll let the readers have the pleasure of arguing whether secular ethics are indeed based on the same kind of faith as is religion, and that secular ethics “are connected to nothing at all.” I will show, as briefly as I can, that secular ethics are not connected to “nothing at all.”

Have at it.

 

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in morality, philosophy | Comments (51)

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 5, 2019 – 7:30 am

Today we have a panoply of lovely fly photos, all taken and sent by reader Jonathan Wallace from England. His notes are indented:

The Diptera get a bad rap and most people associate them with negative connotations.  It is true that some species are vectors of disease and that biting flies can be hard to tolerate for man and beast alike, but there are also many species that are economically beneficial and of course they play a key role in many ecosystems.  They are also amazingly diverse.

The pictures I sent are all except one of hoverflies (Syrphidae) which are a case in point regarding beneficial flies.  These insects are important pollinators that can be easily seen by anyone who spends any time watching a flower bed; a high proportion of the insects visiting the flowers will be hoverflies.  Many hoverfly species also give gardeners a helping hand as pest controllers, for the larvae of many of them prey on aphids.  Hoverflies are also an interesting group for any amateurs of mimicry in animal species: many sport abdominal patterns that mimic bees and wasps.

Here are the species I’ve photographed:

Episyrphus balteatus – known as the Marmalade hoverfly, This is one of the commonest species in the UK.

Eupeodes luniger:

Helophilus pendulus – a species associated with ponds and other wet habitats, although it can be found some distance from water.  I have included two pictures: one of a female with eggs and the other of a mating pair.

Volucella zonaria – the hornet hoverfly.   A pretty convincing mimic of the European hornet Vespa crabro.  This species does occur in the south of England but this individual was photographed in Germany.

JAC: Here’s the putative model, Vespa crabro (photo from Wikipedia):

Myathropa florea –  known unofficially as the ‘Batman hoverfly’ due to the similarity of the markings on its thorax to the batman logo.

Poecilobothrus nobilitatus – the Semaphore fly.  Not a hoverfly (it’s a member of the Dolichopodidae), but to my mind a species demonstrating that the Diptera can be as beautiful as species in more widely appreciated insect orders.  The males have white tips to their wings and raise these up and down in their mating display, giving rise to their English name.

JAC: I found this YouTube video showing the semaphore display:

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in insects, photography | Comments (7)

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 5, 2019 – 6:30 am

It’s Sunday, May 5, 2019, and National Enchilada Day (be sure to eat the whole enchilada). It’s also Cinco de Mayo, celebrating the victory of the Mexican Army over the French at Puebla in 1862. Many Americans celebrate the holiday by feting Mexican food and culture, but of course this is dead wrong; HuffPo has an article with an annoyingly hectoring video and post telling us not to culturally appropriate. Listen to the Pecksniffian leisure fascist by clicking on the screenshot.

The answer, of course, is “hell no!”\

On May 5, 1494, in his second of four voyages to the Americas, Christopher Columbus landed on Jamaica and claimed it for Spain. On this day in 1821, Emperor Napoleon died in exile on the remote island of Saint Helena. He was 51, and it’s still not clear whether he died of stomach cancer or was poisoned accidentally or deliberately.  On this day in 1835, the first railway in mainland Europe opened, taking travelers between Brussels and Mechelen.

On this day in 1891, the “Music Hall” (later known as Carnegie Hall) opened in New York City, with Tchaikovsky the guest conductor of the first performance.  On May 5, 1904, Cy Young of the Boston Americans pitched the first perfect game in “modern era” baseball against the Philadelphia Athletics in Boston. (A perfect game is one in which no batter reaches first base and 27 batters are retired.) 20 other such games have been recorded since then, with only one—pitched by Don Larsen—occurring in the World Series.

On May 5, 1920, the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for robbery and murder; both were electrocuted in August in 1927.  It’s an important day in the history of evolution education, for it was on May 5, 1925, that John T. Scopes was arrested in Dayton, Tennessee for violating the state’s Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of human evolution. After the trial, Scopes began graduate studies in geology at the University of Chicago and became an oil consultant, dying in 1970. Here’s a vanity photo of me at his grave in Paducah, Kentucky (the headstone of Scopes and his wife are hard to find in that graveyard, and I suspect few people visit it).

On May 5, 1945, the only combat fatalities on the American continent during World War II took place in Bly, Oregon. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

Bly is also the site of the only fatalities of World War II in the U.S. continent due to an enemy balloon bomb attack. On May 5, 1945, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded as it was being pulled from the woods by curious picnickers. Killed in the explosion were: Elsie Mitchell, 26, wife of minister Archie E. Mitchell; Edward Engen, 13; Richard Patzke, 14; Jay Gifford, 13; Sherman Shoemaker, 11; and Joan Patzke, 13. Rev. Mitchell heard the explosion and discovered the bodies. The victims’ families were compensated by the government. A memorial was erected at what today is called the Mitchell Recreation Area.

Many of us remember May 5, 1961, when astronaut Alan Shephard became the first American to enter outer space. His Mercury mission was an “up and down” shot with no orbits, and lasted 15 minutes, going up 187 km. Finally, it was exactly two decades later that IRA operative Bobby Sands died in Long Kesh prison hospital on the 66th day of his hunger strike. He was 27.

Notables born on this day include Karl Marx (1818), Nellie Bly (1864), Helen Redfield (1900), Tyrone Power (1914), Tammy Wynette (1942), Michael Palin (1943), Brian Williams (1959), and Adele (1988).

Few notables died on this day: those who expired on May 5 include Napoleon (1821) and Bobby Sands (1981; see above).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the beasts are locked out of the house:

In Polish:

From reader Karl:

And from Facebook:

From a site I look at occasionally to remind me of the harassment that women face in Muslim countries that require veiling:

A tweet from Heather Hastie. There are plenty of cats and DUCKS in the video:

Tweets from Grania. Look at that cat jump about!

In this case I’d just run away:

This deer prefers a cat lick to a salt lick, and the cat likes it too:

This girl picked a fight with the wrong moggie!

Tweets from Matthew. I probably mentioned a frogfish before, but this one is as ugly as a frog peeking through ice. But it’s still cool.

“This is all science, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

This lovely photo reminds me of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”:

The most recalcitrant coffee ever!:

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in Hili Dialogue | Comments (19)

Saturday: Duck report

May 4, 2019 – 2:45 pm

I haven’t much new to report. The Dude (Gregory) abides, despite regular inundation by foreign drakes. I’m beginning to wonder, since they look young and healthy, whether some of these may not be Honey’s offspring.

At any rate, Gregory is in the pond at all hours and in all weathers. He huddles on the “duck tub” in the rain, in the cold, and in the sun, waiting for his hen. The first three photos showing the Dude Abiding were taken from the window in my office:

Sometimes he swims about:

And this morning. . . SIX DRAKES. I chased them out, but of course had to chase Gregory out, too. But he always comes back soon

I’ve got my ducks in a row.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in ducks | Comments (12)

Andrew Sullivan sees Joe Biden as the most viable Democratic candidate

May 4, 2019 – 1:30 pm

In his latest weekly “Interesting Times” column in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan lays out why he thinks Joe Biden might be the best candidate to beat Trump in November, 2020.  I think I agree with him, though it’s certainly early days. Some Leftists, though, are saying we need a woman candidate or a minority candidate. Even Pete Buttigieg, who’s openly gay and married to another man, has been dissed by some Leftists for being “just another white male.”

My own view is that it’s far more important to get rid of Trump than to run a candidate who isn’t the strongest one we have (that could, of course, be a member of a minority who isn’t gay).  Right now Biden is the strongest candidate, at least according to the polls, and his numbers run far above those of the other contenders. And I don’t see him as “too old.” He’s seven points ahead of Trump in a one-on-one survey.

Sullivan, who is also gay, agrees. Read the first part of his column (click on screenshot below). I’ll have something to say about the second part tomorrow:

Sullivan calls out the Regressive Left here, showing data that most Americans are tired of its shenanigans, and that those who are tired probably favor Biden:

[Biden’s] strength is drawn from two contrasting bases: older, moderate whites, and African-Americans. Although his share is in the 30s overall, he has a whopping 50 percent share among nonwhite Democrats, according to the latest CNN poll. A Morning Consult poll found him with 43 percent of the black vote, including 47 percent support among African-American women. Biden’s deep association with Obama gives him a lift in the black vote no other white candidate can achieve. And so it turns out that the base of the Democrats has not been swept into the identity cult of the elite, wealthy, white left. As a brand-new CBS poll finds, Democrats may prefer a hypothetical female nominee over a male (59–41 percent), a black nominee over a white one (60–40 percent), and someone in their 40s to someone in their 70s. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, Biden seems to scramble these preferences.

He’s also been able to reach non-college-educated white men in ways few other candidates could. That’s a big fucking deal in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — and if Biden can carry those states, he’ll be the next president. He’s a union man, and always has been. In what was a brilliant ad-lib, Biden began a speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers by making a joke about the excesses of #MeToo — “I had permission to hug Lonnie,” the union leader, he quipped. Later, as he brought some kids onstage, he joked again, as he put his hands on the shoulders of a boy: “He gave me permission to touch him.” The crowd’s reaction both times was bellows of laughter.

Yes, this might be seen as insensitive, or tone-deaf. It is certainly politically incorrect. But what Biden’s joke did is tell the white working class that he has not defected to the woke, white urban elites. This matters. In a recent poll, 80 percent of Americans say “that political correctness is a problem in this country.” Hostility to new speech codes from elites was one factor that drove support for Trump in 2016. Americans do not want to abolish all differences between men and women, do not support reparations, and view college campuses as strange, alien pockets of madness. Any Democrat in 2020 has to reach that “exhausted majority” who are sick of all that. Biden has already done it.

Another reason is Biden’s strong pro-labor stance, one that appeals to the middle Americans who voted to Trump because they were disenchanted:

Biden’s positive message is a defense of the worker from the excesses of decadent late-capitalism. He can effortlessly channel that and compete with Trump in the Rust Belt. Sanders can do this as well — but Bernie, for all his sincerity and authenticity, does not have the heft of a two-term vice-president who has long been at the center of his party. For those who simply want to defeat Trump at all costs, Biden, for now, seems the safest bet. He can run on a platform deeply informed by the left’s critique of the market, without the baggage of left wokeness or those eager to play into the GOP’s hands and explicitly avow “socialism.”

That’s exactly what the Trump campaign fears. . .

Finally, and here I agree, Biden exudes a fundamental decency that completely eludes Trump, who seems either mentally ill, a spoiled brat, or both:

There is also, dare I say it, a deeper contrast between the two men. One is decent, kind, generous, funny. The other is indecent, cruel, miserly, and has the callous humor of a bully. There would be a moral gulf between any current Democrat and Trump, of course. But with Biden, we’re reminded of the America we thought we knew. Yes, this is partly nostalgia, but no one should underestimate nostalgia in a country as turbulent, afraid, and resentful as America right now. Biden’s moment, in my mind, was 2016, but he was prevented from competing by Clinton and Obama. But history takes strange turns. This already feels to me like a two-man race. That may change. It’s extremely early, but the odds are with Biden. And the tailwinds behind him are intense.

So what do you think? Joe or no?

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in politics | Comments (79)

Williams College finally allows a pro-Israel student organization to exist, but without official approval

May 4, 2019 – 12:30 pm

On April 25 I reported that the Williams College student council, by a vote of 13-8, rejected the bid of Williams Initiative for Israel (WIFI), a pro-Israel student organization, to join the many student organizations already approved. These include the pro-Palestinian organization Students for Justice In Palestine (SJP). Based on its actions and anti-Zionist stand, I consider SJP a “hate group”, but that doesn’t mean it should be banned. What it means is that if SJP is approved, so should WIFI. Favoring one group over the other is viewpoint discrimination, which is banned by the First Amendment. (Williams, of course, is a private school that doesn’t have to follow those free-speech guidelines, but it pretends to favor free speech.)

The reason WIFI was banned, of course, is because the College Council at Williams is woke, and demonstrated that by deep-sixing a pro-Israeli organization. Further, the Council vote was anonymous and the proceedings not subject to the normal live-streaming. The reason for the deviation from these customary procedures, of course, is that the students were cowards who didn’t want their discussion or votes to be public. This has the unfortunate side effect of depriving students, who are represented by the College Council, to listen to their representatives and see how they voted.

This violation of protocol, and manifestly unequal treatment of groups, wasn’t even opposed by the Williams Record, the hyper-woke student organ of outrage newspaper. But it did publish a letter from three students objecting to the deplatforming of WIFI, which noted that that group was rejected on purely political grounds:

During the CC meeting, no Council member present contested WIFI’s compliance with school rules and regulations. Therefore, it is apparent that WIFI was denied official status on purely political grounds, as CC members and guests fought to silence us and effectively turned the meeting into a referendum on Israeli-Palestinian politics.

A counter letter from 11 other students opposed to WIFI makes it clear this really was an issue of free speech and viewpoint discrimination:

Free speech on campus requires some level of basic respect for our interlocutors. We can disagree, argue passionately, even yell; but we cannot, in good conscious [sic], fund student groups that refuse to acknowledge the basic humanity of those on the opposing side of the issue. We cannot support groups that, in response to Palestinian students sharing deeply personal accounts of the pain they have suffered during the occupation, trivialize the violence that this campus was supposed to provide them an escape from. We can have a healthy debate around Israel-Palestine on this campus without erasing the voices of Palestinian students, erroneously redefining colonialism or concealing acts of genocide.

Here again we see the lip service paid to free speech, but then the disclaimer that WIFI wasn’t practicing it because it was “erasing the voices of Palestinian students” and so on. (Exactly how does its existence “erase the voices” of the vociferous students SJP? These eleven students are fascists, and are one reason why Williams, brimming with students like this (as well as many like-minded faculty) is reluctant to sign on to the Chicago Principles of free speech.

In view of this double standard of the students, the Academic Engagement Network, an anti-BDS organization, wrote a polite letter to Williams President Maud Mandel on May 3, a letter you can see here. It informed her of what she should have already known: that in approving an anti-Israel organization but disapproving a pro-Israeli organization, the Williams College Council was violating First Amendment principles. An excerpt:

If Williams College was a public university, the CC’s decision against WIFI would be a violation of the First Amendment. Under Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972), ideology is not lawful grounds for denying recognition to a student club. Williams College is a private institution but we note that it has voluntarily decided to promote robust open inquiry and to protect freedom of expression. Indeed, several weeks ago you sent a campus-wide email in which you reaffirmed these principles. You stated that the school’s goal “shouldn’t be to avoid disagreement or dissent, but to develop ways of engaging in it without losing respect for each other as people.”

The policies of Williams College aim to implement these laudable principles. According to its Code of Conduct, the school is “committed to being a community in which all ranges of opinion and belief can be expressed and debated…The College seeks to assure the right of all to express themselves in words and actions, so long as they can do so without infringing upon the rights of others or violating standards of good conduct or public law.”

While not a public university bound by the First Amendment, Williams College is nonetheless obligated to adhere to its own stated principles and policies. Consequently, we urge you to take immediate action to reverse the decision of the CC and to give WIFI the RSO recognition that it deserves.

And on that very same day, President Mandel finally took “immediate action”, criticizing the students for ditching WIFI as an RSO in a notice on the President’s Office website (click on screenshot):

Among other things, Mandel said this about the denial of RSO (“Registered Student Organization”) status for WIFI:
. . . The transcript of the debate and vote indicate that the decision was made on political grounds.

In doing so, Council departed from its own process for reviewing student groups, which at no point identifies a proposed group’s politics as a criterion for review. The decision also seems to be in tension with CC bylaws, especially Article V, Section 3: “Prohibition Against Discrimination in Student Organizations.”

We’ve always expected the Council to follow its own processes and bylaws. I’m disappointed that that didn’t happen in this instance. College leaders have communicated to the organizers of Williams Initiative for Israel that the club can continue to exist and operate without being a CC-approved RSO. This is not a special exception. It’s an option that has been open to any student group operating within the college’s code of conduct. Even without CC approval, WIFI or any other non-CC organization can still access most services available to student groups, including use of college spaces for meetings and events. I see the communication of this fact to WIFI as a basic matter of fairness and people’s right to express diverse views. Differences over such views are legitimate grounds for debate, but not for exercising the power to approve or reject a student group.

Well, good for President Mandel for taking this stand. My approval, however, is a bit tempered by two considerations. First, it’s possible, though I don’t know for certain, that Mandel issued this statement in reaction to the letter she got from the Academic Engagement Network on the same day. She could have issued this statement ten days earlier, so it’s a bit of a coincidence. And if her hand was indeed forced, then this paints her as a reactive rather than a proactive president: a follower rather than a leader, and someone who acts only when her hand is forced.

Second, note that she kindly allows the WIFI group to exist without its being a Registered Student Organization, a status that may come with other perks like a financial allotment.  Mandel may have the power to turn WIFI into such an organization, and if she can, then she should. She thus imperiously allows WIFI to exist in the hinterlands as a student organization, but not an approved one. Meanwhile, Students for Justice in Palestine continues to enjoy the privileges of being an approved RSO.

This is only one installment of the ongoing social and political crisis at Williams that is turning the school into The Evergreen State College of the East. There will be more to come: wait until you see how the President manages to argue why racially segregated housing isn’t really racially segregated housing.

By whyevolutionistrue | Posted in college students behaving badly, Colleges acting badly, First Amendment, freedom of expression, freedom of speech | Comments (9)