Hudes, or Change: Kathy Chang(e) and my ex-husband

As mentioned in the previous post, I've become interested in the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes due to a woman named Kathy Chang(e).

I did not spend a lot of time with Chang, but I made some graphics contributions to the underground newspaper that she created with my ex, before I knew they were living in an abandoned building.

In 1982, Chang and my ex-husband were part of a loose organization of people who were squatting in West Philadelphia. They called themselves People for Peace and Justice and they were funded by Chang, who had decided to squander her inheritance (I assume from her grandfather who died in December, 1980) on the building.

I was sharing informal, non-court-appointed custody of our three-year-old with my ex (he wasn't officially my ex at that point) and when my ex told me he had moved to a new place in West Philadelphia, of course I assumed his new place would reasonably accommodate a three year old. So when I walked into his residence I was flabbergasted. The Philadelphia Inquirer was absolutely right to call it a "dilapidated hovel" (see below.) 

So I revoked our informal arrangement until our daughter was old enough to watch out for herself. My ex refused to pay child support and I was forced to accept welfare for a couple of years to get by.

Now Kathy Chang was not directly at fault. She didn't force my ex to live in a dilapidated hovel while being responsible for a small child. My ex was certainly capable of fecklessness without her help. But still, her decision to fund the project had an impact on my life. 

The Inquirer article below mentions their newspaper, but it does not mention the office they had rented for the newspaper. It was in Center City on, if memory serves, Walnut Street. Chang undoubtedly paid for that too. But for decades I had no idea she was funding everything - I certainly would not have guessed that anybody had spent thousands of dollars on improvements to the building. Then I happened to see her obituary in the New York Times, 12 years after she died, and I put the pieces together:

For many years, she seemed content dancing for her cause at Penn or at the art museum, spending a $30,000 inheritance to renovate and illegally live in an abandoned building in West Philadelphia...

For perspective on that amount, $30K in 1982 would be worth $93K now. According to the real estate site Redfin the abandoned house is worth $47K now. 

She could have bought a house with cash, and had housing security the rest of her life. She was already in her thirties by the People for Peace and Justice era. She could have even rented out some rooms and had a guaranteed income. 

Hell, she could have gone back to San Francisco where she had lived for at least five years and bought a house there, which would now undoubtedly be worth millions.

Instead she threw her money away on a building she did not own, and when her money ran out, she continued to live in sketchy housing and couldn't get money for the dental care she needed:

But last year, Ms. (Anita) King and other friends remember, she seemed to start losing heart. A huge blow, they said, came last fall when she called her father for help paying a dental bill. He refused. Not long after, when Ms. Chang was living in a converted warehouse with Ms. King and others, they smelled gasoline in the house. They found a leaking jar in Ms. Chang's backpack, and had to talk her out of killing herself.

As my ex wrote on his blog:

 With her money gone and no job, she was dependent as well. She wasn’t always treated well by the men she chose to live with.

I assume Anita King met Kathy Chang through my ex, since Anita and he had been friends since they attended the same high school in Pennsauken NJ. Although I don't think King ever lived at the squat. I think her acquaintance with Chang came later.

I found a couple of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the squat and its demise. There was a big article on December 19, 1982. My ex-husband and Chang are both in the image below.

The article continues...

...and banging on walls well past midnight. Spray-painted messages such as "Don't Pay Rent" and "This is a Free House" began appearing on nearby abandoned buildings.

"That's when we got more than a little question in our minds about what kind of people they are," said Costa. So when the new residents introduced themselves, Costa said, he was pretty blunt. "I said to them, 'If you're all living like pigs and disturbing the neighborhood, then you're not welcome here.'"

Costa soon discovered that the new neighbors, who came together during a protest at the Federal Building last spring, had illegally entered 432 N 33rd Street and made someone else's house - the property is owned by the city - their home. They had done it for two reasons: They needed a place to live, preferably for free, and they wanted to make a political statement on behalf of squatter's rights. After moving in, two of the squatters - Kathy Chang, 32, and Philip Spinelli, 24 - applied for city gift property on the block, but in both cases, they were too late.

The squatters, whose ranks change from time to time, call themselves People for Peace and Justice; on occasion, they stand on the porch or walk around the block, but with a bullhorn, broadcasting their political opinions against the establishment and for economic revolution, against bureaucracy and for anarchy.

The Peace and Justice philosophy on housing is that everyone has a "birthright" to it, real estate speculation puts all but the wealthy out of the market, many landlords are corrupt profit-mongers, and gentrification is a form of genocide because it destroys communities of people. The city, they say, should welcome squatters and buildings that have been vacant a long timed should provide the tools for rehabilitating the buildings.

"Buildings that are empty belong to the people," said Zvi Baranoff last week, as he and eight other squatters, most of them out-of-work musicians, huddled near a wood stove they installed in the building's kitchen. The kitchen walls had been covered with plywood, burlap and leaflets for a variety of political causes.

"Save Fuel, Burn a Bureaucrat," said a hand-scrawled sign on one wall. On another, the eyes of a painting of Pope John Paul II had been pieced with the staves of two Bicentennial flags.

"There are 50,000 abandoned houses in this city," continued Baranoff, 25, twisting his beard with two fingers, "and it's our interest to take them over and give them to the people who need housing."

For many homeowners and tenants in Mantua and nearby Powelton Village - 80 of them have signed a petition seeking eviction of the squatters - the politics and the lifestyles of the new neighbors are echoes from two blocks away and four years ago.

In 1978, a series of confrontations between city officials and the members of MOVE - a group that denounced bureaucracy and amassed weaponry - culminated in a shoot-out at the house MOVE owned at 3300 Pearl St. The incident left one police officer dead and three seriously wounded, and two neighborhoods shaken.

Although Mantua residents say they do not believe that their new neighbors are stockpiling weapons - and the squatters are emphatic in saying they are not - the memories of street-corner diatribes and back yard trash are still fresh.

"We have lived with this situation before," said Ben Blakey, who has lived on the 400 block of North 33rd Street for nearly 30 of his 65 years. 

"The MOVE situation has been here, and that was a ticklish situation until someone had got killed. This place was under siege."

Beyond the regular appearances that police make in response to complaints about the squatters, it seems almost certain that this new collision of values on North 33rd Street will force another confrontation with city officials in the coming weeks.

The building that the squatters moved into is gift property owned by the city's Office of Housing and Community Development (OHCD). Soon after they took over the building, the squatters expanded their living space by knocking out the first and third-floor brick wall between 432 and 434 N. 33rd St. The latter building is owned by the Redevelopment Authority (RDA), which dispenses federal home rehabilitation funds funneled through OHCD.

The city's Licenses and Inspections Department (L&I) has toured both buildings and cited them for numerous violations of building and fire-code regulations; the 434 building was declared "unfit for human habitation" and when a masonry section of the front wall of that building was removed, L&I declared the building "imminently dangerous." The masonry section was restored.

In October, RDA obtained an eviction order for 434 N 33rd St; on Friday, the OHCD filed its petition for 432. At the hearing, three squatters told Common Pleas Court Judge Charles Lord that they wanted time to obtain legal counsel. He scheduled a hearing on the city's petition for Tuesday.

Several weeks ago, when RDA and other city officials went to the 434 address and asked the squatters to leave, they refused, then barraged the officials with political rhetoric.

Reuben Mimkon, supervisor for the L&I's district office, recalled that one of the female members of Peace and Justice "came out on the porch with a bullhorn and started shouting, 'Come on, take my clothes off!" I don't know what she was talking about." A resident of the street said one of the squatters yelled, "This is our Vietnam, and we're willing to die for it!"

Before seeking to evict the squatters, RDA has decided to wait until OHCD obtains its eviction permit. When it does, both agencies, backed by police, will ask the squatters to leave.

What will happen then is anybody's guess. City officials are not sure how far they will push the issue; the squatters say they have not decided what they will do.

But the squatters express dismay that the city might throw them into the street in the thick of winter. They don't say with finality that they will not leave, but they don't say they will. They may invite all their friends for an Eviction Day party. They may demand that the city give them somewhere else to live.

They will not, they insisted, resort violence. "Guns is what destroyed MOVE," said Spinelli. "We're not going to make the same mistake."

To city officials, the situation is a simple legal matter: Breaking and entering, squatting, living among housing and fire code violations, and breaching wills without a permit.

To People for Peace and Justice, those laws are hardly relevant. "Laws are not made for safety," said Baranoff. "They're made to complicate things, to maintain an oppression." Building codes "should certainly be taken into consideration" but for safety reasons not because they have the weight of law behind them. Said Sandy McCroskey, 27: "It would seem to be in the city's best interest if they would make their laws accomodate us."

A few of the block's residents side with the squatters. "Shouldn't there be a certain period of time, " said Sarah Rose, who lives on the block and visits regularly with the squatters, "when nobody's moved into an abandoned building, that it's turned over to people? I think it would be wonderful to cooperate with the city on making something like that work."

At the same time, Ms. Rose said, she understands the neighborhood's apprehension. "We don't look like them, we don't act like them, and we haven't interacted with them. This neighborhood is like a tight family. There are a lot of people who have lived here for a long time, so I think it's a natural reaction."

Why haven't the squatters reached out to the neighborhood more? "It's been very hard, " said Spinelli "for us to get ourselves together. We have to do that first."

As for their neighbor's complaints, the squatters have some responses. Because he owns two buildings on the block, Spinelli said, Dennis Costa "is a speculator pig" Dumping excrement, Baranoff said, was the work of "a couple of crazies" who were asked to leave the group last summer. The squatters play music in early morning hours, Spinelli said, because they are musicians, "and our hours are off other people's." McCroskey said that the squatters thought their rooftop nudity could not be seen elsewhere and that no one ever complained to them about it.

The squatters seem to be having a good time trying to put together a communal lifestyle. Some pick up a little work now and then. One 21-year-old member, who uses the stage name Christina Wilde and whose hair is cut Mohawk-fasion and dyed orange-pink, works as a burlesque dancer in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Spinelli, a jazz percussionist, and Paul Jaffie, a rock guitarist and singer, occasionally get jobs playing music.

On a chilly afternoon last week, some of the members gathered in their living room with guitars. Their view of the world was reflected in an excerpt from their "anthem," written by McCroskey:

Look at them running of to work, Just watch them jump and jerk.

They're keeping the wheels of industry in motion. Just why they do it, they don't have the foggiest notion.

The squatters spend time working on the buildings, smoking marijuana, organizing political events and trying to publish Community newspaper, which says it "serves the interests of those struggling for Land, Liberty, Peace and Justice."

The members say they are not of a common stripe in politics and philosophies. Some are hard-core naturalists and won't use soap when they bathe, others do. Some are dressed neatly and fashionably; others look as if they just emerged from a bog. Some are glib; others stare off into space. A few say they are anarchists and atheists; some say they don't know what they are.

Most of their money has come from one member, Kathy Chang, who is trying to organize a "national moratorium on business-as-usual" during which "basic goods and services would be supplied to the people free of cost." Her inheritance is now gone, she says.

For $800, the squatters say, they hired a plumber to hook up the building; how they were able to get electricity is a mystery. Costa said he saw one member tapping power lines to bring pirated electricity into the building. When he called Philadelphia Electric Co. (PE), he said, instead of disconnecting the lines, the company installed a meter.

Ron Harper of PE's corporate communications department said that the meter was installed at someone's request but that no one at the building has ever filled out the proper forms. Because the squatters have refused to respond to hand-delivered mail and a telegram from PE, he said, the utility's computers show nothing.

The squatters refuse to discuss it. "We're skipping that subject," Baranoff says.

Although the squatters have done some work inside the buildings, they appear to remain dilapidated hovels. In the four rooms that the squatters allowed a reporter and photographer to visit, holes in the floors required circumnavigation, and windows are covered in plastic to break cold winds. The living room - where the squatters' amplified, often cacophonous music vibrates the wall that abuts Costa's home - is furnished with three cushioned sofas, a raggy carpet, cluttered stacks of books and magazines, and piles of junk.

An office is littered with the mechanical components of pamphleteering: a printing press, a duplicating machine, typewriters, all unplugged but ready for cranking up when the group wants to publish another issue of Community newspaper.

Ms. Wilde's bedroom is in the 434 building. The entrance is through the breached wall on the first floor. She calls it the "womb room." She said she used to sleep in a coffin.

The squatters say they have arrested the deterioration in the two buildings and have made them livable and safe. "This was a real hole in the wall. "Now it has a hole in the wall," Baranoff said, laughing. He used a sponge to clean crumbs from a plastic table top in the kitchen. "We've made the place habitable."

I have to admit I laughed out loud at this bit:

Some are dressed neatly and fashionably; others look as if they just emerged from a bog.

Also

...one of the female members of Peace and Justice "came out on the porch with a bullhorn and started shouting, 'Come on, take my clothes off!"

That has got to be Chang.

That article was on December 19. On December 31 the Inquirer ran this story:

Two people were arrested yesterday as sheriff's deputies and police evicted a group of squatters from a city-owned house the city's Mantua section, official reported.

The two arrested were charged with disorderly conduct when they argued with officers, the officers said, but there were no serious incidents. The eviction ended a standoff that some neighbors had feared might turn violent.

The squatters, who have occupied the house since the spring, call themselves People for Peace and Justice and have leveled political rhetoric at neighbors and defiance at authorities.

Yesterday, about 10 a. m., officers removed five adults from the house, at 432 N. 33rd St, which is owned by the city's Office of housing and Community Development.

The two arrests came about 12:30 p. m. after two men argued with officers. Police said George "Sandy" McCroskey, 27 a ride off the house, and Robert Harris, 30, of the 3700 block of Barin Street, were charged with disorderly conduct and released pending a hearing. Harris was identified as a friend who was helping the squatters remove their belongings.

After the group moved into the vacant house last spring, officials said, they broke into the empty house next door, which is owned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. Monday, a Common Pleas Court judge ordered the squatters out of the city property immediately. Chief Deputy Sheriff Pasquale Scarpello said five deputies had been sent to execute the order, accompanied by uniformed police officers and Police Department Civil Affairs Unit officers. A moving company hired by the city removed the squatters' belongings and put them in storage. Scarpello said the goods could be claimed by the group at any time.

Scarpello said police detained several of the people briefly for questioning, after shotgun shells swords and knives were found in the house. No firearms were found, he said.

One of the squatters, Zvi Baranoff, 25, said he "woke up with police in my bedroom." He said he and the other people evicted would be staying with friends but hinted that the group would illegally occupy other vacant houses.

Zvi should have been grateful that's all that happened. Their neighbors had a petition against them and they were being compared, in the press, to MOVE. The cops hated MOVE in 1982 because of the 1978 shoot-out that resulted in a cop being killed.

The next time the cops had an encounter with MOVE, in 1985, they firebombed them into oblivion.

The People for Peace and Justice saga is ancient history now, I'm probably the only person outside of the actual participants who has any interest in it, and Kathy Chang self-immolated in 1996. But she continues to capture the imaginations of people in the arts, as I wrote about in 2015. So I wasn't especially surprised to learn that Quiara Alegría Hudes had included a character based on Chang in her play "Daphne's Dive" which premiered in 2016.

Hudes does not completely romanticize Chang. The character, called Jenn Song in the play, becomes estranged from the hero of the play, Daphne:

RUBY: Has she been around at all? Still picking fights with Acosta I trust?

PABLO: He kicked her out of the squat.

RUBY: No one tells me anything.

PABLO: Your mom (Daphne) stopped bailing her out and Jenn took it real personal.

...

PABLO: You know she started protesting outside the bar? Shouting. With a megaphone. "Wake up! Wake up!" Your mom had to call the cops, a few times.

After the end of the squat, my ex bailed Chang out. He wrote on his blog:

One night I got a phone call from her, a call from the police station. She had been picked up by the Philadelphia police because she had been walking in West Philly – naked. The police were quite willing to send her on her way if she would simply get dressed before leaving. Of course, I had to argue with her to accept this social compromise. My landlady and I begged her, and finally convinced her, to put some clothes on and leave with us. She seemed to not understand what the problem was with her late night stroll. 

Clearly Kathy Chang had a serious mental illness. But not everyone with a mental illness who commits suicide gets an obituary in the NYTimes. And I think the unusually brutal and public method of suicide she chose is only part of the reason for Chang's obituary. Another part, and the reason people in the arts are so taken with her was because she talked big. 

More in the next post.

Steven Pinker, Quillette, and the Trump supporter dark triad

Some of Steven Pinker's fanboys took offense over my connecting Pinker to various alt-right types.

But if anything Pinker continues to confirm his connection to the alt-right, such as his most-recent promotion of alt-right Quillette. But then, Quillette, fellow promoters of "race realism" are big fans of Pinker too.

Less than a year ago, Quillette's founder Claire Lehmann appeared in a video together with alt-right extremist Gavin McInnes in support of the alt-right's favorite victim James Damore. 

Of course Steven Pinker is also a defender of Damore, but he'd have to be since Damore's memo is simply a regurgitation of Pinker's own evolutionary psychology theories, much like Larry Summers' speech informing women of their STEM inferiority - at a conference on women in STEM careers - was.

What Pinker and his crowd represent is the resentment of white men, most clearly demonstrated by Trump voters, whom, a study in the news today indicates, are not worried about money but instead are worried about status:

Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women...

Although Quillette doesn't conspicuously support Trump, Ezra Levant, former employer of Claire Lehmann and Gavin McInnes, does. And McInnes can be seen claiming that Trump's election signaled a return to "masculinity."

The Toronto van massacre was perpetrated by a member of the mens' rights movement, apparently an "incel" who admired that other male supremacy champion, mass-murderer Elliot Rodger.

But meanwhile Claire Lehmann's buddy Gavin McInnes is trying to push the idea that the real enemy is Islam.

So Pinker & Lehmann promote the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men, Lehmann's Quillette, enthusiastically supported by Pinker, promotes the idea that blacks are intellectually inferior to everybody else, and McInnes (with help from "new atheists" like Sam Harris) promote the idea that Islam is worse than other religions. 

The Trump-supporter dark triad in a nutshell.

Am I a centrist?

At a movie theater on the UWS
of Manhattan to see "The Post"
which I guess makes me a liberal.
In the US.

I always thought of myself as a left-liberal, but now that I'm paying more attention to international politics by way of my admiration for Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, I wonder.

Canadian writer Jonathan Kay found it highly offensive that I pointed out that Quillette - for whom he has written three articles, two in 2018 - is not actually centrist but rather alt-right and that it publishes the work of many people - people I like to call evo-psycho bros who believe that black people are innately less intelligent and even, more criminal, than other "races" justified by their transparently bad science.

At least two Quillette articles have been reprinted on the white supremacist web site American Renaissance:
On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell; and
How Criminologists Who Study Biology Are Shunned by Their Field by Brian Boutwell.

Quillette's founder, alt-right Claire Lehmann threw a fit on Twitter when I suggested that one of her favorite authors, Bo Winegard, is a hack who is riding the wingnut welfare gravy train with his laughably bad "scientific" claims about race and gender essentialism. 

Anyway, because of my unpleasant interactions with Lehmann and Jonathan Kay and other Quillette supporters I find I am accused of being on the far Left. 

They don't care, I suppose, that I've also criticized people they consider "Social Justice Warriors" also known (by me at least) as  "identitarians." I even did a series on Social Justice Warriors vs. New Atheists, on this blog. I also dislike the "Dirtbag Left" or sometimes the "Radical Chic." I argued with Rebecca Traister about Al Franken and #MeToo. I have criticized Robin "white fragility" DiAngelo and Razib "too racist for the NYTimes" Khan equally for their racial essentialism. 

In fact, there seems to be no large group of people with an online presence I can be part of because I invariably will disagree with them about one thing or another and that will end in being blocked or banned or insulted.

As far as being Far Left, I voted for Hillary Clinton which makes me left-liberal in the US. 

In Canada I would be Liberal since I would have voted for Justin Trudeau. As I mentioned the other day, in Canada they have two major parties vying for who is the most firmly pro-choice. And even the Conservative party in Canada is firmly pro-socialized medicine. So actually I might be centrist in Canada.

In France I would be a complete Centrist because I would have voted for Macron. In France they have viable Socialist and Communist parties. And while I certainly agree with many aspects of socialism, I don't think it's the complete answer.

Not helping to clarify the issue are people like Steven Pinker, who claim to be liberal, but who constantly bashes the Left.  Pinker even suggests there is an effort on the part of the media and academia to withhold "the truth" - a position in complete accordance with the alt-right.

I think this is all part of the reason why Emmanuel Macron felt he had to create a new political party, En Marche, to reflect the problem of people like me - agreeing with some aspects of several parties, and not finding a place for ourselves with our refusal to accept everything from any one group of people.

All aboard the wingnut welfare gravy train with alt-right Claire Lehmann & white supremacist Jared Taylor

Alt-right Claire Lehmann is really proud of her boy Bo Winegard, so she keeps promoting his left-bashing work in Quillette.

Lehmann is especially solicitous of Winegard's career as we can see when she felt it was her duty to attack me as a " troll" for daring to point out that Bo Winegard is a hack taking wingnut welfare from alt-right promoters of racism like Claire Lehmann. With lots of dittos from her bot-like ditto-heads.

But then Lehmann as a member of the alt-right, seems to prefer men who promote "scientific" justifications for racism.

And it's mostly men, the ratio of men to women writing for Quillette is at best 10:1. This is no doubt partly due to Claire Lehmann's raging, obsessive, unhinged hatred of feminism.

But then Christiana Hoff Sommers has been riding the Koch brothers gravy train for decades in exchange for constantly attacking feminism, and no doubt Lehmann would like an easy wingnut welfare-style gig like that for herself. If in fact Quillette isn't already a direct vehicle for right-wing institutional funding, which would not surprise me a bit.

Quillette appears to be a way of rebranding the alt-right in order to make it appeal to centrists, and thanks to the assistance of New Atheists like Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer she's been making decent progress. It doesn't hurt that she is an advocate for the religion of New Atheists, evolutionary psychology, making a big to-do over James Damore, who was merely repeating everything that evolutionary psychology, human biodiversity and other hereditarians have been promoting for decades, ever since the Pioneer Fund paid people to come up with data proving the inferiority of blacks.

It cannot be pointed out often enough how right-wingers who typically side with corporations against workers suddenly find they no longer approve of "at will" laws like the one Google operates under in California. Funny how that works.

Alt-right Claire Lehmann often publishes the work of people who believe in the genetic inferiority of blacks. In addition to Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard, she's published the work of Brian Boutwell, Kevin Beaver, Razib Khan, Richard Haier, Jonathan Anomaly, Jordan Peterson, JC Barnes and probably many others.

Alt-right Claire Lehmann is undeniably part of the alt-right: she was a regular on alt-right Rebel Media while running Quillette, which was founded in 2015. Lehmann has appeared on Rebel Media as recently as 6 months ago. Rebel Media has featured the work of, in addition to Ezra Levant its founder, a creepy man with a bizarre love/hate obsession with Justin Trudeau, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, Michael "pizzagate" Cernovich, Faith Goldy, Pamela Geller, Jack Posobiec and others. And of course Rebel Media adores Trump.

Quillette seems to be the perfect alt-right/evo-psycho pipeline to legitimacy thanks to the New Atheists and their fanboys. Here's another example: a piece by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell titled On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism, first published in Quillette, is here republished in American Renaissance - presumably by permission.

So Bo Winegard (and his brother and Boutwell) aren't just hacks taking money from Quillette, they are hacks taking money from the unashamedly white supremacist Jared Taylor at American Renaissance.

Anybody who denies the connections between Quillette, often endorsed by Steven Pinker, and the alt-right is a liar.

My critique of Quillete and the theories of the evo-psycho bros have been perfectly rational - but because it's something that alt-right Claire Lehmann doesn't want to hear, she called me a troll, blocked me and accused me of bullying and smearing Bo Winegard. And Bo Winegard "just feels sorry for" me.

These people have no idea how laughably hypocritical they are.

Newsflash: the alt-right hates Justin Trudeau

I would say Justin Trudeau is worth a million Jordan Petersons or Stefan Molyneux, but actually there's really no comparison between a man like Justin Trudeau and the likes of a Peterson or a Molyneux.

It would be like comparing the invention of the wheel to smallpox and syphilis.

Of course alt-right assholes were all over Trudeau saying personkind like anybody but the alt-right gives a shit.

Several evo-psycho bros have given interviews to living coprolite Molyneux, who is also pushing the Trump/Republican/Russian line about the Steele dossier. Like you do. When you're an enormous alt-right asshole.

And of course if you're talking alt-right you have to include worthless racist & misogynist shithead Claire Lehmann, who used to work for Rebel Media, owned by Ezra Levant who is absolutely obsessed with Trudeau and was long before Trudeau became PM.

'

Naturally evo-psycho king Steven Pinker is hyping Peterson.

Meanwhile here is self-righteous atheist Jerry Coyne whining about Trudeau's visit to a mosque and yet, even though he claims to not have a well-formed opinion of Peterson, likes to promote him anyway. Not long ago I pointed out that although Coyne expects women to stop "coddling" all religions, Coyne is willing to cut the religious slack whenever it suits him. And here's an example - it doesn't seem to bother Coyne that Peterson says things like this:

Peterson said religion in general and Catholicism in particular stand as a perpetual bulwark against ideologies of the political left or right, which is why the Catholic Church is under now attack by those ideologies — along with Dr. Peterson himself.

And this:

“The Catholic Church warns us against the danger posed by the un-moored rational mind,” said Peterson, who would not reveal his own religious beliefs. He added that religions in general provide a “balanced” and complete understanding of reality, while ideologies such as Fascism or Marxism (which he says lies at the root of gender theory) present a very narrow understanding.

If you swapped out "Catholic Church" for "Islam" Coyne and Pinker and all the rest of the New Atheist bigot hypocrites would be shitting themselves with outrage.

The support of Peterson by New Atheists tells you everything you need to know about the utter lack of ethics and coherency of the New Atheists.

Meanwhile today my glorious Prime Minister of Love is speaking in the US. 

Worms like Peterson and Molyneux are so jealous of this man.

This is live on Facebook. People can make comments. Some of them are, uh, interesting...

The bigotry and misogyny of evo-psycho bro Jerry Coyne

Today Jerry Coyne reminds us of the Islamaphobia and misogyny that are part of the evo-psycho/New Atheist world view.

Do they really think they are fooling anybody by their opposition to the hijab? It's not because they care about women's rights - the anti-hijab people are almost all anti-feminist as Coyne has proven to be by his frequent attacks against feminism. The Right and their New Atheist sympathizers care most keenly about women's rights when it's Muslim women's rights in question, as Richard Dawkins clearly established back in 2011 with the Dear Muslima letter.

The rantings of the Right and Right-sympathizers like Coyne against the hijab, sooner or later have real-world consequences as we saw in the Portland tragedy last May. And what the rantings serve to do is turn the hijab from a symbol of oppression to a symbol of resistance to bigots and thugs of the Right and their allies who blame all Muslims for the actions of homicidal fanatics:

Coyne in 2010:

Do I oppose the center’s construction? No.  Do I think that building it on that site is a good idea? No.  It’s no better an idea than would be building an American cultural center near Ground Zero in Hiroshima.  It was Islam, after all, that propelled those planes into the World Trade Center nine years ago.

It's true that the original purpose of the hijab was patriarchal control over women's bodies. But so what? That's religion for you. Hasidic women shave their heads and wear wigs for the same reason. Coyne has written about Hassids many times but if he's ever gone on a rant agains their head-shaving and wearing wigs I haven't found it on his blog. In the past month he's mentioned hijab 6 times. 

Since Coyne is stupid about feminism and stupid about Islam, it stands to reason he is most stupid  about them together. Here he is promoting the far-right idiocy of Prager University. Arguing that feminists excuse sexism in Islam. Because Coyne doesn't like the idea of living in a pluralistic society and expects women to behave like cranky ranting New Atheists:

Western women should stop coddling all religions that have misogynistic attributes, and those are not limited to Islam.

Coyne is truly Republican in his outlook, he really needs to stop pretending to be liberal. Democrats work by coalition. Republicans have talking points and everybody is expected to fall in line.

I dislike religion - but am I going to join religious women who are marching to oppose Trump? Hell yeah I am. And I'm sure Coyne works with religious people when it suits him - as usual misogynists have higher standards for how women should behave than they have for themselves.

Coyne gives the whole misogynist game away when he doubts that Muslim women are able to make their own choices:

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip is a good one, particularly timely, and speaks directly to the notion of the degree to which Muslim women “choose” to be covered. When a Western Muslimah (not one in Iran or Saudi) declares that she wears the hijab “by choice,” I never accept that claim at face value. Was she brought up wearing one? Did she go to school where other girls wore them? Are her friends mostly hijabis? This whole notion of “choice” in Islamic dress needs to be examined, yet I haven’t seen a single article on it. It’s the rhino in the room.

I was brought up Catholic and sent to Catholic school and told not to use birth control. I was able to decide to quit the Catholic church and use birth control. So yeah,  if I can make decisions in spite of my upbringing, then I guess I can accept that Muslim women can make their own choices. Even if I don't agree with their choices.

If women are forced to wear something then yeah, we need to fight for their right to make their own decisions. Otherwise it's not our business.

Coyne is unable to understand why feminists in a pluralist society support Muslim women's rights to wear something that signifies their religion - even if the feminists in question don't agree with some of the things the religion says. In a free society we must accept some people will make personal choices we don't like. Coyne is not comfortable in such a society. Because he believes women who make choices he doesn't like are incapable of making their own choices.

Because Jerry Coyne is a bigot. And a misogynist.

Jesse Singal, Pinkerite, defends Pinker in the NYTimes

UPDATE: it turns out that Jesse Singal is a member of the evo-psycho club

The irony is that many of the people who admire Pinker consider themselves New Atheists and skeptics, yet it doesn't seem to bother them at all that not only does Pinker make extremist claims sans evidence, but also proclaims his opinions to be "the truth."

And if you point out that Pinker has a long history of making common cause with the right, and then the alt-right, they will push back on his behalf immediately. Yesterday's NYTimes published an op-ed by Jesse Singal, Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A.

I wrote an op-ed response and sent it into the NYTimes but I don't know if they will publish it or not. 

PZ Myers was mentioned by name in Singal's piece:

Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist ‘alt-right,’” noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton. “And he returns the favor.” Others reacted to the rumor with simple exasperation: “Christ on a crutch,” said the liberal commentator and biologist PZ Myers, who also wrote a blog post denouncing Mr. Pinker for this supposed alliance.

Myers responded on his blog, Steven Pinker and the New York Times are making us dumber and makes one of the same points I did in my as-yet unpublished op-ed:

Even when they vaguely puzzle out this point, Pinker supporters don’t understand it. What does Jesse Singal say in the New York Times?

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.

No. He clearly says that the alt-right’s beliefs are the fault of the “PC” Left, which says nothing about making better arguments to oppose them, and is a falsehood. His talk was about doling out the blame to the Left, not about fighting the alt-right. If you listen to the whole 8-minute video, what you hear is Pinker first saying that you can’t voice certain facts on campus, then stating those facts (self-refutation, anyone?), then explaining that his facts are more complex than he let on, which is what the college professors he’s blaming already do. But then this kind of disingenuous denial of reality, of focusing superficially on he said/she said note-taking, is exactly what the New York Times specializes in.

Jesse Singal is a lazy sloppy journalist and that trait is just as apparent in his tweets. Here he is uncritically repeating Pinker's claim that all he is saying is "the biological contribution to gender differences is greater than zero" along with the claim that there are "people" who react to that as if it was alt-right.

Naturally neither Singal nor Pinker provide any evidence there are people doing that. But even more importantly, "greater than zero" is hardly the extent of what Pinker believes. He believes that biological differences are the cause of a variety of social phenomenon. Which is why he defended Larry Summers.

Pinker lies on the anti-PC video about the source of the Larry Summers controversy, in the same way.

He portrays the Larry Summers controversy as though Summers was punished by simply stating that men and women are different. The actual controversy was that Summers, while the president of Harvard and thus having some power over hiring decisions, suggested at a conference on diversity in STEM that the foremost reason women had less successful careers in STEM than men was because their brains were by nature less capable of STEM subjects than the brains of men.

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

So what exactly were the dire repercussions of Larry Summers proclaiming "the truth"? A few years later Summers went to work for the Obama administration. Apparently the university/media cabal dedicated to withholding the truth is not nearly as powerful as Steven Pinker would have you believe.

It's because of lazy, careless journalists like Singal that Pinker has been getting away with making common cause with professional rightwing racists all these years.

Evan Marc Katz ~ bullshitting the gullible with pseudo-science

I've already demonstrated that Evan Marc Katz is so lacking in ethics that he advised single women to set their sights on married men.

He also advises women to be passive in order to catch "alpha males" whom Katz believes are the only real men. These are men who cling to traditional gender roles so hard that if a woman offers one a ticket to see his favorite band he will FREAK THE FUCK OUT because his masculinity is so fragile. Men who believe in rigid gender roles have been demonstrated to be more likely to abuse women.

So naturally Katz would have no qualms, most recently, against passing himself off as an expert defender of science even though it's painfully clear that he gets all his "science" right from pop-psychology articles in the newspaper.

Today’s post is a little more serious, because it talks about something that is unique and dangerous in our partisan post-fact world: the idea that beliefs about how the world should work are more valid than facts about how the world actually does work.
Witness this article in the LA Times, which poses a very challenging question: “Are gender feminists and transgender activists undermining science?”

I've already criticized evolutionary psychology, aka evo-psycho plenty on this blog over the years but it never hurts to mention that proponents of evolutionary psychology are so reflexive in their belief that all cultural phenomena is due to adaptation that even when women are sold into slavery, they interpret it as evidence of female sexual desire for "alpha males" as David Buller demonstrated in his comprehensive critique of evolutionary psychology (from over eleven years ago already) Adapting Minds (my emphases):

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

Of course the kind of people who are stupid enough to care what a huckster like Katz says aren't likely to be aware of any serious critiques of evolutionary psychology. Katz lives in a bubble of dullards, which no doubt makes him feel like a genius, and he's perfectly content to live that way.

Evolutionary psychologists are not bothered in the least that their "science" is not empirical and in fact, like the poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect that they are, they claim it's their opponents who don't understand or are even hostile to science.

I'll let an actual scientist, P. Z. Myers address that issue:

Why, oh why, do EP’s defenders rely on throwing up armies of straw men to slaughter? It’s silly. Here’s how (Jerry Coyne) starts:

There are some science-friendly folk (including atheists) who simply dismiss the entire field of evolutionary psychology in humans, saying that its theoretical foundations are weak or nonexistent. I’ve always replied that that claim is bunk, for its “theoretical foundations” are simply the claim that our brains and behaviors, like our bodies, show features reflecting evolution in our ancestors.

Have you ever seen a critic of evolutionary psychology deny that we evolved, or that features and differences of the human body and brain are products of evolution? Not me. When I say that it’s theoretical foundations are ridiculous, I don’t mean the idea that there are evolved differences between the sexes, but that EP comes with a set of ludicrous assumptions, such as that we are adapted to the African savannah and the agricultural and urban adaptations of the last 10,000 years don’t count. It leads to absurdities like the paleo diet, in which it’s assumed that we should eat like cavemen, because evolution. 

I also criticize the just-so story-telling. Coyne should know this well: studying evolution is hard and demands rigor. Yet evolutionary psychologists will do a quickie study on color perception in college undergraduates and announce that women evolved to be better at recognizing ripe berries. 

And obviously, as you might guess, there are the methodological problems. There is so much trivial market-driven crap in evolutionary psychology that it swamps out any hypothetically ‘good’ research in the field. If I were doing research on the evolutionary basis of human behavior (I’m not, fortunately), I would run away so fast from the label “evolutionary psychology” that I’d make Kanazawa’s head spin, and he’d have to formulate some story about the distant ancestors of white people having to sprint away from noisy speculating sabre-toothed tigers. 

But then Coyne pulls his magic “proof” out of his hat: the existence of sexual dimorphism. Yeah, who has a problem with that? Men and women look different in grand and subtle ways. Some of those differences were almost certainly selected for. Again, I don’t know anyone who denies that, so it’s kind of weird to use it as his triumphant example. Except that he seems to think all those lefty wackos — you know, feminists, apparently — are in the business of denying the obvious. 

But the left-wing opposition to evolutionary psychology as a valid discipline in principle, especially when it involves differences in sexual behavior, seems to me based more on ideology than on biology. Ideologues cannot allow any possibility that males and females behave differently because of their evolution. Such people think that this would buttress the view that one sex would be “better” than the other.

I know a lot of modern radical feminists. I’m pretty solidly in the left-wing camp myself. And NO ONE denies the physical differences between men and women, or claims that evolution could not have played an important role in shaping the diversity of modern humans. Nor do any claim that there aren’t significant behavioral differences — we encounter those every day. What we oppose is the credulous insistence that every single difference is a product of selection, that the influence of culture is noise gently overlaying the purity of the biological signal, and worst of all, the idea that the status quo is justified as a product of biology (which Coyne at least tries to distance himself from at the end).

Katz himself demonstrates the untestable nature of evolutionary psychology. Evo-psychos claim that men and women have fundamental, completely oppositional natures. But when an example of someone behaving in a way that goes against their alleged gender nature is presented, evo-psychos will say something like Katz says here:

Sort of misses the point, Emily. We’re talking about generalities – always.

But "generalities" is the very essence of evolutionary psychology and that's why it's just as much a science as astrology. Evo psychos make claims about how men and women are but admit there are exceptions - but if you have a high enough percentage of exceptions to a rule, the rule is bullshit. 

Fifty years ago women were kept out of the Boston marathon, on the theory that women just couldn't handle it. As Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon said:

"It was feared that anything longer (than 800 meters) was going to injure women, that they wouldn't be able to have children or they somehow turned into men," she told NPR.

" 'You'll never have children,' they said. 'You're going to get big legs. You're going to grow hair on your chest.' It was hilarious, the myths.

I'm sure the sexists of the time argued, after Switzer ran the marathon, that she was an exception to the general rule of female fragility. Now that millions of women have run in marathons I don't think even someone like Evan Marc Katz could deny that women do not endanger their fertility by running marathons. Because Switzer was NOT exceptional. But until women were allowed to run, it could not be proven.

But evolutionary psychologists avoid presenting test scenarios. The claim that women are by nature "hypergamous" and men are not could be disproved if enough men and women were shown to behave differently than their gender roles. But evolutionary psychologists are not attempting to find such people - assuming you could tease out "natural" behavior from its complex interaction with culturally-learned behavior - because they are already certain they are right. And so it will never be known how many exceptions there are to this alleged rule of gender-based behavior, and evo-psychos don't even bother to predict the percentage of exceptions there will be. They just do a lot of mumbling and hand-waving about generalities. So evolutionary psychology is unfalsifiable.

That is why evolutionary psychology is a pseudo-science.

Swinging cats

Soon-Yi and Allen - I had to pass them because
they walk slow like a couple of tourists

You can't swing a cat without hitting a celebrity in this town. Today I went to a Meetup meeting for Philosophy over on the UES across the park from me and got to meet Massimo Pigliucci who was presenting a lecture with audience participation on the topic of morality vs. ethics. Of course he's not known outside of the world of philosophy, but he's a pretty big deal within it. I had heard the name before but I wasn't aware that Pigliucci was such a prominent critic of Sam Harris - I've been a non-prominent critic of Sam Harris for years on this blog.

After the meeting I found this excellent piece online, Reflections on the skeptic and atheist movements in which Pigliucci says:

I have already mentioned Harris, who writes about ethics with little acknowledgment (or understanding, or both) of just how complex a topic it is, and how much literature there is out there to engage with. As he infamously wrote in the first footnote of chapter 1 of The Moral Landscape, “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” Why are we taking such a brazen display of anti-intellectualism as anything more than a clear mark of an overinflated ego? But far from that, Michael Shermer then builds on Harris’ point (or perhaps simply restates it, at much greater length), coming out with yet another “revolutionary” book about the science of ethics, predicated on an argument that had so many holes in it that I felt a bit embarrassed having to explain them in a public forum a couple of years ago [15].

Pigliucci goes after other New Atheists I've expressed dislike for, Dawkins and Hitchens, although he doesn't mention Steven Pinker in this piece (he does elsewhere though.) He also criticizes Neil deGrass Tyson, which surprised me, but then I wasn't aware that Tyson had dismissed philosophy. And he goes after P. Z. Myers, unfairly, I thought, although I will agree that his Pharyngula can get really nasty - but I found it much worse before everybody realized what an asshole Dawkins was. And of course Dawkins himself was a contributor to the nastiness of Myers' blog, as I found out directly through personal experience.

I also disagree with Myers on some issues, most especially his defense of identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) like Suey Park of #cancelcolbert infamy, and I tangled with him briefly over Hillary Clinton a couple of months ago on Twitter. But he's generally one of the good guys. And naturally he had plenty to say in response to Pigliucci.

I'm surprised it took me so long to really become acquainted with Pigliucci's critiques of the New Atheists, since he's especially well-qualified to defend philosophy from their attacks, being not only a long-time skeptic/atheist activist but also an evolutionary biologist as well as a philosopher. 

I came to know the New Atheist celebrities not through their various political controversies but through my disagreements with evolutionary psychology. Which I discovered via the anthropologist Marvin Harris, who criticized it back when it was known as sociobiology. 

And I came to philosophy also from Marvin Harris, through his criticism of Hegel (and the Hegelian dialectic) and his quoting Schopenhauer. In fact currently if you Google "Marvin Harris, Hegel, Schopenhauer" my blog post is the first hit.

So like so many New Atheist notions, the idea that philosophy is no longer of value, to be replaced by "real" science is overweening and absurd.

After the Philosophy-in-Manhattan Meetup, I walked home through Central Park when I was stuck on a path walking behind a slow couple in front of me. To my annoyance it was another one of these old man with a much younger woman couples, which I see so often on the Upper West Side due to old men using their wealth by buy women. But as I passed their slow asses I realized it was in fact Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. 

I once fantasized that if I ever ran into Woody Allen, whom I despise at least as much as New Atheists, I would kick him, but thanks to this natural experiment I have discovered I would not. But I still think he's a creep. And he walks like a freaking tourist.

Meet the Brocialists

Jacobin magazine is the Kremlin of the Brocialists.  In my new ongoing series, I will be looking at the people associated with Jacobin magazine.

So far it appears that the majority of Jacobin writers are private-college educated white men from privileged backgrounds.

Ironically, two years ago, before I knew what a Brocialist was, I was on Jacobin's side during a Twitter war dubbed #jacobinghazi. Turns out it was really the old "both sides are just as bad" scenario. I've discussed social justice warriors vs. new atheists on this blog as an example. Well this was social justice warriors versus brocialists.

I took Jacobin's side because I wasn't acquainted with brocialism and didn't realize that it was a continuation of the socialist tradition of dismissing women's complaints about sexism as "bourgeois." And then I met Doug Henwood on Facebook. And his wife Liza Featherstone. Both of them write for The Nation. And their pal Amber A'Lee Frost. All three of them write for Jacobin. All of them have the attitude that feminism should not be about women, it should be about socialism. And they routinely attack women who are actual feminists.

When Brocialists attack women, no matter how viciously, they will always blame the women for the attacks. This also true of Gamergaters and Bernie Sanders supporters - and I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap of all three of these groups.

To get a good sense of the Brocialist attitude towards women, observe this tweet by Liza Featherstone. Matt Bruenig had a history of being abusive towards women on Twitter, and when this was brought to the attention of one of Bruenig's employers, Demos, they asked him to tone it down and when he refused they fired him. And Brocialists like Featherstone decided that the real problem wasn't a man representing a social justice organization behaving like an ass. The real problem was women complaining about it. Women complaining about abusive men is "authoritarian" according to Featherstone.

I will be discussing more about Bruenighazi soon because Matt Bruenig will be the first individual Brocialist I write about. Not counting Henwood, Featherstone or Frost.

Henwood: women in high places doesn't change the hierarchy of power

In Henwood's response to Pollitt's latest response, he reveals his view of feminism, which he shares with others on the anarchist-socialist Left:

As I wrote in My Turn (p. xiv): “The side of feminism I’ve studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal [of a more peaceful, more egalitarian society], and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged. It’s distressing to see feminism pressed into service to promote the career of a thoroughly orthodox politician—and the charge of sexism used to deflect critiques of her.”

In other words, women's aspirations should take a back seat to peace and egalitarianism. 

I believe Henwood has the same fundamental understanding of feminism and "women's" issues that the New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris have - women's issues are mostly of interest only to women - important thinkers may consider women in relation to peace or egalitarianism or other important areas, but only as a sub-set of those issues. The role of women themselves, in spite of making up more than half of all humanity, and an oppressed half too, is never worthy of primary consideration. That's probably why Henwood leaves attacking feminists mostly to the Radical Chic Ladies Auxiliary. 

One thing that always cracks me up about lefties is their idea that if only we had the right kind of political system, human hierarchies would disappear. The tiniest moment of insight would reveal that as long as humans live in family structures, with parents caring for - and controlling - their children for the first decade and a half, at least, of their lives, humans will always live in hierarchies. And there is no doubt much research indicating that humans find hierarchies perfectly comfortable. And if the hierarchy is based on skill and experience and intelligence - well what's wrong with that? Should we listen equally to a political pundit and a cardiologist in how to handle someone having a heart attack. Very often hierarchies are incredibly useful and efficient.

It's not hierarchies - it's grossly unfair hierarchies that are the problem. And the notion that women should not be in high places based purely on genitalia is exactly an example of a grossly unfair hierarchy. So by definition, allowing women into the hierarchy would be a huge win for egalitarianism. 

So yes, Hillary Clinton becoming president of the United States does, all by itself, help women. It doesn't change everything but it does help. 

And far more than a Jeb Bush presidency which is what a Bernie Sanders nomination would guarantee.

Henwood gloats about a recent Washington Post poll showing Clinton's lead down. I think this is probably a more accurate predictor of the nominations.

Honey Man vs. Occam's Razor

I've been criticizing identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) quite a bit lately, but what about their arch-nemeses the New Atheists? I've been documenting both sides of this public idiocy coin for a couple of years now, including their mutual contempt society.

So what have those New Atheists been up to?

Well it appears that Sam Harris is continuing to be a complete asshole but I will have to address that later because right now

Richard Dawkins is still obsessed with Mohammed Ahmed, the kid who was arrested when his Texas school teachers thought the clock he made for a class project was a bomb.


Now I'm sure Dawkins has heard of Occam's Razor, which is:

(a) principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

The simplest explanation of Mohammed Ahmed's arrest would be this:

• American schools have been the scene of weapons-based violence in recent years.
• Texas is a state notorious for its anti-Muslim sentiments as this Houston Press article demonstrates - written before the Mohammed Ahmed incident.
• These two facts contributed to a Texas school over-reacting when a kid named Mohammad Ahmed came into school with a rebuilt clock - they had him arrested for fear it was a bomb
• It was announced that Ahmed's family is suing the school district for 15 million and an apology. They say the kid's due process rights were violated.
• Lawsuits over handling of an arrest are not uncommon in the United States.

Conclusion: a Texas school's fearfulness over a teenager's science experiment led to an over-reaction and then an unsurprising lawsuit. 

Simple right? Or maybe just too simple for an Islamaphobe like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins was known as an Islamaphobe long before he ever heard of Ahmed Mohammed.

Using nothing more than hunches and suspicions Dawkins, supported by his sycophants and cheered on by right-wingers, has attempted to turn it into something much more complex. 

Dawkins tweeted his evidence-free suspicion that Mohammed Ahmed is not the victim of misjudgment but the perpetrator of a deliberate media scam.

Then, because the clock was not proven to Dawkins' satisfaction to be sufficiently original, Dawkins accused the kid again without any evidence of being the perpetrator of a deliberate hoax. 

The Twitter-verse, rightly, mocked Dawkins for his absurdity in picking on a 14-year-old kid's failure to live up to adult standards of inventiveness.

But Dawkins remained convinced of the kid's nefariousness and so when Mohammed's parents sued the Texas school district, Dawkins was ready to pounce.

First he doubled-down on the conspiracy theory that the kid deliberately made the clock look like a bomb.

Now remember, Dawkins never presented any evidence that the kid was a deliberate perpetrator of a clock-hoax or a media scam. He simply proceeds as if it was a settled case.

The real lesson Dawkins appears to have taken away from the negative response to his September tweets was that people dislike him for suggesting that a kid could be criticized like an adult. 

And so in order to demonstrate the children are just as culpable as adults, he tweeted this immortal tweet:

Now there are several things to note about this.

First, Dawkins seems to think that a 14-year-old is the prime instigator of the lawsuit against Texas. And because he makes this bizarre assumption, he then suggests that Ahmed isn't really a minor - by putting "kid" into quotes.

Second, he suggests that the 10-year-old in the photo is also culpable for his actions, even though the caption for the photo itself  - which Dawkins provided - says "child executioner... being forced by Isis militants to decapitate his victim.

It's as if Richard Dawkins does not come from this planet, and doesn't realize that minors generally are expected to obey the adults on whom they are dependent. In Mohammed's case, his parents, in the ISIS child's case, murderous extremists. But Richard Dawkins apparently feels that for being in a situation where they obey the will of their elders, children are no longer "kids."

And somehow Richard Dawkins and his followers are so mind-bogglingly obtuse that they believe that it's just wacky that the famously Islamaphobic Dawkins could be criticized for comparing Ahmed to an ISIS forced-murderer kid. Dawkins keeps insisting that it has nothing to do with both being Muslim, just that they both happen to be minors.

"All" Dawkins did was say that Ahmed and the ISIS kid were equally culpable for their crimes. Except of course Ahmed was guiltless of a crime. Except that Richard Dawkins persists in believing he is guilty of a crime. 

Now in spite of Dawkin's dark insinuations about Ahmed, what he keeps harping on the most is that Ahmed did not employ sufficient creativity in building his clock and yet referred to it somewhere as his "invention."

What Dawkins and his followers appear to be unable to grasp is the absurdity that a celebrity scientist is spending his days criticizing a teenager for either bad word choice or boastfulness. A teenager who did nothing  legally wrong and would be unknown still except for his wrongful arrest.

However this isn't the first time that Richard Dawkins used his celebrity to criticize a nobody. People in the atheist community are well aware of Dawkins role in "elevatorgate."

In 2011, Rebecca Watson, known only in atheist circles, complained in a video - very briefly - about a guy hitting on her in an elevator and Watson said "guys don't do that." And this one tiny thing caused Richard Dawkins to have a hissyfit - the story is told here on Watson's blog The Privilege Delusion. As a result of going up against Dawkins, Watson was inundated with rape and death threats that went on for at least three years.

Richard Dawkins finally apologized in 2014 for his Dear Muslima letter, although vaguely - it was too little too late, Watson had already been terrorized by his slavish fan-boys.

So Dawkins has a history of using his celebrity to pick on nobodies for petty reasons. And Watson was attacked by fellow atheists who had formerly been part of her in-group. Ahmed Mohammed was already a member of a hated minority in Texas before Dawkins began to smear him as a criminal mastermind. And at the present time the leading Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, has suggested that there be a special database to track Muslims. 

On ABC News’ This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Trump, "You did stir up a controversy with those comments over the database. Let's try to clear that up. Are you unequivocally now ruling out a database on all Muslims?"
"No, not at all," Trump responded. "I want a database for the refugees that -- if they come into the country. We have no idea who these people are. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don't know if they're ISIS, we don't know if it's a Trojan horse. And I definitely want a database and other checks and balances. We want to go with watchlists. We want to go with databases. And we have no choice."
Trump’s exchange with Stephanopoulos seems to be the clearest explanation of his position. No, he would not rule out a database on all Muslims. But for now, he wants a database for refugees.

And in such an environment, with such slavish followers, Richard Dawkins is attacking this nobody Muslim kid, implying he's guilty of crimes and should be considered culpable for them as an adult. And he seems to be implying that the fact that the kid's parents are suing for due process violations indicates he is guilty of all Dawkins' insinuations.

What could possibly go wrong?

Dawkins got lots of well-deserved criticism for his insanity on Twitter and on web sites such as NYMagazine: Richard Dawkins Is Really Committed to Calling Muslim Clock-Making Kid a Liar.

Now in spite of the fact that Richard Dawkins has become batshit insane out of fear of Muslims, he's also been very irritated by airline security procedures - something that you would think he would appreciate. So when they took his honey, he became furious and began a series of tweets that came to be known  "honey gate." My favorite response to Dawkins' self-importance was this:

I should mention that I despised Richard Dawkins long before he ever got a Twitter account both because of his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and my personal run-in with him on the Pharyngula web site. That was back in 2009 when everybody still thought Dawkins was a cool guy. Now everybody except right-wing Islamaphobes and hardcore New Atheists know that Dawkins has lost it.

One more thing before I finish with Dawkins - I notice that critics for the New York Times revere New Atheists. A review of Dawkins recently publish memoir begins:

Some lumbering robot, this Richard Dawkins. “Lumbering robots” was one of the ways in which this scarily brilliant evolutionary biologist described human beings vis-à-vis their genes in “The Selfish Gene,” his first and probably still his most influential book — more than a million copies sold.

Yeah he's scarily something. I wouldn't say brilliant.

More of my thoughts on Richard Dawkins elsewhere on this blog.