Pseudohistory Repeats Itself, Part 2

What if the movie Face-off had been set during the 1860’s? I think it would have gone a little something like this. (Photo NYTimes)

The first half of this piece can be found at Pseudohistory Repeats Itself, Part 1, an extended fisking of is School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education by Zach Goldberg & Eric Kaufmann 

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Guilt by Association

Over and over, Goldberg & Kaufmann (G&K) express concern about white kids who fear that they will be perceived as racist:

As a likely consequence of this fear, those exposed to CRT become less willing to criticize a black schoolmate, preventing black pupils from hearing useful feedback from classmates.

And,

[T]he teaching of CRT is likely to significantly impair the peer feedback process for black students, limiting potential opportunities for black students’ intellectual growth.

“Useful feedback” is the most euphemistic way of describing racially-motivated bullying I’ve ever heard.

They attempt to quantify this phenomenon by asking how comfortable someone feels criticizing their peers of different races. People reporting more exposure to teaching about racial injustice tend to be more concerned about criticizing students of color, whereas students of color feel more comfortable criticizing their white peers. The latter case is, presumably, the thing that really scares them. Especially scary since it appears to increase the more “CRT”  they report having been exposed to. Suddenly, instead of being “helpful feedback,” (like when Black kids are on the receiving end), for some reason, it is now described in grave-sounding tones. They don’t seem quite so worried that white kids will lose out on the benefits of this criticism.

Until, hilariously, G&K realize the implicit contradiction and make sure to wedge this sentiment into the very end of the section (in defiance of the article’s primary thrust about the dangers of CRT):  “[T]hese results would suggest that teaching more CRT is likely to benefit white students by introducing a greater willingness among pupils to criticize them while harming black students by withholding the criticism that might further their intellectual development.”

Saved it at the last minute!

Whites who say they were taught three or more CRT concepts were nearly 13 points more likely to say they would have been uncomfortable criticizing a black schoolmate compared to whites who were taught no CRT. Ironically, the effect of CRT is to discourage criticism that might help to improve the very minority outcomes that CRT claims to care about.

This is not, in fact, a thing “that CRT claims to care about.” Critical race theory seeks to explain broadly disparate life circumstances among racial groups. It is concerned with matters of wealth, power, and law. It spends considerably less time (in my understanding) on whether it would be helpful for Trevor to tell his classmate to consider whether all lives actually matter.

Yet, they cannot help themselves. They go further still: white kids should not be made to learn anything that causes them to have an emotional reaction.

We find that white respondents with higher CRT-related exposure feel more guilty about their race, experiencing negative sentiment toward their own group. Whereas 39% of whites who did not report any CRT-related classroom exposure indicated feeling “guilty about the social inequalities between white and black Americans,” this share rises to 45% among whites who reported being taught one or two CRT-related concepts, and to between 54% and 58% among whites who reported being taught three or more concepts. Here, we should also note that levels of agreement with this statement are considerably and significantly higher among white liberals (65%) than white conservatives (29%), which accords with the findings of past research.

No one alive currently should, in fact, feel shame or guilt about the past. We weren’t there. It wasn’t us. Even people whose direct ancestors did awful things are not, themselves, responsible for those acts. To live otherwise would be to inhabit a prison of unatonable regret.

This does not imply that downplaying the evils of history is necessary. Rather, the fact of our innocence and non-involvement is what allows us to deal honestly with those evils. Only someone who felt kinship with the past’s worst racists would feel a need to make justifications and excuses for them. Obfuscating the truth about historical actors aligns oneself with those whose reputation the lies burnish.

As far as the “guilt” described in that survey, the extent of distress it causes is unclear. It is possible, of course, to feel guilt within one context without it being an ever-present part of your day-to-day life. Someone can say they feel “guilt” over things which they understand not to be their own literal fault. I might say I feel “guilty” that I missed your birthday party because my flight was canceled. Or I might say that I feel “guilty” that I relished tearing apart your idiotic CRT push-poll faux research article. Of course, I would not feel true guilt in either of these cases. I would feel rhetorical guilt, rather than the emotion of guilt. It is even possible to recognize a certain level of group culpability, without feeling as if you have a personal relationship to it. Needless to say, the potential meanings of “guilt” used here are broad. And its negative effect on students is unspecified.

Good old-fashioned civic engagement

Pseudohistory Repeats Itself, Part 1

A product of concerted pro-Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ historical revisionism: Charlottesville’s 1924 dedication ceremony for one of history’s biggest losers, Robert E. Lee. Fewer tiki torches visible at this gathering than the one 93 years later, but they’re there in spirit.

The gilded pricks who populate think tanks will stake out a justification for whatever deranged policy ideas it is in their interest to. Having been inoculated against the Dunning-Kruger Effect by years of steady income telling rich people what they want to hear, they feel perfectly comfortable wading into any area and splashing their ignorance across any op-ed pages that will have them. They’re not writing for scholars, they’re writing to prop up profitable political interests by giving their desires a thin veneer of intellectual plausibility.

So ordinarily the faux “studies” cranked out by such groups are beneath consideration, but I ran across one by accident and found it so dense with bad reasoning, historical inaccuracy, and paranoia that it renewed my belief in whatever the opposite of the authors beliefs were. It was begging for someone to write a scornful blog post about. It’s shameful that politicians use articles like this as cover for hobbling education in red states, an effort which has kept pace with the radicalizing authoritarianism of the right.

After all, by receiving a PhD, I became duty-bound to defend the search for knowledge and the dissemination thereof. Under a moonless sky, I pledged a blood-oath to denounce really bad scholarship, contrived in service of illiberal ends, whenever and wherever it was reasonable for me to do so. As long as I felt like it.

I have fairly low respect for sociology as it is, but this motivated-reasoning sociology has got to be as bad as it gets.

School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education by Zach Goldberg & Eric Kaufmann 

 

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A primary inspiration for the desire to remake education in the graven image of right-wing hagiography can be found on the collapsing husk of twitter, where one of the authors shared a thread expounding on his belief that younger people are trending more Democratic than previous generations. They draw a straight line from this to modern schooling. This is the kind of view that everyone’s loud conservative uncle has, but Goldberg & Kaufmann (G&K) are determined to bring rigor to it!

He points to the eye-watering turn away from conservatism pictured in this graphic. Unlike previous generations, millennials aren’t voting for Republicans as much as they get older. Without bothering to compare this idea to any other theories, G&K declare that educational wokeness must be the reason. Surely, nothing else about politics or the world could be different than 30 years ago. It must be the kryptonite…of critical race theory…which is warping these children’s view of the world!

It should be fairly obvious that there might be a few flaws here.

It assumes that education itself is different enough than it used to be in the 1980s that it changes student’s thinking permanently, and indeed that schooling itself is a strong determinant of adult political views. (While most of us probably imagine ourselves coming to our beliefs about politics through a process of learning and reasoning—research suggests that for most people, those things serve more as justification than inspiration.)

As for competing explanations for the difference among Millennials, a few alternatives spring immediately to mind. One would be that the generation currently settling into middle-adulthood has been denied the economic stability that usually ensconces people into the feeling that they have a stake in preserving the conservative status quo. Millennials are worse off in almost every economic sense: paid less, for longer hours, buried under student debt, unable to buy homes (which are, relative to income, about six times more expensive as they were 60 years ago). And all against a preposterous din of stultifying boomeristic obliviousness about the value of hard work. A situation of their own making, as champions of austerity.

Or what about the other ways in which unpopular conservative positions have come to affect younger people and new millennial parents? Abortion rights, climate change, LGBTQ rights, frequent school massacres. Or merely the fact that for the entirety of millennials’ political memory the GOP has been a ghoulish assemblage of hateful little weirdos.

 

The authors don’t WANT to find out why people dislike their ideas, they want to turn them into dinosaurs

To even more directly contradict the hypothesis that Millenials’ reluctance to grow more conservative is due to education–the same trend is evident in the UK! This is a good control group. Our educational systems and history are markedly different, but Millenials in both countries are experiencing very similar economies.

For this reason, Kaufmann cropped this chart to avoid showing that the UK was on it, because it would undermine his point if a country with a different history, racial makeup, and educational system exhibited the same trends as us. But indeed, they don’t actually care about understanding this–they care about doing the thing they want to do anyway, which is to warp the history that students are taught in school in the vain hope that it will alter their thinking.

 

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Professor Xavier’s School for Mutant Intellectuals

Conservatives of this ilk often begin by defining a constellation of ideas that make them uncomfortable and then giving them a scary name, to “other-ize” relatively well-accepted facts or reasoning. Fascist thought-leader Christopher Rufo, a successful practitioner of this technique, explained how he does it a couple years ago:

 

Journalists covering the reactionary hysteria over CRT allowed this admission to slide. By the time this moral panic hit their radar in 2021, it had been all over conservative media for a while (building steam as backlash to 2020’s protests against racialized police violence) and they didn’t feel the need to interrogate its origins when they could simply write “both-sides” stories on it. Instead, these astroturfed campaigns have been treated as good-faith disagreements over how to teach subjects dealing with America’s past, rather than an overt attempt to channel white resentment. Fortunately for racists, there’s nothing remotely difficult about finding kooky-sounding lessons in a country of 350 million, and cherry-picking it for your racist audience to say “see!”

It also escaped the notice of much of the media that Rufo’s earlier career was in pushing creationism for the Discovery Institute–an earlier educational panic that had all the precursors to this one, but with less emotionally-fraught topic (and one which was easier to dismiss as a religious effort that had no place in secular science classes).

It should come as no surprise to see several of Rufo’s ideological collaborators linked to overt white supremacism recently: Nate Hochman, Richard Hanania, along with book-banning, Hitler-quoting, censorship front Moms for Liberty. One of the authors of this very “study” (Kaufman) was even in Hanania’s small think-tank, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. And lest one assume that this was a large amorphous group, where he wasn’t close to the famous eugenicist, it was literally three people.

 

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Survey Course

The thesis of this work is that if you are merely exposed to dreaded woke/CRT/social justice theories, even without agreeing, that you are more likely to end up voting for Democrats. What follows are then a series of questionnaire data that they attempt to mangle into this theme. If you don’t want to read an overlong explanation of their bullshit claims and the numerous ways they obfuscate, ignore important correlations, and generally exhibit a degree of carelessness and bias you would expect from a pseudo-academic article written to be printed out and waved around by red-faced Republican town council members–skip to the end.

Avatar: The Way of Sascha

Pictured: Me

Back in 2010 I was out at a bar with some friends of my then-girlfriend when a couple young women cautiously approached me. They asked “Excuse me, are you Sascha?” and without hesitation I somehow had the wherewithal to answer “Yes, I am!” They then pulled me aside to compliment me on the talk I had given at RISD earlier that day, and we had a 7-10 minute conversation on “my work” which I gradually ascertained was some kind of social art collective in New York City, where I, apparently, lived.

I don’t know whether they eventually got suspicious that I was who they had assumed, but if so, they never let on. And I remain proud to this day of my quick-witted choice to lie to these unsuspecting strangers. (As it turns out, I looked pretty similar to this guy, but I’m still surprised that they saw and heard both of us in person on the same day and decided we matched.)

In the same spirit, I enjoy being catfished as much as the next guy, so when an unknown Whatsapp user starts texting me out of the blue, in Spanish, fun can only be right around the corner.

It is hard to know what this person was trying to get out of me, but I appreciated her desire to avoid believability. She was from LA, but currently living in Iraq, with her “only daughter.” What was she doing there? She was “posted” there. With whom? With all these random pictures of people in body armor. The army lets you bring your kids now? Yes, if they are very small.

I used Google Translate because I don’t speak Spanish, but that wasn’t much help when she dropped an Indonesian sentence in there and then seemed to understand my response, in Indonesian. Here is the excerpt:

Jenny: I’m Jenny good morning from here
Sorry I misspelled a number when trying to text a friend and your number came up
Sorry if I bother you, can I know your name please?

Ryan: I’m Ryan. Good evening.

Jenny: WOW, it’s morning here now 04:47
Where do you live?
I am from Los Angeles but am currently in Iraq.

[This was one-hour later than the current time in Iraq]

Ryan: Iraq? What are you doing there? i’m in Boston.

Jenny: i’m posted here
I work here and live with my only daughter.

Ryan: Posted in what?

Jenny:

(Would you believe it if I told you reverse image-searching these turn up generic “girls with ammo” pictures on gun-fetish pintrest?)

that’s it
so nothing much
I was here for the other government. We have been in the second troop for 8 months.
Can I know the time there now?

[I quickly double-check whether there are still American troops in Iraq because I’m honestly not sure. ]

Ryan: It’s like 8 o’clock. I’m surprised the army would let you take your daughter with you.

Jenny: yes because she is very small
Aku tidak bisa tinggal jauh darinya (Indonesian: “I can’t stay away from him”)
that’s Lillian that’s her name

Ryan: Tunggu, apakah kita berbicara bahasa Indonesia sekarang? (Indonesian: “Wait, are we speaking Indonesian now?”)

Jenny: (back to Spanish)

No, I wrote to my friend here to find her a child, so I didn’t change it.
Sorry, he was the wrong guy.
Who lives with you?

[At this point my wife, who has been following along with this saga solemnly places her hand on my shoulder and beseeches that I don’t fall in love]

Ryan: You won’t believe when I tell you: I live in a lighthouse

Jenny: wow, it’s nothing, I mean, do you live with your family?
I am a simple girl ok not rich
I live with my daughter alone, who do you live with?

Ryan: The sea is my family. The waves, my lovers. Whales and starfish, my cousins.

Jenny: oh that’s amazing
Are you married or single?
I’m separated I only have one daughter
I turn 25 next month

Ryan: I have no one to call my own, just the lonely expanse of the sea. The heartless void of the abyss.

Jenny: how old are you now my good friend
Don’t you feel lonely sometimes?
Do you want to be single forever?
I am looking for a decent man you are handsome but I don’t know your attitude
What is your occupation do you work?
Ryan… Really great
I am Jenny
Take care I have to rest a bit so I can arrive early for my duty

Once she’d started glitching, the magic kind of went out of it. And I was already married to the sea. Still, what a deep backstory! Just a simple girl not rich trying to make her way in this world. The last American soldier stationed in Iraq, with her small daughter.

Stilloob

In April 2020 I had tickets to see proto-quirk band They Might Be Giants perform their classic 1990 album Flood for the tour marking it’s 30th anniversary. Or at least, I had tickets from when I bought them in about December 2019 until March 2020, when the tickets evaporated into a powdery mist and blew away, carried forth into an unknowable future date. For much of the following year I went to great lengths to avoid mists of all types.

They tentatively pushed the show back a year, then readjusted, then rescheduled the readjustment, the tide came in, the tide went out, flowers bloomed in the meadow, streams became choked with salmon, a thousand Tuscan suns blazed to life, shone for an eternity, and dwindled to cosmic embers. Somewhere a little after that, a firm date was finally decided upon this past September. Even that was briefly in doubt as John Flansburgh was seriously injured in a car accident this June, one night after managing to commence the tour.

Since the initial cancellation, I’d spent over a year working remotely, got vaccinated, finally saw my friends and family again after the long absence, welcomed a daughter…you get the idea. By the time it finally rolled around, I was a completely different person.

Unfortunately, the person I was now was was a sleepy dad. The kind of guy who wants to want to go to concerts, but doesn’t actually want to go to concerts. And my pal who’d planned to go with me back in 2020 was similarly crushed under the weight of his 2022 life. So I gave my tickets away. C’est la vie. While I’d held out this future event as a personal marker of the end of my pandemic for two years, once it came time to mark it I’d been so battered by those years that I was in no mood. Seems appropriate.

Sensing, I assume, my particular circumstances, TMBG streamed the Minneapolis performance from the tour I missed. So after putting to bed the offspring that was nothing more than a twinkle in my eye when this endeavor began I finally saw my Flood show. It was lovely to hear them do a bunch of album tracks that they wouldn’t have played live in concerts for 30 years, or ever.

The most surprising of these was their treatment of Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love. Specifically, they played it backwards.

Flansburgh told the audience to cheer and applaud before the song, and they proceeded to do it in reverse. It has a geometric plinky-plonky riff and it’s fairly short, so it was a good choice for this kind of thing. The backwards version is called Stilloob, a fittingly imprecise reversal of ‘bullets’. This became evident later in the show when they played the recording of the reversed version backwards, to hear how similar it was to the original. The direction of time, nothing more than impediment. Truly, the Tenet of songs.

Part of my head

In the halcyon days of 2005, when Lost & Desperate Housewives were climbing the charts, and Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone was setting hearts alight, I wrote a blog post about a section of a strange old book I have. It details the supposed resting places of supposed sections of supposed saints. That is to say: it’s about religious relics. There are a surprising number of places claiming to posses body parts that were formerly in the possession of god’s chosen lackeys. Or perhaps what I found truly surprising was how frequently they seemed to be near to each other, or were specimens that no one ought to be be curious about, like “part of a head.”

 

the heads of st. james are very numerous: there is one in toulouse, while two are at venice (one in the church of st. george, another in the monastery of ss. philip and james). there are a skull and a vessel of the saint’s blood in the church of the apostles at rome, a head at valencia, another at amalfi, still another at st. vaast in artois, and part of a head at pistoja. bones, hands, and arms of the saint are scattered about in great numbers, and are shown at troyes, in sicily, on the island of capri, at pavia, in bavaria, at liege, at cologne, and in other places. some bones of the saint are shown in the escorial.”

so for those of you playing the home game that’s like 15 whole bodies for one person.

can you imagine the rivalry between those two churches in the same town that both say they’ve got this guy’s head?

 

In the time since I wrote that, all-lower-caps writing has gone out of style, then back into style again, and a digitized version of the book I mention, Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, Ceremonies, Observances, and Miscellaneous Antiquities by William S. Walsh has been made available online.

I was reminded of my morbid interest in this topic recently when I came across Atlas Obscura’s rundown of The Ultimate Guide to Scattered Body Parts which covers some of the same ground, but with a less 1898 point of view.

One assumes that this particular form of historical artifact preservation is a thing of the past, but you never know. Trends have a way of coming back around. There are a few figures from our era that might leave a bit of themselves for future generations to stick in a museum (or whatever the equivalent of museums end up being in the future). It’s well-known that Einstein’s brain was preserved after death, as well as was Ted Williams’…almost. Gene Roddenberry was launched into orbit, and Hunter S. Thompson was blasted out of a cannon. (Maybe someone still has the cannon.) Walt Disney was supposed to have been frozen, but that’s a myth. (A fable as firmly lodged in public imagination as his eponymous corporation’s dubious legal hold over its intellectual properties.) The blood-stained pink Chanel suit that Jackie Kennedy wore to her husband’s assassination is stored out of sight at the national archives, where it could go on display in the year 2103 at the earliest, as long as whoever JFK’s descendants are at the time decide it’s OK.

So having come to the end of this brief list I conjured out of my memory without trying very hard, I’m forced to admit that we’re not really any better than the people, centuries ago, who ended up creating the two-heads-in-a-town scenario from before. I didn’t want to have to hand it to them and their disturbing hobby, but I guess they showed me. Sorry historical weirdos.

Max Planck & Having Only Bad Choices Under Fascism

If you were looking for a 32-minute video about the dilemmas that faced celebrated physicist Max Planck as the German science academe fell under the control of the Nazi party in the 1930’s, this is the one for you. Science historian Kathy Joseph expounds, rivetingly, on how Planck, a major leader in the development of quantum physics and beloved national figure, wrestled with how much public opposition he could wisely muster to the regime. Initially convinced that the buffoonish right-wingers who came to power in 1933 were a temporary blip, he did his best to preserve the continuity of the German physics community and protect Jewish scientists under his responsibility as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (predecessor to the institution bearing his name). It is striking that while he miscalculated the course of the fascist movement in some ways, it seems unlikely that there is much he could have done differently to oppose their oppressive policies.

Could We Not?

What could be more normal than three people sitting at perfectly-spaced distances from each other right here?

I live in the Boston suburbs. On a foggy walk home one morning, I wandered past this bus stop, noticed this bench, and felt disappointed in everyone involved in creating it.

Benches like this are subtle forms of “hostile architecture“—versions of public infrastructure that are designed to ward off use by the least fortunate in society. Spikes where someone might lie down for shelter, oddly angled seats that discourage getting comfortable, etc. These sorts of decisions are sometimes justified, in places with lots of foot traffic, or to prevent damage from, say skateboards. But more often then not, they’re used to prevent penniless people from sleeping somewhere sheltered or dry. Special constructions designed to ward off use by its user. They’re a way of looking at people who have absolutely nothing, nowhere to go, who are seeking an ounce of comfort from their surroundings, and denying it to them.

Inanimate objects themselves, most would say, are not inherently good or evil. Rather it’s how they’re used, and the intentionality behind their construction and placement that matters. That’s why there would be nothing hostile about anti-sleeping bench in a high-traffic place where there were people lingering or taking up too much space at once, or there was lots of other seating around. But place it somewhere that a desperate person might try to sleep inconspicuously, as a last resort, and it becomes cruel.

The area where I encountered this one isn’t really either of those things. It’s just sitting out on a wide street with no cover nearby, and no houses on that side. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen anyone waiting for a bus here. People take public transportation and there are plenty of pedestrians, but nobody’s lingering. There’s not even visible homelessness around that would prompt a reaction to install a specific anti-homeless-person bench.

Which means that the city either chose this model on purpose, or the bench company makes this kind by default and it’s cheaper. Either someone in city government chose to be cruel without even the excuse of plausibly being afraid of the homeless, or our civic life is so degraded and distrustful that bench manufacturers find it profitable to sell mass-produced hostile benches as the discount option.

I could check I suppose, but why bother? Which option would even be worse? [Note: I just thought about it for 5 sec and realized that the latter case would, because it would represent a more widespread issue.] Fortunately, the main victims of this particular bus stop are mopey citizens like me who find hostile benches depressing, as opposed to any actual hard-up person who needs a bench to sleep on. It’s mostly cruel in a theoretical sense. But just as a prevalence of umbrellas in the hands of Seattleites is a marker of their familiarity with rain, the normality of rude architecture marks a society’s callousness towards the destitute. It would be nice if things like this felt a little bit less normal.

Kramschublade Clam Cram

It’s time for a rustic assemblage of miscellany.

I wanted to use a clever name for a running series of miscellaneous hodgepodge so I thought “there’s probably some zany Germanic compound word for a collection of random artifacts. It’ll be a translation of a common thing that contains random items.” Well, as you may have guessed, it is kram schublade, literally, ‘stuff compartment’ in German. Despite the length and fun to say, it doesn’t appear to be a well-celebrated term. The Germans are very efficient when it comes to junk storage, one assumes, and people who store their junk this way are probably socially ostracized.

It seems like it’s supposed to be two words, really, but compound words are more fun. And now that summer is on the way and people are getting vaccinated, what better time to cram some clams? (Where by “clams” I mean “miscellaneous information,” that is.)

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Ernst Thälmann Island

Bring me the head of Ernst Thälmann!

And speaking of German, East Germany! There is an oft-repeated geography curio that goes like this: a small uninhabited island off the coast of Cuba was ceded to East Germany back when there was an East Germany as a gift between allies. When East Germany ceased to exist, the reunification treaty didn’t specifically mention this island, so, by implication, the German Democratic Republic lives on there, a smoldering ember of a once mighty Eastern Bloc.

It’s an appealing sort of myth–that some geographic technicality undoes a basic fact about the world that most people think they know. In this case, the technicality itself isn’t true: the “gift” that Cuba made was only ever in spirit, never a formal thing. They just did a little renaming ceremony so that the diplomats could get a picture together for the newspaper. The Cubans renamed their uninhabited isle after Ernst Thälmann, a German communist who opposed (and was eventually murdered by) the Nazis, and “ceremonially” gave it to them and erected a bust of the man himself on the beach.

But it is worth observing that even if it were “true” it wouldn’t really be. Things like the existence or non-existence of countries isn’t based on deciphering obscure bits of information, they’re based on mutual understanding, which is sort of the opposite. Unlike a question like “how many atoms make up the moon?” which has a precise, real answer, there is no cosmic ledger that says which countries exist and which don’t. They’re based on whether you can get a sufficient number of people to treat them as valid, so even if the architects of German reunification had forgotten about this windswept isle, it wouldn’t mean anything, and the Stasi wouldn’t get to start prowling around the Caribbean, wiretapping coconuts and whatnot.

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Cash rules everything around me. [Ed: this graph is technically extrapolated from low-wage worker statistics specific to several urban localities, but proportions ought to be broadly true.]

Wage theft is the most common form of stealing in the US. That is, companies underpaying workers what they are owed. And because of the obvious difficulty in bringing legal challenges against an employer, nearly impossible to redress.

An Epidemic of Wage Theft Is Costing Workers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars a Year

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Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth — Scientific American

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds All Living Biomass,” by Emily Elhacham et al., in Nature. Published online December 9, 2020

The implications of these findings, published on Wednesday in Nature, are staggering. The world’s plastics alone now weigh twice as much as the planet’s marine and terrestrial animals. Buildings and infrastructure outweigh trees and shrubs. “We cannot hide behind the feeling that we’re just a small species, one out of many,” says study co-author Ron Milo, who researches plant and environmental sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. […]

He and his team had previously published an estimate of the amount of biomass on Earth, which led to the question of how it compared with the mass of artificial objects. Emily Elhacham, then a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute, led the effort to pull together disparate data sets on the flow of materials around the world. The researchers found that human-made, or anthropogenic, mass has doubled every 20 years since 1900. Total biomass remained more stable in that time period, though plant biomass has declined by approximately half since the dawn of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. The team estimates that anthropogenic mass crossed over to exceed biomass this year, plus or minus six years. […]

Whatever the moment when humanity’s production eclipsed nature’s, the study points to a larger narrative in which humans are modifying the planet to such an extent that we have created a new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene, says Waters, who has been active in research seeking out geologic markers of this proposed division of time.

On The Search For Planet X (the game)

“Greetings, Earthling. Would you like to play this game I bought?”

Occasionally, I write pieces for Adventures in Poor Taste, a cool site about all things pop culture, and even, sometimes, science! I recently reviewed the hit board game ‘The Search for Planet X‘ which falls squarely into the intersection of those two subjects. And after you check that out, have a look at my buddy Chris’s far more popular columns about X-Men comics.

‘Search for Planet X’ board game simulates real astronomy — by Ryan Michney

On the Almost Textbook-Level Simplicity of This Week’s Events

The logical eventuality of electing the world’s stupidest authoritarian

Usually when trying to understand politics, we all grasp for historical precedents or analogies to situations that the founders envisioned. Most political commentary consists of those kinds of warring analogies, like “during the pandemic of 1918 city governments in San Francisco did X, while St Louis did Y” or “the writers of the Constitution wrote the Second Amendment to reserve militia powers to the states, which they believed were…” And a lot of the disagreement between different camps comes from various ways of interpreting the will of the people from the revolutionary era who envisioned how the government ought to do things.

Probably the largest gap in our understanding of how the government ought to work is due to the fact that the Constitution makes no references at all to political parties. This seems to have been the most significant oversight of the founders, who imagined that the three branches of government would be competing with one another, rather than cooperating across them based on factional affiliation to parties. That tension has been increasingly obscured over time despite the founders’ interest in preventing “factionalism.”

That obscurity has caused some number of people to miss an important bit of context in interpretations of last Wednesday’s events: that this scenario was exactly kind of thing that the framers of the constitution spent a lot of time thinking about. In fact, it was pretty much the most obvious political crime.

The president incited a mob to attack the congress during a transition of power. Strip away the particularities of our current age, the party affiliations of the various actors, the more recent historical examples of right-wing authoritarianism which this act was an outgrowth of, and the specific vectors which carried the false narratives that precipitated it. (Violent authoritarianism is almost always based on fraudulent beliefs.)

“What if the president doesn’t like something that congress is doing, and he sends the military to arrest all of them? Or he ignores the laws they pass over his veto? Or he whips up a mob to invade the capitol?” These are the kinds of questions we all game out when learning about the U.S. Constitution in middle-school history. It’s something that lots of people have thought about! Including, importantly, the very people who came up with the idea that there should be such a thing as a president and a legislature, and who enumerated the powers they ought to be granted to deal with one another. Unlike most of the political questions people debate, we don’t need to imagine what the founders would have thought about this—they spent ample time explaining their thinking about lawless rulers and the ability of government to constrain in situations exactly like this!

This is going to be the thing that schoolchildren learn about Donald Trump in 2076. That he lost re-election and then attempted to remain in power using every possible bullshit recourse. Because it is such a clear object lesson on how the various parts of the federal government and political representation as delegated to the states are all designed to interact as to make a perfect writing prompt for kids writing papers in class. They will be given essay assignments on how these events were a violation of the separation of powers, and be able to easily cite the steadily escalating constitutional abuses in the years running up to Wednesday’s debacle. Depending on the way the next 11 or so days play out, the extremely straightforward way in which he tried and failed to do this ought to clarify and distill all of his other actions over the past five years. We’ve been the frog in the pot as it heats up, getting acclimated to each transgression as it passes without consequence, waiting for the bubbles to start frothing over. (Or at least those of us without the wherewithal to look over the edge of the pot at any point and notice the burner.)

The specific lies which have facilitated this attempted power grab are so comically bogus and premeditated as to be unworthy of taking seriously, and have been roundly discredited by anyone even remotely tethered to reality at this point. Some people, by wandering into that mire and looking around, have gotten a bit hung up on the specifics of that alternate reality universe, missing the important consideration that any fascist uprising would, of necessity, be marinated in a sauce of dishonesty. It is always thus with demagogues, and it is indeed important not to ignore the chain of custody tying it to traits of right-wing thinking that led inevitably to this. The right is always a force for authoritarianism and enemies of a free and just society.

Yet that should not completely overshadow the fact that Trump sicced his bloodthirsty deplorables on Republicans as well as Democrats. People in the crowd were most eager to hang the Vice-President (working in his capacity as president of the Senate) and the Republican legislators whom they saw as obstacles to the executive seizing power. They ran roughshod over the seat of government, roaming around the corridors with zip ties to kidnap lawmakers and vandalizing their chambers. It’s a textbook definition of the kind of mob chaos that Madison et al imagined a president would attempt if the other branches were not given the ability to retaliate. Any senator or representative who doesn’t currently understand that they were attacked in their capacity as a legislator rather than as a member of a party “faction” right now needs a wake up call stronger than their own attempted murder, apparently. (The Republicans who voted to sustain objections to the electoral college votes after the incident belong in this category).

Such congresspeople may also apparently need to be reminded that failing to punish not only the president, but also the members of their own ranks who abetted this attack on representative democracy, will invite future attempts, and weaken the United States as a concept.

While I was watching the crisis unfold on Wednesday and seeing the flood of images that emerged afterwards (many gleefully filmed by the perpetrators themselves, who chose this particular moment to not wear masks in a turn of self-incriminating thinking that would be hilarious if it weren’t packaged with an adjacent cruelty towards others that is a hallmark of the year of Covid), I found myself becoming genuinely angry in a way I didn’t expect. I’m usually pretty above it, when it comes to sanctimonious outrage at offensive acts towards patriotic symbols, but as an American, it was infuriating to watch it all come to this in a way that I had cynically believed myself unable to feel at this point. Of all the disgraceful behavior of the right in our recent time period: suppressing votes, stealing a Supreme Court seat, extorting our foreign allies for domestic political advantage, stalling assistance to the country as it suffers through a health crisis, corrupting the justice system, and cheering on basically every variety of brutality towards Black people or immigrants—this was so obviously seditious that anyone who wasn’t shocked by it can safely be written off as unshockable. Anyone with a modicum of affection for this country (or at least good neo-classical architecture) was revolted.

Though this travesty was in some ways the least consequential of the events of the past year for the actual lives of people living in the United States, it was the most forthrightly symbolic of the right’s utter disregard for our shared civic spirit. If this isn’t enough for the people who preen and pose as if they honor our national values to realize that the forces they’ve been stoking are vile and un-American, what else possibly could be? It isn’t like the founders didn’t try to warn them about this guy.