More Nooz from LA and elsewhere (including our meeting)

Good morning from L.A., where the wildfires are still raging, though they’ve been somewhat contained (see below). High winds, however, are threatening to undo the progress firefighters have made. There is still no sign of the fire from USC.

I will be here three more days chilling and visiting friends.

The meeting yesterday on censorship in the sciences was good, I thought,  The highlights for me were Wilfred Reilly’s talk on the taboos in social discourse, the panel on gender led by Sally Satel with Carole Hooven, Diana Blum, and Michael Bailey, Greg Lukianoff’s talk on “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise” and of course our own panel led by Julia Schaletzky and comprising me and my long-time partner in crime, Luana Maroja.

I was nervous about the last one, as it was the only panel at the meeting with free-form discussion between the panelists (the rest of the panels I saw involved three or four speakers, with each speaker giving a 10-15-minute talk followed by audience questions.  But it went well, I thought, with Julia doing a great job moderating, and, since we know each other’s views, we  all talked back and forth fluently. During the 10-minute Q&A session, some distressed man accused me of using atheism and science to fill the “god-shaped hole” that, he said, afflicts all of humanity.  This is the Little People’s argument that Richard Dawkins recently addressed in the Spectator (reprinted in Free Inquiry), and I was prepared to answer him, though the man was persistent in claiming that I was effectively religious. I finally gave up and told him that if he wanted to define “nature” as “god”, as pantheists do, then yes, I was religious by that definition. But that is pure nonsense.

Wilfred Reilly’s talk was okay but he was not as eloquent a speaker as I had assumed after having read several of his several excellent books. The highlight of the day was Greg Lukianoff’s talk, which ranged broadly over academia, censorship, and deplatforming. I hope people will listen to at least part of the conference when the recording (and videos, I hope) become public and free.

Greg’s points that I remember:

• Firings and punishments of professors for speech are higher now than they ever have been since they were made illegal after McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1960 led to laws making it illegal to punish professors for their political view.  In the last two years there has been a slight decrease in sanctions on faculty, but the level is still hugely higher than, say, twenty years ago.
• Deplatformings of speakers by both administrators and students are also at an all-time high, most recently because of the actions of pro-Palestinian protestors. FIRE keeps track of which side the deplatformings come from, and most come from the Left (these include the pro-Palestinian protestors, which of course are considered Leftists). Here’s a slide showing the trend over time. It is OUR SIDE that is doing most of the deplatforming: the blue line are deplatforming attempts from the Left, and the red line from the Right (of course most administrators and students are from the Left, but this graph shows just numbers, not per capita attempts).  One could conclude from this that, as far as stifling of speech on campus goes, the Left is more repressive than the Right. We must do better.

• Harvard and Columbia are almost neck and neck for the position of dead last on FIRE’s 2025 college free-speech rankings, with Harvard in the ignominious last slot. Both schools have a score of ZERO (and yes, FIRE takes into account several indices of speech freedom) and are rated as “abysmal”, along with NYU, which is third from the bottom. Lukianoff’s solution is to repurpose Columbia as a technical school!
• Lukianoff is firm in saying that DEI is encouraging this kind of speech suppression, and he will have none of it.
• Asked about his views on the ACLU and American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Lukianoff pulled no punches. While he still admires much of the ACLU’s work, and even worked for them, he is disappointed with their unwillingness to defend the civil liberties of non-progressive groups, and with their zeal for defending gender activists over those who oppose them. As for the AAUP, which recently endorsed academic boycotts (read: of Israel) as well as endorsing DEI statements, he said that this group is no longer defending free speech, but is actively opposed to it. I agree!

Lukianoff said a lot more, and I recommend that you listen to his entire talk, which was illuminated with many slides. I hope that the organizers will show them all, but I’m sure they will because the entire conference was videotaped.

Kudos to Anna Krylov, who did most of the heavy lifting to get this conference off the ground,

*The NYT reports that the fires in LA are still causing devastation, with about two dozen people killed.

Dangerous winds were again expected to sweep through Los Angeles late Monday, threatening the progress firefighters have made against the devastating wildfires in the area.

Forecasters have issued a rare fire danger alert, known as a “particularly dangerous situation” red flag warning, for Monday night through Wednesday morning. That is the same level of alert that was issued last week as strong wind gusts fueled the fires that have become some of the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.

Over the weekend, firefighters slowed the progress of the Eaton fire, near Pasadena. The 14,000-acre blaze was 27 percent contained early Monday, while the 23,700-acre Palisades fire on the west side of Los Angeles was 13 percent contained. The Eaton fire has killed 16 people, making it one of the deadliest in California’s history, and at least eight people have died in the Palisades blaze. Another 16 people have been reported missing in the areas of the two fires, and officials have warned the number of fatalities is likely to rise.

The rare “particularly dangerous situation” designation applied to three areas across Ventura and Los Angeles counties. While forecasters usually only use this special warning every few years, this marks the fourth time it has been issued in the past few months. The previous two warnings came during conditions that led to the Mountain fire in November and the Franklin fire in December.

*Things are expected to improve later this week as the winds die down.  One of the people who had to flee was Sam Harris, who wrote about it on his Substack in a column called “Starting from scratch“:

When the fire started, I was at my desk, on a call with my team at Waking Up. Moments later, I was meditating on the futility of deciding which material things, gathered over a lifetime of acquisitiveness, I most cherished. In the end, I packed our daughters’ favorite stuffed animals, our two cats, a gun, and a bottle of MDMA (“Why the hell not?”). The one object of sentimental value I grabbed on my way out of my office was a mala from my days in India and Nepal. This moment of triage produced a brief reflection on the many years I’d spent traveling along seemingly incongruent paths: How many people understand the value of both a mala and a gun, and can carry each without feeling like a fraud? As I prepared to step out into a city where nearly everyone would soon be bracing for chaos, I was very grateful to have developed both sides of my personality.

After retrieving our youngest daughter from school, Annaka returned to pack for herself and the girls, while I stood at the window in our living room watching the progress of the fire. I find few things more beautiful than perfectly formed cumulus clouds, and the ramparts of smoke now rising in the West were their magnificent, evil twins. After watching this merciless vision evolve for several minutes, I suddenly decided that we had run out of time.

Based on several reports received in the middle of the night, I became nearly certain that we had lost our home. Later evidence has convinced me that it was spared—while two doors away houses were destroyed. We still haven’t been able to return to our street to see for ourselves, but several times a day Annaka and I learn of more friends and acquaintances from nearby areas who have lost everything.

Whatever the state of our home, much of our world has vanished. Our daughter’s school appears to have been burned only partially, and may eventually be rebuilt, but the surrounding neighborhood is now a toxic wasteland. Many other places that have been part of our daily lives for decades were obliterated. I’ve only seen pictures and video, but they reveal a landscape that resembles Hiroshima the day after the bombing. It is hard to imagine how communities that have been so comprehensively destroyed can be rebuilt.

But Sam uses most of his column to urge the very rich to engage in an act of unprecedented philantropy to rebuild the city. An excerpt:

I have a proposal for the Resnicks, and for every other wealthy person who has deep ties to Los Angeles: Identify the portion of your wealth that has no conceivable impact on your quality of life—I am talking about what is, and will always be, just a number on a spreadsheet—and pledge those residual assets to help rebuild our city. To be clear, I am not asking you to sacrifice anything beyond the idea of how wealthy you are on paper.

Whatever happens, it will take years to rebuild the damaged portions of this city.

*Luana sent me a link to this NYT article, “Judge rejects Biden’s title IX rules, scrapping protection for trans students” (archived here). An excerpt:

A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.

The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It arrived just days before those protections were likely to face more scrutiny under a Trump administration that is expected to be hostile to the new rules and could refuse to defend them in court.

In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.

“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”

The pronoun issue is not as important to me (though it does constitute compelled speech) as the need to protect women’s spaces, especially in sports. The Biden administration had already backed off on this, but this ensures that women’s spaces will be reserved for those whose biological sex is female:

. . .But more significantly, the judge also rejected the revised rule on free-speech grounds, writing that it “offends the First Amendment” by potentially requiring educators to use names and pronouns associated with a student’s chosen gender identity.

“Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” he wrote.

*Speaking of woke practices, the NYT has a guest essay by Kathleen DuVal, a  professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, called “Enough with the land acknowledgments” (archived here). This has always been a purely performative exercise, and I’ve always said that if those who ritually utter these acknowlegments were truly serious, they would give either money or land back to the Native American tribes they acknowledge. DuVal agrees:

If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”

The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.

Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.

The problem that remains is identifying who “owned” the land on which many universities and corporations are built, since tribe conquered tribe, with turtles all the way down up to the first people who came to North America across the Bering Strait.

*Of all places, the Deseret News, an organ of the Mormon Church, has a balanced and informative article about the FFRF KerFFRFle; it’s by Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M university. Click to read:

She also has an earlier article, well worth reading, on Californians’ views about gender extremism. Click headline to read, and remember that California is generally a blue state:

A statue of Tommy Trojan, the iconic image of the University of Southern California. I’m told that whey their football team plays UCLA, the UCLAers deface Tommy:

And some animals that once lived in this area sculpted on an academic building. Perhaps it’s the USC biology department:

From Stacy, You know the answer:

From Positive Attitude Quotes via Diana. Tgus us

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Masih: a Kurdish woman facing execution in Iran for being a political dissenter.

Save Pakhshan Azizi: A Kurdish Woman Opposing Islamism in the Region, Now Facing Execution in Iran

Pakhshan Azizi’s only “crime” was dedicating her life to supporting displaced women and children while championing the values of freedom and justice. A social worker and women’s… pic.twitter.com/A4BEKef9fA

— Masih Alinejad Read More