þe Harvard Administration's 35-Year Tolerance & Shielding of Sexual Harasser Jorge Dominguez; & BRIEFLY NOTED: for 2021-02-08
Why am I always so effing naïve? Plus things that whizzed past. And some others as well...
I confess that I am so effing naïve.
Jorge Dominguez’s harassment of Terry Karl came to light in 1983: he told her "come across or your tenure case is toast.
I assumed that things thereafter would be under control. It was true that the Crimson wrote that “some professors said they were unhappy Rosovsky did not tell the department members what actions he took against Dominguez and complained that the reported punishment was too light. ‘There’s some feeling that the fact that there was supposed to be no publicity and the fact that he is still here are an inadequate deterrent for the future and an inadequate punishment for this case’, one professor said…” Nevertheless, I assumed that Dean Rosovsky or President Bok or both had told Dominguez, over a martini or two, that if any woman ever complained about him again he would be bounced out of Harvard University, and if the Harvard administration had anything to say about it, out of his profession as well.
But no: Thirty-five years. Not a single person in Massachusetts or University Halls or in the Political Science administrative offices… caring to do the overwatch. And Provost Newell’s words here do not fill me with confidence, for she does not say “top administrators intolerant of sexual harassment” but “accelerating progress toward a culture that is intolerant.”
I had thought Harvard had top administrators in 1983—and since—who were as horrified as I was—people who knew that female assistant professors were getting feedback like “your lectures are awful; they would be much better if you lectured naked”, and were working hard to change things.
Silly me:
Harvard Gazette & Deputy Provost Peggy Newell: Harvard Issues Report on Sexual Harassment: ‘GAZETTE: What were the main findings of their report? NEWELL: The committee’s report is incredibly thorough, and I would encourage community members to read it in its entirety. It clearly outlines several cultural and organizational factors that allowed [Political Science Professor Jorge] Domínguez to escape accountability [and for his academic and administrative career to flourish] for so long, and suggests concrete, actionable steps that Harvard can take to create an environment free from harassment and discrimination. These recommendations include: fostering greater “psychological safety” across our Schools and units, better communicating processes for reporting misconduct, achieving greater faculty gender balance, establishing standardized processes for vetting candidates, improving transparency around investigations and sanctions, monitoring employees with past infractions, and accelerating progress toward a culture that is intolerant of sexual and gender-based harassment, broadly. Some of these things we have been working on already. Other recommendations will be the foundation for new initiatives…
LINK: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/harvard-issues-report-on-sexual-harassment/
Very Briefly Noted:
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan: ‘Culture Warlords’ by Talia Lavin: ‘Far-right chatroom… members discussing whether she is too ugly to rape…. misogyny, anti-Semitism and white supremacy… undercover work in extreme-right spaces to draw out the poison…. Efforts to explain the alt-right proliferated throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, Lavin’s work… has a raw and deeply understandable anger. That is not to its detriment. All too often, analyses of white nationalism and the far-right have devolved into anodyne stories of “Nazis buy milk too”, or else created false equivalence with counter-protesters. Culture Warlords is a compelling read… LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/fb635edc-d98b-4f4a-af81-d196e99143f8>
This “divisive”: what is divisive is not convicting Donald Trump. That would be very, very, very divisive indeed: Financial Times Editorial Board: The US Senate Must Convict Donald Trump: ‘His trial for inciting insurrection is divisive but necessary… LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/83911089-98e0-407b-9bd7-c7144de141b6>
Charlie Sykes: The Prodigal Republicans: ‘Liz Cheney may not have been Never Trump, but she is clearly Never Again Trump, and that’s a beginning…. What do we do with the late arrivals?… Cheney… a loyal Trump lieutenant…. Sasse… voted with the president on his emergency declaration for the border wall, and against conviction…. But right now, both of them are saying the right things…. Welcome back the prodigals? Even the original parable acknowledges that this is not an easy call… LINK: <https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/the-prodigal-republicans>
John Burn-Murdoch & Mehul Srivastava: Israel Provides First Signs of Mass Vaccination Driving Down Virus Cases: ‘Daily case[s]… 60 and above… fallen by 46%… a much smaller decline of 18 per cent among under–60s… LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/0cdc8563-1e6d-4089-bedb-b0f675c0d683>
One Video:
Tony Freeth: The Anti-Kythera Device:
Seven Paragraphs:
Francis Fukuyama: What Trump Showed Us About America: ‘The single most confounding thing about the Trump era is that we still do not really understand why more than 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, and why there remains a smaller core of fanatical supporters who will believe anything he says—most recently, that he won the election but that it is being stolen through voter fraud. Over the past several years, a legion of explanations for the Trump phenomenon have been put forward—that it is a backlash against the inequalities created by globalization, that it represents the fear of white voters fearing a loss of power and prestige, that is has been generated by social media companies, that it reflects a huge social divide between people living in big cities and those in smaller communities, that it is based on level of education, and so on. All of these factors are probably true to some extent, but none of them adequately explains the fear and loathing evident on the right in America today. There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship that conventional explanations fail to capture, reflected in poll data showing that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of QAnon theories about Democrats drinking children’s blood. Nor have I seen a good explanation for why so many conservatives can see such an imperfect vessel as Trump as the object of cultlike worship, or fear the Democrats as the embodiment of Satan. At the end of Trump’s term, what I’ve learned is that I really don’t understand America well at all… LINK: <https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/19/roundup-what-trump-showed-us-about-america-435762>
Friedrich A. von Hayek (1988): The Fatal Conceit: ‘I certainly reject every anthropomorphic, personal, or animistic interpretation of the term [god].… The conception of a man-like or mind-like acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind…. Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive. The source of order that religion ascribes to a human-like divinity—the map or guide that will show a part successfully how to move within a whole—as we now learn to see to be not outside the physical world but one of its characteristics, one far too complex for any of its parts possibly to form an ‘image’ or ‘picture’ of it…. Perhaps most people can conceive of abstract tradition only as a personal Will. If so, will they not be inclined to find this will in ‘society’ in an age in which more overt supernaturalisms are ruled out as superstitions? On that question may rest the survival of our civilization…
Karl Marx: Theories of Surplus-Value, Chapter 17: The Childish Babble of a Say: ‘Incidentally, those economists are no better, who (like John Stuart Mill) want to explain the crises by these simple possibilities of crisis contained in the metamorphosis of commodities—such as the separation between purchase and sale. These factors which explain the possibility of crises, by no means explain their actual occurrence. They do not explain why the phases of the process come into such conflict that their inner unity can only assert itself through a crisis, through a violent process. This separation appears in the crisis; it is the elementary form of the crisis. To explain the crisis on the basis of this, its elementary form, is to explain the existence of the crisis by describing its most abstract form, that is to say, to explain the crisis by the crisis. “Ricardo says: “No man produces, but with a view to consume or sell, and he never sells, but with an intention to purchase some other commodity, which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to future production. By producing, then, he necessarily becomes either the consumer of his own goods, or the purchaser and consumer of the goods of some person. It is not to be supposed that be should, for any length of time, be ill-informed of the commodities which he can most advantageously produce, to attain the object which he has in view, namely, the possession of other goods; and, therefore, it is not probable that he will continually produce a commodity for which there is no demand” [l.c., pp. 339–40].” This is the childish babble of a Say, but it is not worthy of Ricardo… LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch17.htm>
Noah Smith: Welcome to Noahpinion: The Substack!: ‘Feels Good to be Blogging Again: ‘I started when I was a graduate student, continued during my years as an assistant professor, and then kept the blog going intermittently after I started writing professionally for Bloomberg Opinion… refine my thoughts… develop a voice… connect with other[s]…. Over the past few years, though, my blogging dwindled, as I shifted more and more of my commentary to Twitter. It’s time to go back. I’m definitely not giving up my awesome job at Bloomberg…. But there’s lots of stuff I want to write that I can’t put in those op-ed columns, and that stuff will all go here…. Twitter has become a dumpster fire of contentiousness, performativity, negativity, stupidity, and misinformation, and one solution is to go back to blogging. Blogs give readers time to digest and think about ideas, without being interrupted by random shouters with little context and lots of agenda. And they allow writers to insert nuance and elaboration… LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/welcome-to-noahpinion-the-substack>
John Gruber: The Rotting of the American Mind: ‘Kevin Dowd revealed himself to be well on his way to Kookville: “The Democrats remain mystified by the loyalty of Trump’s base. It is rock solid because half the country was tired of being patronized and lied to and worse, taken for granted…” Yes, yes, Trump’s base remains united behind him because they’re… tired of being lied to. That’s it. It’s certainly not that they’re tired of being told truths they do not want to hear: “A word of caution to Fox News: Your not-so-subtle shift leftward is a mistake. You are one of a kind. Watching the quick abdication of Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum following the election (joining an already hostile Chris Wallace) was like finding out my wife was cheating.” This treachery that Kevin Dowd equates to his wife cheating on him was acknowledging that Joe Biden soundly beat Donald Trump in the election. That’s not a leftward shift. It’s a statement of fact. A truth, inconvenient or not… LINK: <https://daringfireball.net/>
Bertrand Russell (1921): The Practice & Theory of Bolshevism: ‘The method by which Moscow aims at establishing Communism is a pioneer method…. I do not believe that by this method a stable or desirable form of Communism can be established…. I think these elements of failure are less attributable to faults of detail than to an impatient philosophy, which aims at creating a new world without sufficient preparation in the opinions and feelings of ordinary men and women…. A fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in philosophy and art and private relations, seems absolutely necessary if industrialism is to become the servant of man instead of his master. In all this, I am at one with the Bolsheviks; politically, I criticize them only when their methods seem to involve a departure from their own ideals. There is, however, another aspect of Bolshevism from which I differ more fundamentally. Bolshevism is… a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. A full-fledged Communist is not merely a man who believes that land and… entertains… elaborate and dogmatic beliefs… militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters…. I believe the scientific outlook to be immeasurably important to the human race. If a more just economic system were only attainable by closing men’s minds against free inquiry, and plunging them back into the intellectual prison of the middle ages, I should consider the price too high… LINK: <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-russell-1921-bolshevism.pdf>
WheatNOil: mRNA Vaccines: ‘The mRNA vaccines… brilliant at a science level…. Scientists looked at the COVID virus and saw a protein on the outside of the virus that looked like a good candidate to launch an immune attack against… the virus… uses that protein to get into your cells… makes the virus… more of an asshole…. So scientists took the blueprint for the asshole protein on COVID and made an mRNA version of it. Literally just the instructions on how to make that protein. These instructions “are” the vaccine…. You can’t get infected with COVID from the vaccine. You just get these instructions. Your cells see these instructions and say “sure, I’ll make this”. So your cells make a bunch of the asshole protein. You immune system sees this new protein you’re producing and immediately says “what… the f—… is this?” And it starts attacking the protein…. Your memory cells ‘remember’ the asshole protein. They remember exactly how to destroy it. By the way, your body breaks down the mRNA instructions that you got with the vaccine pretty quickly too. That’s normal. You don’t need a bunch of instructions hanging around forever. Your body breaks those down and gets rid of them. So you’ve broken down the mRNA instructions. You’ve destroyed asshole proteins. Everything from the vaccine is gone. Except for those memory cells who remember that protein very well. So then, a COVID virus enters your body. Your body has never seen the virus before. BUT it’s seen that protein that’s on the outside of the virus. Your memory cells say “you’ve got to be kidding me, THIS asshole again? Get the f— out of here!” Your body’s own ‘natural immune system’ quickly and efficiently launches an all out war, using the template it has… LINK: <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1339624815137722368.html>