Jan
6
2024

Bad Blogkeeping

I should have known better.

Over the years I've relied on Amazon to provide some eye candy to blog posts. I became an "Amazon Associate" at the lowest level (SiteStripe), allowing me to "advertise" their products here with "paid link" images.

I put "advertise" in quotes above, because I've made negligible revenue off them.

But Amazon announced a couple months back that they were removing that functionality. (Here is a comment from a guy who's pretty pissed about that.) Not only would I not be able to create future image links, but…

All the image links I had stopped working, giving that ugly broken image icon. A quick grep finds nearly 4500 of them. Eek!

My apologies. To repeat, I should have known better. I'm working on a fix. Until then, I'll get my eye candy from Getty, Twitter, and … oh, hey, the xkcd guy has a YouTube channel! Check out: What if we aimed the Hubble Telescope at Earth?.

… at least until that stops working.

Also of note:

  • Yesterday's hoaxes are today's reality. Laurence Krauss bemoans: Alan Sokal’s Joke Is on Us as Postmoderism Comes to Science.

    When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism.

    This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”

    Krauss has plenty of examples, including one from our favorite physics prof at the University Near Here:

    In 2020, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society published an article by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein titled “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Ms. Prescod-Weinstein wrote: “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression.” This sentence, which dramatically misrepresents Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mr. Sokal’s 1996 spoof.

    Had an article like this appeared in 1996, it would have been dismissed outside the postmodernist fringe. But last year Mr. Sokal himself, noting that the article was No. 56 in the Altmetric ranking of most-discussed scholarly articles for 2020, felt the need to write a 20-page single-spaced rebuttal. The joke turns out to be on all of us—and it isn’t funny.

    We previously looked at Sokal's takedown of CPW's scholarship here. CPW has a response at Twitter, make of it what you will:

    Shooting the messengers?

  • It needs to be said. The WSJ provides an excerpt from a City Journal interview: Shelby Steele on Affirmative Action.

    People defend things like affirmative action under the rationale of diversity, so we’re going to lower standards for blacks and not admit as many Asians. Race is constantly used, in the name of the good, in the act of committing racism. And we’re saying such racism is inclusiveness. How insidious evil is! You’re saying this person gets into school and this person doesn’t because of the color of their skin, and that is diversity, that is inclusiveness? It’s just a convenient way for you to get the innocence and moral authority that gives you power. It’s a hell of a problem in a huge, complex society like America. Evil is everywhere waiting around the corner, advocating for itself as a moral convenience that will make you a better person. Evil fascinates me in that sense; it’s always ironic. It’s sweetly insidious. It makes you feel good and gives you that sense of innocence. “I stood up against Shelby Steele.” So you become a cheerleader for evil, thinking you’re helping. In the long run, we see evil for what it is, but it usually has done a lot of damage by that point.

    And a lot of damage has, indeed, been done.

  • Are you a mature American citizen who needs to join something? Mark Hemingway recommends: AARP Alternative AMAC Has Become A Conservative Powerhouse. "AMAC" being "Association of Mature American Citizens".

    Causing me to wonder: I'm old, but am I mature?

    Color me agnostic about the value of joining AMAC, but Hemingway reminds me why I send my AARP-related mail straight to the shredder:

    For decades now, AARP, which once stood for the American Association of Retired Persons and has been subsequently rebranded as just a set of initials that stand for nothing, has been one of the most influential lobby groups in Washington, D.C. Though AARP was supposed to represent a large and politically diverse cross-section of older Americans, its transformation into an overtly partisan Democrat organization is hard to deny.

    Recently, AARP lobbied heavily for the Biden administration’s disastrous and ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” AARP’s biggest congressional critic, Sen. Rand Paul, recently noted that of AARP’s 94 congressional lobbying events during debate over the Inflation Reduction Act, only one was held in support of a Republican officeholder. The rest were for Democrats.

    I believe AARP's slogan is something like: "Ruining the future for your kids and grandkids."


Last Modified 2024-01-07 6:19 AM EDT