ANNALS OF FEMINIST AUTOPHAGY: Neo-Neocon on Margaret Atwood: feminist vs. feminist.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Link was broken; should be working now.

ANNALS OF FEMINIST AUTOPHAGY: The Handmaid’s Tale Author Margaret Atwood Accused of Crimes Against Feminism for Defending Due Process. “In the first year of the Trump presidency, the Hulu television series The Handmaid’s Tale—which concerns a dystopian future U.S. where totalitarian religious authorities subjugate women—became essential #Resistance viewing. Many saw parallels between the treatment of women within the universe of the show and President Trump’s alleged history of abusive behavior. One might expect, Margaret Atwood, the author of the source material—the 1985 novel of the same name—would be considered something of a feminist hero. But now Atwood must counter charges that she is actually a ‘bad feminist,’ because she thinks the University of British Columbia denied due process to a male professor accused of sexual misconduct.”

No one is ever pure enough for The Revolution. Or The #Resistance. The question is, seeing how these people act when they’re out of power, why would we ever want to let them into power?

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, GRAY LADY DOWN EDITION: SJWs Melt Down Over “Racist” New York Times Chopsticks Photo.

The revolution eats its own – while haggling over the inherent racism of the “wrong” chopsticks placement.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Conflicting Dogmas of the Liberal Clerisy. “What modern liberals believe instead is that a clerisy, an educated elite that favors personal autonomy and open-mindedness and fairness, should write the rules for everybody else. Today’s liberal elite do not look backward for their authority—there are no scriptures and no inviolable traditions in modern liberalism. They look to the future. The rules issuing from the modern liberal clerisy are thought to be the latest manifestation of moral progress, to which educated people must adhere if they wish to be thought of as good people.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Why I’ve Started to Fear My Fellow Social Justice Activists.

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, MEDIA EDITION: The ‘Sh*tty Men in Media’ List Has Officially Been Weaponized.

The “shitty media men” list wasn’t made to be a bludgeon. When the anonymous, crowdsourced Google spreadsheet was first created earlier this month to collect anonymous reports of alleged sexual abusers, harassers, and general creeps in the New York City media and publishing sphere, it was presented, and understood by its creators, more as a shield than as a weapon — a tool to help women to protect themselves from men they should avoid. It was highly and admittedly unreliable — “take everything with a grain of salt,” it said at the top, and “if you see a man you’re friends with, don’t freak out” — but it was also private, meant to be shared quietly and directly between women the way whispered warnings always have been.

This model, of course, didn’t work for very long. For about 24 hours, the list circulated as it was intended to, among a fairly small number of women. Then it was taken offline, though screenshots, and a re-created read-only version floated around the internet in the days that followed. That iteration of the list was also taken offline; now, an Excel spreadsheet that appears to be a reproduction of the original Google document is floating around the web. This time, though, the list is no longer even theoretically a tool for helping women. It’s now being leaked and distributed not to protect women from predators but to publicly attack the men on it. The list has been weaponized for the online culture wars, and the women who created it, contributed to it, and were intended as its readers left totally powerless and voiceless as it’s used to undermine the industry in which they work.

You’d think that savvy media women would have foreseen this likelihood.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY EDITION: Professors warn academic intolerance for dissenting views is reaching new highs. But when taxpayers lose patience and won’t fund it, academics will blame “anti-intellectualism.”

NEW FRONTIERS IN LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Delete! Leftists’ attempts to ‘normalize’ George W. Bush aren’t going over well with ‘real Dems.’

Which seems so odd — since real Dem Donna Brazile wrote at CNN.com in 2013 that “Bush came through on Katrina,” and while it’s a standing tradition on the left to rehabilitate the previous Hitler to bash the current Hitler in office, perhaps they’re not yet ready to destroy the false narrative that eventually gave us Obama — and Obamacare.

(Classical reference in headline.)

NEW FRONTIERS IN LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Leftists Decry Straight Black Men as ‘The White People of Black People.’ So I guess they should start voting for Trump, right?

Related: “White women have a history of betraying their sisters.”

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, MUSICAL EDITION: British conductor sacked by US music festival after ‘innocent’ joke with his African-American friend was labelled racist. It doesn’t say who the officious “white woman” was who overheard two strangers talking and took it upon herself to tell the Stasi that she had witnessed badthink. But I doubt she was motivated by “good intentions.” More like self-importance and a desire to wield unaccountable power. She should make a public apology for this unconscionable act of big-brotherism.

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, GOOGLE EDITION: Google cancels all-hands diversity meeting over safety concerns: Google feared questioners would face threats if their names leaked online.

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY IN PORTLAND: White women’s burrito shop is forced to close after being hounded with accusations it was ‘culturally appropriating Mexican food and jobs.’ I’d like to see a civil suit for conspiracy to deprive them of civil rights by driving them out of business because of their race.

Of course, this is yet another reason to cram SJW types into crowded blue cities where their only targets are other leftists.

NEW FRONTIERS IN LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Anti-Trump “March For Science” Protest Has Problems W/ Bill Nye Because He’s A White Guy. “Nye, who is not, in fact, a scientist, except on television (he’s an engineer by trade), was slated to be the March’s chair, and an announcement was made last week. But organizers quickly panicked that having Nye at the forefront of the event meant they might be substantiating the idea that scientists are only old white men.”

But hey, don’t worry: “While Nye is an old white man, he is not a scientist.”

THE DINNER BELL RINGS AT THE AUTOPHAGY CAFE: Chuck Schumer under fire from left-wing activists.

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY UPDATE:

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY UPDATE: Women’s March Waffles on Sex-Worker Rights, Disinvites Women Who Oppose Abortion: The Women’s March claims to be for anyone “who believes women’s rights are human rights.” And yet… “That’s right: anything less than complete agreement about abortion and the group doesn’t even want you participating in the rally. Nevermind if you’re with the group on any or all of its myriad other principles—identify as pro-choice (but against sex-worker rights) or the cool girls don’t want to sit with you.”

Modern feminism morphed into Mean Girls so gradually I barely even noticed. Oh, who am I kidding? It was always Mean Girls.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY EDITION: Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race.

Many thousands of women are expected to converge on the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. Jennifer Willis no longer plans to be one of them.

Ms. Willis, a 50-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina, had looked forward to taking her daughters to the march. Then she read a post on the Facebook page for the march that made her feel unwelcome because she is white.

The post, written by a black activist from Brooklyn who is a march volunteer, advised “white allies” to listen more and talk less. It also chided those who, it said, were only now waking up to racism because of the election.

“You don’t just get to join because now you’re scared, too,” read the post. “I was born scared.”

Stung by the tone, Ms. Willis canceled her trip.

“This is a women’s march,” she said. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?”

Because people have been rewarded for this sort of drama all their lives, and nobody has enough self-discipline to set it aside now because they haven’t been rewarded for that.

Plus:

Ms. Rose said in an interview that the intention of the post was not to weed people out but rather to make them understand that they had a lot of learning to do.

“I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly,” she said.

That phrase — check your privilege — exasperates Ms. Willis. She asked a reporter: “Can you please tell me what that means?”

It means decades of campus diversity training are going to make organizing an anti-Trump movement a lot harder.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY EDITION: Volokh: University Of Oregon’s Punishment Of Tax Prof Nancy Shurtz May Signal The End Of Free Speech For All Professors At All Universities.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, AUTOPHAGY EDITION: The University Of California’s Extraordinary Legal Battle With Ex-Berkeley Law School Dean.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, PROGRESSIVE AUTOPHAGY EDITION: Letter From Oberlin: The Big Uneasy.

During this academic year, schools across the country have been roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism without changing its ideals. At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes, proposing in an e-mail that it smothered transgressive expression. Her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially from someone tasked with fostering a sense of community, and the protests that followed escalated to address broader concerns. At Claremont McKenna, a dean sparked outrage when she sent an e-mail about better serving students—those of color, apparently—who didn’t fit the school’s “mold,” and resigned. In mid-November, a thousand students at Ithaca College walked out to demand the resignation of the president, who, they said, hadn’t responded aggressively enough to campus racism. More than a hundred other schools held rallies that week.

Protests continued through the winter. Harvard renamed its “house masters” faculty deans, and changed its law-school seal, which originated as a slaveholder’s coat of arms. Bowdoin students were disciplined for wearing miniature sombreros to a tequila-themed party. The president of Northwestern endorsed “safe spaces,” refuges open only to certain identity groups. At Wesleyan, the Eclectic Society, whose members lived in a large brick colonnaded house, was put on probation for two years, partly because its whimsical scrapbook-like application overstepped a line. And when Wesleyan’s newspaper, the Argus, published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement, some hundred and seventy people signed a petition that would have defunded the paper. Sensitivities seemed to reach a peak at Emory when students complained of being traumatized after finding “TRUMP 2016” chalked on sidewalks around campus. The Trump-averse protesters chanted, “Come speak to us, we are in pain!,” until Emory’s president wrote a letter promising to “honor the concerns of these students.”

Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear. Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides: both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think.

That’s because it stopped thinking. Mouthing dumb slogans and taking offense at trifles doesn’t require thought. Mizzou, as I’ve said, was a harbinger. For those who don’t take the warning, there will be the opportunity to learn from their own experience.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, POLITICAL AUTOPHAGY EDITION: More professors subjected to Title IX investigations.

This week brought news of two more college professors who faced Title IX investigations for allegedly sexually harassing a student and an executive assistant. Both learned the hard way that due process is no longer allowed on college campuses, even for professors and administrators.

First we learned of Oberlin theatre and dance professor Roger Copeland, who was subjected to a brief Title IX investigation (which was dropped) because he spoke sharply to a female student. That’s it. That’s all he did, but because Copeland is a male and the student was a female (and no man can ever criticize a woman these days) Oberlin considered, however briefly, that the situation might have been caused by sexism.

Even though the Title IX investigation was dropped, Copeland was still investigated for hurting the student’s feelings. He was allegedly told by an administrator that it didn’t matter if witnesses could say the alleged verbal abuse didn’t happen the way the accusing student described, because “what matters is that the student felt unsafe.”

This opens the door for a whole new set of accusations against professors and other administrators, as any student who gets verbally reprimanded can claim abuse, thanks to the federal government’s dumbing down of what constitutes a “hostile environment.” Conduct need no longer be “pervasive” or even ongoing, a single incident, involving a particularly sensitive student, is enough to ensnare a professor in a due process-free investigation.

Copeland hired a lawyer (a right most students across the country are denied or can’t afford) and was told by the university that if he didn’t meet with them without his attorney present, they would bring him before the Professional Conduct Review Committee. Copeland and his attorney told them to go for it (I’d like to imagine they were laughing), and they never heard back from the administration.

We also learned this week about University of California Berkeley law professor Sujit Choudhry, who essentially faced double jeopardy for his alleged offense because UC President Janet Napolitano was facing criticism. Choudhry was accused of hugging his female executive assistant and kissing her on the cheek. The assistant, Tyann Sorrell, told administrators that Choudhry hugged and kissed her in this manner “five to six times a day.”

She apparently never told Choudhry she was uncomfortable by his actions, which he said he only did once or twice a week to show support. When Sorrell finally did mention the conduct to Choudry — after she complained to the school and had an investigation launched — she told him in an email: “I know you do not mean anything by [your actions] other than, perhaps a warm and friendly greeting.”

She gave the school the names of two witnesses, who backed up Choudhry’s version of events that the hugging and kissing was rare.

No matter, the school sanctioned Choudry by cutting his pay 10 percent for the year, forcing him to pay out of pocket for workplace coaching, writing an apology to Sorrell and constantly having those who investigated him looking over his shoulder.

Lesson: Lawyer up, and punch back twice as hard.

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Scripps students protest Madeleine Albright as speaker because she’s a ‘white feminist.’

HMM: Mitochondrial DNA that escapes from autophagy causes inflammation and heart failure. So is there a way to block that?

AUTOPHAGY AND cellular senescence.

THIS WAS A KNOWN PROBLEM BUT THE SPEED OF IT MIGHT BE NEWS: Cannibal AIs Could Risk Digital ‘Mad Cow Disease’ Without Fresh Data.

A new study by researchers from Rice University and Stanford University in the US offers evidence that when AI engines are trained on synthetic, machine-made input rather than text and images made by actual people, the quality of their output starts to suffer.

The researchers are calling this effect Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD). The AI effectively consumes itself, which means there are parallels for mad cow disease – a neurological disorder in cows that are fed the infected remains of other cattle.

Without fresh, real-world data, content produced by AI declines in its level of quality, in its level of diversity, or both, the study shows. It’s a warning about a future of AI slop from these models.

“Our theoretical and empirical analyses have enabled us to extrapolate what might happen as generative models become ubiquitous and train future models in self-consuming loops,” says computer engineer Richard Baraniuk, from Rice University.

“Some ramifications are clear: without enough fresh real data, future generative models are doomed to MADness.”

The solution is simple, comrades — we must generate more content, faster for our digital overlords to consume.