Local shenanigans

We can’t have those darned kids voting! The Morris city council met to discuss shutting down half of our polling locations, and of course the one that they singled out for closure was the one on the university campus.

City Manager Hill stated when he came to Morris he was surprised to see there were six voting precincts. Hill indicated is it hard to staff a voting place and believes the future of voting is that less and less people will come to the polls. Hill suggested getting rid of the University as a polling place because a polling place should be readily accessible and comfortable to get in and out of and they have no parking. Hill stated the Armory would be a good option. Hill noted after the 2020 census takes place the city can look at some redistricting. Hill pointed out that there needs to be a better job of getting people to register before Election Day.

You see, the university doesn’t count. There are 1700 students here, out of a total population of 5000, so it would be more convenient to make the students walk into town to vote, rather than having an accessible location on campus. Also, this university has a heck of a lot of parking.

If they are concerned about staffing, we have a lot of motivated young people here, and I’m sure some of them would be willing to volunteer at any of the six polling places. I’ve worked at them before. Rather than resigning themselves to fewer people coming to the polls, maybe our city officials ought to be working harder to tap into the pool of democratic activists that can be found at any university.

Local people have put together a response. The letter can be signed online by other locals who are concerned (I’ll refrain from posting a link to that here, but if you’re a Morris resident and don’t know where to find it, email me and I’ll send you a link.)

Just when you think the youth are getting their act together

Some of them have to disappoint you. Three young women visiting Italy decided to try their hand at cooking, apparently for the first time ever.

According to Italian newspaper La Nazione, three 20-year-olds bought some pasta and took it back to their apartment in Florence, with high hopes for an authentic Italian dinner. But instead of boiling several quarts of water before adding the pasta—you know, step one on every set of back-of-the-box instructions ever—they emptied the dry noodles directly into the pot. (Sigh…)

Because spaghetti isn’t meant to be seared, it caught on fire immediately. And because people who don’t understand how to fix pasta also don’t know what to do with stovetop flames, the students had to call the fire department.

I…I mean…they can’t…OK, words fail me. How can you reach the age of 20 and not understand that pasta needs water? These are college students, they must have at least been exposed to ramen, right?

But for every act of ignorance, there must be a graceful response. The Italian reaction makes me happy.

“As a generation and as a Florentine, I feel guilty, I feel there was a strong communication deficit on the part of this city”. The patron of Cibréo and C.BIO Fabio Picchi said so. “What have we transmitted to these girls who came here to study and in a moment of rest they tried to become the most typical dish of our gastronomic culture?”. The girls justified themselves: “we put the pasta on the fire without the water, we thought it was cooked like that”. Does it make you smile? “In fact – says Picchi – there is little to laugh about. It ‘s too easy to make the joke. Instead we must reflect: why did something like this happen with the Italian dish par excellence? “Did we show the world too many fireworks?” It may be – concludes Fabio Picchi. And it is for this reason that I decided to give 4 hours of Italian cooking lessons for free to the three American girls protagonists of the fact. Together with two of my extraordinary cooks will have lunch in our restaurant. Meanwhile they will teach them the simple basics that if well done are very good. I think this can be useful to them, but also to us. Understanding is always – with simplicity and cognition – what is beautiful and necessary “.

Magnifico!

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

Kevin Williamson is an unpleasant kind of person — the ugly conservative who really ought to be mumbling in a gutter somewhere, despised and pitied, but instead got himself a paying job at the National Review…which, come to think of it, is a kind of gutter. He’s the kind of guy who repeatedly insists that women ought to be executed for having abortions, which tells me that he’s absent any theory of mind or empathy, and ought to be labeled as a sociopath.

This weekend, Kevin Williamson, whose Twitter bio describes him as a “roving reporter for the National Review,” declared on Twitter that all abortions should be treated as premeditated homicide, and that women who have had abortions should face capital punishment, namely hanging. No exceptions.

@Green_Footballs Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014

I have hanging more in mind. @LeveyIsLaw @charlescwcooke
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014

Well, he doesn’t work for the National Review anymore.

Instead, he’s been hired by The Atlantic.

On Thursday, the magazine — which is now led by Iraq War cheerleader Jeffrey Goldberg — announced a new opinion and commentary section, “Ideas.” The staff of this new section includes two current Atlantic writers, economics writer Annie Lowrey and former MSNBC host and contributor Alex Wagner, and two new hires: the writer and academic Ibram X. Kendi and National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson.

Williamson holds a long list of odious views, and I don’t just mean repellant to liberals, but so vile and stupid that they should not be held by thinking human beings.

It’s a strange time. In an era when the worst president and the worst congress in the history of the country are in charge, our national media, led by cowards, are hedging their bets by hiring conservative scum. Instead of challenging great wrongs, they seem instead to be concerned with pandering to the wrong-doers.

Need popcorn, this is going to be better than the original creationist movie

A while back, I attended Eric Hovind’s extravaganza, Genesis: Paradise Lost. I panned it. Now Paulogia has begun a whole video series to take apart the bad science in the movie. This should be good! Here’s the first episode.

He spends some of the time dismantling Charles Jackson, which I also mentioned. Jackson is the guy who proudly announces that he has four degrees, unlike those evolutionists, who typically only have three (I only have two. I am so ashamed.) It was a ridiculous argument, but I guess it passed against the background of so many ridiculous arguments in the movie.

The social media dilemma

Facebook is objectively evil. But at the same time, it’s so delicious. It’s like an evil donut that you can’t resist nibbling on, but it’s going to kill you in the end. I have friends on Facebook! It’s where I go to get my grandbaby photo fix! I have connections there!

But now I’m thinking I really ought to #DeleteFacebook. The arguments are annoyingly strong.

Some say, “I don’t want to stop using Facebook, I want them to change.” And that is wrong. Keeping up with your friends is good. But Facebook’s business and data model is fundamentally flawed. For you, your data is who you are. For Facebook, your data is their money. Taking it from you is their entire business, everything else is fancy decoration.

Others will say, “I need Facebook because that’s where my audience is, and my livelihood depends on that.” And it is true. But depending on Facebook is not safe in the long-term, as others have learned the hard way. Ever changing, opaque algorithms make it harder and harder to reach “your” audience. So even in this case it’s wise to look for other options and have contingency plans.

It would make it easier for me to leave if all of you would go, too, because it’s not Facebook I like (it’s evil, remember), it’s the people. We need an alternative, but the Zuck seems to have devoured them all. Is there something similar emerging from the non-corporate world, like Mastodon, the better Twitter alternative?

New professorial challenges for those teaching philosophy

The new academic problem is the bad information spread by Peterson, Boghossian, Lindsay, that ilk. I suspect it wasn’t so bad when these ignoramuses just turned up their noses and ignored philosophy, but now they’ve decided that they completely understand it, and they don’t like it, nosir, so they’ve begun active disinformation campaigns that are infecting college-aged students. A professor writes in to Reddit to vent:

But in the past few months internet outrage merchants have made my job much harder. The very idea that someone could even propose the idea that there is a conceptual difference between sex and gender leads to angry denunciations entirely based on the irresponsible misrepresentations of these online anger-mongers. Some students in their exams write that these ideas are "entitled liberal bullshit," actual quote, rather than simply describe an idea they disagree with in neutral terms. And it's not like I'm out there defending every dumb thing ever posted on Tumblr! It's Simone de fucking Beauvoir!

It's not the disagreement. That I'm used to dealing with; it's the bread and butter of philosophy. No, it's the anger, hostility and complete fabrications.

They come in with the most bizarre idea of what 'post-modernism' is, and to even get to a real discussion of actual texts it takes half the time to just deprogram some of them. It's a minority of students, but it's affected my teaching style, because now I feel defensive about presenting ideas that I've taught without controversy for years.

Peterson is on the record saying Women's Studies departments and the Neo-Marxists are out to literally destroy western civilization and I have to patiently explain to them that, no, these people are my friends and colleagues, their research is generally very boring and unobjectionable, and you need to stop feeding yourself on this virtual reality that systematically cherry-picks things that perpetuates this neurological addiction to anger and belief vindication–every new upvoted confirmation of the faith a fresh dopamine high if how bad they are.

I just want to do my week on Foucault/Baudrillard/de Beauvoir without having to figure out how to get these kids out of what is basically a cult based on stupid youtube videos.

Honestly, the hostility and derailment makes me miss my young-earth creationist students.

I haven’t had to deal with this yet in my classes — post-modernism isn’t part of the biology curriculum, and since I address sex and gender from the ground up with genes and molecules and signaling in my genetics class, by the time we would get to cultural aspects (we don’t, they’ll have to go to the social sciences or humanities for that), they’re already accustomed to the fact that the biology is complex and plastic and variable. But I’ve definitely seen this intransigence and stupidity online. Peddling simplistic misrepresentations of science and philosophy seems to be a major money-maker for those who understand neither.

That last line, though…yeah, I’d rather deal with young earth creationists. The difference is that creationists, whether they’re aware of it or not, have a serious case of science envy. They’re all wanna-bes who are constantly trying to rephrase the Bible in sciencey-sounding terms, thinking they can explain the Flood with geology, or constraints on evolution with genetics. That’s the whole point of Intelligent Design creationism, to provide pseudo-scientific, rather than religious, justifications for their beliefs. They can’t, but it means their arguments can be spanked by somebody who understands the scientific discipline better than they do.

It’s their greatest weakness, actually. It’s why they don’t make greater inroads into academia, because everyone who is well-trained in the sciences can see right through them.

But these anti-philosophy gomers are taking a completely different approach. They don’t want to be philosophers, or sound like philosophers, because they hate philosophy and women’s studies and sociology and all those other disciplines. Rather than trying to learn just enough of what they’re complaining about to try and turn the jargon against them, they’re in flat-out denial and a total rejection of everything to do with, for instance, post-modernism. They’re engaged in simple-minded anti-intellectualism (creationists come out of a religious tradition that usually respects an intellectual foundation, or at least a pretense to one), and the know-nothings who eat that crap up won’t even listen to word one from someone who has the educational background to know what they’re talking about.

So that’s what lesbians do!

My first instance of school yard sex ed was a peer trying to tell me that daddies got mommies pregnant by peeing on them. I had a vague suspicion even then, at the age of 5, that this was incorrect, but it did take a few years before I could get access to the grown-up books at library and learn how it actually worked (and oh, but that was a surprise!). So I guess I’m not terribly shocked at the inanities promulgated online any more, like this one, the claim that “feminists are going to trigger a genomic meltdown…“

…because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about – unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit – with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

So when a lesbian loves another lesbian, they writhe around a bit and try to push their ovaries together to make a little baby lesbian? I have a vague suspicion that this is also incorrect, I guess I’ll have to go to the library…wait. I don’t think our library stocks those kinds of books.

I will say I’m impressed that modern 5 year olds are so proficient at getting online and typing out those long words, though.

Mad Mike Hughes actually did it!

Mad Mike Hughes, the guy who build a steam-powered rocket to prove that the Earth is flat, succeeded in launching himself into the sky yesterday. He reached an altitude of about 600 meters, was battered in the landing, but he survived.

The one thing he did not accomplish was to prove that the Earth is flat.

I don’t quite get the point of the rocket, though. He could have just rented a Cessna, which has a service ceiling of something around 5000 meters, and reached a significantly higher altitude with little personal risk, and he probably wouldn’t have needed to be carried away in a stretcher afterwards.