Why are conservatives so weird?

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder if they were all raised by Harry Harlow’s fake mothers made of chicken wire and cotton, because they sure seem to be lacking in something. This guy at the Federalist, Hans Fiene, has an essay that reads like something from an alien.

The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.

We do not have a problem of underpopulation — we’re doing just fine, maybe growing too fast for our environment. The “demographic shift” is merely the typical natural change in a population over time. There was an era when there were relatively few Irish in North America, and now there were lots of people of Irish descent. It wasn’t a tsunami, it didn’t cripple us. It’ll be the same with an increase in the proportion of Latin and black families — we’ll be fine. There is a kind of demographic tsunami that would be destructive, like the one that overwhelmed the Indian population of this continent, but there’s no threat of that. Maybe Mr Fiene has a guilty conscience?

Maybe the real problem is his use of the word “us” — it doesn’t seem to have the same inclusive meaning to him that it does to me. He’s using the racist “us”, referring to only people with his skin color.

What is his solution to the “tsunami”? He wants “us”, you know, the white “us”, to have more children than the brown “them”. How does he hope to do that?

Perhaps I’m overstating the danger a bit, but the point remains: Americans need to raise our sagging birth rates. One of the best ways we can do so is by reversing the trend of Americans waiting longer to get married. So, apart from tearing down America’s institutions of higher education, which tend to slow down the recitation of wedding vows, how do we do that? It’s quite simple. We tear down the Friend Zone.

But we Americans don’t have a sagging birth rate…oh, wait, he’s using the racist version of “Americans”, that doesn’t include every American citizen.

I’m relieved that he’s not advocating tearing down universities, but his reasoning is weird. Having children a little later is a fine idea, especially since child-rearing is a difficult and important job that would benefit from a little more emotional and intellectual maturity (trust me, I work with 18-22 year olds all the time, and there’s a huge amount of growth in that span. Because someone is physically capable of getting pregnant at 14 does not necessarily mean they’re mature enough to raise them well…but then, if your vision of parenting is chicken wire and cloth, you may not get that).

Instead, he thinks we need to tear down the Friend Zone. There’s that strange, alien “we” again — now it seems to exclude women. “We” White Men are going to insist that if “You” Women want to have dinner with us, you must also consent to be impregnated.

Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.

Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration. Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.

Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed. For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.

I can simplify that rule a lot. Don’t be friends with Hans Fiene, or anyone like Hans. Hans needs to realize, though, that this isn’t a binary situation, where one is either friends with Hans, or is fucking Hans–there is the possibility of accepting neither.

He goes on and on about his fantasy of a world where women either have sex with him or obligingly vanish into the woodwork, never to speak to him again, but I think we get the message. Hans Fiene does not consider women or minorities to be fully human, and not part of his “us”.

Hans is a Lutheran pastor, by the way.

His mother was probably just fine. He just thought she was made of chicken wire.

Tooting Mastodon

There’s a lot to despise about Twitter, but at the same time, it’s become one of those social necessities, like those calling cards you had to have handy when visiting Victorian homes. But at the same time, Twitter totally sucks. It’s a haven for Nazis and shit-posters and harassers, and Twitter management has zero interest in making it better for users. Another problem is that they don’t seem to have any competition.

So let’s see some! Sarah Jeong explains a promising alternative called Mastodon. It’s similar in function to Twitter, but has a different underlying philosophy, relying on distributed clusters of users called instances, which then share conversations with users you follow more widely. I haven’t figured out all the mechanics yet, it’ll take time. The big difference is that the instances have zero tolerance for fascists, racists, and harassers, and they say so — and they’ll cut you off if pull any of the crap that is routine on Twitter. That sounds good to me!

If you’re interested in trying it out, go to the list of instances and pick one out — they’re rated for their reliability and number of current users. Jeong signed on to mastodon.social, but that one is closed right now, so pick a different one — they should all allow exchanges between one another, so it shouldn’t make a difference, I don’t think. I chose octodon.social, just because something about the name appealed. Don’t know why. I also kind of liked the manager’s rules:

It should be similar to mastodon.social’s.
NSFW/any legal porn is allowed, but tag it as NSFW or make it unlisted or something.
Trolls are only allowed if they’re quiet; you can shitpost but not harass someone, and my threshold is pretty low.
I’m not Twitter, I’ll fuck up nazis and bullies for fun, and get an AI to do it if I get bored.
I’m your nice cyberpunk queen but I intend to keep this place decent and safe for everyone.

So now I’m signed up as pzmyers@octodon.social. I haven’t done anything with it yet — you know the general principle with any social medium, right? Listen for a while before blaring — but the environment seems pleasant, if a little more quiet. The problem with these things is that they require a critical mass of users, or they fall flat and die, so that may happen here, too.

Oh, and another problem: you don’t “tweet”, you…”TOOT”. Ugh. Why do the people who have the smarts to set up this kind of thing always have a tin ear?

Anyway, if you’d like to take a small step in disrupting the Twitter hegemony, try it out.

But what about the Smug Points?

Interesting. An analysis of the results of that Ivy League college vs. the state land-grant college shows no difference.

These researchers tracked two groups of students—one that attended college in the 1970s and another in the early 1990s. They wanted know: Did students attending the most elite colleges earn more in their 30s, 40s, and 50s than students with similar SAT scores, who were rejected from those elite colleges? The short answer was no. Or, in the author’s language, the difference between the students who went to super-selective schools and the students with similar SAT scores who were rejected from those schools and went to less selective institutions was “indistinguishable from zero.”

What does that mean, exactly? It means that, for many students, “who you are” as an 18-year-old is more important than “where you go.” After correcting for a student’s pre-existing talent, ambition, and habits, it’s hard to show that highly selective colleges add much earning power, even with their vaunted professors, professional networks, and signaling. If you’re one of the roughly 50,000-100,000 students who is sweating a decision from one of these tony schools, you’re focused on the wrong thing. The decision of a group of people you’ve never met isn’t as important as the sum of the decisions, habits, and relationships you’ve built up to this point in your young life.

Or, to put it in less encouraging terms, college isn’t a vehicle for upward mobility. There is an important exception, though.

For the elite colleges themselves, the Dale-Krueger paper had an additional, fascinating finding. The researchers found that the most selective schools really do make an extraordinary difference in life earnings for “black and Hispanic students” and “students who had parents with an average of less than 16 years of schooling.”

In other words, getting into Princeton if your parents went to Princeton? Fine, although not a game-changer. But getting into Princeton if your parents both left community college after a year? That could be game-changing. There are several potential explanations, but I’m most persuaded by one that Dale and Krueger put in their conclusions section. Minority students from less-educated families are more likely to rely on colleges to provide the internship and job networks that come automatically from living in a rich neighborhood with wealthy parents.

As the article points out, though, the students who would benefit most are the least likely to get in — the big name colleges have an interest in perpetuating the status quo and protecting the social hierarchy, so through mechanisms like “legacy” admissions (jeez, but I hate “legacies” — I saw too many brilliant undergrads fail to get into med school while their less competent, lazy peers sailed in on their parents’ status) they police who is admitted.

Anyway, I’m at a state university — apply to the University of Minnesota and specifically Morris! Our new motto will be “We’re not worse than Harvard.”

Time for the War on Easter!

I didn’t even know we were fighting over that one, but apparently we are. It’s an unexpected front. You might be wondering what deep article of Christian faith we’re going to be battling over. That too is unexpectedly trivial.

The war is to be fought over eggs.

The latest manufactured moral outrage came courtesy of the Archbishop of York, whose bandwagon was soon jumped on by none other than the Prime Minister. The cause of their holy indignation? Cadbury and the National Trust have had the temerity to advertise Egg Hunts, rather than Easter Egg Hunts. Well, there go hundreds of years of Christian-appropriated pagan religious tradition down the plughole!

It’s hard to believe, but the fanatics are up in arms over those totally biblical symbols of Jesus from deep antiquity, chocolate eggs.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu said Mr Cadbury, a Quaker who founded the firm in 1824, was renowned for his religious beliefs and would not condone dropping the word Easter.

He said if people were to visit Cadbury World in Birmingham “they will discover how Cadbury’s Christian faith influenced his industrial output”.

“To drop Easter from Cadbury’s Easter Egg Hunt in my book is tantamount to spitting on the grave of Cadbury,” Dr Sentamu added.

A spokesman from the Church added: “This marketing campaign not only does a disservice to the Cadburys but also highlights the folly in airbrushing faith from Easter.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the issue reflected “commercialisation gone a bit too far”.

Are all the party leaders idiots over there? Even the prime minister, Theresa May, is whining about it. Doesn’t she have anything better to do, like preparing for the coming war with Spain?

P.S. Cadbury, the guy whose grave we’re supposed to be spitting on, was a Quaker. Quakers don’t actually celebrate Easter.

Good museum news!

The Bell Museum is in the process of getting a new building and moving, and is scheduled to open early in the summer of 2018 — it’s a fine museum that will be even better.

The new $64 milllion Bell Museum slated to open in the early summer of 2018 is under construction on the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus, Thursday, March 30, 2017. The building will feature products sourced sustainably in Minnesota, including white pine from Cass Lake; granite from Morton; Iron Range steel, and bird-safe glass from Owatonna Scott Takushi / St. Paul Pioneer Press

The new $64 milllion Bell Museum slated to open in the early summer of 2018 is under construction on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, Thursday, March 30, 2017. The building will feature products sourced sustainably in Minnesota, including white pine from Cass Lake; granite from Morton; Iron Range steel, and bird-safe glass from Owatonna
Scott Takushi / St. Paul Pioneer Press

One thing of note is that the new building will be very modern, with lots of glass, and look! A natural history museum, unlike our local football stadium, actually cares about animals in the region and will have bird-safe glass windows!

See, Minnesota Vikings? It’s not that hard to respect your community.

#ObscenelyOptimistic

Jeremy Messersmith is giving away a free songbook of Obscenely Optimistic songs. I don’t know if we should be encouraging this sort of thing:

It’s jam-packed with ridiculous songs about kittens, world peace, flying cars and the transformative power of love. Why? Because we all need a ray of sunshine every now and again. Because it’s important to not lose sight of how good things could be. Because the first step to a better world is to imagine a better world.

He’s not kidding. Look at the song list:

Everybody Gets A Kitten
There Is Nowhere We Won’t Go
We All Do Better When We All Do Better
Love Sweet Love
Why
Everything Is Magical
Honeybee
I’m A Snowflake, Baby
You Belong Up There With The Stars
We Can Make Our Dreams Come True

I tried sneering and fixing the lyrics to better reflect my attitude — “Everybody Gets a Vicious, Bloody-Minded, Bird-Slaughtering Predator”, for instance — but then found that they don’t scan anymore, and they don’t fit the notes, either, so I guess we’re stuck with the cheery words he’s giving them. I think I was also bitter because I looked at his tour route, and noticed he wasn’t coming anywhere near western Minnesota.

messersmithtour

Then I realized he couldn’t, because his route makes a perfect heart shape*, and he couldn’t visit Morris without wrecking the pattern, so I’ll forgive him.

Get a copy and print it out, and attend his concerts — they’re going to be singalongs, accompanied by ukulele. Presumably without the accompaniment of Vicious, Bloody-Minded, Bird-Slaughtering Predators, but you never know.

*Before you all peevishly tell me that that doesn’t look like your heart**, note that I didn’t say what species. That pointy triangular shape looks exactly like the heart of a salmon, which are better than people anyway.

**Any salmon writing in will not be making that complaint. I appreciate your support. Don’t ask how I know the shape of your heart.

Eyes in the sea

I was informed that a panel of judges had selected the top underwater photos for 2017, and the grand winner was a photo of an octopus — so clicked over and looked. I was a little disappointed, since I’d already used that photo before…as well as a couple of others. I guess that means I must have good taste and a good eye to spot quality images before they win awards, right? But maybe it’s just that they’re all fantastically beautiful, as any fool can see.

So go browse all the candidate photos — they’ve all also got a short summary of how the picture was taken, and judges’ comments. You’ll find that whales are popular subjects, as are closeups of fish, and shots of underwater wrecks.

Fabrice Guerin

Fabrice Guerin

Jean Trestin

Jean Trestin