Calling ordinary people racist

Following the election, many people have called for liberals to stop calling their opponents racist. According to them, many of Trump’s supporters aren’t racist, they’re just ordinary people.

Let’s talk about this. I mean, let’s not talk about Trump, because ugh. But this has long been a point of contention: I do, in fact, think that ordinary people are racist. Yet lots of people reject the idea out of hand.

There is nothing inherently ridiculous about saying everyone is a thing. I can say that ordinary people are human. I can say that ordinary people are kind or fascinating or patriotic. What separates “racist” from the other adjectives is that it expresses strong moral disapproval. Humans have massive hangups about moral disapproval.  Here I try to identify and address those hangups.
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Linkspam: November 11th, 2016

This linkspam does not mention the election, since I collected the links in the previous week.

How Should We Respond to Passive Communication? – Miri discusses the conflict between “ask” and “guess” culture, and more specifically how she responds when people around her use “guess” culture.  I was also raised with ask culture.  But I’d say for me the more serious cultural conflict is between positivity and negativity.  Many people have trouble understanding that I don’t like compliments.  I’d rather people be critical of me, and let me be critical of them.

Valeant sued for botching marketing of female libido pill – Some of you may heard of Addyi (aka Flibanserin), which is used to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder in pre-menopausal women.  After getting approved by the FDA last year, it seems to have been a market failure.  Possibly because it’s barely effective and has serious negative side effects.  And now the investors are suing the owning company for poor marketing.  Via Next Step: Cake.

Entropy and Complexity, Cause and Effect, Life and Time – Sean Carroll teams up with Minute Physics to explain stuff.  I particularly like the one on cause and effect, embedded below the cut.  One of my pet peeves is when people cite physics as supporting their intuition that causation is real.  Causation isn’t really a physics concept, it’s a philosophy concept.

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Reactions

I don’t really want to talk about the election, but I don’t feel I could talk about anything else.

In my “optimistic” scenario, Donald Trump will merely be incredibly corrupt. And Republicans will also get their way on a bunch of things, like killing the ACA, eroding reproductive rights, blocking immigration, and getting their choice of supreme court justices.  And the market will do badly in the year I’m supposed to graduate.  But at least Donald Trump won’t destroy the Pax Americana, declare himself president for life, start a nuclear war, or recreate the Japanese internment camps.

I have talked to some people who are even more optimistic, believing that Trump will result in backlash and make way for a truly progressive party.  I don’t think that’s how it works.  Politics are more of a random walk than an oscillator.

More likely that this will lead to years of internal conflict among liberals, with some wanting a “truly progressive” candidate and others wanting anyone who will make the hurt stop.  It’s kind of like how people thought 9/11 would unite the country but it ended up doing precisely the opposite.

In more positive news, look at the California election results.  Not everything is going the way I voted, but the most important ones did.  Prop 53 (voter approval required for certain budgeting) is failing.  Prop 57 (makes parole easier to get) is passing.  Prop 60 (condoms required in porn) is failing.  Marijuana will be legalized.  However, it looks like the death penalty will remain.

I feel done with blogging about politics and current events.  For a little while, I’d like to write about things that are completely unrelated.

California election positions

In California elections, we always have such large ballots.  I took a few hours this weekend to look into all this stuff, and here are my choices.

President: Hillary Clinton

Yeah… not really a swing voter.

US Senator: Kamala Harris

Loretta Sanchez and Kamala Harris are nearly equivalent (other candidates were eliminated in the primaries), so it’s mainly a matter of looking at their priorities and seeing which grabs me more.  Harris seems to prioritize criminal justice reform more.

US Representative, 13th congressional district: Barbara Lee

For US Congress, party is the most important factor, so I’d go with the Democrat.

State Senator, 9th district: Nancy Skinner

Sandre Swanson emphasizes on healthcare and education, while Nancy Skinner emphasizes gun control and criminal justice reform.  Those both sound great.  Kind of a tossup for me. [Read more…]

Origami: Hydrangea cube

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A cube made from six copies of Shuzo Fujimoto’s Hydrangea

The instructions for the Hydrangea are freely available online in diagram or video form.  It’s not too difficult, except for one step (8:32 in video, #23 in diagrams) that involves inverting a pyramid, which is the source of all the wrinkles in above photo.  In theory, you can recursively add smaller and smaller petals ad infinitum, but for some reason I chose not to.  These flowers only go 3 levels deep, which is quite shallow but people seem to be impressed by it anyways.

This model was inspired by Origami Inspirations, by Meenakshi Mukerji.  She included a single photo of a cube made of Hydrangeas, and it was fairly easy to reverse engineer.