So, I’m disappearing for the rest of winter break. I leave you with my annual music post, where I share a few bits of music that I enjoyed in the past year. See you in 2019.
1. The Mercury Tree & Cryptic Ruse – The Cold Flame Burns
You know how earlier I was talking about microtonal (or xenharmonic) music? Well here it is, the best xenharmonic rock. In general, I think both Mercury Tree and Cryptic Ruse are the best current xenharmonic artists.
Poisson has blessed me with many links this month. I’ll start with a few plugs and followups.
Plugs
The Ace Community Survey Team (which I co-lead) released our big report on the 2016 Ace Community Survey, alongside a shorter report on the 2015 survey. If you’re interested in data, or want to know about the kind of diversity we talk about in ace communities, please take a look!
I wrote a summary of a scholarly article on asexuality and race. Yep, I’m reading about critical race theory now.
Followups
After I wrote about the Tumblr ban, there were several other takes in my circle. Brute Reason talked about how awful this is for sex-positive communities. And Marcus Ranum put it in context, as an example of a cloud service exercising monopoly power.
I was saying over on Tumblr, that the widely mocked “female presenting nipples” is strangely appropriate. There’s no way to tell someone’s “real” gender, you don’t know how people identify, and you’d like the policy to depend on whether the person wants to appear female or not. On the other hand, “female presenting” is ambiguous whether it refers to intended appearance, or simply appearance (and the latter is likely more accurate to their real policy). Anyway, they clearly put some thought into it, and the problem is that it’s attached to a discriminatory policy.
Readers may recall earlier this year, when I wrote a practical guide to sexual violence terminology.
Now I’ve written another article, as part of the Ace Community Survey Team, explaining how sexual violence is classified by the CDC. Go take a look.
Although the CDC’s definitions of sexual violence are publicly available in the NISVS report, few lay people would sift through over a hundred pages in order to find them. The lack of easily accessible information concerns us, because it deprives some victims of tools they need to understand their own experiences. The goal of this article is to explain the CDC categories and their use in the 2018 Asexual Community Survey.
Honestly I wasn’t paying that much attention this month, so there aren’t too many links.
The 2018 Asexual Community Survey was released. If you can spare 20 minutes or so, please take the survey!
Fellow FTBlogger Great American Satan needs some money, and is taking art commissions!
Asexuality in Japan: An interview (video) – Vesper has a great interview with a couple asexuality activists in Japan. Interesting tidbit: what we call “asexual” in the English community is usually divided into two groups in Japanese, with “asexual” referring to aromantic asexuals, and “nonsexual” referring to romantic asexuals. If that interests you, watch the interview to learn more.
Catfishing and Conspiracy in Groves – This is a human interest story about a very young openly gay councilmember in a small town in Texas. Someone got their hands on some nude photos that he exchanged consensually on Grindr, and released them to the media. Other councilmembers filed a petition to get him recalled. The town comes off looking rather bad. And the pastor who insists that it’s not about homophobia gives the most unbelievable excuse. I looked up the outcome later; he was recalled.
Pronouns (video) – Contrapoints offers analytic arguments for why calling a trans woman a “he” is just false, and not merely rude. If I were to address the topic, I would probably not make much in the way of analytic arguments, I would just say I’m not having any of it. Well, I’m glad we have Natalie around.
On the “Sokal Squared” hoax by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose – Three authors submitted 20 hoax papers 48 times to “grievance studies” journals, and 7 of them were accepted. I am so unimpressed, for reasons discussed in many locations. I’m choosing to highlight this particular take, because it shows the dishonesty of Boghossian et al., who have made very misleading statements about the content of the papers, which papers were accepted or rejected, and about how friendly the peer reviewers were. Usually peer reviewers will be polite and say a few positive things, even as they demolish and reject a paper; they’re supposed to. I’m not on board with this crusade to make peer reviewers more hostile.
Ozy also has a post detailing several of the papers that were accepted.
Note that I myself have been critical of papers in gender studies (which I occasionally read in my role as an ace activist). The “Sokal Squared” hoax does not come anywhere close to identifying any of the problems I would identify, it just muddies the waters.
YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (for fun and profit!) (video) – Lindsay Ellis talks about the desire for authenticity in content creators, and how this creates emotional labor for them, similar to how workers at Disneyland are required to maintain a friendly affect as part of their job.
Although there’s an obvious analogy to be made between blogging and vlogging, I feel like blogging really isn’t the same because one’s personality doesn’t come across quite so clearly, and often it isn’t expected to. And the giants among blogs tend to serve as news sources, not as expressions of personality. But perhaps there are some big shot bloggers who feel otherwise.
Let me start this link roundup with a couple of plugs. First, I was interviewed by Asexual Artists, an awesome website that has lots of interviews of ace artists. Second, in case you missed it, I published a two-part article talking about the history of asexuality in early radical feminism.
In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You – This is an old essay explaining how we might create a planned economy using math, and all the reasons why it would be so difficult. This post was brought to my attention by Larry, who has a reply. Larry says that to the extent this problem is intractable for socialism, it is also intractable for capitalism. The difference between the two isn’t necessarily how the economy is computed, it’s the goal that they’re trying to achieve.
It seems like the best way to approach the problem is to break the economy down into more manageable pieces–each of which could be centrally planned–and have just a few inputs/outputs being passed between the different pieces. This is basically what capitalism does, with individual firms being centrally planned, and inputs/outputs being passed between firms in the form of prices. But in principle there could be other solutions, perhaps solutions that are computationally similar, but different in execution. For example, Russian economists came up with the idea of “shadow prices” which help calculate resource allocation, but which don’t involve money actually being passed around–I have no idea if this particular idea works, but it’s a thought.
I think of myself as a socialist who lacks imagination, so I mostly complain about the current system while advocating for a familiar market-based economy with lots of redistribution. YMMV on whether that counts as socialism.
I’m going to make this short, because it’s Breitbart, there’s hardly any point. I’m only talking about it because a friend was quoted in it.
Recently, Breitbart posted an article titled “Asexual” is a Hot New Sexual Identity In the San Francisco Bay Area. Rather than doing their own journalism, they basically copy content from Mercury News, and add insinuations that asexuality is a ridiculous trend that is confined only to recent times, and to the San Francisco Bay Area.
They also spoke to an “expert” from Israel, the author of The Truth: A Pathway to the Subconscious. She says:
My research shows that every person is divided into five different levels of being; the mental body, the feelings body, the emotional body, the spiritual body, and the sexual body. […] The people who define themselves as asexual, most of them are activated from a conditioning that says ‘sexuality equals delete’.
At first it looked like Breitbart quoted an “expert” to invalidate asexuality, but on second glance I believe they were trying to find someone ridiculous to “support” asexuality, in order to make asexuality look ridiculous. But nobody in the ace community would take this woman seriously, and we can all see that it was Breitbart who thought she was worth talking to.
Breitbart also wrote about asexuality last year. What? I don’t follow Breitbart, I get Google alerts, okay?