As many people know, I moonlight as a media watchdog on the subject of asexuality, using Google Alerts for tracking. Mostly that means finding interesting essays to promote on The Asexual Agenda, but on very rare occasion I find some hateful garbage, which I pluck out for communal mockery. See previous editions of this series from 2018 and 2022.
The term “affirmative action” was originally created by John F. Kennedy in 1961, in the context of the employment of government contractors. But affirmative action has been very unpopular in the US, and was backed into a corner until it came to only refer to university admissions. Prior to the recent Supreme Court decision against affirmative action, the idea was already only hanging by a thread.
Now that the thread has been cut, I encourage people to imagine other possibilities. Previously, we could only ever talk about affirmative action in elite universities, because that was the only politically viable option. Now, none of the options are politically viable, so we might as well talk about the possibilities we forgot.
What if we had affirmative action… in hiring? Salaries? Political representation? Affirmative action tax breaks! If you’re outside the US, help me out here, what sort of affirmative action do they have in your country?
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Koi, by Robert Lang, with some adjustments by me.
This is a model from Origami Design Secrets–actually, it’s on the cover of the book. It is a demonstration of the technique of pattern grafting, where you fold a flat pattern into the paper before going on to fold the general shape.
Robert Lang’s design is well and good, but I have a tendency to work with 15 cm paper at largest. It’s not ideal for a lot of types of models, but it is my self-imposed constraint. So, in my version, I made the scales very large relative to the size of the paper. In Lang’s version, the scales are one quarter the size in both directions, meaning there are 16 times as many scales. Lang’s version is more realistic, while mine mostly just evokes the idea of scales.
So the funny story was, I was thinking about how I could adjust the model to work with 15 cm paper, and I woke up one night thinking, “Of course! I should just fold the paper into a 29×29 grid! Then the proportions can remain the same and all the math works out!” It turns out that my dream math isn’t very good, and 29×29 makes very little sense. But it worked out anyway.
If a lender offered the same price (i.e. interest rate or APR) to every borrower, then it would only be a good deal for the riskiest borrowers. Lenders would have to raise prices to match the risk, and then it would only be a good deal for the riskiest of the riskiest borrowers. Lenders would have to raise prices further and further until there are no takers. This is called an adverse selection death spiral.
Therefore, lending fundamentally relies on offering different prices to different borrowers—and refusing some borrowers entirely. In other words, lending fundamentally relies on discrimination.
Lenders assess the risk of each borrower, in a process called underwriting, and make the decision whether to decline or approve, and at what price. Traditionally, underwriting has been done manually by human experts. It has also been performed by following pre-determined rules. More recently, many lenders are using machine learning to make underwriting decisions.
When we talk about discrimination, usually we’re talking about “bad” discrimination, such as sexism or racism. But in general, discrimination is just about treating different people differently, and that in itself is not bad. Nonetheless, legitimate discrimination can be used to conceal bad discrimination. Bad discrimination can also occur unintentionally, being concealed even to its purveyors. Fair lending regulations try to delineate and mitigate bad discrimination in lending.
I have a comment on the recent retraction of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases”. I happen to have some expertise on this precise issue.
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is an alleged phenomenon where kids suddenly experience gender dysphoria. The hypothesis is that this is caused by social contagion and therefore the kids are not authentically trans. The entire research area is fundamentally flawed because it’s based on the accounts of parents who frequent ROGD forums, instead of, you know, talking to the kids in question. The kids likely have a better idea than the parents just how “sudden” the onset really was.
But that’s not why the paper was retracted. The journal stated that it was retracted “due to a lack of documented consent by study participants”. The stated reason is not obviously connected to the real problems with ROGD research, so it sounds pretextual.
I guess it’s just one of those months where I didn’t save links for this roundup. Nonetheless, I will plug the Ace Journal Club’s discussion about why low sexual desire is considered a mental disorder. And I have a single link:
Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs? | Moon Channel (video, 1:31 hours) – The short answer is that the evil god is capitalism. This is a great video essay about the history of Japan, and how it’s interpreted through the metaphors of Japanese mythology. Through this lens, Japanese history is a sequence of false gods, each rising and falling–from the Shogunate to Christianity to state Shinto, and now capitalism. The game isn’t mentioned in the video, but it finally makes sense to me why Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is about a bunch of old immortals feeding on the life force of a populace doomed to die young–although I suppose that same story could have been written from an American perspective as well.
In an earlier blog post, I facetiously said I would go after the slogan “love is love” next. Well, why not. This should be quick.
“Love is love” is a slogan that is used to legitimize queer love by appealing to the value of love. It brings to bear every cultural narrative of star-crossed lovers torn apart by circumstance or by society, and observes that homophobes are the clear villains of the story. Love is love, and why are you against love? What petty prejudices do you have that motivate you to support one kind of love and oppose another? Also, if you read it literally, the slogan is tautologous, which is cute.
None of that is wrong exactly. The issue is that for some people, there are in fact substantive differences in how they love, or whether they love at all.