Linkspam: August 10th, 2017

Sexual Harassment Is Pervasive and Under-Reported in Gay Bars – I found this link via a Facebook thread, where a bunch of gay/bi men were arguing that it was ridiculous that anyone would ever complain about sexual assault.  They ask, if you don’t want people to grab your ass/dick unasked, why would you even go to a gay bar or club?  This is absolutely infuriating.  This is the sort of thing that makes me think RAINN et al. are completely underestimating rates of sexual violence.

On the Corner: Intersectionality and the Existence of Privilege – Crip Dyke responded to my article criticizing the “privilege” framework.  She disagrees with my conclusion about “privilege” (which is fine!) but thinks that there’s something to be said about the limitations of “intersectionality”.  My response is in her comment section.  I should also link to this one: Every Other Trans Person is Wrong, which is disagreeing with me re: gender and sex language.

University of Oxford – Why am I linking to a random Facebook post by the University of Oxford?  Notice all the comments about the Philippines!  Somebody from the University of Oxford published a study looking at government funded trolls.  Among other things, they found that President Duterte of the Philippines spent $200,000 on trolls.  A bunch of people went to the University of Oxford’s page to attack this study, and it’s hilariously unconvincing.

A reminder to all the Americans out there: Duterte is not like Trump.  Duterte has much higher approval ratings, and has already put the Southern Philippines under martial law.  The martial law was supposed to be 60 days long, but was recently extended to the end of the year–in conflict with the Philippine constitution.

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On being partially vegetarian

Content note: This is just a personal account of how I became partially vegetarian. I won’t say much to defend this decision, although I’ll talk about some of the reasons I did it.

A couple years ago, I decided to eat less meat. First I decided that at restaurants where decent vegetarian options were offered, I would prioritize those. Then I switched out deli sandwich meat for meat substitutes. As for all the dinners I cook for myself, I tried making most of them vegetarian.

I would not say that I am 99% vegetarian, or even 95% vegetarian. It’s really more like 50-75%. At time of writing, the last time I ate meat was… yesterday. There are lots of reasons I might eat meat. Sometimes the vegetarian options at a restaurant are absent or unappealing. Or I’m at a social gathering where the food has meat in it. Or I’m cooking for my boyfriend, who happens to like meat a lot. Or he’s cooking for me. Or I’m just cooking a dish that I haven’t figured out how to make vegetarian yet.

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Can we dispose of the four horsemen?

A comic panel showing the four horsemen on horses. Dawkins: We held a calm, rational debate and came to the consensus that we should initiate doomsday!! For we are the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse! The world as you know it ends this day!

Source: Virus Comix. This is from circa 2008, and you can judge for yourself how well it has aged.

“The Four Horsemen of Atheism” is first and foremost, a marketing term. The term was coined almost exactly a decade ago, in 2007, in order for the horsemen to sell recordings of themselves.  From there, the term had runaway success.

It appears that the reason that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens were chosen (instead of other well-known atheists) is that they were all best-selling authors of atheist books in 2007. It also arose from media coverage, such as the famous 2006 Wired article, which coined the term “New Atheists”, and interviewed Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. (Hitchens hadn’t published his book until 2007.)

But for me, it was never the books which were important, it was the blogs. I started reading Pharyngula in late 2006. I only ever read one of the books, and I read it in 2008 and didn’t care for it. To me, it has always seemed odd how much we venerate book authors. There are other media outside of books, after all! What about bloggers, journalists, youtubers, podcasters, and artists? Or for that matter, any more recent authors?

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Origami: When Rebecca Met Shuzo

Photo of When Rebecca Met Shuzo 1

When Rebecca Met Shuzo 1, by Robert J. Lang

This design is part of a set of 3, and you can find photos and diagrams on Robert J. Lang’s website.  Although his models are 3 inches wide, and mine is only 3 cm wide.

This model caught my eye not just because it looks nice, but because it looked relatively simple to replicate (which is not true of most of Lang’s models).  The biggest difficulty was that the very first step was to fold the paper in 5ths in one direction, and 13ths in the other direction.

To fold paper into 13ths, you could probably just use a ruler, or a printer for that matter.  I am not above such tools.  But if we can do it by origami instead, well wouldn’t that be nice?  So how do we use pure origami to fold paper into 13ths?  Instructions below the fold.

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The “privilege” framework is weak

1. Allosexual privilege

I can give a lot of reasons why “privilege” is a weak theoretical framework for social justice activism. But as it is for many things, I didn’t come to this conclusion by just working through all the reasons, I came to it via an experience. So I’ll start by sharing that experience.

In fact, it’s an experience shared by most asexuality activists of a certain generation. There was a time, around 2011, that activists tried talking about allosexual privilege. This was widely regarded as a failure, and now we don’t talk about it anymore, except to tell newer activists that it’s a bad idea.

The whole debacle is well-documented. This was around the time that the asexual tumblr community was formed, and asexuality discussion that used to be held internally was for the first time exposed to a much broader audience. A lot of ideas were refined during that time, often by way of flame wars with TERFs.1

One of the biggest flame wars was over the concept of “sexual privilege”. As with many flame wars it was a lot of nonsense, but there were a few substantial critiques that came up.

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Disagreeing with HJ here

HJ Hornbeck has a post titled Watch Your Language, criticizing Laci Green for a series of tweets on Trump’s ban on trans people in the military.  I have numerous disagreements with HJ’s post, and it feels too long to leave as a comment.  On the other hand, this is a bit arcane, so I don’t actually recommend people read this unless they’re especially interested in the topic.

TL;DR: It is reasonable to call trans discrimination gender discrimination (as opposed to gender identity discrimination).

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Trump’s past light cone

When Trump was elected, and for many months following, people kept on talking about why he was elected. What caused it? This conversation irritates me deeply, because people lack a base-level understanding of what causation is. But I’ve waited to say anything because I thought it might be too crass to insert a philosophical discussion into a political one, at least while it was still hot.

Cause and effect is often thought to be a fundamental part of the way the world works, but I and other physicists understand that it is not. For a brief explanation, I recommend this video by Sean Carroll. It is better to think of causality as an emergent property, more in the realm of philosophy than physics.

What does physics have to say about the cause of Trump’s election? It’s everything in Trump’s past lightcone! It was the DNC, it was Clinton, it was Comey, it was Russia, it was neoliberalism, it was identity politics, it was ancient supernovae. This answer is rather naive, but what did you expect from us? Physics can’t provide all the answers.

When we talk about causes, we’re typically just selecting a few things from the past lightcone, and highlighting those things as important. In philosophy, this is known as causal selection. Sean Carroll talks a little bit about causal selection. He says that one way of thinking about it is that a cause is something that has great leverage over the future. But that’s just one way we might think about it.

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