Lonerbox takes a hard look at hard times and hard men

An obsession with “hard” masculinity is a very old trope, but one that continues to plague us. It’s often supported by facile historical comparisons that fall apart upon closer inspection, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for manipulating men into a whole array of harmful behaviors. Self-destructive showing off, domestic abuse, abusive relationships between friends, violence, support for political “strong men”, support for war, hatred of “weakness”, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia – all the traits we currently categorize as “toxic masculinity” tend to be supported by the notion that being a “hard man” is a good thing, and being not that is a bad thing. I think this Lonerbox video is a good companion piece to Thought Slime’s earlier look at the same topic, from a different angle. The reality is that this psuedo-historical “ancient wisdom” is both a-historical and (in my opinion) instrumental in creating hard times.

Shaun’s video on anti-vax propaganda

This is sort of an appendix to yesterday’s post. Jimmy Dore is far from the only person spreading misinformation and devaluing the lives of most of humanity, he’s just caught my attention a few times in recent weeks, and the hypocrisy of him attacking other people for not being “left enough” has become more than a little annoying.

I think this video is important for a couple of reasons, beyond the satisfaction of seeing Dore dismantled. The first is that it touches on a bunch of talking points that are being pretty widely used right now, and the second is that it digs into the research, and demonstrates how errors and unclear language within scientific articles can play a big role in how bits of propaganda get started. I suggest you put it on while you’re cooking, or gaming, or something.

Cody’s Showdy takes a look at Biden’s first year in office

I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s felt like time has been moving strangely over the last couple years. Part of my problem is that I was just getting used to life in Scotland when the pandemic hit. We had a year in some form of lockdown, and then another international move, getting used to another new country, and trying to make this blog work as a source of income (because my visa doesn’t allow me to do normal work – help out on Patreon if you can!), and then I realize that it’s been a whole year since Biden took office back in the States.

I voted for Biden, mostly because I felt that a conservative neoliberal whose primary defining features are “not Trump” and “not Bernie” would be better than the naked fascism of a second Trump term. I stand by that, but I have to admit that as low as my expectations were, Biden has disappointed me. I thought that his ego would have him actually fight for the agenda he ran on, or at least see how much he could do directly through the executive branch, but apparently even that was too much to hope for. At this point, it seems like he’s committed to handing Congress to the GOP in 2022, so that he can do nothing for the rest of his time in office, and blame them for it, and blame the left for somehow causing the Democrats to lose their elections.

As usual, Some More News has done a pretty good summary of the situation:

I’m starting to feel like the only real change we can expect from Biden’s victory is for his administration’s seemingly deliberate incompetence to convince more people that the Democratic Party is not actually on our side, and it’s not interested in the progressive policies on which it runs. The electoral process – as it currently exists in the U.S. – is something that has clearly demonstrated its inability to actually serve the people, or meet the need of our time. By all means vote, but if that’s the end of what we do, the we will never see the world we say we want. We have to build collective power so we can take control away from those who would drive us to extinction.

Leaping Larvae! A new insect jumping technique has been discovered!

It’s a problem we’ve all faced – what do we do when we need to hurl ourselves through the air, but we’re too squidgy to pull off the latch-mediated spring actuation mechanism that all the cool bugs are using? Well, whether or not you wanted an answer to that question, you now have one, and in my opinion it’s pretty neat:

While there are other insect species that are capable of making prodigious leaps, they rely on something called a “latch-mediated spring actuation mechanism.” This means that they essentially have two parts of their body latch onto each other while the insect exerts force, building up a significant amount of energy. The insect then unlatches the two parts, releasing all of that energy at once, allowing it to spring off the ground.

“What makes the L. biguttatus so remarkable is that it makes these leaps without latching two parts of its body together,” Bertone says. “Instead, it uses claws on its legs to grip the ground while it builds up that potential energy — and once those claws release their hold on the ground, that potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, launching it skyward.”

The discovery of the behavior was somewhat serendipitous. Bertone had collected a variety of insect samples from a rotting tree near his lab in order to photograph them when he noticed that these beetle larvae appeared to be hopping.
[…]
“The way these larvae were jumping was impressive at first, but we didn’t immediately understand how unique it was,” Bertone says. “We then shared it with a number of beetle experts around the country, and none of them had seen the jumping behavior before. That’s when we realized we needed to take a closer look at just how the larvae was doing what it was doing.”

To determine how L. biguttatus was able to execute its acrobatics, the researchers filmed the jumps at speeds of up to 60,000 frames per second. This allowed them to capture all of the external movements associated with the jumps, and suggested that the legs were essentially creating a latching mechanism with the ground.

The researchers also conducted a muscle mass assessment to determine whether it was possible for the larvae to make their leaps using just their muscles, as opposed to using a latch mechanism to store energy. They found that the larvae lacked sufficient muscle to hurl themselves into the air as far or as fast as they had been filmed jumping. Ergo, latching onto the ground was the only way the larvae could pull off their aerial feats.

It’s not something I spend a lot of time looking for, but it always cheers me up to learn about a moment when a bunch of scientists said, “wait – that shouldn’t be possible!” and then went about figuring out why it is possible. I don’t generally think of beetle grubs as particularly acrobatic creatures, but apparently I misjudged them. When life gives you lemons, latch on to them with your little claws and fling yourself into the void.

An update from Shaun on the BBC transphobia saga

As you may recall, I did a short post this past November about bigotry, which included a video about the BBC’s transphobia. Shaun put out another video in early December following up on that, and we have now come to part three:

Unsurprisingly, the folks at the BBC seem to be hoping that if they just ignore the problem (that being people who don’t like big news companies spreading transphobic bullshit), it’ll just go away. Wouldn’t it just be terrible if instead of going away, the problem got bigger? On an unrelated note, there’s some interesting stuff in the description of this video. A sample letter, a “contact us” link – all that jazz! It’s amazing to think how far the internet has come!

What kind of world could we build?

One of the reasons why I write science fiction, is that it’s a way for me to think about what the world could look like, and how it could be different from what I’ve always known. It can be hard to imagine how such a society might work, but fortunately a lot of people over the years have put a lot of thought into societal structures and forms of governance that lack the incentives for injustice and inequality that currently exist. I don’t think I or any other person is capable of giving the “right” answer, but as a collective, we can build on each other’s ideas and strengths, and create things that are better than any one of us could achieve.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what society is all about? Anyway, here’s Thought Slime on that very topic:

If Chile is to be the grave of Neoliberalism, let this be played at its funeral!

Chile has been described as the birthplace of Neoliberalism. Specifically, it was the Pinochet regime that seized power from the democratically elected Salvadore Allende, with U.S. support, that then enacted a brutal regime of torture, murder, and privatization with the continued backing of the U.S. government, and advice from “the Chicago boys“, acolytes of Milton Friedman’s cult of The Invisible Hand of the Free Market that pioneered the ruthless profit-seeking and “marketization” of every aspect of life that has become typical of American capitalism in the decades since. I’ll pause here to once again link you to the free audiobook of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”.

Recently, the left has been rising again in Chile, finally moving back towards the kind of society they had been trying to build before capitalists tried to crush that dream, and presidential candidate Gabriel Boric has been credited with saying, “If Chile was the birthplace of Neoliberalism, it will also be its grave!”

Now, Boric has released the funniest political ad I have ever seen, and while I was going to take today off, I had to share it with you.

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!
If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming

-Emma Goldman

The “Nuclear Family” is a myth that limits our capacity to understand ourselves

Humans are a social species. Our greatest achievements, for good and for ill, have all come from the collective effort of thousands of people, often spread out over multiple generations. Mainstream discourse in the United States holds that the “Nuclear Family” is the foundation of all of that, and more conservative people will often go farther to claim that that structure – a cis man, a cis woman, and their children – has been central to all “greatness” in human history.

As with many such assertions, this quickly falls apart as we look at what’s known about human societies around the globe, but there’s a persistent effort to erase, denigrate, or dismiss any alternative ways of structuring our communities, past and present. Abigail Thorn’s video about witchcraft, gender, and Marxism explores the ways in which modern gender roles began to be enforced in Europe, and the role the witch hunts played in creating the world we all live in today. Where she focused on economic theory, concepts of magic, and historical eras, Saint Andrew’s video Rethinking Family focuses on family structures, and the roles they have played in making us what we are, in limiting our understanding of ourselves, and in limiting our power to resist oppression.

U.S. culture is obsessed with “the individual”, while also discouraging more than the most token expressions of individual identity. We are told to think and act as individuals (outside the workplace) and to define ourselves by work plus whatever we can do in our spare time – usually some form of consumer activity. In my view, understanding who we are as individuals requires some understanding of what we are as Homo sapiens, and in forcing everyone to conform to a particular vision of “the family unit”, we have been lied to about what we are. Not only does this make it difficult to truly understand who we, but that lack of understanding also greatly impedes our ability to shape ourselves, and determine the course of our own lives.

The Nuclear Family is an artificial construct, and one that has never been real in the idealized form we were taught to strive for. It’s past time to re-learn who and what we are, and allow humans to be humans.