Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it’s facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here’s one of the more outrageous comments:
Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it’s wrong and that it just shouldn’t be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won’t have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It’s never gonna be right so yah!!
There’s more there—way too much more—and there are lots of kids who are blindly supporting that kind of statement. They say “it’s wrong” and that’s enough: their brains shut down, they’ve got nothing to back it up, and they just repeat the “just wrong” mantra over and over again, spicing it up with eliminationist calls to get rid of them. “So yah!!” sums up their reasoning perfectly.
Where do these kids pick up this kind of bigotry? From their parents and churches, of course, but also, the schools out here have been collaborators in a conspiracy of silence. A year ago last Spring, we had a perfect example: the university put on a play about tolerance and diversity, and regional schools boycotted the event, and the reaction to the Vagina Monologues has been similarly backwards. There are no processes in place to teach kids something more than their tradition-based dogmatic ignorance: the schools have given up, some of the churches encourage it, and whole families wallow in this level of stupidity.
And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.
Have the same thing where I live here in rural Illinois, and not exactly looking forward to the uphill battle with my kid and his peers…
Advice?…
Thank Allah I graduated from high school before Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, et al.
The best revenge is graduating, moving to a nice city, and having interesting things to talk about at the 10-year reunion.
There are plenty of other reasons to view “The Vagina Monologues” negatively.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the Popular Kids suck. They always have, they always will. They’re the ones incessantly talking on their cellphones while driving their hummers when they’re 30. The Popular Kid clique is united in their acceptance of “normalcy”. Their shallowness ties them together and drives out those who think or act differently than their accepted cultural norms. They are best ignored. You will not change them.
A buck says the student body president comes out before he graduates from college.
I think that it’s worth getting into the debate now so that they don’t think the world is an echo chamber with no other views. But you’re right, you can’t change them in high school. All is not necessarily lost though – sometimes they change themselves later.
Ah, popular kids and the hell that was middle and high school. Man, I can’t imagine how much worse that would have been if I were gay. (I still got pushed around and called “fag” a lot, but I suppose it would have been far worse.) I really wish someone had handed me Why Nerds are Unpopular back then (I guess through a time machine); it all seemed so arbitrarily and pointlessly cruel. Adults told me it would get better but never why.
It’s amazing so many people manage to escape from high school with their humanity largely intact.
It’s comforting to see that nothing has changed in high school since I graduated in ’59 except the technology. We had the same opinions but we wrote them on animal skins with charcoal sticks.
I grew up in rural Minnesota, in a town smaller than Morris, very close to the Iowa border. Next year will be our twentieth reunion. i won’t be going. you can nuke the fucking town while they’re all back there, for all i care.
“Their brains shut down…”
That sums it up in a nutshell. Critical thinking has already fallen by the wayside by the high school age, apparently, unless one is fortunate enough to have parents who believe in challenging knee-jerk assumptions. It’s not just a problem of bigotry. Bigotry is based on willful ignorance, which is the fundamental problem. It’s what makes education such an uphill battle, because students don’t want to think. “Thinking is, like, totally hard and stuff. So yah, I’d rather just parrot what my pastor told me!” Sadly, they often do NOT change themselves later. Some of them even run for Congress…
And I’m with Molly from NYC: That student body president will be marching in a Gay Pride Parade before he’s 30. :)
Sm ld trd PZ dcy.
” m rght, thy r wrng, thrfr thy r dts.”
G lk n th mrrr, Mr. Dsmvwlr.
So they want to send us a bunch of well dressed folks who are in touch with their own sexuality, and most of whom have lots of disposable income because they’re not supporting kids.
That’ll give our population a boost, be good for the economy, and will piss off the Religious Right on both sides of the border.
As a proud Canadian, I’m good with that.
Same old tired PZ idiocy.
Poor widdle Hoody!
Mom pressuring you to quit spending so much time online and get a job?
Yeah, I used to get real mad at grownups when I was your age, too.
Interesting article on links between homophobia and arousal related to homosexual stimulae.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:OuUWXezMbF8J:www.oogachaga.com/downloads/homophobia_and_homosexual_arousal.pdf+
It’s funny how common sense that is!
And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.
Not a potential valedictorian? Hey, we will always need people to pump the gas and mop the floors. I also agree with molly,nyc.
Good on you, Skatje.
Maybe it’s just the image that comes across on TV etc., but US high schools sound even worse than our kind. Granted, I was one of the nerds, but at least we had our own little nerd clique (three of us are still in science!) and there wasn’t a one-dimensional ranking system.
Primary school was far worse in the swot-hating stakes, probably because the school was smaller and there weren’t enough nerds to club together.
ship all the gays to Canada
I don’t think David Mainse of Marriage Canada would approve. He was on 100 Huntlet Street (Canada’s version of 700 Club), crying about homosexual marriages and the “rights” of children. I said it is not okay with him to have a “homosexual” agenda. Well, it’s not okay with me that he has a “Christian” agenda.
If Morris HS is anything like my own Highschool… that gay-hating student body president is probably a closeted homosexual himself.
The woman who cleans my mom’s house is involved in a similar controversy. There’s some MySpace/Facebook kind of deal where a bunch of kids from her kid’s school did such wonderful things as talk about conspiring to get a retarded boy to kill himself, among another things. She had it shut down, and brought it up to some of the parents, and they hated her for it. Boys will be boys, yadda yadda. Well, one of the kids who was being picked on, I think he was suspected for making a bomb threat against the abusers, and now everyone is even more mad- at her, for bringing it up. For a couple of weeks she would show up at my mom’s house in tears.
That’s not “just being kids”. That’s sociopathic.
“There are plenty of other reasons to view “The Vagina Monologues” negatively.”
I disagree. My girlfriend used to be involved in many stage plays in her undergrad. When we first started dating, she took me to see her troupe’s staging of The Vagina Monologues. I found it shocking, but that’s exactly why I had to see it. We have to stop letting people with weird and unexplainable values make others feel embarrassed about completely normal aspects of human existence, as well as call attention to despicable things that are getting swept under the rug because they don’t make for polite dinner conversation.
“I really wish someone had handed me Why Nerds are Unpopular back then”
That essay should be airdropped into middle and high schools across the country. Seriously.
That’s actually why I didn’t care much for the Vagina Monologues: I didn’t find it shocking at all. When you remove the shock value, it becomes a little bit tedious.
vagina monologues was great. high school was and probably still is a theater of passions. and hoody is a moron.
but i think there is a grave danger here for many folks me included. that is to be bigoted against bigots.
in other words, hating people who hate people is kinda stupid. this is often a fine blurry line away from pointing out how stupid their opinion is.
my question: what is the preferred alternative?
Hate’s an emotion we all have. So, if we’re not that into hate but have to hate something, why not hate people who hate other people for no good reason?
That reminds me of the Daily Show. “Why aren’t you tolerant of people who don’t tolerate you?”
If you’re tolerant and loving of everything, you won’t get anything done.
Armchair psychologist here. I agree this is despicable, but there are two things that might be at work here. One is the developmental level here. Most kids are inclined to think in black and white terms at this age. There’s right and there’s wrong and there’s nothing in between. Second that black and white viewpoint often gets reinforced at home or when people are not exposed to different points of view. I suspect, PZ, that you and your kids have nuanced conversations about these issues. I suspect the class president is not hearing anyting but the viewpoint he himself espouses and that when another viewpoint gets expressed, it is soundly rejected. I imagine yelling at the tv in this instance. This is all not to excuse the behavior but an attempt to figure out how to change it. It’s an uphill battle, to be sure.
Much worse, I assure you. I…don’t even remember much of high school, actually, just a few things here and there. My shrink friend says that sometimes blocking out unpleasant things isn’t a problem so much as the only effective self-defense.
Yeah, well, times change for all of us. I’m far happier now than I ever could have been then. The voices of PZ and the like can, in this time, at least be heard by anybody who looks. Not so when I was in that situation myself.
Morph
Actually, I wouldn’t mind if the US shipped all its gays to here to Canada, if we can ship all our religious woowoos to the US in exchange.
I see your Fred Phelps, and raise you a David Furnish (Elton John’s husband)
Yaksman and E Squid both beat me to the punch– A massive migration of gays (and liberals) to Canada is just fine with me. Leave the lunatic homophobes to stew in their own self-righteousness. Hate needs a local target– I think when they run out of common enemies to focus on, their internal divisions (big-endianism vs. little endianism) will kick in and we can all watch the civil war from the increasingly temperate north.
On second thought, ugh. The English revolution played a major role in making religious and political tolerance central values– but what a price to pay.
I think Laura’s right about the right and wrong thing and high-school aged children. However, I’m a TA at a university that draws most of its students from the surrounding rural area, but most of my 18-20 yr. old students thought that homosexuals should have the same rights as everybody else. In fact, I had a hard time getting a debate going (it’s part of the class) because only a couple of people disagreed with homosexual marriage and the other students didn’t want to argue for a point they thought was bigotted.
BTW the students that didn’t think homosexuals should be able to get married supported their argument by saying it was gross. Like that’s acceptable support for a debate!
my 18-20 yr. old students thought that homosexuals should have the same rights as everybody else
Interesting. I was about to comment that when I’ve taught about homosexuality, transgender etc. etc. in anthropology, “non-traditional,” ie returning, older students are much more relaxed about the subject matter than younger ones. I’d always put it down to growing up, getting out in the world, escaping bigoted parents (if that’s what they’d had), and having to deal with real people, instead of whatever hysterical projections they may have formed before. It would be nice to think that your experience is the more common (and that it’s not being paid for by a loss of open-mindedness later on in life!)
We had people like that in high school, but not all of the popular people were like that. Our valedictorian became a doctor and volunteered in Africa, and was one of the nicest girls in school, along with being a cheerleader and president of the Student Council. The jocks, on the other hand, were completely out of control, and every geek’s nightmare.
As has been pointed out, kids like to think in black and white – it makes sense of a complex world full of grays. Still, though, we need to expose them to alternatives as early as possible. That is, if raising balanced, thoughtful, well-rounded adults is our goal. If we wanna raise benighted, narrow-minded adults who know they are right regardless of the evidence, we’re doing it the right way already.
“That’s actually why I didn’t care much for the Vagina Monologues: I didn’t find it shocking at all. When you remove the shock value, it becomes a little bit tedious.”
Wow. I guess I just grew up in a way more conservative family than some others! Also, apparently the show isn’t always the same everywhere one sees it. But that’s okay, I understand the point.
BTW the students that didn’t think homosexuals should be able to get married supported their argument by saying it was gross. Like that’s acceptable support for a debate!
The perceived ‘grossness’ of homosexuality is actually the true basis of EVERY argument against gay marriage.
All that varies is what veneer of pretentious rationalization is laid on top of that.
That said, a majority of people 18-30 accept gay marriage, and acceptance of it has been proven to be inversely proportionate to age. Rejection of it is highest among people over 65. It’s just a fact that homophobia is declining. Time is not on the side of people who want anti-gay legislation.
Clare,
We’ve had the exact opposite outcomes in most of our anthropology classes here, but our non-trads tend to be from the very local (very conservative) population that adamantly opposes anything that disagrees with the bible.
Arden Chatfield,
Whereas the perceived “grossness” maybe the underlying basis for any other arguments, you can’t use it in a classroom debate. However, it would be fun to be able to say something like I don’t think Bush should be president because he’s gross!
Also, more people now are in favor of gay marriage than were at the time of Loving v Virginia in favor of interracial marriage. Numbers don’t always win out; progress is made. Slowly, perhaps, but surely.
I went to my 30th reunion this summer and started talking to a woman who had been a good friend in high school. I told her I was working a lot with MoveOn.org, and she just frowned and said, “Oh, well we have nothing more to talk about then!” and turned away.
Some people have simply become stupid in this country. About 30% of them still are, too.
‘I went to my 30th reunion this summer and started talking to a woman who had been a good friend in high school. I told her I was working a lot with MoveOn.org, and she just frowned and said, “Oh, well we have nothing more to talk about then!” and turned away.’
As rude as she was, she actually did you a favor by freeing up your time to talk with other people.
Hmm. Take out “homosexuality” and replace it with “Judaism” and translate the whole thing into German… do you suppose the kid realizes he’s one word away from being a Nazi?
Whereas the perceived “grossness” maybe the underlying basis for any other arguments, you can’t use it in a classroom debate
True, but this fact goes quite far in explaining why no arguments given against gay marriage make any sense.
i think that one of the great advantages of going away to college [or getting away from home and doing something else, with different kinds of people], is that students who were insulated in high school are challenged on BS assumptions, and forced to rethink them. or at least, that happens for lots of folks post-high-shcool.
i remember quite a heated debate freshman year of college, with a guy who probably was student body president in HS, about his firm conviction that all women should stay home and raise the kids because that was only natural. our discussion group let him have it between the eyes, and he disappeared for several days. he said he went to the desert, and he returned much subdued by the application of thought to his lifelong assumptions.
back when i was shuttling middle-schoolers around, sometimes friends of my son would make gay jokes, as if that was the funniest damned thing in the universe. on quite a few occasions, i pulled the car over and explained why that wasn’t funny — that people cannot help who they fall in love with, that gay friends had been beaten up just for being who they were, that the hatred of gays is so out of control that i’d even had straight friends beaten up because their attackers thought they were gay.
not sure if that made a dent, but it seemed to me that middle school was not to early to make kids think about fairness and how to be a decent human.
Just to put things in perspective, when I graduated High School, inter-racial relationships were considered abominations; and that was in 1995. I actually dared to date an African-American girl and it resulted in anonymous threats and a brick thrown through my car window. Welcome to the deep south. There are places which still have a long way to go.
The developmental argument is important. I think we also have to consider that these kids have less experience in the world and can have difficulty recognizing the complexities of a society in which they are starting to participate. What are the potential effects of talking points like “liberals hate America”, “godless atheists are trying to destroy the foundations of our country”, and “homosexuals have an agenda to undermine all of our traditional values” when they meet youthful idealism and the child does not have the skills to identify them as meaningless rhetoric spewed out by a bloviating pundit out to make a buck by appealing to base emotion? It seems likely to me that you will get some kids taking in this tripe and adopting it as a foundation for their idealism. Scary thought.
The perceived ‘grossness’ of homosexuality is actually the true basis of EVERY argument against gay marriage.
Straight marriage too. But most of us outgrow the “Boys [Girls] are icky” phase before we get to high school.
I think the principal talked to him:
Andrew (Morris Area Secondary) wrote
at 1:13pm
Sibz you knows I was jokin about Canada ppl need to relax and get a life. Stop trying to be all holy and God this, God that! Just get over it and move on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah, what prowess the young boy has in deductive reasoning! Look at how he flawlessly moves from his introductory premise to his final retort:
1. Homosexuality wrong.
2. We all know homosexuality is wrong
3. So yah!
Is “So yah!” some adolescent fuckwit version of Q.E.D. that I haven’t been made aware of? Thus is it, like, proven and stuff?
Steve: the worst excesses are carried out by those in the middle of the food chain; the most popular kids don’t need to pick on nerds to make themselves popular, because they’re above that.
That said, I distinctly remember a girl in my high school classes, blond, very pretty, a cheerleader, for cryin’ out loud. I didn’t talk to her much until I got a spot at the AP students’ table–I had previously been too dorky even for them–and she turned out to be not at all airheaded, just as bright as everyone else, and not have a mean bone in her body. I felt pretty dumb for my stereotypes.
That’s why they’re trying to push constitutional amendments while they still might have the demographics for it. Amendments will take longer to undo than statutes.
1. Homosexuality wrong.
2. We all know homosexuality is wrong
3. So yah!
Is “So yah!” some adolescent fuckwit version of Q.E.D. that I haven’t been made aware of? Thus is it, like, proven and stuff?
This is nothing unusual — it’s really just an extremely inarticulate version of the same logic in the ‘Intelligent Design must be true, it’s just obvious!‘ argument we’re all so used to.
grendelkhan: A very attractive friend of mine tells me she was often alone in school because her strikingness was intimidating to others. She claims her experience generalizes … I guess we have another data point, of sorts …
As for critical thinking, I remember in elementary school I had a teacher who espoused all kinds of bogosity like the King Tut curse, Bermuda Triangle, etc. Also, the schoolyard was ripe with (usually false) urban legends, like the idea that the composer of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” had committed suicide, or that the products depicted on “wacky cards” were actually for sale somewhere. I somehow learned from my parents to investigate such claims critically, and realized towards the end of high school that my attitude towards investigating the world was rather different from many of my peers, even though some of them had much better grades in classes where such was important. I gather from this and other things since that critical thinking and scientific reasoning has to be taught in elementary school. Unfortunately, as I have alluded previously, suffers from a horrible bootstrapping problem.
The issue here is bullying behaviour, not attitudes to homosexuality. Your daughter’s right to call them over, not for being wrong, but for acting like bullies. Keep on calling them over for as long as they do it, that’s the way.
[My word Dr Myers you’re a bolshie family aren’t you]
[In this part of the world bolshie’s not necessarily a term of disrespect.]
I know I shouldn’t acknowledge hoody at all, but I find it hilarious here that he’s implicitly siding with the brainless teenager. Way to pick your battles, hoody! Who I address even though he won’t ever read the other comments ever! Okay, I’m done.
I suppose one small comfort in all this is that these people (El Presidente, not hoody) always go on to mediocrity at best. Maybe if he could argue his position with some better language, he could be a politician or a talk-radio bloviator, but I imagine he’s headed straight for the call center in whatever town nearby is large enough to have a call center. Such is the fate, or should be the fate, of those who continually misspell “yeah”. I figured him for one of those salt-o-the-earth Minnesota Swedes at first until I remembered that I’ve seen “yah” all over the internets.
So what if Canada ships all the homosexuals back? What’s his Plan B?
While the content of the quoted message is troubling, I agree with those who have pointed out the black-and-white way that (many) kids that age see things. He’s basically parroting what he’s been taught.
What’s more troubling is that, among things he’s been taught, the hate messages got through but the ability to communicate in English befitting a student body president did not.
My high school didn’t do valedictorians, but the graduating class would elect someone from among their ranks to give a commencement speech. When I graduated, we elected one of the girls soccer players, who was one of the Popular Kids, but was also very smart (went to Williams College) and nice to everyone (including me, a social outcast if there ever was one). Her speech was of the standard “opportunity knocks” archetype.
When my brother graduated the following year, however, the girl who gave their speech told it like it was, with what was probably the best description of high school ever given by an actual high schooler: it’s all a protean, petty, pointless social network of little or no long-term significance. I don’t remember much of the speech, but the phrase “we build our castles in the sand” has never left my mind.
I went to my ten year reunion a couple years ago. In highschool, us nerds knew we’d fare better than most of our peers in life. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what I ran into: those of us who had taken the AP courses back in highschool generally did alright, but the rest really had a lot tougher time. East St. Paul & its adjacent suburbs had been hit rough by ten years of downsizing by 3M, the major local employer, and so things were grim. Most of them became corrections officers or personal care assistants… or were getting by with help from their parents. The idea of affordable single family housing for working class people in the area evaporated years ago, and most of them that didn’t move away were still very much dependent on their parents; my guess is that the local economy of Morris isn’t that different.
The take-home message is that these petty tyrants ought to be pitied. Yes, they’re viscious little bastards now, but in ten years, reality will have them by the short-and-curlies.
Popular Kids are successful because they do ‘successful things’ and hold ‘successful opinions’ for their social setting. I doubt very much that change is possible because this would need a revolution by those outside the select group (which is generally a bunch of disparate people wh don’t share a common cause). Things change when the social setting is shaken up in college.
Same thing applies to business leaders and politicians – they continue to do the things that made them successful in the past, even though circumstances change.
“Why Nerds Are Unpopular”– yes, that truly would have been helpful back in junior high/high school… They should just read this at an assemblies, seriously. It would have been WAY more helpful to me than another “Just Say No” presentation.
When a conflict between government and a persons self-determination arises, it is the government that should “ship off” or “go away,” NOT, I repeat, NOT, the person.
Do I have to do anything to initiate this trade, or will transportation be provided?
Do I have to do anything to initiate this trade, or will transportation be provided?
Hey, yeah, if I claim to be gay, can I get the US government to pay for my vacation in the Canadian Rockies next summer? And maybe the Maritimes the summer after that? I have been doing an awful lot to destroy the American family…
Actually, I wouldn’t mind if the US shipped all its gays to here to Canada, if we can ship all our religious woowoos to the US in exchange.
Fuck Canada – there’s an entire world that wouldn’t mind swapping their religious bigots for educated US gays tired of their home country’s idiocy. We’ll swap you these guys for those Queer Eye dudes any day.
I made the mistake this weekend of trying to engage my date in a deep discussion about gay marriage, which is already legal in Canada and frankly it pains me to think that it was automatically so due to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
You see I was trying to connect with her on a level deeper than my appreciation for her ass, but it turned out to be a mistake since she basically said that it was wrong in language frighteningly similar to the quote above.
Man, I need to date smarter girls again.
I went to a blue-state, diverse, liberal, yadda yadda high school (e.g. in my class of over 400 we had a grand total of two actively evangelizing Christians), and the “popular kids” were still fairly homophobic, at least in regards to actual gay/bi students vs. “haha funny gay people” on TV. And the staff generally looked the other way unless it escalated to the point of physical violence, which was (fortunately) very rare.
So it’s not merely a result of “Red-State America” or the Religious Right. I’d say the root of the problem lies with the conformist mentality of the “popular” cliques as much as anything. Though it does seem like homophobic indoctrination on the part of church/parents/community makes the problem much worse.
Excuse me? What’s wrong with sending all your gays to Canada?
It’s called killing two birds with one stone. We get people who will be happy to live in Canada and you get to appease the bigots. It’s a no-brainer.
I’m beginning to get this impresson of Skatje as being a real-life version of MTV’s Daria.
Larry Moran: APPEASER!!!
Holy cow, Skatje’s posting reminds me of my high school, between 1988 and 1994 while I was there. Out of a school population of approximately 1100, there were fewer than 10 non-white students, the student body was approximately 85% evangelical Christian (most of the rest were non-evangelical Catholics, Baptists and Lutherans), and pretty much everyone had a problem with even the very idea that someone could be gay.
Two girls who were a year behind me started an openly lesbian relationship during my last year of high school, and there were nearly riots. One of the girls was physically threatened a few times. I had another friend who was unsure of his sexuality and of a mixed ethnic background (Latvian mother; Spanish father), and people not only called him “fag” but every ethnic slur in the book because they couldn’t decide which one fit him.
The kicker: I’m Canadian. *sigh*
For Andrew:
Look, kid. Leaving your laughably ignorant bigotry aside, do you see what I just did? That’s right. I put a little dot at the end of a complete thought to separate it from other complete thoughts. Here’s one of the little dots on its own: . This is called a “period” and we use them to end complete thoughts, called “sentences.” This is what we call “proper grammar.” Try it, you’ll like it. Then you can move on to what we call “age-appropriate spelling and vocabulary.” You’ll find these skills very useful as well, once you get over the disconcerting fact that people will have to recognize you as an infantile little troll based on the content of your statements, rather than being able to rely on the presentation thereof.
As a side note, I’m curious. You’ve obviously been far too busy staring at your English teachers’ bodies to pay attention in their classes. I’m willing to bet that your English teachers haven’t all been female. Is this the case? Because if some, or most, were male, it would certainly shed some light on the motives behind your little tirade. The question then becomes, why should innocent people who happen to love other members of the same sex have to suffer just so you can indulge your masochistic tendencies? (Cross-posted on Lacrimae Rerum, cause I’m proud of it).
I always love it when people argue that something (e.g. homosexuality) is bad because it’s supposedly unnatural… on the internet! What, that computer just grew on your desk, did it? Is it powered by photosynthesis? Is that ADSL cable its root system? Yeesh. (I’m aware the quote in the post above doesn’t mention the word “unnatural,” but Skatje referred to it so I’m assuming it came up in the Facebook discussion at some point.)
when i was in HS my pop was a flaming homophobe…my little sister was the one who made him THINK about the stupidity of his ranting ….after a loooong rant about how homosexuals should all be fired from their jobs etc etc etc… …my sis looked at him, shrugged and said, “well they’ve gotta eat too!
he stood there just opening and closing his mouth for the longest time
i think that this was the first time he’d ever really thought of gays as “real” people and not as an abstract focus for his dislike (…none of his kids “inherited ” that attitude….. we all thought it was childish ..growing up in nyc, we all knew gays)
i never heard another anti-gay rant from him in almost 40 years
Why’d you stop? :-P
By the way, Andrew’s apparently discovered how to troll with a sockpuppet – but not to change his e-mail or IP when doing so. It would be hilarious, if it weren’t terrifying that he managed to get elected to school president.
I’m with Gav in this.
Homophobia is a disgusting and sometimes dangerous behavior (though receding). But it is the increase in communication methods, reaching into every social moment, that is the real problem. Some kids get a double whammy of anxiousness from both trying to be reachable everywhere while being bullied or mobbed by any means at any time.
You know it is a problem when the a governmental organization gets its ass in gear and places expensive info ads to parents everywhere. A dollar says treating nervous disorders will become an even bigger business.
I’m with Gav in this.
Homophobia is a disgusting and sometimes dangerous behavior (though receding). But it is the increase in communication methods, reaching into every social moment, that is the real problem. Some kids get a double whammy of anxiousness from both trying to be reachable everywhere while being bullied or mobbed by any means at any time.
You know it is a problem when the a governmental organization gets its ass in gear and places expensive info ads to parents everywhere. A dollar says treating nervous disorders will become an even bigger business.
Why’d you stop? :-P
you must not date intelligent women very often.
They’re “high maintenance” in more than just a monetary sense, from my experience.
surely always my preference (sexy mind over sexy body any day), but still, sometimes it’s just so much easier when the topic of conversation is how cute that kitten in the window is.
Skatje wrote:
In fact, it’s developed evolutionarily; it’s not just some horrible thing gone wrong. It’s advantageous to a species. If it wasn’t good for a species, why the hell would it keep happening, and be so common?
Ouch. PZ, please get her to correct that before somebody starts thinking you are teaching her to be a group selectionist!
Oh boy, don’t worry. My friend and I already discussed this and I see where I was wrong and have now been convinced to read The Selfish Gene.
I haven’t changed what I wrote in the post because I feel like I’d be dishonest to sneakily change my opinion like that. >.>
ah, fair enough.
I’m surprised your dad didn’t give that book to you when you were knee-high to a grapevine!
;)
after you read that, you might check out:
Narrow Roads of Gene Land by WD Hamilton.
it goes into the early models that much of Dawkins’ theoretical work, including the Selfish Gene, is based on.
Hamilton himself does all of the introductions, and tracks in great detail the history of how he became a scientist, and how he developed his theory of inclusive fitness. Moreover, he also covers the political fallout from the implications of his theory he ran into after it was published.
Well, Dawkins isn’t the best to counteract the bias — Gould is much less of a panadaptationist. I’ll bring home Bully for Brontosaurus and let you read that.
ya know, something that really helped me early on was a book an undergrad advisor gave me to read by Phillip Kitcher where he outlined the “support” for group selection.
seeing that in print allows one to see the best arguments for group selection and then be able to tear them down, one by one.
I can’t recall the title of the book now, unfortunately.
I think it was Vaulting Ambition.
anywho, it was very helpful to see serious, but nonetheless incorrect, arguments in support of group selection; helps one to clarify the issue in one’s own mind.
It is so striking and wierd how nothing changes. Back when I was in 8th or 9th grade (so say around 1970), some of the kids from my class, kids I knew well, beat the crap out of another kid, also one we all knew well. When I asked why they said “because he was caught sucking (another kid’s) cock.”
I was a bit taken aback, because at that age homosexuality was something I could not recall ever having though of one way or the other. So I asked what seemed a logical question, which was WHY did that constitute a reason to beat this kid into a pulp?
The answer? “Because!”
Of course, pressing the question began to garner the expected hints that maybe I was “one fo them” as well because who else would question the rightousness of the beating.
The popular kids do, indeed, suck large.
There are times when group selection takes place – but they’re the ones when there are so many groups that they can be selected between like individuals. Particularly superorganisms.
As for TVM, it’s just not a very good play. I grok that the sociopolitical positions it espouses are popular, but aesthetically and dramatically, it’s lacking. I suspect it’s a case of the message being more important than the medium.
There are times when group selection takes place – but they’re the ones when there are so many groups that they can be selected between like individuals. Particularly superorganisms.
and in those cases, the argument becomes over the definition of “group” as distinctive.
This page is so lame. A bunch of middle aged people making fun of an 18 year old boy. Doesn’t that sound lame to you? Andrew clearly believes that being gay is wrong, and that is his American right, to say what he believes. He is not the only person with this view, so stop making fun of him.
Is this Andrew, who sock puppets with:
Skatje isgay
you’re laughable, kid.
and you just don’t learn, do you?
ridiculing idiotic attitudes is as American as “apple pie”.
… so why should we stop making fun of idiocy?
as you apparently are starting to grasp, it’s quite effective.
Holy Sockpuppet, Batman! A fellow who is almost certainly Andrew Jallo wrote:
On top of everything else, he’s egocentric too. In this thread, we’ve already moved on to discussing group selection versus selfish genes, the evolution of sexuality, and the merit of The Vagina Monologues. Get that? We’ve moved on. We have more interesting things to talk about. It’s not all about you, and it never was.
Not a sockpuppet. It’s Justin Rohloff.
No, that’s not Andrew. It’s a kid named Justin Rohloff, who, ironically enough, is posting from the computers at Northwestern College, a Christian college in St Paul.
Dumb as rocks, I tell you. Start with a kid who doesn’t know much to begin with, send ’em off to Bible college, and it’s like rolling the educational odometer backwards.
Gd lck n jdgmnt dy!
and it’s like rolling the educational odometer backwards.
ahh! a future rethuglican representative then.
got it.
moving on.
How funny is someone saying that to a bunch of atheists?
What’s with these people saying you can’t criticize openly stated beliefs.
It’s as if they’re all covering their ears and screaming… I can’t hear you!
Yes, but the point is that it *does* happen. It’s an unusual, special case – but it happens.
seriously, all you adults need to move on past this issue. Don’t you have something better to do in your life than pick on me? THe way I see it is you live your life through making fun of others. So stereotyping me as an egolistical idiot that only cares about being popular is somewhat pathetic. Considering you’re tryig to say that stereotyping gays is wrong, maybe stereotyping me as a popular idiotic kid is wrong. Just a thought I guess…?
Saith the bully.
Don’t you have something better to do in your life than be hateful to homosexuals?
I remember an interesting talk by David Sloan Wilson at ICCS 2006 on group selection. I should do more research on this, but the impression I took away was that it is most useful to speak of multi-level selection. After all, there is no philosophical reason to prefer gene-level selection over group-level; they depart from the organism scale in opposite directions, but in a symmetrical way. So, to favor one over the other without any experimental evidence smacks of inconsistency. Unfortunately, I’m not as well-read in the literature as I should be, so I can’t put my fingers on the examples indicating which way the world goes.
With a big planet and a few billion years, Nature has every opportunity to use each of a multitude of mechanisms. Altruism arose here by one route, over there by another — a wonderful puzzle for the biologists, whose work we ignorant physics types can study to dispel the clouds at our horizons.
Andrew, you stereotyped YOURSELF as a popular idiot. I think we’ve covered how you’ve made yourself look like an idiot, so I’ll just enlighten you on some of things you forgot you said about being popular:
So stereotyping me as an egolistical idiot
uh, like Skatje said, you appear to be doing the hatchet job on yourself far more effectively than Skatje ever intended.
*shakes head slowly*
So stereotyping me as an egolistical idiot
uh, like Skatje said, you appear to be doing the hatchet job on yourself far more effectively than Skatje ever intended.
*shakes head slowly*
all i can do is shrug over the multiple posts. haven’t a clue.
anywho… moving on to matters of far more interest…
I should do more research on this, but the impression I took away was that it is most useful to speak of multi-level selection.
here’s a brief review:
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/okasha.html
After all, there is no philosophical reason to prefer gene-level selection over group-level; they depart from the organism scale in opposite directions, but in a symmetrical way.
So, to favor one over the other without any experimental evidence smacks of inconsistency.
indeed, this is the problem with philosophers expounding on biological issues. Like Kitcher in the 80’s, they actually DIDN’T bother to look at the models predicting selection based on the level of the individual, and how those predictions actually played out in real field studies.
There actually is MASSIVE amounts of in-situ data to support the idea that selection acts on the level of the individual. Far more than support the idea that group selection is stable for the vast majority of cases.
Even around the time Fisher released the first models of selection, we already had data supporting the idea of selection acting at the level of the individual, and Hamilton’s models of inclusive fitness that came in the 60’s based on similar reasoning have also been found to have excellent predictive and explanatory power in many cases.
It’s easy to produce logical extensions of how selection might act, far harder to produce evidence that supports that selection acts on anything other than an individual level in the vast majority of cases.
In fact, maybe we should go into more detail on the special case Cale mentions, as it is often the case that exceptions help to clarify what the “rule” is.
Cale, if you can remember the exact reference you are referring to, maybe it’s available for public viewing?
It indeed would be interesting to start a discussion on this issue.
I should note that I posted the review merely as a starting point, and a place to gather references. the author’s take on several issues, including the misintrepretation of some of Dawkins’ models as examples of group selection, is certainly nothing I am supporting.
There’s no particular reference, just the understanding that genes which promote their own perpetuation will accumulate. In most cases, a gene’s best bet is to maximize the fitness of the organism that carries it – but there are instances where selection pressures act on groups instead of mere individuals and genes can achieve greater payoffs by causing individuals to impair their fitness to improve the groups’.
One of the best-known examples of this is altruism among vampire bat populations. An example of negative-group selection is the gene in mice that’s lethal when two copies are inherited but is extremely effective at ensuring it’s passed on in male’s sperm – I can’t remember the name of the gene, unfortunately, and by Googling on the subject has been unsuccessful.
but there are instances where selection pressures act on groups instead of mere individuals and genes can achieve greater payoffs by causing individuals to impair their fitness to improve the groups’.
most of this falls under simple inclusive fitness, which i mentioned above, or in the case of vampire bats, a stable case of cooperation (rare), but not necessarily for the benefit of the “group” (at least, the last time i checked). Though, we could discuss this example further, if you are interested. I haven’t glanced at the literature on them for a few years now.
speaking of interesting examples of cooperation (as a tangent), have you seen this:
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/061207_fish_cooperation.html
I thought you specifically were referring to some of the studies looking at the ideas of group selection in colony formation.
for example, the debate over the evolution of colonial organsims like the portuguese man-o-war.
An example of negative-group selection is the gene in mice that’s lethal when two copies are inherited but is extremely effective at ensuring it’s passed on in male’s sperm – I can’t remember the name of the gene, unfortunately, and by Googling on the subject has been unsuccessful.
interesting. Would you post the link if you run across it again?
Wikipedia’s article on “group selection” actually has a number of citations that you might find interesting. And yes, if I come across a discussion of that mouse gene, I’ll send you a link.
So where is bashing the high school president of the student council much better? We have the “he’s a closet gay” statements abounding here. But that really isn’t the issue. The issue is how does a public institution teach tolerance for differences and still stay within the bounds set for it by the local community? Unlike a college, high schools are run by school boards. In Morris the school board is very conservative. the people of the community have elected board members that consistently follow that route.
How do you teach tolerance? If you were a parent of a student there, what would you want the school response to be? The school needs to talk about this, certainly, but they need to do more. While Skatje’s suggestion of a lyceum certainly could be a start, I think the only thing that will work is zero tolerance of that kind of remark and behavior. This is not a “freedom of speech” issue. Hate talk against anyone should not be tolerated. Period.
Reading through these posts a year later, I find myself even more sickened than I was the first time – not about Andrew and his remark… he was young without much experience in the world. Hopefully, he will grow to learn tolerance for people with a wide range of beliefs other than his own. No, my distress is with those who felt the need to post personal attacks as far as Andrew or Justin were concerned. Andrew and Justin need to be tolerant – but apparently you do not. Rather than focusing on the issue of helping students understand diversity, you attack them personally.
“Dumb as rocks, I tell you. Start with a kid who doesn’t know much to begin with, send ’em off to Bible college, and it’s like rolling the educational odometer backwards.” Nice example of tolerance, Professor Myers.
Thank you Susan Hauger! I always liked you as a teacher (even though I was quite upset, and still am a little, when you gave me a B- on my “American Dream” essay)! You always know how to diffuse a sticky situation. Everybody needs to be tolerant of different beliefs. We may not agree, but tolerance isn’t agreeing; it’s allowing others to have differing opinions.