This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
I hate Monday mornings.
Well I would never dare attempt to post #1 in the Thunderdome. In the Lounge, maybe. But not the Thunderdome.
Aaaaaagh!!!!!!!! Will you look at those time-stamps?!?!?! Dammit, Lofty, it’s not Monday morning for another hour and five minutes. Aagh.
Just because you lot are a bit slow to embrace the awfulness that is Monday morning doesn’t mean it’s inevitable arrival can be stopped. For everyone still celebrating Sunday afternoon, carry on. Your turn will come.
I like cheese!
What in the name of … whatever … is that picture??! ‽?!
-posted on a sunny Sunday Afternoon.
so there
and that’s the truth
My Monday afternoon is going to involve driving a couple of hours to get my mom to the eye doctor. She is always fun to be with, but two hours of driving are going to play hell with my lower digestive.
I could spend my Monday morning over at an Emotion Disability classroom. The job description mentions yelling, swearing and hitting – the kids doing that, I mean. The substitute teacher must be able to stay calm but move quick. That listing has been just hanging there all weekend. Nobody wants it, and I have been taking some of the bad jobs so as to stay in good with the bosses. I need sleep more than a few bucks and an attaboy, though.
Whenever Thunderdome starts with say what you like, I feel it is a challenge. Um … poop.
chigau (違う)
daspletosaurus_face_bite.jpg
Does that help? Looks truly Monday morning to me.
The pic up there is a couple of daspletosaurus, in the new feathery version.
https://luisvrey.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/cannibal-daspletosaurus/ is the artist’s site.
They are about tall enough that you could get clonked on the head by that pubic bone thingy. (Did anybody ever make sense of that?)
Sorry, I had the proportions wrong. A daspletosaurus is about tall enough to bite your head off while running. I apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced.
I wonder if daspletosauruses transmit cancer like Tasmanian devils?
Anyway, it’s a good time to catch up on over 600 comments from the previous Tdome.
Menyambal,
I was brave enough to take a couple of subbing assignments in the emotionally disabled classrooms when I was subbing.
I found that I really didn’t have the stamina for it. I didn’t last very long in the middle school classrooms either, and I wouldn’t even try elementary school. I was quite happy subbing in high schools around the district for nine years, then teaching in my own high school classroom for seven years.
I prefer to teach teens after they have reached the age of at least some reason.
My own teens hated it when I was subbing. They never knew when they might saunter into their English class and find Mom sitting behind the teacher’s desk. My two youngest were in high school when I was offered the full time teaching position in another high school, and they pushed me to accept it.
testing testing….
Why is the preview button borked for me, and how do I unbork it?
@cr:
Well, I use NoScript, and when I have forgotten to allow scripts from freethoughtblogs.com and wp.com, the Preview button stops working until I do unblock them.
Oh, also googleapis.com
Dunno if you’re doing something similar.
Thanks. Yeah, I’m using noscript, request policy and a cookie blocker thingy, but I can’t figure out what must have changed….
I’m guessing that it’s beacause you’re both eereevuuul and not worthy.
—
Not like me.
Unidentified gunmen have killed Pakistani women’s activist Sabeen Mahmud in a targeted shooting that also left her mother in intensive care. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/27/sabeen_mahmud_dies_in_shooting/
Of course it’s Monday Morning, haven’t you noticed? Also, for those who hate Mondays, I recommend bringing a pork-strawberry-sweetcorn-rawmushroom-basil-sourcream-filled tortilla to work. Mmmmm-day!
It is indeed monday morning here.
Anyways, I read this TED talk about “everyday violence” (in areas with no effective law enforcement) being a major factor in worldwide poverty. And apparently this is one aspect of the problem that gets neglected a lot.
The TED talk seems intuitively plausible, but I don’t see any significant discussion about law enforcement and violence in top google sources for information, and it isn’t something I’ve heard of much before. Does anyone here know much about this?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/04/26/christian-preacher-adds-insult-to-injury-with-nepal-tweet/
Tony Miano can fuck right off, and when he’s done fucking off, he can fuck off some more.
That there would be significant violence in a society or parts of society without law enforcement is what I’d consider the default position, prevalence of violence from law enforcement notwithstanding. Vigilante justice doesn’t work.
Excluded Layman’s post on the previous thunderdome I thought was very interesting and thought provoking: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/03/18/thunderdome-60/comment-page-2/#comment-936252
Here are the key things that need to be considered though:
-Though it may seem like it sometimes, there is no clear indication that the bigot brigade actually out-numbers other people. They have sockpuppets and invest a lot more time and energy in being disruptive and vile assholes, and it is likely that this makes them seem more prevalent than they actually are.
– The victory condition isn’t to just prevent beatdown forever. There is a third team: The Neutral Brigade. The people who sit on the sidelines and make much noise about Both Sides, and how they haven’t made a decision and etc. Winning over the support of these people by revealing more about the Bigot Brigade is key. It isn’t just about using tactics to make safe places for us to survive their eternal assault. The only way to beat them is to let them marginalize themselves and by making it clear that the Social Justice side is the moderate, reasonable, moral position.
And it isn’t just the pure Neutrals that need to be addressed in this fashion. Essentially, the core bigots have a layer of protection. Call it #notmyshield Armor. These are people that provide the group as a whole with plausible deniability. A thin veneer of being more sophisticated, or focused on other priorities, as a mask to hide what they are actually doing and how they are actually behaving. That is their disruption tactic: Smokescreen. Hide how awful they are with ranks of people used as human shields, to act as a pretty face for a hideous faction, while also hiding the true stances of the people they are opposing and attacking. But insofar as these people aren’t just sockpuppets or blatant liars (facts that can be determined and exposed as part of our tactics), the people used in the Armor are also their most reasonable and might dissociate from the core of the group if the issues are made clearer. Get rid of that layer of people, and they become an obvious hate group, about as popular and well-regarded as Stormfront or the KKK.
That is the win condition: Win over the Neutrals, and convince the #Notmyshield Armor to dissociate from the bigoted core. Don’t do that, and yes, you are just playing defense forever.
Kent State was 45 years ago.
(cross post)
An National Guard anniversary is coming right up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Neil Young Ohio
45 fucking years
tabernac
Baltimore is burning.
Still burning.
I don’t feel this is appropriate for the Baltimore thread, so I’m putting it here.
In local online papers, there’s an article about a video of a mother “discplining” her son (beating him) when she caught him throwing stones at the police during the riot.
Someone actually wrote this sentence in the article:
Beatrice: Damn. Beating a child, in a protest against police killing people, in the name of teaching the kid to not be violent. Irony is critical mass.
anteprepro,
Just to make it clear, that was mother and son but not mother and child. Guy was taller than her.
Why am I going to law school?
Fuck.
This is so…
…useless.
I prioritize constitutional law because I saw the US constitution written in such a way as to eventually **require** war. It may even have been the best that they could do (certainly the Articles of Confederation didn’t work out). But I thought that maybe I could do better. Not because I’m smarter or more just or “better” somehow. Because I have an extra two centuries of human knowledge to deploy.
Even after Fergusson I had some hope that I was doing the right thing. But Baltimore…I want to puke. I can’t get this sick feeling out of me. How can the law ever fix the abuses of the law?
and don’t give me shit about cops were breaking the law and blah, blah, blah.
We’ve known for decades (or longer) that cops get away with thuggish shit because reasons. We’ve known for decades (or longer) about the reliance of prosecutors on cops and the way that corrupts any attempt to hold bad cops accountable. We’ve known for decades about how cozy relationships within forces allows corruption to build (where forced transfers lead to not knowing whom to trust – is this other cop corrupt? Or an IA informer?).
We’ve known this, and more importantly, LEGISLATORS HAVE KNOWN THIS.
To say that legislators have not fixed it after fucking decades is to say that THIS IS THE SYSTEM THAT LEGISLATORS WANT.
And for those elected officials to now say that they don’t want riots? Well and good: that simply means you want unaccountable police violence to thoroughly cow the populace…instead of merely making rebellion too risky unless one joins a larger group. YOU LEGISLATORS WANT THE COPS TO CONTINUE OPERATING UNDER A SYSTEM THAT WILL NOT HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE, KNOWING THAT THEY KILL, PARALYZE, AND MAIM.
How could I ever work with such a group to accomplish anything good?
Apropos of nothing:
Before the 1st Intifada Gaza had no real infrastructure, no industrial or commercial areas and very little clean water. So little, in fact, that even the Israeli soldiers stationed there would often get diarrhea and various infections. The entire place was nothing more than a huge slave camp, since the residents of Gaza had to seek work anywhere they could for wages even lower than those offered to residents of the West Bank.
After the 1st Intifada Gaza received a semblance of autonomy and self-rule in the form of the Palestinian National Authority, many new facilities were being build and an a large industrial zone was established in its northern part.
Before the 2nd Intifada almost all of the fertile land in Gaza was in the hands of a tiny amount of settlers.
After the 2nd Intifada there are no longer any settlements there and almost all of Gaza is under Palestinian rule.
I got an ARC of Ashamet, Desert Born by Terry Jackman (e-book), and I’m excited. Gonna go read.
A school teacher in Lacey, Washington thwarted an active shooter situation, without the use of a firearm:
Well, I just wrote a rousing not-pology. The school that I was at today held an earthquake drill and a building-evacuation drill, and the class of children that I was in charge of did not take either one at all seriously.
The day had had been stressful already, and trying to get a group of oblivious people to safety triggered my PTSD and a few nightmare memories. Once we were all outside, my old drill sergeant and safety instructors came elbowing into my brain, and I gave the kids a few minutes of school-appropriate corrective discourse at some volume. And turned around to see the principal.
I tried to explain, later, but kept stuttering into sweating silence. Just thinking about some stuff still hurts. (My moniker is a souvenir of the 2004 Indi (and I can’t finish that).)
So I was asked to write a letter to explain to the kids. I think it was supposed to be a flat apology, but as I said, they had been yelling more and worse all day, and I had carefully and correctly prepped them for the drill. Which they bockled to fuck and back.
So my letter was some artful snark, and ended with a bit about the kids not being at all upset, stated rather indirectly. I think it will pass as sincere.
But I left some rather harsh criticism on the day’s feedback form, so maybe only the kids will be fooled. I blame the teacher for letting the class learn bad habits and systematic disrespect. Which screws things up for the good kids, which were the majority.
Yeah, ten years agone, and still the memories. And nobody expects it, and I didn’t expect a drill, or the reaction.
It has been thirty years and more since the ship almost sank in the freezing dark, and that mixes right in with tropical earthquake better than you might imagine.
I did feel bad about the day, damn if I didn’t, and my trauma excuses nothing. But it was the worst class ever well before the alarms went wild.
Menyambal
Have a *hug*.
I know this is the Thunderdome but what the fuck, eh?
Thanks, chigau. Thank you much.
From Tony! @34:
You mean there might be a situation where parents COULD give the boy permission to take the gun to school?
And, unfortunately, the police officer was following protocol (most likely). The insurance carried by LEOs is very strict — if you fail to follow training/protocol, your ass may be hung out to dry in a lawsuit. Which sucks for the officer and, more important, really sucks for whoever the officer is dealing with. If the officer had tried to disarm/talk down/whatever, and the kid had fired another shot, the officer would be open for a massive lawsuit. Had the officer fired, then it would have been according to protocol and thus a ‘rightful shoot.’
Cops annoy the shit out of me. I know that most (perhaps being too charitable here) are really trying to make a positive difference but, because of the poor supervision, overly militarized training, endemic racism, insurance, and the asshole cops who think the rules do not apply, law enforcement officers (those who follow the rules, anyway) are so constrained in the ways that they can react to a given situation that escalation is basically required. If they do not escalate, they get bad evaluations, maybe get fired, and don’t get promoted. If they do escalate (according to protocols, of course) they get promoted which means that the asshole gun-happy militarized idiots are the ones who become sergeants, or chiefs-of-police, or training officers which continues and exacerbates the problem.
Just about any heirarchical organization develops the same problem. Those who adhere very strictly to the most conservative, most unimaginative, interpretation of regulations get promoted. You can get fired for not classifying a document top secret when it should have been; over-classifying a document will almost never create a problem. Being creative and trying to save the life of someone who is trying to comit suicide by cop can get you fired; pulling your weapon and blasting them will not (or it may garner a promotion or a medal). Over-reacting is rewarded and under-reacting (or differently-reacting) is punished.
And, unfortunately, more training is not the answer. Guess who ends up training the officers? The right-wing authoritarians. Even if the training is in non-lethal force, or diversity training, or cultural sensitivity, or youth issues, the ones doing the training are the RWAssholes. Which means that they go through the motions, teach the materials, and then, usually, add on lots of extra commentary stating that this is bullshit and that they are all criminals out to kill cops.
=====
Hugs to Menyambel.
We all react to situations based on our training, our knowledge, and our experiences. And the experiences can help, hurt, or put things into a perspective that others do not grok.
Hugs from me as well, Menyambel.
____________________________
Ogvorbis #38
You probably are. Don’t know about USA, but in Russia, Ukraine and Israel cops usually recruited from former conscripts. And not the clever ones either – conscripts from military intelligence, technical divisions or even elite units are rarely admitted, it’s usually the former border guards or other soldiers who have proven that they can perform the most monotonous duties that get the job. Add to that that most people who apply to join police are from the lower to lower-middle classes, and that those classes (at least in the above countries) statistically tend to be more jingoistic, and you’ll get a force made up mostly from stupid thugs.
Huh, this is odd. Did you notice that there now is only one box under comment window?
AlexanderZ @40:
I noticed that too.
I’d long thought that [at least] one of the boxes was redundant.
Ogvorbis @38:
I had the exact same thought when I reached that part of the article.
Tony! #41
Notification boxes aside, this redesign is clearly evil. In the new redesign PZ’s comments are no longer red with the blood of the faithful, but plain black. And he’s lost his octopus as well!!
This is interesting – Kiwi xtians are afraid of tai chi …
A while ago, here, there were some concerns about yoga and deep breathing.
Re: My comments on strategy, places, like the ‘pit and those that choose to comment there.
Sorry about the delay in responding. Visiting my family complicated things.
Let me preface this by pointing out that my concerns here are related to the same sorts of phenomena that produce and propagate things like institutional racism and sexism. In this case the locations of interactions that nurture and enable such behavior, or outright support and reward it.
We speak of “echo chambers” because there is a very real way that toxic behavior and beliefs get created and propagated. Interacting with an individual is the basic currency of social interaction. But that interaction with individuals ideally is done in a way that undermines and opposes the existence of places that create and enable such behavior until the places or the behavior is eliminated. An effort has to be made to deal with places where role-modeling and rewarding of specific behavior is allowed by the status-quo. To avoid this is to lengthen a worthy social conflict.
How do we deal with the 4chans, 8chans and Stormfronts of the world? Pointing and laughing or condemning at the places is not enough. Strategically responding to individuals that choose to go there based on how they interact in those places is needed. Any one of you could go to Ponychan right now and find some shitty comments that propagate bad behavior and I would find questioning my participation there acceptable. My response would be to show you examples of where I fight such behavior. My overall goal is the creation of social tools to fight these problems.
@chigau 44, previous thunderdome
I’m sure that some of them are there because they like to argue, but they choose to argue about specific things and do so in specific ways (repeatedly attacking any attempt to deal with rape culture no matter the means or ends like I see Steersman do, or responding to expressions of suffering from one group by replacing them with their own group like I see in comments to articles about the problems of women around the internet). Those things and ways are behaviors that are used because people have been rewarded for using them before. This process occurs in places where the local culture allows it.
Mere belief in one’s own cleverness is emotional fuel for the above. The places of role-modeling and reward for the actions that are taken based on those beliefs are still issues.
@polishsalami, previous thunderdome
The people that post there. The Slymepit is a society and societies are made from the people that create and propagate them*. Every single one of them. If the rank hierarchy is flat ownership is shared (otherwise we treat leaders and such differently for real reasons, they have more social capital). Regardless of ownership the ‘pits existence as a place of social activity and evolution remains.
Why does the phrase “the standard that you walk past is the standard that you accept” exist? It exists because shaming of individuals for allowing unacceptable behavior in their midst is a genuine means of trying to change society. That does not mean that we treat the person that does nothing the same as the one that uses brutal harassment as a social tool. But that does mean that we do something about the people that literally give life to the places where those brutal harassers thrive and hone their craft.
You speak of those who role-model behavior.
We treat them as individuals, but we also use the social tools (evolved social tools) that have traditionally worked as morally and ethically as we can. If they joined and abandoned ship they still chose to participate. They can point out that they only have a small number of posts and bailed when they learned of the nature of the place. How do you react when you find out that someone you know was a member of the KKK? I doubt that you would have no reaction at all.
We do not simply have no reaction to such for perfectly good reasons and avoiding that part of human social instincts is not a good idea (reputation and similar). A reaction to finding out someone has participated in the ‘pit is part of how such places are dealt with. The same instincts that deal with contagion and contamination likely deal with social behavior as well (consider how social disgust factors into social conflicts, it’s a moral neutral and what matters is how the instincts are expressed). A person who decided to shame racism in the ‘pit would be able to show such postings and would then be a role-model in a different way. It’s unpleasant and it sucks, but ending a social dynamic always sucks and there is real structure to how it is done.
Choosing to participate in a community (participation is the lifeblood of a culture) that allows toxic behavior is an action. A comment is an action. Treating someone like they participated in the propagation of a community that enables and supports toxic is treating them like an individual. Again, that does not mean we treat them the same as the most awful community members, but neither do we simply have no reaction.
*I think this point also has interesting implications for dealing with shareholders of companies that harm society. If the owner of a dog that hurts people is responsible for damages why not the owners of a company that hurts people?
I messed up the location of the “*” that directs to my note at the bottom. The asterisk was supposed to be at the end of this,
I think I will just have to avoid comment sections on posts that concern religion on The Mary Sue.
There was a stealth update of WordPress that zapped all the customizations. Should be OK now, I just had to slap it around some.
PZ @49
There’s that violent rhetoric Nugent is always going on about again.
toska @50:
Oh dear. Does this mean we’ll soon hear of a 70-bajillion word admonishment about PZ’s tone and rhetoric…again?
Beatrice @48:
Uh-oh. What happened?
This is for PZ, you claim that human nature doesn’t exist, but I think this scientist makes a good argument for its existence. The interview in general is good, too.
http://ilevolucionista.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/darwin-dios-y-el-sentido-de-la-vida.html
ahilan @53:
You could have emailed him rather than sharing it here. By posting the link in the Thunderdome, you’ve opened yourself up to some inevitable criticism (inevitable, bc going on your comments around Pharyngula, you’re a fool).
ahilan @ 53:
That’s an extraordinary (and very silly) assertion. How about you back that up? Or you another one of those people who make up definitions for words?
More opinion, not evidence, from a troll. Why don’t you forget editorials, and go for the academic literature. Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t support your bigotry.
Got a citation for that?
For anyone interested in the material at ahilan’s link here’s an excerpt (incidentally, it’s in Spanish, so if that’s not a language you speak or understand, you’ll need to translate it; also I noticed that the Spanish to English translation results in some odd sentence structure):
Professor Stewart-Williams doesn’t say much about human nature in this interview. I’m not sure what PZ or anyone is supposed to glean from it, especially since ahilan’s post didn’t have much of a point behind it.
Ahilan appears to be misogynist/bigot trying for a gottcha moment to create doubt in what PZ says. Which means everything Ahilan says or links to needs further conformation to be be anything other than bullshit. Crickets chirring…..
Fucking A! This is absolutely abominable:
The American Psychological Association may be complicit in USAmerica’s torture programs begun under the Bush administration:
Human rights for select humans it seems.
How goddamn wretched.
Ooooh, pretty images from Flavorwire! Terrifying 1906 illustrations of H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’:
There are 12 images in the gallery.
US police kill a lot of people.
On another forum the significance of this death rate was challenged since it apparently sits at around 500-1000 deaths per year at the hands of the police, and with a population of 300 million, that actually doesn’t amount to much. Which is more or less true. Most Americans won’t be killed by a police officer. But, quite frankly, most americans aren’t going to be murdered, either.
That, to me, is the obvious comparison: compare how often police kill people with how often the general population kill people. Let’s see how the cops stack up against the rest of the USA.
The homicide rate in the USA is 4.7 per 100 000 per year. The US has a population of 320 million. That’s 15 000 homicides per year, or about 47 homicides per 1 million citizens. Combining the census data for local and state LEOs with that of the census data for federal LEOs places the US LEO population* at 920 000, which I will round up to 1 million for convenience.
killedbypolice.net counts 2256 police homicides over 2 years. A report from the Bureau of Justice places the number between 930 and 1240. Given that, I’m going to assume 1100 police homicides per year.
1100 homicides per year per 1 million sworn LEOs vs. 47 homicides per year per 1 million US citizens. The police commit a little over 23 times as many homicides per capita as the general population.
But that’s the general population. The police have to deal with criminals on a regular basis. So how do the police match up against them?
This report** states that 20 million US citizens have been convicted of a felony. If we assume that all murders are committed by felons, then the 15000 homicides per year maps to 750 homicides per 1 million felons. The police, sitting at 1100 per million, are a little more than 45% more homicidal than felons.
The felons at least have oversight in the form of the police. The police are more homicidal, yet lack any such oversight. For instance, in Chicago: “Between 2002 and 2004, civilians filed 10,149 complaints of excessive force, illegal searches, racial abuse, sexual abuse, and false arrests. We limited the disciplinary data set to those five categories, because they encompass the most serious forms of civilian abuse and correspond to the types of abuse endured by Diane. Only 19 of the 10,149 complaints led to a suspension of a week or more.”
19 out of 10149 is 0.19%; at face value, that implies that police abuse warranting 1 week suspension is more than 3 standard deviations from average police behaviour. It is then, quite unsurprising to find out that this isn’t true at all: “We found that standard CPD police abuse investigations violate virtually every canon of professional investigation.
—
These are not hypothetical or aberrational practices. These are CPD’s standard procedures when it comes to investigating police misconduct. In more than 85% of the CPD police abuse investigations analyzed, the accused officer was never even interviewed. In many of the remaining 15% of the investigations, the Department determined that the complaint was “not sustained” without ever requesting any information from any of the officers on the scene.”
Chicago a decade ago might have been really bad compared to the rest of the country when it comes to police oversight. But unless it was several orders of magnitude worse, I don’t think the rest of country is doing well.
*Note that this population is limited to those with the power to arrest people. It excludes people who are employed by law enforcement agencies but lack that power.
** I’m tentative on this report. It’s the only source I could find giving a total number of convicted felons in the US, so there’s no corroboration. Other sources gave a minimum estimate of 6 million: that is apparently the population of people who can’t vote due to felony charges. I don’t know how US voting rights and felony charges interact, so I can’t guess how well 6 million disenfranchised felons matches up with 20 million felons total.
Tony,
Pope made a statement against page gap, so now everyone is praising him for being so very progressive; with the general attitude of “he is by no means perfect, but he is much more decent than the last guy and he’s the most progressive we can reasonably expect from the Catholic church so this statement is a huge deal and I like him”.
I am not going to praise for some crumbs that wouldn’t bump him even to somewhat decent person level if he was somebody else.
http://www.themarysue.com/pope-pay/
I have just realised something…
no one is perfect
—
I’m going to bed.
A round of *huggses* on me.
http://imgur.com/gallery/QVh32
http://diarrheaworldstarhiphop.tumblr.com/post/117629873073/lunarobverse-spread-this-so-among-the-first one more article
Interesting…
chigau,
Right?
And yet, expecting something more than an occasional platitude from the pope is somehow the same as expecting him to be perfect.
Beatrice
My remark about perfection wasn’t really about the Pope.
It was just triggered by the word ‘perfect’.
Sorry, a misunderstanding on my part.
Cranes!
at least a bazillion
Jacob Schmidt
Excellent analysis. Do you mind if I post it/excerpts elsewhere? (With attribution, of course)
Please feel free.
In Canada, we used to have this in the Criminal Code:
Repealed 2012.
Replaced with double-negative gibberish.
I really need to keep up.
.
How does this happen???
I know, I know … googling in other tabs.
Wow, Sam Harris really, really, really believes that intent is magic.
I admit I didn’t read the whole thing, the beginning was sickening enough and I don’t have time at the moment, but wow, what a “get out of jail free card”.
Jacob Schmidt, would you be willing to repost your #62 in the current Morning in America thread? Or can someone else have permission to repost it there, with all your links?
I’ll repost it when I get the chance, probably sometime tomorrow evening. In the mean time, you have my permission to repost is yourself.
:(
;)
♥
♣
?????
emojis are weird
Giliell @73 – it only gets worse the further in you get. What astounds me is his apparent belief that he comes out of that as the more reasonable one. He’s tone trolling Chomsky. I didn’t even think that was possible.
Hm.
?????
I think I get it.
The emoji that show up are actually tiny png files from http://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/72×72/
I am copying and pasting from my character map app, which doesn’t have the coloured images that show up in preview (and presumably, after posting).
? ???????????
Hee.
really weird
♥
♥️
Owlmirror
When I look at the source code for your #80, I see the emoji images.
When I look at the source code for my #81, I see a normal black heart for the first one and an emoji image for the second.
Which is how I typed it.
On my IPad, I see the emoji heart all the time. Including links with a ♥.
A few days ago PZ had a ♥ in the title of his post.
It was a little black heart in the thread title but it was an emoji heart in the recent post side-bar.
It’s just all too many for me.
I think I’ll have a drink.
https://youtu.be/rIlpYLIiZLE
Thats a link to a simpsons clip thats been memed to death. It has also been about 15-20 years since i saw more of the joke than “thats the joke (holy recursion batman (I miss the simpsons from when i was a kid (holy recursion batman)))” and i may have laughed for aproximatelly forever.
More exactly, the bit about woody allan. Thats because i have in those years *learned about the joke and context of it* and just goddamn
Then i realised that he is still influencial and rich and… ugh fuck that guy.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite #46:
Thanks for the detailed response. I’m pretty much on board with what you say, as being a member of the Slymepit is a choice that they have clearly made of their own free will.
♥ ♥
U+2661 WHITE HEART SUIT ♡
U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT = valentine ♥
U+2763 HEAVY HEART EXCLAMATION MARK ORNAMENT ❣
U+2765 ROTATED HEAVY BLACK HEART BULLET ❥
U+2766 FLORAL HEART ❦
U+2767 ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET ❧
(heart card suit skipped)
U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART ❤
U+1F60D SMILING FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES: ?
U+1F63B SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART SHAPED EYES: ?
Only the three listed above appear as emoji on my FF browser (the black heart is actually a red img) so . . . I dunno.
U+1F493 BEATING HEART ?
U+1F494 BROKEN HEART ?
U+1F495 TWO HEARTS ?
U+1F496 SPARKLING HEART ?
U+1F497 GROWING HEART ?
U+1F498 HEART WITH ARROW ?
U+1F499 BLUE HEART ?
U+1F49A GREEN HEART ?
U+1F49B YELLOW HEART ?
U+1F49C PURPLE HEART ?
U+1F49D HEART WITH RIBBON ?
U+1F49E REVOLVING HEARTS ?
U+1F49F HEART DECORATION ?
All of the above are emoji images.
@ Odin and and Giliell
I skimmed over that too and wow. Chomsky chews Harris up one side and down the other and Harris is posting that whole exchange with this smug attitude like he put Chomsky in his place. Harris is such a hack.
Re Harris and Chomsky
I couldn’t read the whole thing because I was so embarrassed for Harris. For a “thought leader” he certainly doesn’t do thinky very well. Maybe self reflection and growth have more of an “estrogen vibe”, so we really can’t fault him.
Harris is either a complete fool or a really skilled rhetorician. I think a lot of what he writes is well-calculated to be convincing to people who won’t catch his faulty reasoning, i.e. most people.
An example is when he was on Bill Maher’s show with Ben Affleck a few months ago. He “estimated” how many Muslim people are sympathetic to Islamist extremist positions. He pulled some reasonable sounding number out of his ass, like 15% or something but then cited a survey that supposedly showed 70% of British Muslims felt the Danish cartoonist from a few years back should have been prosecuted. As far as I can tell, this survey doesn’t actually exist, it’s just a claim passed around the internet as part of a list of factoids about Muslims. So he first makes himself look like he’s actually being generous and low-balling the number of extremists but also making it clear that you’re supposed to understand that really most Muslims are sympathetic to extremist views. He appears to have supported his claim with evidence but it’s really just Shit Sam Harris Made Up.
I’ve had an interesting weekend. I attended my daughter’s college graduation from Oral Roberts University yesterday and her hooding ceremony the night before. As a fellow traveller to many bloggers and readers here at FTB, it was an experience, shall we say.
Hooding ceremony included anointing and blessing each graduate and a “charge and commission” to go out to dominate and succeed in the business world for God’s glory. More preaching than business school. Gracious. The faculty member chosen to speak at my daughter’s hooding ceremony was picked for her Spirit-filled Born-Again Christian bona-fides and spoke about the need for each graduating student to pursue humility and prayer every day. Only in that way would they succeed.
The commencement exercise was more of the same. Being in an arena packed with fervent believers is an unnerving experience as the President of the school is talking about his hopes and dreams for this graduating class and getting back a steady stream of “Amen!”s and “Hallalujah!”s from the crowd.
The commencement speaker was none other than Ravi Zacharias. “Christian Apologist” is right. He told tales of his past, how bad he was, then how he came to God and became a champion for God and how every graduate needs to be a champion for God in whatever they do in the world. Then he pivoted to a story about his daughter’s work saving women and children from sex trafficking and used that as an opening to rant “especially for you young men!!!!” about the dangers of pornography and how it leads to profaning this body God has given you and how it will drag you down to hell. WTFBBQ? This is a commencement exercise!!!!! All the while getting “Amen!”s and “Hallalujah”s! from the crowd.
I didn’t pick this school for my daughter. In fact, I had no say in the matter at all. These people scare me. Posting here because I had to find someplace to off-load my thoughts before my head asploded.
Sounds like an excruciating experience, Anonymous Squid. God-bothering – at least at this sheer volume – is unusual in university education on this side of the pond, so this reads like a glimpse of hell. As it were.
Seconding opposablethumbs, from the same side of the pond.
I’ve been to several graduation ceremonies and there were no gods involved. There was a lot of talk about honor, respect and dignity but not even a glimpse of a God.
So, I managed to slog my way through Ashamet, Desert Born, and it turned out to be one hell of a distasteful chore, but I got it for free in exchange for a review, so…
Well, the book starts out in a culture which favours genital mutilation (eunuchs) and slavery. Great, I’m already disliking it, a mere 2 paragraphs in. Then, the main character rapes one of his wedding gifts (an intact slave), after duly marrying a female and spending 5 days attempting to impregnate her, because, and I quote, “females are for babies!” (Not for any type of pleasure, mind, and they seem to have no function beyond this, of course.) So, back to machismo, bloodshed, and religion. I start skimming, because I can’t take much more. Finally, I approach the end, where there is this little gem of conversation:
Yeah. Well, myself and one other reviewer gave this nasty book of rape apologetics a negative review, but I have been seriously disheartened by some of the reviews coming in now – “wow, what a great book!” “I loved this book!” “Wow, 5 stars!” and so on. Some days, I really dislike people.
Opposablethumbs and Beatrice, Oral Roberts is a christian evangelist, and the university is christian based. The school most likely would have gone under in 2008, but the Hobby Lobby family came to the rescue with a fucktonne of money.
Oh, that’s nasty. Thanks for the explanation, Caine.
Anonymous Squid,
That really sucks, I wish you and your daughter best. I hope she’s not too deep into the mindset.
Anonymous Squid @ 90: I went to a Jesuit college and our commencement speaker was the local bishop, who went on a 20-minute rant about the “evils” of abortion. I spent that 20 minutes getting really good at flipping someone the bird whilst keeping plausible deniability (“I was just scratching my nose!”).
Caine
Do you know Kelly Armstrong and her “Women of the Otherworld” series?
Not totally without problems (which books are), but enjoyable.
Giliell @ 97, nope, never heard of her, but I’ll remedy that right now. Thanks!
Caine
I stumbled upon her via a short story and thought “I’d like to read more about these people”.
Unfortunately it spoiled the first book a bit. Well, you can’t have everything..
+++
Talking about having everything, I have a rash from my antibiotics…
Boy, that Sam-Noam thread is tedious.
Yeah, but do you have anything better to do?
I could go to sleep, but I’m trying delay Monday.
*looks at the watch*
Oh hell, too late.
Oh, I have plenty of things to do but I don’t wanna do them.
Opposablethumbs, Beatrice, yeah. I should have made it more clear. Oral Roberts University was founded by the fundamentalist preacher Oral Roberts and is full-on American Protestant fundamentalist christian. Their Founding Vision is:
The faculty who spoke were all passionately evangelical Christian and focused on educating the next generation of Christians to go out and further God’s work, whatever that may be.
My daughter was raised in that kind of environment, private Christian schools and evangelical church by her mother after we divorced. I didn’t have any influence over such due to circumstances. I don’t know exactly how much she internalized as we don’t communicate particularly well. Fortunately her mother and I are able to communicate when necessary with little friction.
So I just watched the latest episode of Cops. The last segment had a guy getting arrested for drug possesion, In Escambia County, Florida. BUT, the Sheriff or whatever the fuck he was, after telling the guy what he was charged with, then added an extra charge of being arrested within 1000ft of a church … is that even legal ?
Giliell:
Oh, that sounds nasty and uncomfortable. That might also be the beginning of an allergic reaction – are you still taking them? Have a care, sudden allergies can be very bad.
cunninglingus @ 104:
Sounds dicey to me, but it is Florida, and they have a fair number of strange laws concerning religion.
A fair number of states have laws about use and sale of drugs within a certain distance from a school but I’ve never heard of a church’s sacrosanct crime-free radius.
A quick search turned up:
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0800-0899/0893/Sections/0893.13.html
However, a quick reading of this implies that the arrest would need to be more than simple possession to tack on the “oh look, a church!” charge.
From googling other stuff, I just learned that Joe Cocker died.
Last December.
I must have been drunk.
chigau #102:
Don’t start playing with that How Old thingo then, you’ll get nothing done.
Caine
Thanks.
It’s more the “day thre of treatment” rash and fortunately not the very quick allergic rash. Still I’m vain enough to bother…
It could also be that I caught #1’s Slapped Cheek disease, I’m not ruling that out yet…
Hey Caine, Anonymous Squid, thanks; Oral Roberts’ name is recognisable around here – in a generic “another one of those weird evangelists” sort of way – wasn’t he involved in some quite big scandal several decades ago? Could have made the news here; I have a vague notion that that might be why the name is familiar. But the thought of someone having to grit their teeth and sit through a situation I would find extremely disconcerting as well as unpleasant – at a graduation ceremony – is still unfamiliar enough to perturb! Sympathies, and hope that the young woman is not too deeply scathed.
I clicked during lunchbreak at Work an ad on Pharyngula, which led me to site www(dot)jugendherberge(dot)de/. Even after eight years in Germany, I am not able to read german articles very fast but it seems to me after light skimming that it is some transphobic far-rigth and possibly even neo-fascist site. Could some native-german speaker (Gilliel?) please confirm/assuade this suspicion?
I do not care for ads generally, especially when they forward to some inconsequential stuff, and I get amused when the ads promote some creationist nonsense or bible-code, but I am a little (little more) disturbed by this.
I’ll just drop a nice little turd here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/paul-krugman-race-class-and-neglect.html
Krugman argues that the Baltimore riots aren’t about racism, they’re about class.
The comments on his blog are high-quality compared to Internet standard, which is to say, they’re correctly-spelled and mostly-grammatical blather.
numerobis
Well, if he knew anything about the way class divides along racial lines, he’d be right. Can you put that up here
pretty pleaseor else I shall use this flaming sword to strike your head off?Actually, he presents an #AllLivesMatter argument – which is valid in a different context, not current events in Baltimore. And his points should be addressed, but not by erasing the racial factor in current Baltimore unrest. The racial factor that is so closely tied to cases of police brutality, which is the added burden of the black community in Baltimore – on top of the economic inequality. So. I don’t know if I have a real point here.
Charly
Are you sure about that URL? Because it leads me to the normal webpage of the German youth hostel association.
I think Krugman is dead right about economic inequality and the effects on healthcare.
He could have written his acticle solely about that.
Why he chose to duct-tape it to the obviously racist nature of Baltimore and elsewhere is another question.
shoulda refreshed
rq already said that
I just bought a VIP ticket to see Richard Dawkins talk to Peter Boghossian* in Portland — only $250! See you there!!
https://richarddawkins.net/junetour2015/
{*DISCLAIMER: Described events may not have actually happened}
@Gilliel
Thanks for the answer. I sure as hell copied the wrong link from history, zeefix. This is NOT the site I was objecting to.
THIS is the correct site http://www.donotlink.com/ezni.
I clicked the ad because I initially thought it could be educational about gender issues (it looked innocent enough on the surface). After short skimming of the site I quickly left it.
:eyeroll: Gad, you’re a bit thick, aren’t you?
Charly
Yep, Junge Freiheit. Right Wings assholes extraordinaire. Lately they have been jumping on the gender train because the right had some success in mobilizing the homophobes and anto-feminists. If you want, you can see it as a triumph of the renewed feminist discussion: It’s the backlash to this.
Dawk Across America 2015. With opening act Dokken! Hear all the hits, from “Dear Muslima” to “Don’t Take My Honey Pot Away, TSA.” We’ll sell you the whole $250 seat, but you’llonlyneedtheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedge.
Caine #122:
nonsecksualnym (late:polishsalami) #125
very cute.
really.
You won’t last long.
Thank you Giliell. It is somewhat ironic, how right wingers like to use word “Freedom” in their quest to restricting freedoms of everyone but them.
It is also very telling that the “Juge Freiheit” Zeitung has about ten men in their team, and only one token woman. That was the last thing I noticed before I closed it for good.
I feel very uncomfortable with the fact, that ad for homophobic hatemongering site occured on FtB. On one hand it is good to see them spend money and FtB getting it. On the other hand, propaganda work even though its chances are very slim to succeed on regular readers here.
Charly
I haven’t looked at it, but if their token woman still is Birgit Kelle, she’S the German CHS
chigau #125:
A death threat for showing a 3-second Youtube video. Yay internet atheism!
@129, nonsecksualnym (late:polishsalami)
Wait, do you seriously think the words “you wont last long” were a death threat? Seriously?
What those words actually meant is that you will be banned from this blog soon. That’s it. Nothing more exciting than that.
brianpansky #130:
Funny, but the last time I did get a bona fide death threat, it was those four words in that order. So pardon me for being jumpy. Death threat, intimidation — it’s all cool! It’s the Thunderdome after all.
Oh, look it’s a martyr. Must be a day ending in Y.
The last time someone told me I wouldn’t last long, it was a game of chess.
So let me get this straight:
You, yourself, note the absurdity of getting a “death threat” for posting a 4 second video of a buzzer sound effect.
Then, when confronted with the possibility that maybe it wasn’t actually a “death threat” in response to the posting of a fucking buzzer sound effect, suddenly it is absurd to NOT think it is a “death threat”.
Whatever the fuck you call yourself now, you have been disappointing me lately. I thought you were a good commenter when you first arrived, but you seem like you are now randomly lashing out in petty ways. Please just get yourself together. I don’t want to see yet another person come here, seem like a good and reasonable person, and then have them suddenly go berserk and conjure forth a massive shitstorm the second their ego is somehow bruised over some random perceived slight. It’s okay. Just step back, breathe.
@ 125:
Ah. Thank you for clarifying – you aren’t a bit thick. You’re a fuckwit.
Tomfrog
Personally, I am totally fine with restrictions of Free Speech when they are actually hate speech. Holocaust denial isn’t free speech and scientific discourse, something denialists would like to claim. It’s hate speech against jews, Sinti & Roma, LGBTQ people, Trade Unionists, Communists and Socialists*. Basically you can reduce my position to the following: You don’t get to use the liberties of free** society to destroy it. I think we tried that and it ended badly, almost exactly 70 years ago.
*A remarkable feat is that those people usually deny the gas chambers while at the same time telling you that this is where they’d like you to be.
** For a given value of “free”, of course.
Albertans!
Go vote!
Giliell, #136
Thank you very much for answering to me (for everyone else, my original comment was here.
I guess I’m going back and forth on this… I agree with you and at the same time I don’t really like that those “hate speech people” get to use our laws to play the martyr-of-free-speech card (like for Faurisson or Dieudonné) or even the conspiracy theory card (“if you had nothing to fear about our ideas you wouldn’t ban them”, which is ludicrous but used).
Anyway, thanks for the clarification. I asked because I saw you mentionned agreeing with laws in France or Germany about this.
chigau (違う) #133
Was it also a guess of shame?
I’m a bit surprised that the (former) polish salami didn’t take the opportunity to respond to “you won’t last long” with a premature ejaculation joke. If you’re going to work blue, stick to your gun.
Maybe something about experiencing premature ejectulation (from Pharyngula)?
But instead of a bang, we got a whimper.
Tch.
nonsecksualnym (late:polishsalami): Did you know you can get banned even if commenting in Thunderdome? It’s true! I don’t moderate what goes on here, but if someone makes such a total ass of themselves that I don’t want to see them anywhere, out they go.
Getting harassed by MRAs, gamergaters, conservative radio shock jocks, pundits, and other random assholes? And then are you told, by people that you are Just As Bad if you don’t immediately play dead when they start poking you? Do people listen to you pointing out male privilege, patriarchy, and rape culture and only respond with cries of “MISANDRY!!!”? Well then you might just be a feminist. #HowToSpotAFeminist
Also, for fuck’s sake, looking through even many of the good comments regarding #HowToSpotAFeminist there is plenty of people who make sure to bring up Misandry, as a Just As Bad, Both Sides, Equal and Opposite Reactionary counterpart to Misogyny. No, fuck you, even if you are distinguishing feminism from the “man hater” stereotype you are still acknowledging and feeding into that stereotype, implying that there is significant contingent of such people that exist, and that they are completely unjustified, warrant scorn, and are just a simple counterpart to misogynistic assholes. There is just not a single part of those assumptions that are true. And yet the assumptions continue, propagating, always just beneath the surface. “I’m a feminist but not one of THOSE feminists”.
The right-wingers have simply done a fantastic job demonizing feminists over the decades. It is an effort to just get people to see that feminism isn’t a dirty word, let alone get people to realize that even the feminists they think are extreme and are supposedly irrational and horrible have also been fucking distorted and demonized. It’s infuriating. It is absurd to an extent I can’t believe it is the reality I live in.
Hell has frozen over.
Pigs are flying.
I should have bought a lottery ticket.
Yay NDP in Alberta!
chigau: are you in Alberta? I forget where in these acres of snow you live.
On this thread I can say “what the fuck” about the tories getting shown the door. Their leader was kind enough to say thank you and walk through it. I’m stunned in the best possible way.
Now with any luck the provincial NDP will still be doing a good job in a few months when the federal election comes. Then maybe Harper will find himself faced with an open door.
The one blemish on this result: the Wildrose party are the opposition. Nutters all — but maybe they’ll get dragged leftwards by opposing the NDP, rather than opposing the tories.
numerobis
I am in Alberta.
and as absolute proof of flying frozen pigs
the Medicine Hat riding has elected a NDP.
and
hoping the very best for Harper
Medicine Hat NDP, the giant surrounding riding WRP. Pretty much looks like a dems vs GOP map with most of the little dots blue and most of the vast areas red, except with orange and green instead.
Anyway: congrats on your new government :) I should go to bed now, given it’s past midnight over here.
numerobis
Thanks.
NOT PC is a fucking good start.
anteprepro #143,
->> (…, those who say) “I’m a feminist but not one of THOSE feminists”.
Wouldn’t it not be equated to “I’m a feminist in theory, but not in practice”.
Cherry blossoms are very picturesque when covered in snow.
:(
All this talk of voting.
I applied to get put on the roll here in Hong Kong. We get to vote for our Chief Executive in 2017. One has to prepare. Even if the CE can only be selected from one of two pre-approved pro-Beijing candidates. Fake democracy. We merely serve as a rubber stamp to lend legitimacy to the controlling political mafia. But who knows? Many a slip twixt cup and lip.
In more voting news, the terrorist, Netanyahu, looks like he may get into bed with the überfascists on the Israeli right.
So much for voting.
theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物) #155
Democracy is voten?
:)
That and Moose Jaw get the “Best Place Names in North America” award from me.
And Swift Current ain’t half bad either.
chigau,
Oh noes, I hope this won’t prove detrimental to future cherries!
(unless these are wild cherries, in which case I’m just sorry you’re having snow at this time)
chigau: clearly the NDP win made Hell freeze over, and the chill poked out through the gaping holes in the Earth around Fort Mac.
Meanwhile, the hot part of Hell has moved to Quebec. High 20s, low 30s all week — about 10 degrees warmer than the norm. It’s welcome compared to this past winter (we were part of the one spot on Earth that was hitting record colds), but I’m going to get tired of it quite soon.
It was quite hot here too, about 28°C for most of they day. Stuffy.
I don’t like it when it’s above 25°C.
I work 40 hours per week… supposedly.
I’m already on 31 hours, so I’ll definitely hit 50 if not more. Getting payed for the extras would be nice *sigh*
I’m about to do some reading but I thought I would test my impressions first.
Would I be right in thinking that the character of Black Widow in the latest Avengers movie is a net negative in how women are portrayed?
I wonder if there has ever been a serious study to measure homophobia in academia.
@Brony –
Haven’t seen it yet.
I liked BW in one of the Iron Man movies…I can’t remember which it was, though I know it wasn’t the first. Maybe Iron Man 2?
yeah, I think it was that one.
In the first Avengers she wasn’t badly written either – she’s the one that manipulates Loki into giving away more than he’d planned and her fight with Hawkeye is pure awesome. Her opening scene with the corrupt Russian general is a bit too dependent on stereotype, but the negotiations with Dr Banner in the slums of whatever Indian city that was (Kolkata?) showed cunning, intelligence, bravery, reasonable fear of the Hulk, and a competence that made her a trusted commander…all without being dependent on any stereotype at all that I could name.
As I said, I don’t know about Age of Ultron, but there’s plenty of stereotype-dependent scenes for the character and plenty of ass kicking for the character and even an occasional brilliantly awesome scene (like the one with Dr Banner) – which beats par for the course for a character of any gender within any decent action/superhero movie. The writing for BW would have to be substandard compared to her recent movie roles for her to be a net negative in my book.
Brony,
Check out the discussions on http://themarysue.com/
I would disagree it’s a net negative, and I think Mark Ruffalo got it right:
Make more and more diverse women characters! We’re putting everything on Black Widow and we expect her to be All Women and that’s just impossible. If there were more women, more different personalities and different kinds of story arcs could be explored.
[Polishsalami has been banned. –pzm]
polishsalami
You are a troll and you won’t last.
@ polishsalami
You’re adorable.
Sorry, the evidence says otherwise. Evidence you present with your attitudes and lack of cogent responses.
polishsalami:
Flattery will get you everywhere.
Brony:
I would say net neutral and a minor but notable backstep for the character. She was so awesome in Winter Soldier that you would hope that they would continue that trajectory for her, but since she is a second tier character compared to the Important Four Men that make up the first tier, that just didn’t happen. She was a lot less plot relevant, and their attempts to expand on her character and humanize her, while interesting, had that key problematic element (oh noes I can’t have babies!) which ruined things. Also she sort of got damselled, but she also used that capture as a means to actively lead everyone to Ultron, so I call that one a wash as well.
Beatrice:
Precisely this. Scarlet Witch is a good step in the right direction on that front, but that is still a whopping two female characters to the four main male heroes, the male peripheral hero, the new male hero, the male hero who is a friend of Iron Man, Scarlet Witch’s brother, the male hero from the latest Captain America movie, the male Ultron, and the male leader of SHIELD. Also the male villain from the previous Avengers. It is utterly male dominated. Though the source materials do bear some of the blame for that.
(The other new female character of note was just a hero’s wife, who just lived in a safe place raising children. Much feminist)
Beatrice:
I hear you. I’m trying to make sure my team members don’t feel pressure to work overtime — unfortunately that means I feel pressure to work way overtime.
polishsalami:
If that was true, there would be no desire or need to comment at all. You might want to stop proving you are a fuckwit with every post you make.
Oh polishsalami, we hardly knew ye. Should have taken my advice at 134. Oh well.
Perhaps Chigau should be the official prophet of Pharyngula. (Said with tongue firmly in cheek.)
Caine
I accept.
Everyone send me money.
An order of polishsalami with banhammer seasoning is now en route.
I’m assuming I don’t want to know what polishsalami did, nor what their nym refers to.
@anteprepro, #171:
Well, if we’re including him, don’t we get to include Maria Hill? Or did she somehow get written out?
Crip Dyke: She was there, but she didn’t actually do much. Sure, she did more than Fury, but I think at least Fury has a big fancy leadership title, which is something she lacks. And which is consistent with the tendency of making women second tier characters and out of important roles.
@anteprepro, #180:
That wasn’t “sure” to me since I haven’t seen it yet.
There are some really, really divergent opinions on this movie. I had been intending to see it. Should I?
And would it be suitable for tween girls?
Anteprepro:
And yet, in the comics, Hill was named Director of Shield. Later on, she was named Deputy Director.
Crip Dyke: Definitely see it. I don’t know how mixed the opinions are on it, but it was damn good, as most of the Marvel films are. Obviously there is legitimate debate about the portrayal of women in it, as with all the Marvel films, as with all films in general, but there is nothing odious in it, and I would rate it as only slightly worse than the first Avengers movie, but with a much more entertaining and compelling villain.
Caine: Perhaps with time. They apparently have plenty of more films upcoming to develop her and give her more authority, an expanded role. (Or I could just be forgetting things from Winter Soldier, she may actually be director of SHIELD at the moment and I simply forgot).
Thanks to a FB friend, here’s a good news story-
Stephen Colbert announces major gift for South Carolina teachers:
Crip Dyke,
Definitely see the new Avengers.
anteprepro,
I had to stop myself from cheering for Ultron. He was made of awesome.
Particular article on Mary Sue that I was referencing above, mentioning Ruffalo:
http://www.themarysue.com/age-of-ultron-stars-talk-black-widow/http://www.themarysue.com/age-of-ultron-stars-talk-black-widow/
Beatrice, #185
I thought Ultron was awesome too. Was it him or [insert newly introduced character’s name here] who said “You confuse peace with quiet”? Where was he during the Baltimore protests?
It’s a Pod kinda night.
I’m planning on making this Tuesday a day at the movies so I’m going to catch AoU before I catch the RiffTrax Live encore.
Saad,
not sure, probably.
Saad, somehow I missed that line, but I saw that quote in a Cracked article about the movie, and it was one of many lines that I think were all attributed to Ultron. So, probably Ultron, assuming I can remember a second-hand account properly.
@ Tony!
As much as I hate to break it to you, there is a tendency to the following:
support of deserving causes … whether social housing, or educational initiatives, tends to create the impression that the problem is taken care of. You see this in countries like Ireland, where a lack of salary in the corporate world is made up by social subsidies. Walmart and McDonalds can pay less than a living wage and expect he balance to be filled in by government.
The above Irish example from the “blueshirts” official policy. That is, the blueshirts that our red-shirted Michael Nugent joined, back in the day. (Not that I hold him in any way responsible for such a disgusting, retrograde policy… being a mere footsoldier at the time.)
Cross-posting with Lounge #496:
Anyone here competent with layout/design and want to donate their work?
I’m just so flat busted and need cash super-bad, any way I can get it. law school and depression and eye-surgery and visa problems in a country where I don’t have citizenship have all combined to make it ridiculously difficult to earn an actual living (occasional internships don’t really pay the bills).
My partner has been out of work for over a year. That was okay for a while because she had been in one place for ever, was well placed (just barely-below executive level, any promotion would have involved her becoming a university Associate Vice President or Assistant Vice President, I can’t remember which), and thus covered by a union contract (not being an exec) that valued her (being highly placed otherwise) and so gave her the option of salary continuance as severance, and it lasted a good long time.
But it’s over, and neither of us have full time, pay-the-bills jobs.
I’ve been trying to work with publishers to put out physical copies of my work, some of which is actually fairly valuable, in my experience, but it’s taking too long and is just too damn difficult without an agent. Blogging for pay is difficult, and school and kids don’t allow for the kind of regularity in output that really drives traffic. So I want to turn some of my writing into e-books.
…and I have no talent for design.
This is no panacea, of course, and is unlikely to make any serious cash. But having the work out there will substantially benefit some academic, will hopefully contribute to a progressive/anti-oppression information ecosystem, and if I make $5 out of the deal, it’s still one more meal for my kids, y’know? But if I PAID someone to design the book/s, I would likely lose money on the deal …at least for a while, and I can’t have that right now.
If you want to read some foundational trans* feminism for free (or if you’re a really, really serious masochist) and you have some design skills, think about e-mailing me, would you?
My e-mail, as always, is my nym, minus the honorifics, at google’s mail service – with a dot com TLD, don’cha know.
Theophontes @192:
What comment of mine were you responding to?
My smoke detectors work.
I hear you. Mine went off while toasting a bagel under the broiler…
I have a head cold.
I usually take this opportunity to clean the oven so just using it doesn’t set off the alarm.
But I feel like shit and I can’t be arsed.
me @164
The closest thing I’ve found so far is a CiF in the Grauniad arguing that “Gay scientists are almost completely invisible, and part of the blame for this lies with the LGBT community itself”. It seems to be at least partly fueled by resentment for not being mentioned in a list of influential LGBT people.
The argument goes along the lines of “the scientific world is at least no worse a place to be LGBT” and that the problem of visibility is that “being “out” as a scientist in the LGBT community” is where real prejudice kicks in. As someone with more access to a scientific community than an LGBT one, this argument strikes me as utterly unconvincing.
I was enthusiastic about the Avengers movie (and I still recommend it) and, even with some crappy bits and feeling like parts of the movie were too obviously missing, I still liked it.
But the more I think about it and read about people looking forward to the director’s cut with all those missing bits, people essentially looking forward to the real movie, the more pissed off I am.
Was the movie we watched basically another extended trailer? It’s kinda starting to feel like that. Fuck off with that shit.
@Tony!
Steven Colbert.
As much as one can appreciate his efforts, it shouldn’t ever come to this.
At some point, it will be possible to post an emoji sign for “live long and prosper” (and skin tone modifiers!). But it doesn’t work (here) yet with the WordPress PNG emoji.
http://emojipedia.org/raised-hand-with-part-between-middle-and-ring-fingers-with-black-skin-tone/
(currently, boxes with hexcodes on my system) → ??
?
@theophontes, #201 & Tony! (because I haven’t written “Tony!” with the appropriate exclamation point nearly often enough lately…and because he quoted the original article that started this train of thought, I suppose that’s a bit relevant):
Re: Colbert and even more Re: having no fucking money for education:
I thought the same thing.
@everyone:
Being cross-posted to the lounge again, I hope this doesn’t get to the point where people think I’m spamming.
Numerobis has suggested (among other useful things which I am more prepared to attempt on my own) that I have a truly catchy, enchanting, pithy, accurate, funny, profound, sound-bite-friendly, captivating NAME (ideally, apparently, the name should be equally catchy, enchanting, pithy, accurate, funny, profound, sound-bite-friendly, and captivating in any language currently in use on the internet) for my educational/publishing endeavor. “I whack you on the head with a hundred pages at a time until you get some clue about oppression” apparently fails to meet several of these important criteria.
I can, like the most reliable clocks in the world, be accurate up to twice a day. The rest of it is a little more difficult for me to achieve. So I’m asking for ideas in creating such a name.
Please.
Reward for creating an awesome name? You will have a small e-book publishing venture named after your catchy, enchanting, pithy, accurate, funny, profound, sound-bite-friendly, and captivating contest entry.
What, you expected some sort of awesome, futuristic, electric three-wheeler? That’s for the next contest: Who can deliver USD$500 million in tax-free cash to your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke the fastest. Each of the first 3 to deliver gets an awesome, futuristic electric three-wheeler, with first to deliver the money getting first pick.
For now, though, I’m expecting name suggestions to come in a little faster than the half-billions.
Do you think there’s indiegogo or patreon potential for your stuff?
@numerobis, #204:
I’m not sure. I really don’t know much about those sites or how they work.
Fuckety fuck. A freezing rain has been falling all day, and I was probably too late pulling in my sage and lavender.
Caine #206
ohno
.
You did make me look.
It seems both my sage and my lavender from last year are not dead.
Cherry blossoms also look not dead.
Asparagus is nowhere to be seen.
Drizzling here almost non stop for a week. A fine day would be nice, I could get outside and do something useful.
I should put on a hat.
and a long-sleeved shirt
chigau,
Some people here are already wearing flip flops. Getting too hot too early.
re: hats
I have yet to find a hat that doesn’t cause people to burst out laughing when they see it on my head.
Beatrice
Nice hat?
I could have handled this better, but yesterday, I tried to get in a debate with a street preacher (why in Canada is not punishment from God over having no abortion laws, allowing same-sex-marriage). He seemed to avoid talking to me and wanted to stand above me and shout down to me and everybody else. I put my hand on his shoulder trying to get him come down from his soapbox and I could tell he was uncomfortable with that. I did apologize for squeezing his shoulder but I wanted to show if he really believed in what he says he would stand higher than everybody else (my reasoning on why I called him being a hypocrit).
I am not an oral debator so I guess I should leave that do professionals.
Yes.
Was that the wrong answer?
There are never any wrong answers when a hat is in question, only opinions.
coreyschlueter #212
You really should NOT touch people on the street.
Christian street preachers need to answer to Matthew 6: 5-8.
It’s a lovely hat.
oh
and
Beatrice
re: people laughing at your hat
fuck ’em
Seconded.
and because I haven’t linked this in a few weeks
“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me. ”
http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/jenny-joseph/warning/
can I just vent and say fuck job application companies and their skills/aptitude/personality/subservience tests with unnecessary streaming videos that CANNOT BE COMPLETED ON A DIAL-UP CONNECTION. Rural small-towns aren’t profitable enough for real internet? GEE I WONDER WHY. *spits*
That poem should be required reading.
I love that poem
I also love hats. But they need a brimor I look like the upp part of my head has been squeezed. Caps? No way…
Chigau:
I have hopes for my sage and lavender. The sun is out today. I’ll have to go check on my little crabapples, they had blossomed already when the freeze fell.
@Beatrice
My class read it in grade school once!
Hey guys, I’ve been a lurker on Pharyngula for a while now, and finally decided to make an account. I really hope that I’m not derailing the thread by posting this, but I wanted to ask about something that’s been bothering me. I’ve noticed that there’ve been a lot of posts about action/adventure fiction and the ethics of media that has the hero physically fighting the villain to resolve the plot. I can agree with people on this blog about a lot of things, like feminism, racial equality, secularism, and science, but I feel a bit uncomfortable about dismissing action and adventure stories as brainless or not worth people’s time.
I may just be saying this because I’m part of the video game generation, and fighting is an easy-to-execute plot device in games, but I still think that combat can be a legitimate storytelling element. Also, considering that “hero fights villain” is such a ubiquitous plot point in fiction, if we were to get rid of all media that featured it, we would have to throw out a lot of classic, well loved fiction like Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or any number of other books and movies. I think that the reason why people like to see fighting in fiction is because it adds a sense of danger and stakes. We like to hear stories about people fighting for their lives because it’s tense and exciting.
I want to clarify that I don’t think that violence is an effective way to solve most problems in the real world. The only times that I think that fighting is acceptable is in self-defense or to protect others, like if you stopped a mugger from knifing someone. I think that it’s important that fiction treat fighting ethically, and for fiction to include plots that are resolved by peaceful means. Just because I like action fiction doesn’t mean that that’s all that I like.
emergence @ 225:
I think you’ve been reading the wrong blog – many people here have a great love of such fiction, whether stories, movies, or games. What’s likely to get talked about is when such fiction goes wrong, frinst., all the violence is against women. Perhaps you can point to specific posts / comments to clarify your complaint.
Hey, guess which favourite racist child murderer is in the news again for a violent firearms altercation?
I’ll give you a hint; he was given a lot of money after he murdered a black child then went free with no repercusions.
Oh. and he wasn’t a cop./
Caine @ 226
Sorry, I was probably just getting defensive. I read a couple of posts like “Problem Solving 101”, “Magnus, Robot Fighter”, or that one post about how Thunderf00t unintentionally brought up a good point about men being considered expendable in fiction. It seemed like everyone was complaining about the fact that people like violent entertainment, and were pointing out how action movies seem to set up conflicts that can only be solved by fighting the villains.
I can understand how shallow entertainment that has nothing but explosions and lasers could get annoying, but I think that it might be a bit wrong-headed to complain about how violence can’t solve real-world problems like pollution or poverty. That’s true, but I don’t think that many people think that violence can solve those kinds of problems. I mentioned this before, that violence in the real world is only viable for immediate self-defense, like a guy pulling a knife on you. More complex problems need more inventive, peaceful solutions.
I’m sorry if I misunderstood what people were saying in those posts. I didn’t intend to antagonize anyone.
I recently had an encounter with a fractally wrong Creationist (are there any other kinds?) on youtube. Here’s a link to my responses (on my blog) if anyone wants to see.
Tashliciously Shirked,
I couldn’t narrow it down until you said that.
What’s the latest update on the situation? Last I checked, the police is saying Zimmerman pointed his gun at the other guy first. Is the other person on the run?
*Tashiliciously Shriked
Sorry, spelled your username wrong (should probably start copying-pasting instead of lazily trying to spell).
Emergence @ 228:
No need to apologize, your post was fine, just a bit on the vague side.
Well, sure men are expendable in fiction, because they are guaranteed a place in fiction to begin with – male characters are the default, which is something ol’ Phil doesn’t grok in the slightest. Violence, and solutions founded in violence are the default, too, which is unfortunate, because we tend to end up receiving the same old shit over and over. I do think there is more of a problem with violent entertainment in the States than elsewhere. Here, we contend with, and live in a culture of violence, which is steeped in both racist and rape culture.* Add a lot of ‘guns, guns, guns!’ to that, then it’s easier to see the problem of violent entertainment.
A lot of the violence isn’t directed in any proportional sense, either. Women and minorities tend to be the bulk of collateral damage, reduced to being mere things, props for motivation and so on. Even when a woman is a major character (a la the recent Avengers flicks), she ends up getting erased, and I find myself increasingly bitter about that, because just for fucking once, I’d like to see a full representation of a woman in comics flick who passes the Bechdel test. I’d also like to see representation in the toy dept. Anyway, back to violence – it shouldn’t always be the default. It would be great to see fantasies fueled by a brainy, critical thinking sort of person, super or not.
*For real world nasty violence, see here and here.
Caine @232
I agree with pretty much everything that you said. I think that female characters and non-white characters should be treated as actual people in fiction. It’s irritating how women and non-white people are shoehorned into narrowly defined stereotypes while white males get to have identities and actually drive the plot.
I tend to prefer combat-oriented movies and games where the violence is more stylized and focuses less on the kind of stuff that the gun nuts like. I don’t like military or crime-themed games that much, and I can see how games like modern warfare or movies or games that sexualize violence against women would make people uncomfortable. I don’t think that action/adventure entertainment should pander to the racist, misogynistic frat bro demographic. It gets irritating when games that I like, like Dark Souls or Bioshock, get lumped in with stuff like COD: Ghosts or Duke Nukem Forever.
I actually do think that there should be more scifi/fantasy games and movies that are more slow-paced and non-violent, if only to add some variety to the genres. I also think that it’s important that action/adventure stories have engaging, well-written plots and characters to contextualize all of the fighting and make it meaningful. If a video game has nothing but fighting with no plot or characters to give it context, then it isn’t as engaging. An action movie with no plot or characters has even less excuse, given that it lacks even the challenge of the gameplay to keep me interested.
Related to emergence and Caine, I just finished watching the first season of Daredevil, which I thought was very well done. Murdock is a a very violent person but really wrestles with the idea of actually taking a life, even if it is the life of an evil person. He excessively beats the shit out of people and shows regret for it later. It’s refreshing to see a character reflect on being violent and not just go from one ass kicking to another ass kicking. It’s not mindless ass kicking anyway.
This is kind of related to the point that I was talking about before, but it’s a little bit different. I was thinking about science fiction and how exactly a writer is supposed to make all of the technology and weird physical phenomena like cyborgs or alien life plausible. It seems like if someone wants to write science fiction, they have to actually have a background in science to avoid making some mistake and incurring the wrath of science-literate SF fans.
Say I wanted to write a sort of bio-punk story in which people have been biologically altered to live for centuries, have extra organs, and regenerate tissue like salamanders or planarians. I just know that if I don’t go into enough detail, or even by including certain speculative scientific concepts that most scientists doubt are possible, I’m just inviting people who know more about the science in question than I do to jump in and explain in detail why everything in my story is impossible and dumb and I’m bad at writing SF.
This problem is even worse in highly derived sciences like biology, astronomy, or geology. More fundamental sciences like chemistry or physics have stricter “rules”, while more derived sciences like biology or geology involve so many factors that it’s hard to strictly say whether or not some speculative scenario is possible. It seems easy to say that we can be certain that a given molecular structure is impossible, or that it would break the laws of physics for a space ship to move too fast, but saying with any kind of certainty that some sort of speculative biotechnology, alien species, or space station couldn’t exist in real life seems far more difficult.
There’s also the issue that science fiction is inherently speculative and any particular gadget or alien critter is going to have some black boxes and cut corners in the writer’s explanation of how it works. This means that it’s inevitable that the reader will have to exhibit at least some willing suspension of disbelief at some point, even if the technology is fairly well explained.
One last issue would be about the unintended side effects of the technology. For example, if I had a character who could regenerate, then I would also have to explain how they could avoid any side-effects that that would have, like tumors or immune system issues.
Having to consider all of this almost makes the idea of writing science fiction seem like too much trouble to bother with, or even outright impossible to write without making a few glaring scientific errors. I’d like to hear someone else’s thoughts on this.
emergence
There’s a gradation between ‘hard’ sf and ‘soft’ sf, with things like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy epitomizing the ‘hard’ side, and a ‘soft’ side that goes all the way to ‘rubber’, a la Star Trek. If you’ve actually got a background in a particular scientific field, and your sf delves heavily into it (e.g. Peter Watts), or you’ve otherwise shown your work to an extreme degree (The Ringworld is unstable!!!!!), then the fans might hold you to some pretty high standards, but generally you’re allowed a fair amount of leeway as long as the technobabble is vaguely plausible.
As long as everything is internally consistent and you don’t include too much real science you don’t understand, you’ll be alright. i.e., if you say that FTL drives work by means of Kanazawa radiation exploited via the Singh-Azikiwe equations, you’re good, because you made all those people up. If you try to justify it based on some half-assed misunderstanding of Nima Arkani-Hamed’s research, you might be in trouble if anyone who’s actually familiar with his work reads your stuff.
That said, science marches on, and if you base your idea on something that seems plausible now but turns out not to be due to a discovery that’s made next year the fans will cut you slack for that; it’s happened to almost every science fiction author before, and the harder the sf, the more susceptible it is. Same goes for side effects; if you’ve thought of at least some of them, and either included them or explained why they aren’t a problem, people will usually forgive you for not thinking of others; no one can think of everything, after all, and that’s the bane of worldbuilders.
HappyNat:
That in itself is very rare. I wish Netflix would put Daredevil on bloody disc – I want to see it, but I can’t stream it, thanks to my handy dandy data cap.
emergence: At some point, any speculative fiction is going to break down to a sufficiently critical eye, and thus almost all speculative fiction requires a degree of suspension of disbelief. Be plausible enough to make the majority of audiences keep their disbelief suspended, for the vast majority of the time, and you have done a good enough job. So use technobabble to explain things, or just leave things without explanation. Just beware of three things: Leaving unexplained something important enough that should be explained to some degree (the “It’s Just Magic” route), explaining something using science that isn’t esoteric enough and is thus seen as implausible by a large audience segment (the “Hollywood Computer Masters” route), and explaining something in a way that doesn’t really explain it entirely and just adds a whole new element that makes things even LESS plausible (the “The Force Via Midi-Chlorians” route).
Not sure what to think about latest episode of Penny Dreadful. Anyone else watching?
This is going to seem like a complete non-sequitur, probably because it is, but I want to talk about it anyway. I’ve been thinking about the nature of logic and what it is, and as far as I can tell, logic is a human invention. I don’t think that the laws of logic are entities that exist independently of human thought. The laws of logic are abstract concepts that humans use to describe the physical world.
I’ve already thought of a few responses to potential arguments against this.
I’ve heard people argue that even if reality didn’t exist, or if all humans died, that it would still be true that 1+1=2. The problem with that is that it’s always said from the perspective of a human who does still exist, and the only reason that it still applies is because of how “1”, “+”, “=”, and “2” are defined by people.
I’ve also heard that if logic was invented by humans then it would be arbitrary and meaningless. I don’t agree with this. The reason that logical concepts have meaning is because they accurately describe the physical world. Just because the laws of logic describe the physical world doesn’t mean that they aren’t human constructs. For example, just because we can describe an object as “one” object, or an object and another object as “two” objects, doesn’t mean that there’s some outside cosmic force that dictates what “one” or “two” are.
I suppose that my main point is that I think that, if logic was somehow some actual outside force, rather than an abstract way of thinking about the world, then there would have to be some sort of “logic force” that permeated the universe and forced physical objects to adhere to logical rules. As far as I can tell, this is not the case.
I’d like to hear some thoughts on this.
emergence:
You’re an ignoramus, sadly in need of education.
@John Morales
Hold on, hold on, I wasn’t trying to make anyone mad. I probably did come across as a bit stupid, but I didn’t intend to. I’m not saying that logic is meaningless or that we can just ignore it. I was trying to say, in a somewhat convoluted, inept way, that I don’t adhere to platonism. I think that abstract concepts are properties of the physical world, be that inanimate objects or the human mind, rather than being “immaterial entities” that exist outside of the physical world.
I don’t want you to think that I’m an ignoramus, and I’m willing to admit to sloppy thinking when it’s pointed out to me. I’m sorry if I did anything that made me look ignorant.
Also, I can probably just remove that bit of navel-gazing if you want. I kind of wish that I had just kept talking about science fiction now.
emergence, relax. Nothing to regret.
This is Thunderdome, I felt whimsical, and your desire was met: you got a thought from some guy on the internet. You may get different responses yet.
FWIW, I encourage you to further pursue your inquisitiveness, more rigorously but not more rigidly.
PS emergence, given your stated interest and examples, I think you might find this post on logic from a mathematical perspective of interest: Leading in to Fuzzy Logic.
In particular:
While we’re in the category of topics that are likely to be contentious, I should probably also mention that I have some sympathy for transhumanism. I should probably clarify what “some sympathy” entails.
Here’s what I don’t like about transhumanism:
– Brain uploading doesn’t really seem possible. It seems like your consciousness is tied to the neuronal structure of your brain, and you can’t just download your consciousness, memories, and personality out. Besides, you’d most likely just kill yourself and brainwash a robot into thinking that it was you.
– I don’t think that there’s going to be any sort of technological singularity where we build a mechanical demigod to solve all of our problems. AI research is still in its infancy, and building a machine as intelligent as a human is difficult enough, let alone making one even more intelligent.
– Actual silicon-and-metal “nanobots” that can reshape matter instantaneously don’t seem plausible to me. I’ve heard that the materials that we make machines out of on the macro-scale wouldn’t function properly on a molecular level, and it seems like reconstructing matter like nanobots are commonly depicted as doing would be chemically and physically impossible.
– I don’t really like any of the major proponents of transhumanism like Kurtzweil or De Grey. The time scales that they propose for the development of the technologies that they’re talking about seem unrealistic, and they all seem to promote some transhumanist concepts that I don’t think would work.
– I don’t think that cryonics would work. I don’t really see any way that your consciousness would be preserved if all of your brain cells have ruptured from being frozen or injected with preservatives. It also seems like repairing and reviving billions of cells from decomposition, freezing, and exposure to cryoprotectants would require nothing short of magic to achieve.
Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I’ll explain what I’m actually interested in:
– I’m interested in life extension, but I’d prefer to work through actual biomedical gerontology, rather than whatever De Grey is proposing. I do wonder if it might be hypothetically possible to give an organism an indefinite lifespan if you were somehow able to replicate or simulate the germ line’s cell-rejuvenating and defect-elimentating processes in somatic cells, but I don’t really have any idea how. I have somewhat limited knowledge of biology, so I’m not sure if i’m making some sort of mistake here. Even if we aren’t able to give people truly indefinite lifespans, I’m still interested in at least extending people’s lifespans, even if only by a few decades at most.
– I’m also interested in other somatic biological alterations, like making people heal from injuries more easily, or making people resistant to diseases. More outlandish stuff like seeing in infrared or putting symbiotic algae into people I admit is a bit “out there”, but I’m still kind of interested in it. I realize that this kind of stuff will probably be very difficult, and come with a lot of ethical issues regarding how affordable it is for working-class people, or potential side-effects, but I still think that it’s at least interesting to think about.
– I can kind of see someone eventually figuring out how to use organic compounds to make some sort of alternative to the more stereotypical nanobots that I don’t find feasible. They most likely wouldn’t be able to take apart and reassemble an entire city in a few minutes, but I can see them being used to trigger certain activities in biological cells, or “grow” non-biological structures.
– I’m not quite as interested in cybernetics, but given that there are simple mechanical prosthetics already in development, I can see more advanced ones that integrate with living tissue better getting built at some point in the future.
When it comes to the ethics of life extension, I have a few ideas of how society would work if people could potentially live indefinitely.
– I get the feeling that fewer people would want to live forever than you would think. Given that you would never really be able to retire and that you would have to find something to actually do with all of the time that you have to live, I get the feeling that only people who have some sort of ambition or lifelong project, like exploring the entire planet or making new scientific discoveries, would actually want to get their life extended.
– I get the feeling that people would reproduce less and wait longer to do so if they lived longer, and people who could potentially live forever would simply choose to adopt kids rather than actually reproduce.
– I suspect that long-lived people would only be able to tolerate forming lasting relationships with other long-lived people, just so they don’t constantly have to make new friends as their old ones die.
– Given how people’s personalities change over time the longer they live, and how people tend to forget memories of events that happened farther back in their lives, I get the feeling that very long-lived people would eventually have a completely different personality if they lived long enough.
I kind of consider the transhumanist thing to be my one weird idea. It’s the one outlandish, implausible idea that I really have any sympathy towards, while I tend to avoid stuff like religion, alternative medicine, or conspiracy theories. I’m fully aware of how crazy this post made me sound, and I accept that. Even if this kind of thing isn’t plausible in real life, I still enjoy it as a theme in fiction, and I plan on actually going into real biology to achieve more realistic goals, even if it doesn’t lead to all of the grandiose technology described earlier. I’m aware that I probably have some gaps in my knowledge of biology, and that some of my ideas might not be plausible, and I’m willing to listen to any criticism people can give me.
Wow, this was a long post. I don’t really blame anyone if they just skim it. Sorry.
I wear hats. I like them and I need the shade. Echoing the others her. Fuck the critics.
emergence, #240:
I agree that, as abstractions, they’re not exactly what I’d call “entities.” And I agree that, like mathematical or scientific laws, at least some of them are human inventions to a certain degree. It’s from our own perspective that we think of what things we want to identify or explain or understand or relate to one another.
However, none of that means it isn’t true or isn’t about actual things in the world. If there weren’t any humans thinking about them, it would still be the case that 2+2=4 or F=ma or whatever, so they are independent or objective in that sense, not purely mental constructs. That’s because there is a real world which they are about (generally), not just us thinking these abstractions apart from it (as if even we were not in reality). I have a hard time thinking of how an alien species (let’s say) would not have some ideas like the classical logical laws of identity, excluded middle and noncontradiction (of course, there’s much more to logic than that, but it’s a start). We may have come up with such claims, but they didn’t come out of nowhere because the real world isn’t inconsistent with itself, doesn’t lack identical things, and so on. I suppose the applications of such laws could be different though. In some cases they might, for example, have different categories of objects than us, so that what is identical or contradictory might not be considered the same from one species to the other. But again, I wouldn’t say objects themselves are inventions of the human mind or alien mind (only the abstract categories we put them in) which don’t exist independently of us, because that would be silly and because I want to be clear that by “objects” I mean the actual stuff in the world that any kind of thinking being in the world has the potential to think about, even if they never do.
Note that I’m taking it for granted that reality exists. However, I think that “P and not P” (e.g.) cannot be true. If there were some other kind of reality than ours, “P and not P” would still be contradictory (and false) in it, for whatever P in that alternate reality. I don’t care much if you do or don’t want to call that “a truth” (as if it’s a thing that exists) about all realities, but I will claim it’s a true statement (which I’m making here, now) about them, in the same kinds of domains where that kind of a statement holds in this universe. But I don’t know what it would mean to say something like that if absolutely nothing existed, and I don’t see a reason to say it given that we already know there are things which exist.
You make it sound awfully spooky, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about physical laws. Are the laws of electromagnetism an “outside force” telling particles how to move or fields how to change? Or do you agree with me that such laws are our best descriptions of those regularities in the world? If they are our descriptions, how does it make it sense to say that “they don’t exist”? Shouldn’t we be clear about whether we’re referring to either the actual regularities in the world themselves or else to our statements about them, not confusing the two? And not naively saying that something doesn’t exist, when obviously it’s a description which in fact is a set of physical states in the world that does exist?
—
As for “living forever,” it isn’t happening to anyone. Maybe living a long time, but infinity is far too long. Heat death is a real thing. Finite numbers make it easier to think clearly too, so that’s helpful.
I don’t put much trust in your feelings and hunches about human psychology. Nearly everyone tries to extend their lifetimes by small amounts with medicine and so forth, and I don’t see a reason why that would be any different when there was a potential (accidents and so on would still happen) to increase it by larger amounts. I have no idea why that wouldn’t increase the motivation to try it, not decrease it — assuming these people were capable of affording this thing and it was environmentally/socially sustainable, which is certainly a hard assumption to make. Anyway, the big ethical problems won’t go away because you have a hunch that people will somehow manage to avoid them voluntarily.
consciousness razor @248:
I get that the laws of logic are real, but I think that logic as a system is a method of thinking about the world that humans invented. It is true that ideas like Aristotle’s laws (something is itself, something cannot be itself and not itself at the same time, etc.) are real, but I think that there’s something more subtle to them than the laws of physics. It seems like the laws of logic are immutable to a degree. I can imagine hypothetically what the universe would be like without gravity. As far as I can tell, it’s literally impossible for me to imagine how 1+1 could equal 3. Suppose you had one apple and another apple, and then put them together. Would that cause another apple to spontaneously appear to make 3 apples? Even that hypothetical scenario doesn’t actually have 1+1 = 3. It’s like the laws of logic are literally true by definition, and if you understand what the terms actually mean, you can’t imagine them to be wrong. I think that’s why people accept the laws of logic; they can’t “not” think that they are true.
About the whole immortality thing; It’s fairly obvious that even someone who was immune to aging would die when the universe finally rips itself open and fizzles out, and it’s also likely that an ageless creature would still die due to a disease or an accident if given a long enough time. I accept that much. I was mostly saying that while I expect that a lot of people would want to live for a longer time if they could, I expect that there would be an upper limit to how much people would want to extend their lives. Even in previous comment threads on Pharyngula, people have said that they would probably get bored of living if they had to live for hundreds of years. I just figure that most people would only extend their lives by a little bit, while a tiny number of people would extend their lives further if they had some sort of grandiose goal they wanted to achieve, like reading every book known to man, or performing scientific research in multiple fields.
I do wonder about the cost of these sorts of procedures if they existed, but that’s yet another reason to try to make medical technology affordable for everyone. I think that medical research should focus on reducing the costs of medical technology and procedures, if not to make hypothetical lifespan-augmenting technology available, at least to make mundane medical procedures within the price range of underprivileged people. Granted, I have no idea of how to achieve this, and I’m mostly just hoping that whatever new space-age medical technology we develop over the next few centuries is somehow more efficient and requires less resources than what we have now. So, it seems like the ethical issues over life extension aren’t going to be easily solved.
It kind of makes sense to me to think that people who didn’t age wouldn’t reproduce all that much. In a good number of species, including humans, longer lifespans are generally correlated with less reproduction. I also think that the idea of the population becoming stagnant due to having the same people around for centuries might be slightly alleviated by the fact that people tend to change in personality over time, and combined with the memory-loss and the fact that people’s brains wouldn’t age, I can see ageless people being adaptable.
I don’t really think that the ethical problems are just going to disappear due to my ideas, but I think that they’re at least worth thinking about, and would at least slightly alleviate some of the issues. While I am interested in actual biomedical gerontology, I at least like to think about this far-out hypothetical stuff for fun. It’s interesting material for SF stories at any rate.
What about my attitudes towards other aspects of transhumanism? Does anyone have anything to comment on?
Also, if the scientists who invented the anti-aging procedure were willing to ignore their sense of ethics, they could just perform it on themselves once they got it working, hide all of the research and refuse to let anyone else use it. Just a thought.
Hmm, I’ve seen comments from Enopoletus Harding in the past. Seems they made racist comments over at Daylight Atheism, which resulted in them being banned by Adam Lee.
Hmmm, that is a familiar nym, Tony! And what do I do when I vaguely remember a commenter? I google.
Here they get a warning from PZ: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/21/i-would-not-want-to-be-nicholas-wade-right-now/comment-page-1/#comment-800707
And he also quibbles about race in this thread: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/21/hes-not-a-racist/comment-page-1/#comment-800159
And this thread: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/11/the-hbd-delusion/comment-page-1/#comment-795235
And bullshit apologetics for trickle down economics (by talking about taxes for some fucking reason): http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/14/a-useful-illustration/
And then complains about needing to rehash a “dreary” debate with progressives regarding an increased minimum wage here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/03/15/its-the-right-thing-to-do/comment-page-1/#comment-580652
For some reason I didn’t remember that nym as being associated with an incompetent troll and thought they might have been one of the good ones. But all my searches showed with that kind of shit. Guess my memory is going.
Good to know. He’s gone.
Emergence @ 246,
Like five years? Seriously, I don’t know what the average cutoff is for this sort of thing, but I don’t recognize thoughts I am reasonably confident I had recently, I know that an indefinite lifespan would mean little to me as today’s me is doomed regardless.
@249, emergence
Yup.
Also, I don’t actually find your transhumanist ideas that outlandish. They seem very down-to-earth and sensible. (Except I’m not sure why you think people will change their child-rearing habits)
And I was just thinking about nanobots today…especially in comparison to bacteria. That’s the closest analogue I can come up with.
golly.
PZ can remote-ban.
Everyone behave.
anteprepro #252
Oh, yeah!
Now I remember!
Thanks.
(I’m with you on the unreliable memory.)
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about that’s sort of related to my original topic would be about video games and how they handle violence. I’m a fan of RPGs, and I’ve noticed three main things that bother me about most of them.
1. They all seem to have the exact same setting. Almost every fantasy game that I’ve ever played is the same pseudo-medieval world with dragons, wizards, orcs, elves, and dwarves. This seems to be a problem with fantasy books and movies too. I wish that fantasy writers would actually come up with new ideas for creatures, magic, and cultures rather than just recycling the same tropes over and over.
2. The only skills that the games let you develop are combat abilities. There’s more to going on an adventure than just breaking stuff. I wish that there were more RPGS that had substantial non-combat gameplay. Even in games like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls the non-combat abilities are just side activities with no real gameplay behind them. I don’t consider navigating dialogue trees to be all that entertaining.
3. The storytelling and characters tend not to get much attention. There are exceptions, but most RPGs tend to lack actual distinct characters. The only RPG that I can name off the top of my head that has memorable characters with personalities was Dragon age, and Dark Souls’s “background storytelling” is pretty good, but I’d like to see more games that had characters and plots that I could actually care about.
I’ve been looking around on Steam or the like for games that fix the above issues, but I couldn’t find all that many. Actual AAA titles that do this are almost completely nonexistent.
I said this before, but I think that the first issue also applies to fantasy literature as well. I think that I’d read more fantasy novels if they had more inventive world-building. Does anyone know of any? Here are some criteria: The setting can’t be a fantasy version of medieval Europe, the creatures and races can’t just be stock fantasy tropes like orcs or elves, and any sort of mystical forces or characters with supernatural powers that the story might feature can’t just be the standard D&D style magic and wizards. Nuanced, 3-dimensional characters and inventive plots kind of lose something if they’re stuck in an overused setting.
emergence
You have an awful lot of topics going on all at the same time.
Maybe just concentrate on one or two?
You can bring up the rest of them … later.
Sorry. My brain tends to jump around a lot. I think about a lot of different ideas almost constantly, and it can be difficult for me to focus on any one of them. I’ll try to narrow down the topics of my posts a bit.
Ya, I’ve always been a bit annoyed with the standard fantasy creatures. For one thing, they are humanoid, which I find very boring. And for another things, as you pointed out, they are overused and cliche.
@ brianpansky
Tardigrades armed with hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, pursuing nefarious nematodes across the moss patch…
Going back to the transhumanism thing, one group that irritates me are the conservative anti-transhumanist types. Guys like Theodore Beale or John C. Wright oppose transhumanism not out of any real concerns, like potential side-effects of augmentation or issues of how society would be affected, but because they think that the specific arrangement of tissues, organs, and appendages that humans have right now is somehow sacred and changing any of it would somehow make humans lose their specialness.
I’m of the opinion that human thoughts and emotions are what constitute personhood, and just because an augmented human would have a different arrangement of organs or different biochemistry wouldn’t turn them into a “subhuman”. I think that these guys’s opposition to the idea comes from the fact that they’re human supremacists. Human exceptionalism seems to be common in conservative religious believers. It’s the same arrogant mindset that leads to letting women die because their braindead ectopic fetus still has a heartbeat, or driving another species to extinction to build a condo complex.
This actually slightly ties into the posts on science fiction and fantasy that I made, considering that the sad puppy slate was deliberately filled with anti-transhumanist stories that depicted augmented humans as emotionless, subhuman monsters.
emergence:
It’s not clear what you’re implying by this. In one sense, like any other intellectual endeavor we engage in, it’s a human contrivance like you’re saying. In another sense, logical laws are systematic and inviolable features of the world, having nothing whatsoever to do with us or our activities. You could very well say that human thoughts are real despite the fact that they are something we invent (trivially, since we can’t invent unreal things), but that’s not the sort of claim I would make about logic itself. It ought to be a lot stronger than that. The fact that those features are the case doesn’t depend on its imaginability or conceivability to us, nor does it depend on us doing or being anything. We’re not that important, so you can take us out of the picture entirely and ask (more clearly) the same metaphysical questions about them.
Well, if something we were calling a “physical law” were mutable or violable in this universe, then we were wrong to have considered it law-like in the first place. Maybe there’s some other law describing the situation as it actually is (or maybe not). If it’s probabilistic or something like that, then things become a bit more complicated, but the basic idea is still the same.
Sure. For all I know, there might be some physical laws that are necessary/not contingent, just like logical ones, but there may never be a way for us to tell the difference. I’m not sure what it would mean to say “there’s a universe without space or time,” so if gravity doesn’t do anything there, okay I guess, but at some point we’re saying there’s no there there. Physics is about matter in motion, so having nowhere to go or no way to move would mean we can’t be talking about a physical universe anymore. But of course there could be different ways of moving around, at which point it’s a question of why we’re not categorizing those as the same kinds of “forces” that exist in our universe, since they also don’t exist as anything more than our best descriptions of the way objects happen to move.
Note that there are various mathematical systems which don’t work in the “standard” way, even for simple things like numbers or addition, but I’m assuming you’re not discussing them here.
Also, again, I don’t think the issue is about us or what we are imagining or saying.
This is one thing that doesn’t sit well with me about a lot of anti-Platonism (as well as positivism). We shouldn’t be picturing “scenarios” of concrete physical objects in the first place. We’re not talking about apples, causation, appearances of phenomena in the world, or anything like that. These are abstract relations we’re talking about. They’re not physical, so they’re causally inert, so I don’t see why I should expect them to work as if they were something other than what in fact they are. I have no idea how to imagine a scenario in which “1+1=2 is true” makes it the case physically that a pair of apples appears (spontaneously!) in front of you — that would be a very different sort of universe than the one we live in. You need matter and spacetime and shit like that to get apples, not numbers or equations (and not people thinking of numbers or equations). Math just isn’t about that, and physics doesn’t work that way either.
Michael Nugent: Still too busy to bother concocting an actual reply to Ashley Miller and others, after posting a non-response response on April 20th. Which I would say “yay, whatever. at lesat he seems to have moved on!”. But no, he’s not really too busy nor has he moved on. Go figure.
Here’s a fight he has been having with some Twitter person regarding his dissociation from PZ on the one hand, and his association with Anne Marie Waters on the other hand.
https://twitter.com/micknugent/status/596835834441105408
https://twitter.com/micknugent/status/598088484268711936
https://twitter.com/micknugent/status/598089254670065664
https://twitter.com/micknugent/status/598843699552980992
https://twitter.com/micknugent/status/598857685853990912
Bizarre, yet fascinating, yet bizarre.
On Anne Marie Waters:
She is Proud to be UKIP:
http://www.annemariewaters.org/why-i-am-proud-to-stand-for-ukip/
“What is UKIP?” Americans such as myself might wonder. Well thank God for Wikipedia.
“Right wing populist” just warms the heart to hear, I’m sure. But we don’t need to rest entirely on that. We have Anne Marie Waters’ own words.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/watch-ukip-candidates-spouting-vile-5526503
And here: http://www.loonwatch.com/2015/01/sharia-watch-uk-and-the-metamorphosis-of-anne-marie-waters/
And for this long quote, trigger warnings.
I didn’t pay too much attention when theDukedog7 was posting here about Democrats vs. Republicans, but I just read his post on Ed’s blog about gay people.
Holy shit. Not even sure how much of that is worth responding to. Is this a Poe? Does xe have history here?
Yes, of course.
No, you are still free to be a hateful bigot in church.
Saad: Dukedog is (allegedly) Michael Egnor. And their other nonsensical shit has been about stupid bullshit about how Democrats are bad because they are in charge of cities X, Y, and Z, and those places are supposedly bad (examples were Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and more). They are not a Poe, in the sense where I have no reason to believe they are a parody. They are a Poe, in the sense that they verify Poe’s Law, by showing an example of how difficult it is to tell a sincere wingnut from a parody of one.
(And if you want to see similar idiocy, just look at the blog Egnorance. The stuff is similarly bigoted and idiotic, though the quote that you gave really does take the (wedding) cake)
anteprepro, #269
Yeah, Poe 1, Me 0 again.
I just went there and the top entry was “I don’t like Pam Geller. I love Pam Geller.” And this was my reaction.
So straight-sex-having Christians don’t get AIDS? That’s surprising. It’s also simply amazing what kinds of first century prophesies there are, from people who had no knowledge whatsoever of the subject. Must be some kind of a miracle. I thought there was some other oppression related to that, having to do with victim blaming and sexism and racism and all sort of nonsensical shit, but maybe you’re right that that as well is totally inflicted on gays by gays. Or maybe you’re completely full of shit.
Because being so pure and chaste would cure the people with AIDS overnight. Except for the (probably gay and super-powerful) people who transmit it by sharing needles or whatever.
But don’t you see yourself and everyone else as a sinner, like you just said? It’s simply that your livelihood consists of generic Christian sins, not the special gay sins, so it makes no difference to anyone. And if we dispense with all the “sin” bullshit, you have some weird problem with sexual organisms having sex. No idea why anyone should care what you think, except when it’s used as a cudgel to force us to live the way you do (self-hating, paranoid,, irrational and dishonest, presumably).
Saad: A very appropriate reaction!
Also, I can’t resist.
————————————————–
“Gays are sinners, just like me”. This is how Christians view gay people. It is misrepresentation to say that they don’t see gay people any other way. Except we then watch Dukie say that AIDS is a pox on the gay community, and that it is a key Christian right to not support gay marriage. I had no idea that Christians also thought that God was going to give them a fatal disease for working on Sundays, or that Christians also thought that Christian businesses have a right to put every customers’ hands under a blacklight so they can refuse service from people who have masturbated. So much I was unaware of! Sinners just like me, indeed.
Obviously he doesn’t count “forbidden from getting married to who you want to get married, because of religious bigotry” as a form of oppression. And also doesn’t include stereotyping or discrimination or slurs.
From February of this fucking year: http://www.advocate.com/crime/2015/02/22/louisiana-men-arrested-under-unconstitutional-sodomy-law
And this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/08/05/gay_people_are_still_being_arrested_for_having_consensual_sex_in_some_red.html
And the employment discrimination really doesn’t even need a cite. That is just complete denialism.
Citation needed.
1. The set of gays and set of Christians overlap.
2. AIDS is far from a disease that exclusively affects gay men.
3. AIDS is far from exclusively spread by sex.
4. Chastity on the part of EVERYONE would be needed. And even that would not stop all forms of transmission.
5. This is pretty pure, undiluted bigotry.
The danger of gay marriage is that Christians will feel obligated to do business with gay people, and teachers will feel obligated to not rant about the evils of gay marriage. Yeah, that’s a pretty typical argument against gay marriage.
Gay marriage is bad because people will have to be interact with gay people which is bad because gay marriage is bad.
It’s either bigotry at the bottom, or circular logic such that there is no bottom. They have no good foundation for their opposition regardless.
They don’t take away tax exemptions even when churches violate separation of church and state by sticking their nose in politics. Now we are supposed to believe that the government is going to violate the separation by forcing them to involve themselves in religious ceremonies that have no legal impact on whether or not a couple is actually considered married? Color me incredulous.
“Gays are not oppressed and haven’t been for decades!”
“Christians are so oppressed, they are coming for us, they are coming!!!”
Equality for a group that has been discriminated against is about oppressing the powerful majority group previously preventing equality!
That really might be one of the most disgusting and inane things I have read in a while. And when I have been reading comments by Dukedog/Egnor, that is really saying something. There is Christians playing at being martyrs, and then there is Christians playing martyrs right after saying gay people are being punished by AIDS.
And, for emphasis, how the fuck is the stance that “gay marriage is about ghettoization of Christians” at all consistent with the original claim that Christians have no special problem with gay people, and see homosexuality as just the same as any other sin, just other sinners just like themselves? It isn’t consistent. Not at all.
I love how holding positions of great power in the entertainment industry is about the only example of Teh Ghey Owning ALLTHESHIT these people can come up with.
This one comes with a side of Silicon Valley, but yeah, that just about sounds like the Gayvolution is Upon Us. Mmhm. Run and hide, christians, run and hide.
Fucking Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/14/columbia-students-claim-greek-mythology-needs-a-trigger-warning/?tid=pm_national_pop_b
In order to properly ensure that they mock trigger warnings, they quote at length from contributors to The New Republic, Breitbart, and Reason Magazine. The key people in support of them that they quote are the students in the original story, the supposed actual topic that they are supposed to be discussing, and someone from a Buzzfeed article.
Fair and fucking balanced.
(Apparently New Republic ain’t what I thought it was. Must have confused with Free Republic)
And of course, designated Atheist Alpha Assholes, Dawkins and Coyne, are getting in on the action.
Dawkins tweets: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/598898332803735552
And Coyne’s article is best summarized by the title
But you really have to read this believe how fucking dismissive he is.
In italics: THAT IS WHAT A TRIGGER WARNING IS!
In bold: Pure assholery.
And also the standard “it doesn’t affect me personally, so fuck you and your sensitivity”
And towards the end he pulls the same dishonest shit that Dawkins did when he did his initial “you don’t deserve college education if you want safety” twitter shit. He conflates learning challenging or troubling ideas or concepts with the actual subject: highly emotional subject matters that might trigger traumatic memories or reactions from the people who aren’t like Dawkins and Coyne and have actually personally dealt with that kind of shit.
Fuck these assholes.
Consciousness Razor:
I suppose that I’m trying to wrap my head around what abstract concepts actually are. When it comes to logic, I was trying to answer the question as to why the universe behaves according to logical laws. Why is it the case that A is A, or 1+1=2? Why not A is not A, or 1+1=3? It seems as if the latter two are impossible simply because of what I understand the terms to mean. It doesn’t seem like abstract concepts arise from anything. I suppose asking what causes the laws of logic to exist is an invalid question.
A related issue would be about various logical problems, like the regress argument, the problem of induction, or Descartes’ deceiver.
Here’s my response to the regress argument, and what I think my starting point for reasoning is:
– I think that part of the reason why I was talking about what I can and can’t coherently conceive was because I was talking about how I know that the laws of logic are true. For example, I accept that A is A because, based on what I understand the terms to mean, it’s inconceivable to me that it’s not the case. I have no choice but to think that the law of identity is true. This goes for other logical laws as well. That’s why I said that the laws of logic are true by definition.
– I think that there are two fundamental types of knowledge that are not derived from inference. The first would be your perceptions. Even if what you’re seeing is just a dream, or you’re a brain in a vat, it’s undeniable that you are in fact perceiving something. The reason that you know that you are perceiving something is because you are. You directly experience your own perceptions. You also directly perceive your own thoughts. The reason that you know that you are thinking something is because you are directly experiencing your own thoughts. I also think that it’s possible to infer abstract concepts from your perceptions, regardless of whether or not your perceptions are real. Even if the only time that you’ve ever seen a circular object was in a dream, you can still correctly identify the abstract idea of a circle from that.
My response to Descartes’s evil deceiver would be to invoke falsifiability. It’s impossible for anyone to prove to themselves that they aren’t just dreaming what they’re currently experiencing, or that they aren’t just crazy and hallucinating, but it’s also impossible for anyone to prove that they aren’t just dreaming everything around them. The idea is completely unfalsifiable in either direction. With that in mind, I would argue that if an idea is impossible to prove or disprove, but is for all intents and purposes correct or incorrect, then you are justified in putting the idea aside and acting as if it is true or false. In the case of Descartes’s deceiver, even though you can’t prove or disprove the idea that you’re a brain in a jar, and the world around you is fake, the idea appears to be wrong for all intents and purposes. You may as well just put the idea aside and not bother with it.
The problem of induction is a bit more difficult, and I’ve heard it argued fairly convincingly that there’s no real way to justify induction, and the reason we use it is based off of animal instinct. It’s fairly obvious that induction is important to allowing people to live their day-to-day lives. If we didn’t assume that certain things behaved consistently, we couldn’t even get up in the morning without worrying that we’d fall through the floor. I think that probability might have something to do with this. If something has exhibited consistent behavior for a very long time, and has shown no capacity to change that behavior, then it seems like there’s no reason to assume that it’s behavior even can change. Another thing would be falsifiability again. You could say “all swans are white” has not been falsified if you had never seen a black swan before, and you’re justified in thinking that the next swan that you see will most likely be white until the day that you come across evidence that black swans exist.
If anyone else has any ideas about the above three issues, I’d like to hear about them.
Hell must have frozen over:
Reddit enacts anti-harassment policy after user complaints.
Coyne, quoted by anteprepro:
Other than stating the obvious again, I just want to note that it’s really fucking bizarre that Coyne treats sacred texts like they’re the gold standard. What the fuck is his problem? Or better yet, why the fuck does he have so many fucking problems?
emergence:
I don’t really know what to say. It’s definitely not an easy issue to sort out.
If it were not internally consistent, it wouldn’t make sense to say it “behaves” any way at all. That’s simply what you must mean when you say it’s like this or that or the other: it does what it does, and it isn’t not doing that. It is a certain kind of a thing, or it’s not that kind of thing. That just comes with the territory of being or doing anything. I wouldn’t say there exists some abstraction “forcing” it to be that way. But as far as giving you a reason why to explain that fact, I think that’s about all there is to it.
I would say it’s “undeniable that you’re experiencing something.” The term perception carries with it (for me at least) a connotation that you’re a perceiver and there’s a perceived object. You have sensory perceptions like vision, hearing, etc., which all operate (we can reasonably assume) by physical interactions with an environment. To me, an “experience” sounds less like it’s loaded with such assumptions — even more than “being aware of” or “conscious of” something — so I guess this is one case where vagueness or ambiguity is actually somewhat useful.
Besides ourselves, I don’t think the existence of time (for example) is deniable on that basis either: it sure seems to me like any sort of mental process (thinking, experiencing, believing, doubting, intending, whatever) must occur over some length of time. An interesting implication of that is that if a supernatural being existed, it could not (read: impossible/contradictory/inconsistent — see above) be totally independent of temporal relationships, since it would have at least that much in common with us given a reasonable definition of what a supernatural being would be.
I don’t know what work “directly” is doing here, nor do I get what “perceive your own thoughts” means. Maybe I’m being too picky about a psychological term. You think your thoughts, or (sometimes) you experience them or are aware/conscious of them. It’s not as if you have a sensation of them. When I “hear” music in my head or “imagine” a picture, that’s really just a metaphor, not the same thing as perceiving physical stuff in my environment. But of course it’s a very convincing and useful illusion to have.
Well, okay, but I guess the big question is this: who cares?* Is “it’s unfalsifiable” supposed to refute radical skeptical doubts, or it just supposed to make you feel better about the fact that nobody can refute them? That might be okay at some level — sometimes therapy is helpful — but I don’t think you’ve “justified” those beliefs in a strict sense. And falsifiability certainly doesn’t get you very far, even in scientific discussions, much less metaphysical ones more generally.
Also, as you just said here, you have the option to act as if it is true or as if it is false. You apparently have there nothing in particular to guide you toward one conclusion or the other. But you suddenly made the leap in one direction anyway. So it definitely seems like I can still ask “why?” and expect some kind of an answer, even though I’m sure the intention was to end the conversation at some point. After 500 or so years of nobody taking it seriously anyway, Descartes included, I bet there are plenty of good reasons to not take it seriously. Or we can go with thousands of years, if you consider the ancient Greek skeptics and all of their tricks and riddles and paradoxes and what have you.
*Only kidding here, but if none of you exist, I know that it’s not me.
I wouldn’t say that’s much of a reason, but this is one area where I’m fine with being pragmatic, which is not the same as instinctual. We make good enough predictions about lots of things most of the time. Trying to “justify” our thoughts beyond that, trying to rig up our expectations so that we couldn’t possibly be wrong about what’s likely to happen next, just seems hopeless and pointless and misguided. It just doesn’t worry me that that sort of belief isn’t founded on much at all. The world will still turn (maybe), no matter how we think about it, and it seems a lot safer to bet that we very well could be wrong or unjustified to believe otherwise. Various things that have been regular (or so we think, if our memories now work as they did before) might change inexplicably. Why not?
@227, emergence
And you’re right.
As for things like Cartesian demons, and infinite regress, I recommend a blog post called Epistemological Endgame by Richard Carrier.
Carrier also has a sort of long but amusing article here. As I remember it and skimming through it again briefly, it’s mostly concerned with some lines of theistic apologetics, so it’s sort of tangential to all this, but where it makes contact he brings up some interesting points about the existence of certain kinds of abstractions (like logical and mathematical truths), as well as how they can fit into a more general discussion about ontology.
@279 consciousness razor
“Experience” can also be used to describe your own thoughts or emotions, so I was using the word “perception” to clarify that I’m talking about sensory information. I couldn’t think of a better word to describe experiencing sensory information. Still, I think that my main point stands that even if the sensory information that you are experiencing is just a dream or a hallucination, it’s undeniable that you are experiencing something. There’s still the experience of shapes and colors and sounds and the like, even if they’re all in your head.
I used “directly” to point out that whatever thoughts and sensory information you are experiencing aren’t inferred from prior facts. I was using them as a sort of terminator for the infinite regress, as you can know that you are experiencing sensory information and having thoughts without inferring that you are from other facts.
When it comes to the evil deceiver, I think that falsifiability actually helps somewhat. I’m not saying that I’ve disproven solipsism, it’s been set up to be impossible to disprove, and my argument is mostly to help me feel better about that. In spite of this, I think that it’s useful to point out that it’s also impossible to prove that I am a brain in a jar, so it’s equally non-viable intellectually to say that I am. Of course, the next part of my argument was trying to work around this by pointing out that the two options aren’t actually equally viable. I suppose that you could choose to believe that you are a disembodied brain, and nothing that you perceive is real, but that’s still less justified than claiming that what you see is real. Even if “you are an isolated brain” and “you are not an isolated brain” are technically both unprovable, it’s still more reasonable to act as if the latter is true. For all intents and purposes, you are a human living in the real world, and your situation won’t change just because you assume that nothing you see is real.
One major thing that bugs me is that if we were to allow hypothetical, unfalsifiable ideas to be accepted as valid, then we would be stuck in a world where we weren’t sure if any number of invisible, intangible pixies and eyeball monsters were floating through the air around us, or that and we need to punch ourselves in the face three times daily to stop puppies in a parallel universe from getting thrown into jet turbines. Just because we can’t disprove any number of wacky, off-the-wall bullshit ideas doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable to give them thought. What’s the point of thinking about something that you can’t prove or disprove and makes no difference anyway?
My attitude toward the problem of induction is kind of conflicted. I think that I have a few main points that bother me:
– I think that there are two underlying ideas that would make induction viable if they were able to be confirmed through something other than induction. As it stands they’re either the first things people use induction to “prove”, or they’re just assumed to be true.
1. Uniformity of nature: The laws of nature are self-consistent and don’t change
2. Causality: in any given situation where an inductive, causal relationship is made, it is possible to prove that one event caused the other, and the fact that one event is correlated with or came after the other is not just a coincidence.
– I think that I could say that if I don’t know of any way that the laws of physics could change, then I would be justified in not expecting them to change. Even if I was wrong, I had nothing to lead me to believe that they could change at the time, so it’s not that big of a deal. I would need to actually get some indication that something was possible before I considered the idea that it would happen.
– Everyone has to take something of a leap of faith when it comes to induction. Scientists have to assume that the laws of physics won’t change, religious people have to assume that their god won’t suddenly change its mind about some aspect of their scripture, and everyday people have to assume that they won’t fall upwards into the sky or spontaneously combust when they touch sunlight, or any number of other ways that things could be different over time.
I think that I might want to talk to someone about these epistemological issues who studies them for a living. I’m led to think that Richard Carrier is a professional philosopher, is there any way that I could contact him and maybe get some advice from him?
Well, technically, Cartesian demons (or evil neuroscientists, Matrix designers, gods, etc.) could demonstrate it to themselves. It’s generally assumed they know what they’re doing. And if they wanted you to know as well, they could certainly do so, given the powers they supposedly have to shape all of your experiences. But just by introspection, you can at least be fairly sure that you’re not a Cartesian demon, on the assumption that Cartesian demons don’t trick each other. (Or if there’s only enough room for one of them, or some silly thing like that.)
So, that seems like a matter of perspective. It’s not some airtight distinction concerning physical facts or points of logic. There’s definitely no logical contradiction involved in being able to figure it out somehow or another, nor do I have any reason to believe that’s physically impossible. (We’re already doing a number on physics as soon as we have demons, but as I said, knowing or “proving” it is entirely consistent with the rules of whichever version of the game we’re playing here.) So, it’s not actually impossible. It’s just frustrating that you may not have some kind of a clear and obvious and guaranteed way of determining that … which doesn’t look anything like a contradiction once you’ve pulled it all apart and looked at all the pieces.
What do you mean? They are valid ideas. Being falsifiable isn’t a condition for an idea or a claim or an argument being valid. And your slippery slope doesn’t get us anywhere. If such things exist, then like it or not (know it or not), then in fact we are stuck in that world. Knowing or not knowing simply doesn’t put us in a different position, where we could have any effect on that fact. (Unless, knowing about them, your plan is to destroy all of the intangible pixies … somehow … but even then they still would have existed in the past just like brontosauruses or whatever else.)
Anyway, if that’s what reality is like, it doesn’t matter to us, except to the extent you’re genuinely interested in knowing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, for its own sake. Standards like falsifiability, detectability and testability just aren’t meant for that. People who invoke them don’t (in that instance) have a genuine interest in figuring out what the truth is. They want a quick and dirty way to ignore what they believe are lies, distortions, nonsense, bullshit, wild speculation, and so forth. Having done that, you’re no less ignorant about the world than when you started. In fact, you’re ignoring more things, like the bullshit that you set out to avoid. But, generally, getting knowledge about reality is a lot trickier than having a few rules of thumb for screening out some things which seem obviously wrong.
Those are both induced. You infer what the laws of nature are probably like and what probably causes what (if anything), based on your past experiences. It doesn’t make any sense to think you could “assume” that before you ever have experiences of any sort.
Anyway, I’m pretty much with Hume when it comes to natural laws or causation, if he were alive now and updated his physics. It’s just one damn thing after another, and we can only try to do our best with that. End of story. It’s sort of nice that many things are (as far as we can tell) regular and predictable, but it’s pointless to look for a reason why that must be so, or what it is that makes it so. I have no reason to think there is anything making it that way. It’s not as bad as it probably sounds. Breathe it in. Let it wash over you. See the light.
Well, he does have a blog here, so comments or emails are possible. (I think he screens comments in moderation, so it could take time, and I’m sure he wouldn’t want it posted off-topic.) But he has several books too. Or there are a million other philosophical articles and books to pick from I guess, depending on what topics you want to learn about.
@283, consciousness razor
No, actually.
@282, emergence
He answers basically all questions posted in the comments on his new blog here at freethoughtblogs. But see here for how this is limited currently.
Anyways, he’s covered some “problem of induction” type stuff too, and here’s one of his comments where he links to another place where he talks about it and stuff.
@283, consciousness razor
I guess you’re right. For all intents and purposes, the universe behaves predictably and consistently, and for all intents and purposes we can detect what at least appear to be causative relationships between events. We can keep an open mind about any number of weird ideas, but until we can actually find some way to test them, we should just put them on the back burner and get on with our lives. Until we have evidence that the universe doesn’t behave consistently, we should just act as if it does while being open to evidence that it doesn’t.
That’s what’s so weird about all of these topics in epistemology; they actually make you think about and question how you know things, and make you come to the realization that you accept a lot of what you think is true out of pragmatism.
Coyne cited @276
Yup, that’s how Mussolini started. With trigger warnings. ¬¬
@ dõki
Latter-day salonfascists are having a field day about this.
If a movie were to be made about Ovid’s work (or Homer … My GAWD™: ‘The Odyssey’!) , it would at least get an NC-17 rating, and an intro: “WARNING: The following movie contains extremely graphic and disturbing images. Viewer discretion is advised.” What is this, other than a “trigger warning”?
Such has not, AFAIK, led to any outbreaks of Fascism amongst moviegoers.
Guys I want to Internet atheist but I keep failing to evidence the protocols. :c
(Okay I’m bored and this is my subtle way of wondering what’s up with that “Nerd of Redhead”-guy.)
dõki, #287
As in “We’re warn you to surrender or we’ll pull the trigger”?
Tpyos pls
I’d bet my car that
1) Neither Coyne nor Dawkins actually understand what a trigger is and how it relates to trauma. No, Jerry Coyne, “triggering” is not the same as “shocking” or “disturbing”
2) They don’t actually have a trigger, something that can turn them from a functioning adult into a cowering kid within seconds because fuck abuse you suffered.
Do they also yell at wheelchair users for wnating ramps and elevators because earth isn’t a flat smooth surface?
Also, wouldn’t it be nice to walk past a magazine rack without seeing sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized?
Isn’t using a Trigger Warning similar to having harassment policies in place? They both show that the person involved has thought about the situation and has tried to be empathic to everyone concerned. If you can avoid causing trauma to another human being, why wouldn’t you?
I remember the first TW I heard which was before a training video which centered around someone having a heart attack and their spirit being shown various ways they could have improved things. The TW was delivered because on a previous showing one of the participants’ husband had died of a heart attack and it naturally brought things back.
Pink Jenkin #289
Will you talk to anyone, or just the ‘guys’?
Theophontes:
Well, there are a substantial amount of people who don’t much like movie ratings, either. (Or music rating). Back in the day, there was all manner of fuss over movie ratings, which has now been pretty much forgotten, now that such ratings are the ‘norm’. However, they can be considered to be a guide to those who might watch or listen, and that’s all a TW is – a guide, a brief mention of potentially upsetting material. It’s certainly not worth the amount of words Coyne and Dawkins are spilling in their angstiness over change.
Giliell:
A mad, dystopian, totalitarian future where publishing, publishing magazines for broad customer bases, care enough about women, and rape victims specifically, to not have content on the covers that bring to mind “sexual assault”. Political correctness run amok. Liberal fascism. Censorship unfreezing all the peaches. What an outlandish, absurd and horrific future this “caring about people” is leading us to.
Caine, in fairness, I don’t think Dawkins is spilling many words (at least not right now). He just tweeted that wanting a trigger warning means you don’t deserve to be in college. So yeah.
——————————————————
Look at the amoral idiocy coming from the fucking fans on Dawkins tweet. Prepare your eyes, for they may roll straight out of your head.
Dawkins really has some high quality followers. Super.
@chigau (違う) #295:
I’ll talk to anyone willing to explain the arcane rules of this community to me. You peeps seem to be a pretty tightly-knit group, as far as Internet opinion gangs go, so I’m just wondering if Nerd of Redhead’s behavior is what you can expect from this place.
(Also, I was under the impression that “guys” was a gender-neutral way to address the plural second person in English. It’s not my first language, so I’m still learning.)
Pink Jenkin:
The word “guy” is strange. I view it as equally gender neutral and masculine, but most people view it as specifically male (see: “guys and gals”).
As for Nerd of Redhead: There are mixed feelings about him (or at least I have mixed feelings). He often takes the right stance (not always, in the case of his interaction with you) but, in my view, he often goes about defending it in a weird way. The way I describe it is that he is constantly in pitbull mode, and often winds up barking up the wrong trees. I would say that he can be overly hasty, and sloppy. He tends to repetitiously use the same phrases to castigate people and almost seems like he is operating off of a script, which he has been criticized for before on several occasions. As you can see in the thread you linked, a few other people wondered what the fuck he was doing. I would say he is not quite the typical Pharyngulite, but I also imagine people outside of Pharyngula might disagree with that assessment.
Also: “internet opinion gangs”?
Pink Jenkin
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/rules/
Nerd’s behaviour is what is to be expected from Nerd.
“Internet opinion gang” is insulting.
“guys” is nowhere near a gender-neutral as some people think.
It’s mostly the casual way the Islamophobia-card gets thrown out that gets me. I mean, I criticize Sweden’s decision to deny a temporary visa to a Bangladeshi atheist, and the reaction I get is “You hate teh Moslems!!!”? Seriously?
That kind of shit would get you banned from most decent forums I’ve frequented, but it seems that around here it’s more important to take “the right stance” (whatever that means) than to spend two seconds thinking about what you write.
As for “Internet opinion gangs”, I had already used “community” once in that post, and repetition is the sign of an uncreative mind. More seriously, this is obviously a community trying to push atheism. That’s fine, I push stuff all the time. But I’m getting a bit of an insular cult vibe from stuff like the reflexive Islamophobia-accusation.
Now it seems I had the luck to have “the right stance” about the visa-thing, but I’m not really interested in investing any time in this place if I’ll get rabid dogs thrown at me the moment I disagree with people like Nerd of Redhead.
Regarding “guys”: I think back to other words, especially in (slightly) older times. The term “man” used to refer, collectively, as a plural, to all human beings. Similarly “mankind”. Then I remember reading through books for 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons. In a preface, it explained that it would constantly use male pronouns when gender wasn’t known? Why? Because that is how they did it in the Middle Ages. Similarly in Spanish, a group of people is only be referred to by a plural feminine word if there was NO men in it. If there was at least one man in a group of woman, that group would be considered a masculine word.
So in other words: It is another way of imagining that Male is Default.
Pink Jenkin, obviously the accusation of Islamophobia was wrong.
It takes something pretty odious for PZ to ban people here.
We are not JUST trying to push atheism.
You managed to get “an insular cult vibe” from one person. Who has been criticized by several of the rest of us. That is bizarre.
I suggest you lurk more. And stop being so snide when you admit you are not fully aware of what is going on.
Pink Jenkin
‘bye, then.
Your loyalty in closing ranks and protecting your own is all very admirable in its own way, but I really don’t think you are doing yourselves any favors with regards to that “insular cult vibe”-thing. And your eagerness for me to shut up is rather telling.
When Nerd of Redhead is ready to stick his cowardly little head out and stun me with his insights into visa and asylum policies, he knows where to find me.
I’m not eager for you to shut up. I think you would fit in rather well with us. But if you are going to be pissy and insist that we are all a cult, laboriously defending our own even when we are actually siding with you and telling you that the one of our own was wrong, then obviously there is not much that can be done.
Pink, please know that plenty of us (including me!) sometimes find Nerd to be somewhat obnoxious. As much as we joke about it, we are not a hivemind.
Yeah yeah, fine, that was unfair of me. I just came back here all revved up for a fight about migration politics and then he hadn’t answered and I was like “Now who is gonna face my righteous fury?”
I should probably just go clean up some parrot shit. Blow off some energy. Peace, y’all.
Pink Jenkin:
Jesus fuck. Why not just yell “hivemind!” and flounce already? Instead of making stupid judgements and refining a grudge against one particular member of the commentariat, why don’t you work on your own fucking obnoxiousness? Or has it not occurred to you yet that you’re just as bad as Nerd?
Pink Jenkin,
Have you ever had that friend? You know that one?
I would love if Nerd took some time to read what people write instead of just giving his scripted answers, and I think I wrote that at least once already (as did others). He didn’t change, so I usually skip his comments in threads outside here and the Lounge.
Maybe it’s my loss, but it doesn’t feel like it.
Still, Nerd is Nerd and this is not Borg.
Pink Jenkin
We are nothing like closing ranks and protecting. That’s why it’s called the horde.
We just people gathering to warm up from residual heat, growl and give the occasional bite. Hunting on the late fresh flesh. Yep, I know, if you’re still human, you’re at risk.
@chigau (違う) & @anteprepro:
I think I can understand where outsiders can get a feeling of ‘group think’. I don’t think we can dismiss it all too easy though, if only because there’s the expectation that the other must do it, because they’re wrong (which maybe is often true, but we might be too sometimes, and it’s never a bad thing to introspect). That’s because some positions require erasing appreciation of shades down the way. Outsiders without history calls will not see where lines are blurred, only to get offended by a few with lower acceptation of casual oddities or strongly within the binary mood of “if you’re not with us, then you’re against us”. I think the result is to remove people that might be still philosophically transitioning (by which I don’t imply p(l)ainfull wordiness or ivorythinkery, but rather being in the process of a change in stance and general orientation). Please note that I don’t take any stance on whether this is bad or a good thing itself, it’s only saying that bersekers can be scary when you face them, independently of whether the job is neat or somewhat less neat.
Okay y’all (I looked up gender-neutral second person plural! I am learn!), that remark about “insular cult” was an ass move on my part. I tend to subconsciously pick fights when I’m bored and angry, and I let my dislike of this one dude influence my opinion of the rest of you by first justifying it via ascribing a group mentality to the commentariat as a whole. I apologize, no snarkiness.
Hi, I’m Pink. If you need to know stuff about Sweden, the porn industry or Parthian numismatics, I’m useful. I hope we can get along.
Pink Jenkin, fair enough, I understand the urge to argue. It’s another part of this place, and another reason why I think you would be suited for our particular playground. It is treacherous territory, so get your bearings, but I imagine you have a very similar political orientation and debating attitude as the rest of us. So hope to see you around some more.
———————————————
Okidemia, that is also fair enough. No one is immune to the power of groupthink, conformity, herd mentality, etc. We might like to think we are, but psychology is a curious thing. And I also do acknowledge that Pharyngulites, in addition to inner group dynamics, often have a bit of a siege mentality when it comes to new people. We are sometimes overly critical of those who are mostly like us, hounding a mostly decent person over one or two mistakes until they explode on us. But then there are also all the cases where new people that seem just as friendly wind up to be Trojan Horses for whatever kind of troll of the day is deciding that they want to stir shit up. And then there are the long-term Pharyngulites who remain almost untouchable, no matter what they do or say, due to sheer momentum, which is also a problematic ingroup thing (I’m thinking specifically of how long it took to get rid of StevOR when a newbie who said the same exact things would get banned pretty quick, though I am sure there are plenty of other examples).
And yeah, we might be overly harsh on those that don’t have clear positions due to transitioning or having never really thought about it. The hard part is that someone thinking out loud on the issues is almost indistinguishable from someone JAQing off. I imagine that it is hardly just a problem in our little community.
I got a few shots of a Rose-breasted Grosbeak, serious excitement! Now I don’t want to settle down to work – I’d rather be stalking the birdies.
anteprepro #314
Definitely not only a pharyngulite thing. The ‘demarcation’ problem is a strong issue, specifically because of trolls and trojans, indeed.
I remember “discussing” once with a pro-science people that was used to debate anti-vaxers and other science denier kinds. Unfortunately, you* may end up stereotyping people you* discuss with by doing so, and lose the ability to tolerate grey zones, and grey zones do exist in the real world. In these situations, the right thing is to accept opposing views are perfectly reasonnable and consensus cannot be reached (yet). They ended up accusing me of cherry picking, because I “had” to produce counter-examples but “wasn’t able to”. Except that my counter-examples were the same as theirs: simply I would go over just citing peer reviewed papers for convenience, to discuss the actual content, where results consistently demonstrated patterns of intermediate or lose correlation levels that would introduce possible deviance from the very conclusions the cited papers offered.
The discussed subject was whether a certain “medical” condition was best treated by long term medication. Since medicating has strong effects on mood and behaviour patterns, and “disorder” is treated in order to reach conformity to social behavioral norms, I was disagreeing with medicating as the absolute way to treat all possible cases (of course, I never denied extreme cases would have life improved over drug use). Both positions are perfectly valid on an individual basis, except that the social implications of medicating are beyond what I find acceptable in terms of social control. (we were not discussing vaccines at all, simply they was thinking the analogy was good where I found it dubious at best).
Holy shit, there were four Rose-breasted Grosbeaks outside, four! I’m not getting any work done. At all.
Wow, nice photos there. I love that red.
Caine, those are the most beautiful birds! Elder Daughter and I are envious.
Thanks, Saad. Looks like a strawberry, doesn’t it?
Anne, I agree! It’s been years since I last saw one, and now four, in one day. I am overwhelmed.
You’re a photographer? Neat, now I kind of wish I didn’t antagonize you so much.
What lense you using for those beauties?
Pink Jenkin @321:
I’m reading an implication in this comment from you. One that says not being a photographer is justification for antagonizing someone (in this case Caine). I hope I’m not correct.
….
On a separate note, when it comes to gender-neutral pronouns, you can always use ‘they’, ‘them’, and ‘theirs’.
****
re: ‘guys’
I know some commenters around here are fine with the use of the word, but for my part, I still think of it as a male pronoun and try not to use it unless speaking to (or about) men.
****
Beatrice @311:
I agree with everything you said.
Most of the world’s great atrocities have been commited by non-photographers. Genghis Khan never picked up a Nikon in his life. I’m not saying correlation is causation, but are you willing to take that risk?
“You them”? Doesn’t really work. Second person, peeps. Peeps? Does that work?
ffs
Peeps? You mean those marshmallow birdies and bunnies covered in pastel sugar? I don’t see any of those around here, do you? How about “folks”, or “people”, or, since it is Pharyngula, Horde.
consciousness razor
Well, didn’t you know that Coyne was a super-liberal back when he was in college in the early 70s? This makes him a super-duper authority on what is and is not appropriate liberal behavior, and if you’re advocating for the rights of women, victims, the other-than-cisgendered (is there a term for that?), minorities, or trying to get Israel to stop committing war crimes, you’re just not a Real Liberal.
Pink Jenkin:
A fairly small one, a 70-300mm. I have things set up so that I’m never farther than 20 feet from any given bird, and I’m generally much closer than that, so I can get decent shots without having big glass. (Not that I’d turn big glass down, mind.)
Caine, #320
It really does. When I first looked at it, I thought it was some sort of marking that someone had painted on them. Very beautiful.
Did you actually set up and wait for the birds or take those as they showed up? They’re looking pretty sharp.
I do some photography too but don’t think I’d have much luck with bird or wildlife (seems to require a lot of patience and being quick on adjusting settings). This gorilla was kind enough to pose for me once.
@Caine #327:
Ha, 300mm “small”. I usually don’t go above my trusty ol’ 85mm. Then again, I usually take pictures of naked ladies and not birds, so I guess our needs are a bit different. I’ve been meaning to do some more nature shooting though, so I’ll definitely look into getting something a bit heavier.
In any case, I really love the pics!
Saad @ 328:
I set up the feeding stations each day, then just shoot as they show up. The way that the feeding stations are done, I’m usually around 6 to 8 feet from the birds, sometimes closer. All that’s needed is a fucktonne of patience, and the ability to stay still, using micro-movements when necessary. A lot of the birds don’t give a shit about the shutter noise, which is nice, but others are very sensitive to it, so when there’s a chance to shoot, you have to take it, and get as many shots as possible before they flip out and take off. I shoot handheld, so there’s nothing much to set up, camera-wise.
That gorilla shot is absolutely stunning! I’d be right proud if I took that one.
Pink Jenkin @ 329:
Definitely different types of birds! ;P I draw naked women, rather than photograph them, but at times I’ve had to shoot a client, drawing from the photos, and I favour my 18-135mm for that. (That’s my favourite lens, I can get anything with it.) Thanks!
Pink Jenkin #323
I found this link to be useful.
English natives may use it more naturally than people whose first language does not have a grammatical equivalent…
To me, it’s still difficult to use singular they, but it’s improving.
On my way to reflect upon languages specifics (and their consequences), I came to realise that French (my own native), which I first thought had no equivalent since it has no working neutral at the third person (it has one for objects, not for people unless you want to be really dismissive), actually has something that works in the same direction: singular you. I began writing you* in my comments here where I’m using the French basement of “singular you* as a neutral pronoun”, because it seems to work at least a little bit in English too… :)
Perks up!
Sounds interesting. I don’t even know enough to know how often parthian numis were automated!
I would like you to explain all three simultaneously, in fifty words or less.
Hey guys, I’m pretty much done here for a while, but I can’t unsubscribe from this thread. I hit the button to manage my subscriptions, but it didn’t take me anywhere. The page that said to follow that link didn’t actually have a link on it. Any ideas?
@consciousness razor:
I think it involves a coin-operated, animatronic this routinely placed in Swedish hotel rooms in the spirit of the Gideon’s bible.
Parthian numismatics
The tossing of coins to the rear, as you ride away, for drachmatic effect.
Giliell (292):
Of course not. Everyone knows .
@emergence
Sorry. Once you subscribe you can never leave. It’s over for you now, might as well not fight it. You should have read the fine print.
Rob Grigjanis, #336
Brilliant :)
Caine
Wonderful!
Ahilan, where the fuck are you misogynic evidenceless troll….*sharpens titanium fang*
Lofty @ 340:
Thank you! There’s more…
Woah, the ones with the plain sky in the background look awesome. Really puts the focus on the birds. In the second one, it’s like it’s looking directly into the lens.
hmm, some popular post on tumblr is saying that in the V for Vendetta movie, Evey voiced criticism of capitalism. I don’t remember that happening. I think maybe people are conflating capitalism with random other things? I dunno.
Was there anti-capitalism in that movie?
Well, the post doesn’t say “anti-capitalism”, it says “a female protagonist that criticises capitalism”.
I don’t think it was so much that she was anti-capitalism as she was pro-anarchy.
That is to say, the whole movie was basically anarchy vs fascism. Capitalism wasn’t really part of it.
@Nerd of Redhead #341:
Nerd of Redhead, you shitweasel poorly masquerading as a hominid! If you’re feeling so gung-ho, how about you start defending your bullshit (and seemingly crypto-racist, although it’s highly probable that you’re simply too stupid to realize it) opinions about visas and asylum in this comment thread? I don’t really see why you even show up here, seeing as you have completely disgraced yourself with your idiocy, and seeing as no-one here is willing to defend you in any way.
Sorry for my insistence on this people, but This Stuff Matters ™. Okay, now that that’s out of my system …
WRT to trigger warnings, private sector censorship and such: I understand where you guys are coming from, but often these attempts to protect some people (most often, in my experience, “the children”) hit certain already highly discriminated-against groups hard. I am of course primarily thinking about sex workers, or really any woman (in the vast majority of cases) who uses her sexuality as part of her job.
For example, Facebook has started cracking down on “sexual content” hard. At first, it was anything showing nipples, that sacred area of skin that is the ultimate American taboo. Okay, so we start putting cute little cartoon octopuses over the nipples. Yeah sure, but Facebook knows the nipples are still under there somewhere, so we had to remove that stuff or our accounts would be shut down. Okay, so only pictures with bras on from now on. Except bras are also sexual. And then panties. And then full-body catsuits that appear too, I dunno, non-Stepford Wives-y?
This is all ostensibly to Protect The Children ™. But it hits hard many women who already struggle to make ends meet in their chosen profession — it attacks their ability to reach potential customers with their content, and it annoys and frustrates their fanbase. (Yes, Facebook have every legal right to do what they do, but they also have the legal right to replace their front page with a giant blinking face of Charles Manson shouting racial slurs.)
And yes, I’ve seen it argued that Facebook also needs to remove sexual content because some people might be triggered by it. Especially sexual content that has an element of bondage or eroticized violence. But my opinion, and this is just the opinion I’ve come to from experiencing and thinking semi-deeply about a certain hated corner of society, is that seemingly well-meaning attempts to protect people from sexual and violent pictures often mask part of the cultural machinery upholding the same patriarchal mores and values that condemn sex-workers to lives as second-class citizens.
(I actually have a day job, so I won’t be able to answer much in case someone answers, but I’ll check it out tomorrow at the latest.)
brianpansky and microraptor
Agreed. That the “critique” equates capitalism and fascism says more about the person offering the critique than it does about V is for Vendetta.
Pink
Not sure you understand what trigger warnings are. Facebook not showing nipples isn’t even in the ballpark.
Hence why I said “trigger warnings, private sector censorship and such”. I’m thinking about the whole area of supposedly justifiable censorship by the private sector, and where it can go wrong.
The thing is that someone brought up “sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized” — which is kind of part and parcel of my work. The eagerness to desexualize public spaces is often, sadly, just part of the cultural pressure facing sex workers of all kinds, taking shape in the form of an eagerness to exclude their bodies from public spaces.
Also, as I explained, the problem on Facebook is far more extensive than “not showing nipples”. You don’t have to be so dismissive of many non-conforming, sexually liberated women’s reality.
Pink @350,
So “sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized” is kind of part and parcel of your work?
Fighting it with legal or other means I would hope? Pro-sexworker lobbying on facebook?
If not, advertising, movie industry or porn I wonder?
If it’s the latter and since this is the thunderdome on a site that prides itself on its stance it will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out regardless.
@Henrik Larsson #351:
As I think I’ve already said, I work in the porn industry. (Although you don’t really feel part of any “industry” when your office doubles as your bedroom, but hey.) To make a very long story short, I do “fight” the parts of the porn industry I see as taking power and freedom of sexual expression away from women (and men, but I almost exclusively work with women, so I don’t have a lot of experience with the male side of things) by attempting to be part of an ethical production process, but I see a clear difference between production and the content of a pornographic product. I believe in complete freedom of fantasy and self-expression, so I don’t judge the end result of the production process, but that production process in itself must at all times involve nothing but fully informed, consenting, decently paid and treated individuals who are always free to give input and halt the process. Only by doing that can we hope to clean up the actual filth in our industry.
Shit, wasn’t I supposed to work today? Seriously, bye for now.
Popcorn for breakfast.
Pink,
If you want to make it about your work, make it about your work. If you want to make it about Trigger warnings make it about that. Both are valid discussions I just don’t see anything other than a tenuous relationship. Associating trigger warnings with “for the children”, “justifiable censorship” and facebook make me dismissive of your comment, not “non-conforming sexually liberated women’s reality”. Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but I’ve seen enough people say trigger warnings are for “prudes” that I’m past given the benefit of the doubt.
I’m really not the one who brought up “sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized”, “covers that bring to mind ‘sexual assault'” and so on. The supposed problem with images of sex and violence is constantly brought up in these discussions, and when I point out the implications you don’t see “anything other than a tenuous relationship”?
And yes, when your immediate categorization of me as some kind of enemy makes you dismiss the issue as “Facebook not showing nipples”, then you do dismiss the reality of an already oppressed and discriminated-against group in society.
Caine
That’s cute. My big lens is 55-250mm ;)
But at least I have a decent cam again, right?
Pink Jenkin
1. That someone is me.
2. Nice false dichotomies you’re setting up there.
Not all nakedness is sexual. Not all sexuality is eroticised violence.
We are perfectly capable of saying that sex workers should be able to do their work legally and safely, that people should be able to watch porn and simultaneously saying that trauma victims should be able to live their lives without being sent into a nervous breakdown walking down the street.
Censorship is government banning stuff. Facebook setting their own terms is not censorship. People saying that you need to actively seek out such content instead of having it open in your browser window without you having any say in it is not censorship.
That’s just plain bullshit. The cultural product sends a cultural message which can and should be evaluated and criticised. You sound like the “Freedom of speech means nobody is ever allowed to voice criticsm of my work”.
theDukedog7 is at it again-
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2015/05/16/another-dumb-atheist-meme/#comment-423967
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #356:
You sound like a libertarian, arguing that as long as it’s a private company doing it rather than the government, we have no right to criticize their decision. Private sector censorship is still censorship, especially if a single company has a de facto monopoly.
And for the rest: Bullshit. Just because your livelihood doesn’t depend on your ability to reach your potential market in social media, and that the plutocrats in charge of that infrastructure can just decide to censor whatever image of you they decide, doesn’t mean you can just dismiss the reality of the women who do live like that. Your fucked-up way of thinking is part of the same patriarchal, oppressive, misogynistic mores that have created the shitty society we live in.
Try being a BDSM porn producer in the UK or Germany and see how that “evaluation” and “criticism” has gone.
Giliell:
It’s good to have a decent cam! I didn’t mean to be an ass about the lens, it’s just that compared to what most wildlife photographers have, it is a small lens. The 55-250mm is a really nice lens, that’s Mister’s go-to lens.
Saad, thank you!
Pink Jenkin:
No, she did not sound anything at all like a libertarian, and you deliberately twisted what she said so that you can pretend to pontificate from on high. Being an asshole, constructing strawmen and lighting them on fire isn’t going to get you far here.
Pink Jenkin:
:snort: A word of warning, Pink – don’t assume you know where people are from. The commentariat here is global. Here’s a wee hint: Giliell is in Germany.
Pink Jenkin
1. Me? Libertarian? That’s cute.
2. Nope, I’m keeping my terminology clear
3. You’re the one who just argued that you mustn’t dare to judge a product
4. Nobody said “don’t criticise”. I’m perfectly able to criticise FB for banning breastfeeding pictures while still supporting spaces that use trigger warnings and opt-in for sexual content.
1) So you demand that all spaces let you re-victimize trauma victims because if you’re not allowed to push sexualized violence on each and every person because you might lose a potential customer?
2) So you demand that people provide you with a space and infrastructure but that they are not allowed to set any rules? Try 8chan.
3) That’s not dismissing the realities of sex workers. There are ways to ensure they can earn their living without everybody having to watch BDSM porn all times without choosing to opt in.
4) That’s cute. I doubt you really understand much about feminist theory, but I guess you have found your “get out of jail free card” for having your content criticised.
You’re again conflating criticism and censorship. I will fully acknowledge that many rules surrounding porn in Germany are pretty stupid. But that’S not what criticism means.
Caine
Oh yes, it’s sooooooo good to have a decent cam again.
After all the years with a click-clack small digicam….
Giliell @various posts
Watching and learning. Thanx.
@Caine #360:
So? It’s other Germans ruining German BDSM porn producers’ lives, so her nationality doesn’t mean shit.
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #361:
Hah! Yeah sure, and TERFs are just trying to protect rape victims from women with penises when they want to kick trans women out of restrooms. Give me a break. The desire to erase the visibility of sex workers in every area from public space to the Internet has nothing to do with any concern for trauma victims and everything to do with our culture’s continued devaluation and suppression of female sexuality in favor of a fatherhood-oriented sexual morality.
Yeah, you really do sound like a fucking libertarian. Facebook can decide to make sex workers invisible and bakeries can decide to not deliver cakes to same-sex weddings, right? Fuck off with that attitude. As long as our society is in the hands of reactionary plutocrats, we have every right to put demands on how they decide to use their resources.
You’re right, I don’t know much about feminist theory. But I know about cultural history, and how patriarchal value systems stretching back to the fucking Akkadians and beyond are still used to minimize the influence and freedom of women who refuse to conform to sexual norms wholly benefitting the fatherhood-obsessed social structure we live in. I will continue to fight that shit, no matter if my enemies call themselves “conservatives” or “liberals” or “feminists”.
Giliell @ 361:
Hee. I still have my first, a tiny Coolpix L1, and sometimes, it’s the perfect camera for the job. Not often, but I’m glad I still have it.
disingenuous
…interesting word…
google translate doesn’t seem to find words in other languages that have the nuance of:
.
pretending ignorance
.
maybe I’ve been using it wrong
Anyone here with good competence in physics and in feminism want to read a book chapter by me? I need to make sure that my metaphors and language are consistent and clear, so you have to keep up with my feminism and be (as good as/preferably better than) me at physics. (Neither should be hard.)
Or, heck, if there’s a pair of people who can read it together….but I’d really prefer if you read it together. It’s not enough to review the physics in isolation – the metaphors have to work, and that requires either understanding the feminism or being right there in dialog (preferably in meatspace) with someone who can explain anything confusing in real time. Vice versa obviously applies in reviewing the feminism.
My ears just popped.
The antibiotics must be working.
I’m going to bed.
@ Caine
For you.
I discovered my little Panasonic has a bluetooth function. It lets me set the camera up at the sugarbird feeder, and click away from a distance.
Crip Dyke @367
Depending on the level of the physics, I’ll give it a go if you need me. I like your writings here.
Perhaps you still have my email since our minor exchange a while back?
I read lots of stuff that I don’t know enough about. Because I want to know more about it.
I am one of those who try to give Dunning-Kruger a recognizable avatar. Or a bad name.
Caine
I had a Coolpix S10 before this and it is a damn fine camera for its size, but it’s getting a bit slow due to old age. I passed it down to #1 who is having lots of fun with it.
Pink Jenkin
Now, I’ve decided against wading through all that straw you’re valiantly bashing. I’m disgusted at your use of trans oppression to further your point and I am less than convinced of your honesty in this discussion.
I’ll simply state my argument again:
People should not have to encounter depictions of violence against women, especially sexualized violence, in public without their consent.
This is what got you whining and faliling, talking about censorship.
Theophontes @ 369:
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Rats below, how beautiful! I don’t have any birds which can compete on that scale, those colours are magnificent.
@Henrik Larsson:
I don’t appear to still have your e-mail. At least not searching by your nym in the body of any e-mails (and not as the e-mail address itself either).
You want to drop me a line @ my nym, using the google?
Then we can consider it closed, for now. I’ve got TMM, rq, and you, so that should be a good sample of people telling me if I’m off on the wrong track in my metaphors.
Of course, they’re still metaphors, but if I’m connecting strong force to spin in my metaphor, I have a problem. Or at least, **I** would say I have a problem.
Most feminists would just think it poetic, but I’m trying to use the metaphor to enhance the power of the writing, rather than create strong writing despite a stretched/pushed/broken metaphor.
@theophontes:
That bird-shot is awesome. Caine’s right, the colors are beautiful!
More, please?
@Caine:
Your rose-breasted goshawks were gorgeous: don’t sell them short.
Kiwi religious education as valuable as maths or science.
That just makes my bile boil.
鈴木さん、愛の手紙を書かないで下さい。
sorry
That was in my 宿題 (homework).
copy/paste
error
error
errrr….
@Caine:
Bird giving a shit about shutter noise (about 1:53 in)
(I recall that you’re on a slow line — the above is about 11MB or so; dunno if that’s too much)
In the thread on Pigliucci I was assured that “No one is stopping you.”
After writing that I was disappointed that PZ and MP were not on the same progressive side, I was subsequently called a troll, an harasser, inept, fucking, fucking, faux civility, dishonest, dumb, like a creationist(!), to shut up, to leave, a dishonest fuckwit, dishonest, dismissive, having a dog in the fight, an idiot, a bigot, a time troll, an asshole, fucking, a sexist atheist, whining (when I protested this language), a piece of shit, a dumbass, a fucking coward, a gnat, a fuckwit, to shut the fuck up, an asshole, a fuckwit, an irritating gnat, whining, a sexual harasser, just wanting to make my boner happy, not minding rape every now and then, playing JAQ and MRA, whining, harassing women, a tedioud sexist pig, to bugg off, a sexist asshole, to need to go, an asshole, a rapist, thinking like a rapist, providing rapists cover, not a big enough fuck you, a gaslighter, obtuse, dishonest, tone trolling, dishonest, a delusional mind, a dishonest fuck, fuck you and your lies, a dishonest bum-on-pate (don’t even know what that is).
After this, I was the one deemed “incapable of civilized conversation” and sent off to this thing called “thunderdome”. No joke.
I have appreciated PZ’s blogs for years, luckily without ever looking at the discussions below them. I’ll soon forget this episode and return to my previous routine, which includes reading both PZ and MP with much interest , and which, for clarity, does not comprise harassment or rape.
stick the flounce, siger
Crip Dyke @ 366,
My subjects are maths and chemistry, but I have basic physics.
I’m not good on feminism, though.
@ siger
Having not followed the Pigliucci thread much I just went and had a look. You parachuted into a 200+ comment thread, demonstrated that you hadn’t even made a cursory attempt at following the ongoing conversation and, when called on it, started flailing about insisting that everyone here thinks only men flirt and that all flirting is always harassment and bleating about people slurring and misrepresenting you etc etc. You behaved like an abject fool and people lost patience with you. You’re just the latest in a long line of people who claim to have been long time readers and yet are totally flummoxed when the regulars here expect them to actually defend their positions coherently.
You don’t understand what haraasment is, so this is nothing but a parting shot from an obviously stupid troll. Until you shut the fuck up and listen, you don’t know what harassment is. Thank for showing us with prima facie evidence why you are part of the problem, and will never understand why you are.
Amazing photos, Caine@315!
For those who haven’t read the thread siger has arrived from, here is briefing to put his tone trolling in context:
In comment number 242 of a thread, siger introduces himself with this:
Note the diminishment of sexism as “ocassional language”.
Also noteworthy, the comment refers to comment number 26 by doublereed. Doublereed explicitly changed their mind after more information was provided by comment 39. As in, 200 comments before siger barged in, and just over 10 comments after the one siger must have read because it was specifically referenced.
In reference to my comment where I noted both of the above, siger responds:
In this, he alludes to a post by Saad that quotes heavily from Pigliucci and denotes condescending attitudes and a stance regarding harassment policies that doesn’t differ significantly from Thunderf00t, in making much noise over the existence of “gray areas”. The fact that siger dsmissses it by saying that there is no “error of substance” is completely missing the point. Deliberately so.
Instead of addressing any of the issues, siger decides to get defensive. In response about asking why there is no hyperskepticism and desperate searches for gray areas when it comes to zero tolerance policies against racism, siger sez:
Again, missing the point. And in response to asking whether siger “has a dog in the fight”, in the sense that lack of harassment policies personally help siger, siger cries:
Again, missing the point and spending undue effort addressing an insult rather than the substance of criticism against them.
After that, siger sez:
Harassment policies of course do nothing to ban all flirting and there was that could be anyway interpretted as believing only men flirt. Or even that only men harass. But facts or reading never stopped siger before.
And then the trolling gets more blatant (the third section is deliciously ironic):
“Defending the possibility of flirting as a good thing” is not the same thing as arguing against the existence of policies against sexual harassment. But who cares about little details like that? Certainly not siger. But obviously WE are the ones who are deliberately misinterpreting THEM. Because obviously.
I think the audience might better understand now the context in which people said all of the things on siger’s list of Bad Things We Said To Poor Innocent Siger, at post 379 here. No, it wasn’t just all from siger wishing that both PZ and Massimo were on the same progressive side. That is a complete misrepresentation of events. Surprising, I know.
Also notable in that last quote: I believe they were attempting to again allude to doublereed, but misattribute it to “Tumper or someone” (Thumper). Even after I explicitly told them it was doublereed. They couldn’t be bothered to either check the original comment or doublecheck my response to them to find the actual nym of the person they were talking about. As if we needed more evidence of their intellectual laziness
(Thumper’s shows up seven times in the thread and none of the comments mention anything that sounds like “someone at a certain moment accuses MP of saying the same thing as feminists do”. But perhaps siger was just being incoherent instead)
So Michael Nugent apparently just went on a podcast called Trolling with Logic. Sounded like an interesting, and worrisome, name. 4chan came to mind. And apparently they did interview ERV/Abbie Smith at one point.
So I looked deeper.
From their about page:
Here is their blog last updated last year with a list of Special Guests: http://trollingwithlogic.blogspot.com/
Going backwards, skipping the ones already mentioned above:
-Russell Blackford
-Sara Mayhew
-John Loftus
-Tracie Harris (like Matt, also from The Atheist Experience)
-Robert Sheaffer ( his wikipedia page . Note the feminism section).
-Robert Johnson (author of Rational Morality, another book that tries to use science to get objective morality)
-Andrew Dart (author of Building Your Skeptical Toolkit)
It doesn’t look horrible, but it does seem to skew towards the other side of The Rift….
@ Crip Dyke
Sadly we don’t have anything as colourful in Hong Kong, so you may have to wait until I go back to SA.
We do have the most incredible eagles, that fly along the updrafts of the skyscrapers. I never seem to have my camera handy when they fly past my roof (incredibly closely). Also feral cockatoos, that come to screach in a nearby tree.
There is an incredible bird-park nearby, with birds from all over Asia, but that’s kinda like shooting fish in a barrel. Not quite as sporting.
I’ll keep my eye’s peeled.
Owlmirror:
Holy fuck! That was absolutely amazing. A bit sad too, with the chainsaws.
Nick @ 384, thank you!
Dear Siger-
Bum-on-pate. Let’s play the thesaurus game! Bum can also be ass! Your pate is the top of your head! Thus, if your bum is on your pate, you are wearing your ass… which makes it, and you, an asshat.
This is interesting.
https://twitter.com/micknugent/status/600320599160913920
Vote “no” on the lowering the minimum age for presidential candidates from 35 to 21.
The logic: There is a religious oath required before one can take office, so atheists are never able to take the office of the presidency and are discriminated against. Decreasing the minimum age means more atheist potential candidates are discriminated against in this fashion.
Per numbers in that conversation from John Hammil, 1 Million people are between age 21 and 35. 12% are non-religious, so 120,000 additional atheists would be discriminated against on the basis of the religious oath.
Except those 120,000 additional atheists are discriminated against now on the basis of age, and the “logic” involved here says to continue discriminating against them, and 880,000 other people, on the basis of age, just to spite the government for having an unrelated policy regarding the president taking a religious oath of office.
I am losing faith in atheists’ capacity for logic.
anteprepro
Well, MN has repeatedly demonstrated that he has problems with logic. Assuming he is referring to the US age requirement for President, there is not actually any such requirement that one takes a religious oath before assuming office. The swearing in ceremony and the required oath of office are not religious. The incoming President swearing their oath on a bible is merely a tradition, not a legal requirement.
Sexist language aside, it is clear that once again MN is tilting at windmills.
It’s Ireland, I am assuming (he is saying this in regard to Atheist Ireland’s stance, and the propositions they are talking about voting on are, I am fairly certain, not happening in America).. Weird coincidence that Ireland and the U.S. have the same minimum age for the presidency though.
A brief search on age of candidacy requirements shows wide variation, but many countries have, or have had 35 as the minimum. It seems quite odd to me that AI wouldn’t simply work to simply change the law that requires a religious oath, rather than muddle the issue with age discrimination.
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #371:
I’ve heard all that bullshit before. “How dare you in even imply that sex workers can be disciminated against in a way that is even remotely similar to the discimination against trans people? I’m disgusted and offended!”
Yeah, and that’s what people who were pro-gay rights said about trans rights. And people who were pro-African American rights said about gay rights. And what people who were pro-women’s rights said about … and so on and so on. The progressives of one generation find themselves the reactionary assholes of the next. But hey, maybe you’re lucky, maybe social progress will stop here. The hatred the patriarchal running-dogs feel for women who use their own bodies and sexualities as they see fit is unmatched, after all.
It always sounds so innocent and noble when TERFs and SWERFs work to ignore and erase the existence of whatever groups they disapprove of. It’s always to protect someone weak and innocent. But what it actually means, in the case of SWERFs, is the eradication of sex workers’ bodies from the the public sphere. They should be happy with whatever dark, hidden corners our misogynistic society grants them.
I have no interest in the brainwashed tools of the many patriarchies. But by all means, continue deluding yourself that you’re anything except another cog in a machinery designed to suppress female sexual power and liberty.
Gah, I hate it when I simply use the same word twice in a sentence because I rewrote the sentence for clarity, and then proceed to completely miss the redundancy on preview. Need moar coffeee.
Pink Jenkin
I note your complete absence of substance combined with lots of indignation, trying to paint me somehow as a TERF and anti sex-work because, I guess, you have no actual argument against the point I raised.
Come back when you have an actual argument. Until then I take you as a dishonest dipshit who spouts lots of phrases.
Pink Jenkin
Most women who are fully liberated and comfortable with their bodies and their sexuality
don’t want to pose for your porn.
I keep reading the stupidity of Pink as “Wah, I make my living creating BDSM porn. Your failure to appreciate my kink makes you a tool of the patriarchy.” The glaring contradiction of profiting off depicting women being sexually abused for men’s sexual pleasure as some great empowering advance for feminism? I guess being logic impaired is the theme of the day.
Also, I had to look up SWERF. It stands for sex worker exclusionary radical feminist. Just as the TERF crap is rejected by the commentariat, I don’t think we have any hordlings who think sex workers can’t be feminists, so why Pink is here slagging on us is a mystery
@Caine: Glad you liked it.
So far this little community has been unable to show me anything except semiliterate crypto-racists, erotophobic authoritarians and indoctrinated pawns of a fatherhood-oriented cultural matrix who have somehow managed to convince themselves that their parochial, petty ideologies free them from the oppressive mental structure they claim to have liberated themselves from. You are not the future. You are shitstains on the pages of history.
Hoping to find allies in this pathetic Internet cult was moronic. I won’t be wasting my or your time any longer.
Pink Jenkin,
Can you address this from Giliell’s #371:
You think that a patriarchal viewpoint? You think that’s erasure of the visibility of sex workers?
Oh, never mind. Bye.
#403
That was pitiful, Pink.
Really sad.
Darn, Pink won’t be gracing us with more of these ridiculous claims based on his very special theory of of feminism? AFAICT, ze doesn’t know the difference between paternity and fatherhood. Our cultures place great import on paternity, and holds sex within marriage that leads to motherhood as the pinnacle of female achievement. Fatherhood? Yeah, not so much.
Funny how these free speech absolutists like PJ just can’t take others using their free speech to criticize their ideas. And like a lot of absolutists, I saw no concept of responsibility. Just let them act like spoiled undisciplined assholes, without complaint. And anybody who disagrees is a fascist/reactionary/prude/etc.
PJ, you don’t believe in free speech, but freeze peach. Pitiful.
Telling victims of sexual abuse that life is hard? Really?
Telling them that if they can’t “get over” their abuse they should not be in school when many women are raped at college? Seriously?
These men think they are smart. My 8 yr old could point out the logical flaws in these men’s arguments, but they think they are super-duper thinky kings.
Privilege is a hell of a drug.
I’m surprised Dawkins and Coyne have not suggested that these women are either lying or to blame for their own assaults. Maybe they haven’t because these women weren’t raped by friends of theirs.
What scum.
PJ,
Someone so invested in kink should have a better understanding of consent.
It isn’t prudish or anti-sex worker in any way to be responsible and respectful of other people’s boundaries. If you don’t understand that, you should find a new vocation.
Very cute, Pink Jenkin. So, what do we have so far … you like to make money out of the sexual exploitation of women – specifically in the context of depictions of their sexual abuse and humiliation – and if anybody questions any aspect of this in any way then of course they are SWERFs/prudes/tools of the patriarchy/the real oppressors. And hey, you even learned all the magic words to use! And you put them into painting-by-numbers sentences, well done you! And you think you’re going to get mileage out of painting regular commenters as anti-sex? It is to laugh. (you really don’t know where you are.)
Do you seriously think you’re fooling anyone?
@412, opposablethumbs
I haven’t been following along that closely, but where did you get the impression that Pink’s porn was being done in an exploitative way? Or is it all exploitative to you?
Just a guess, brianpansky, but as anyone who reads opposablethumbs can’t possibly believe that that opposablethumbs believes porn is exploitation by definition, probably this passage:
is key, though possibly not determinative, in opposablethumbs’ assessment.
As I said, I don’t know OT’s entire thought process, but I would think it’s obvious that your general question,
is answered by Pink Jenkin’s description of PJ’s own porn as about sexual humiliation. I haven’t been following closely either, so I’m not clear about “abuse” or how it’s being used in this particular context, but I do remember seeing something about humiliation.
In any case,
comes across as trolling when OTs immediately previous statement entirely contradicts that notion.
Crip Dyke, it looks to me like you are continuing to troll me for some reason. I honestly feel like I’m on eggshells around you, so I will be ignoring you (at least for the next little while).
For anyone else reading, I still don’t know which words of Pink’s were being referred to, and I still think opposablethumbs position is unclear. Their position could be one I agree with, or could be one I would want to disagree with.
Also, if there are tools/setting I can use around here to make Crip Dyke’s posts invisible to me when I’m signed in, I’d like to know. That might be useful…
What happened to the term “troll”?
.
Brian Pansky
Try scrolling past the comments from people you don’t want to read.
Brian Pansky
Try a ctrl + f search of this thread and read everything written by Pink Jenkins and the various replies. He claims to not know much about feminism, but has no problem referring to the horde as SWERFs and worse. It’s certainly possible to be both a feminist and a photographer who specializes in BDSM porn, but I find it highly unlikely that Pinks motives for fighting the evil censorship of Facebook are altruistic.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think CD’s attempt to answer your question is trolling. Based on Bayesian priors, I agree that opposablethumbs probably doesn’t think that all sex work is exploitative.
Brian Pansky
re: Pink Jenkin
You could also ctrl+f this thread
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/05/12/atheists-need-to-abandon-bangladesh/comment-page-1
@ chigau
The origins go back a long way. Let me quote some Sufi wisdom in regard to trolls (& their flouncing):
theophontes
ああああ
わかりました。
ありがとう。
…
Have you had good flights lately?
I read this as “Have you had good fights lately?”
What’s that tardigrade been up to?
@ chigau
We have had the most appalling¹ weather for weeks now. I have re-built an old quad that I built out of Correx™, and equipped it with an FPV camera that I cobbled together from security cam parts for under $4. But not had the chance to test yet. Also rigging up everything to operate on solar power only.
Not enough time in the day.
@ Owlmirror
No. Words like “fight”, “protest”, “June 4th”, “0604”, “tank”, “remember”, “anniversary” ….. etc are all regarded as seditious in this neck of the woods. As we head into next month, terms like “next week”, “Thursday”, “tomorrow”, “today”, will also have to be vetted. :'(
☂
——————————————————————————————————————–
¹ For flying, that is. It has been most appealing for ducks.
I will give Pink Jenkin this: they learned all the big words. They are throwing a temper tantrum, but a really big worded temper tantrum.
brianpansky,
see Pink Jenkin @ 350:
and @352:
He does say that he places importance on ethical standards in production, which is obviously crucial, but he apparently doesn’t give a toss what the end result is. However, I think that photographic work using live models depicting “sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized” is problematic in the context of the reality we all actually live in. And I think that it’s legitimate to want to talk about how it’s problematic. And I think it’s ever-so-cute that the moment anybody dared suggest that it’s even worth discussing, PJ immediately and loudly tried to shut it down with his SWERF-and-prudes bullshit.
i.e. CD and Tethys are both right (right about me, and right!).
Ok horde, so this weekend I went to a trade show with my cofounder, our programmer, and our business/sales intern. Very fun and successful show.
Bets on how long until the programmer got email asking her out?
I’ll take this as a reminder I need to get her a professional email STAT so she doesn’t have to give any professional contacts her personal email ever again.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-helpful-answers-to-societys-most-uncomfortable-questions/
Cracked does priviledge and social justice 100 listicle. Quite good.
That put a tear in my eye. My grandfather was self-conscious of being a product of his time, and was happy that society had moved on and left him behind.
So, I’ve come across an interesting video. Two men open-carry an AR-15, perfectly legally, in the same town. One is black, one is white. So the police react exactly the same way, right?
Uhuh.
Wow, now I am ashamed that had the tiniest bit of faith in Pink Jenkin. Fucking slimey shit they have attempted to pull. No, no one you have engaged with is in the tiniest bit anti-sex or anti-sex worker. No, nothing of what you say excuses potentially triggering actual rape victims that actually fucking exist and are not going away because we don’t live in whatever fantasy fucking land that Pink Jenkin would prefer we live in just for the sake of their own petty arguments. Or in other words, what opposablethumbs said at 424. What dishonest, sleazy fucking shit.
Stick the flounce, Pink.
Tashiliciously Shriked: Article is good. Read five comments and lost faith in humanity again. The sheer, concentrated, aggressive and entitled stupidity.
Thumper, #428
Holy fuck.
No words.
Thumper, #428
Actually, I’m not sure what to make of that exactly. Yes, what happens to the black man is fucking racist, but whoever put together that video is being dishonest.
Here’s the white guy video, titled Albany [Oregon] and uploaded August 9, 2012.
Here’s the black guy video, titled Washoe County [Nevada] and uploaded August 27, 2013.
I haven’t seen the video Saad so how is the video presenting the info dishonestly? (I see the risk that it might be cherry picking as one possibility).
At very least, both states allow open carry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_States
In addition, Nevada, where the black man was arrested, is MORE permissive about open carry than Oregon (which, at least according to wikipedia, allows open carry but is “anomalous” in that it does restrict open carry in certain densely populated regions).
Link to brilliant comedy sketch, crossposted from the lounge. The Last Fuckable Day
anteprepro, #432
I think I misunderstood it then. I thought the video was saying this was an experiment done in the same town around the same time, but I see it doesn’t actually say that anywhere.
For some reason I thought this meant it’s done together. It could still have been a collaborative effort (not that that takes anything away from the point of the two videos). Never mind. Disregard my #431. I go back to #430 as my response.
@Saad:
I saw a stitched-together video showing both of those, and in that context it does not make clear that two different cities are involved (although I was curious about that, and so I looked at the cop cars during the video and could see it was 2 different jurisdictions).
I think that editor was sloppy and it doesn’t help the case when it’s not made clear it’s 2 different jurisdictions. Not deceptive, b/c like you said it doesn’t **say** it’s the same town. But sloppy and makes room for doubts about the intentions of the people who did the original videos (who, in fact, are super-clear about what they are doing and where and why).
So I get your doubts, but I also agree with your ultimate conclusion: this shit is awful and makes visible some bullshit racism.
Asinine comments from the great Cracked article Tashiliciously Shriked linked to at 426:
This one is an odious and racist attempt at parody. Conservative humor at work.
And this last is one long comment that is the entire anti-social justice brigade in a nutshell
And Cracked’s comment section skews younger and probably more liberal than average (but not as liberal as actual liberal websites, of course).
Get me off this fucking planet.
I bought a lovely pair of red leather shoes with amazingly padded inner soles at goodwill the other day. They’d never been worn, and they are unbelievably comfortable. So, today, I visit the site of my wonderful new shoes, and find out I got a pair of $125.00 shoes for $7.00. Yay! Although, now I. Must. Have. These. Boots. Must. (in black, not walnut.)
That heel! Even I could comfortably wear those.
I finally discovered shoes with a bit of a heel that I can wear whole day : from Aerosoles.
@Caine:
Nice looking boots. Not my flat-or-die style, but go you! They are good looking.
I just looked at a guitar today.
$600.
It would allow me to practice at night without bothering kids, spouse, neighbors, but $600. Plus I’d need an amp.
That’s waiting at least a year. But it’s good to have a goal.
@opposablethumbs 424
I’m not seeing anything that fits the description of “make money out of the sexual exploitation of women”. I mean, that second quote sounds like something Greta Christina might say. What definition of “sexual exploitation” are you using here?
What kind of “end result” do you think he doesn’t give a toss about? And what are you basing that on? And is this the “exploitation” you mentioned or was that something else?
And I disagree with you here. I’m also confused about how “live models” is supposed to make a difference.
But you haven’t addressed my question about this “exploitation” accusation.
@myself in 440
Well, it must be because actual people can potentially be exploited, while cartoons or CGI cannot.
Here is a good discussion of the porn industry, consent, race, and how most of porn is inherently exploitative. All the Trigger Warnings . missing intersectionality in sex positive feminism
@Tethys 442
I don’t see anything useful in the article for the claim that “most of porn is inherently exploitative”.
Brian Pansky #443
ah, I understand you now.
Bless your heart.
theophontes
I look forward to new vids, as circumstances permit.
and
are you sure you want to go independant solar power?
what if They® like, y’know, get, like, independant?
Sleep.
We don’t need no stinkin’ sleep!
I could go finish spading the garden.
It’s the dark of the moon, that should work.
@ chigau #444
Eh? I doubt it. I suspect you’re very clueless in that category, actually.
I’m also judging you for being condescending towards me for no good reason like this:
@ Saad and anteprepro
I took that to mean that it was in the same place. Clearly I misinterpreted that, so my apologies. It’s not quite as obviously horrific as I first believed, but I it’s still another data point in an ever-expanding scatter-plot of shit.
Maybe that should be splatter-plot?
Brian Pansky, PJ says he makes money out of photographing “sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized”.
We live in a world where sexual violence against women is a huge fucking problem.
And he makes money out of photographing aesthetically stylised images of same; that is, he’s exploiting the real life context of a world in which sexual violence against women is commonplace, far too normalised and where too many men enjoy it. I think this is problematic – something that PJ dismisses by invoking SWERFs and prudery.
(You got one thing half right: consuming images of real people being sexually humiliated or subjected to sexual violence has an additional dimension over comparable drawn/painted/programmed images in that the consumer is buying the knowledge that what he sees was actually staged with a living person.)
Mainstream het porn doesn’t just reflect, it’s part of a social and economic dynamic in which women are seen as “less than” and despised for it. Yes, feminist porn exists, and yes it is possible for porn to be empowering, consensual and non-exploitative. And yes, most porn – certainly most mainstream het porn, at the very least – is inherently exploitative. Context, it’s a thing.
If you are looking for signed affidavits and court decisions to prove specific individual instances of exploitation to your satisfaction, may I suggest that you fuck off.
I don’t see how
Video games with sexualized nameless women being abused or killed = bad
but
Photographs/videos with “sexual violence against women aesthetically stylized” = good
I don’t want to live in a world where portrayal of sexual violence against women so men can knock one out (let’s be honest, that’s the majority of who will be consuming such media) is considered a feminist endeavor. To the contrary, there’s already a name for promoting a culture of sexual violence against women: misogyny.
I should add that I’m not criticizing people consensually participating in any of these things. I’m saying the media they produce is misogynistic in the context of the place sexual violence against women has in our world.
@opposablethumbs #449
Maybe you’re tired of this, so if you don’t want to continue responding or engaging, that’s fine.
For now I’ll continue.
Yes I know you think it’s bad. Just as I thought when I first asked you. Bad enough that you used it against someone’s character in an inaccurate way that equivocated very different activities (while ironically also ridiculing Pink for “you even learned all the magic words to use! And you put them into painting-by-numbers sentences, well done you!”).
But it isn’t bad. And so your using it to shame someone is wrong (and unnecessary because there are other better reasons to judge Pink).
Your argument that it is bad (or “problematic”) seems to be that:
But I’m not getting the logic here.
Brian Pansky, you missed a bit (in addition to apparently missing the entire point).
You say you’re not getting the idea; on that I agree – you certainly don’t seem to get it at all.
Feel free to have as many last words as you like.
Brian Pansky #447
Sorry. I thought you were familiar with Pharyngula tropes.
“scroll past” means just that. Nothing condescending about it.
“Bless your heart” means “go fuck yourself”.
How exactly does one “aesthetically stylise” violence against women? A tasteful black-and-white nude of a man choking a woman?
Yeah, you’d think the word “against” would give it away.
I am getting pretty annoyed at the implications that my kink and BDSM likes are inherently problematic.
Well, here’s a few articles/comment sections that say things better than I might be able to:
On Writing Kinky Porn in Rape Culture
Porn, Social Criticism, and the Marginalization of Kink
Woops, that didn’t work. These links should work:
On Writing Kinky Porn in Rape Culture
Porn, Social Criticism, and the Marginalization of Kink
anteprepro quoting the internets @436:
I reluctantly agree with this quote (e.g. me @425). But this is merely a present reality, not a immutable law of nature.
In addition to being virulently homophobic and racist, it seems Bill O’Reilly is a perpetrator of domestic violence:
Tashiliciously Shriked
That’s because they probably are. Not on your individual level. But on a larger level where we have to ask ourselves why so many people get off at the degradation and humiliation of people* and how this influences society as a whole.
Because likes and dislikes don’t fall from heaven. They are formed within us by living in society and they shape society in return.
And I would like BDSM people to simply admit that most BDSM does indeed NOT happen in the super safe and consent heavy setting of an ethical dungeon but in porn videos with the explicit illusion of non consent and in DIY reenactments of 50 Shades and other crap.
Therapists and researchers notice an increase in acts of violence tied to BDSM porn settings where young women for example report being unexpectedly chocked until they faint while their male partners do not even understand that they are actually assaulting their partner.
Or the increasing prude shaming that happens to women who don’t want to do all the things those women in BDSM porn apparently get off on.
Children’s introduction to sex happens via BDSM hardcore porn videos that get shown around on primary school schoolyards. What is that going to do to them and their ideas about sex and consent?
*Irrespective of whether you’re the one doing or receiving the humiliation.
Those are questions that are not answered by screaming “It’s what I like! I choose my choice!”
Again, this is not about shaming the individual kinkster, I would not be very credible in trying to do that. It’s about a social discussion. To use a related example: Some white people are really, really, really not attracted to PoC. Some white men are very atracted to Asian women. Harping on the individual is no good. We all agree that racism isn’t solved by yelling at that person about a very intimate part of their lives, but I think you will agree that it is a sign of society’s racism and that the dominant portrayal of all those groups is problematic.
Giliell @ 461
Agreed with everything you said, especially this. Each one of us would do well to think hard about why we like what we like. Even if there’s no changing it, recognizing the societal influences is good and helps prevent future harm. Why does this person only desire blonde cis women? Why is this one repulsed by anyone with a BMI over 20? Why are books with clearly abusive relationships appealing?
Individuals don’t have to feel bad for what they like, but we do have to consider the larger context and what harm may be done by it.
From my link at 442, simply substitute BDSM for racism. The broader question that needs to be explored is “Why does this fetish appeal to people in the first place?”
@Giliel
I am going to admit first off I mostly just read the first bit of your post (and mellow monkey quoting and agreeing), and I’m going to tell you exactly why. I said that I had issues with kink and BDSM being considered inherently problematic, and your reply was “well it is and here is why because of social context”.
Which, honestly, missed the point of my statement. If something is *inherently* problematic, the social context does not come into play for it. For example, rape is pretty much agreed to be inherently problematic outside of the social context that rape takes place in. The social context can make it *worse* for sure, but that is not why rape is inherently problematic (I don’t think I need to go into why rape is inherently problematic, but I can if needed or someone else can).
So, immediately, my entire point is pretty much dismissed and I am given what looks to be a lecture how I need to be aware of the social context my kink life belongs in, and how it can be regressive and exploitative and so on. That serves to piss me off to the nth degree, because it not only assumes that I am unaware of the greater sexist and patriarchal social order, but that my sexuality has anything to fucking do with it.
Which brings me to monkey and the quote and the reaction to it. No, this is not a fucking choice of what my sexuality is, this is what my sexuality is. It is also not my greater responsibility to tell a regressive misogynist to not abuse his girlfriend in the guise of BDSM as it would be a gay persons greater responsibility to tell a pedophile not to rape a child in the guise of homosexuality. The current social sexual climate is what gives the problematic elements to the kink world, not the other way around. Without the current misogynistic outlook of the world on sex, kink would *still exist and be a perfectly healthy and positive relationship choice between individuals*. Sadists, masochists, bondage enthusiasts, rape play, slave play, Adult Baby/Diaper Lovers, necrophiliacs, ebetopheliacs, a fucking never ending list of the wide range, variety, scope and depth of sexual expression that is the umbrella of kink could actually be expressed better, because there wouldn’t be the puritanical sexual shaming that is a huge part of our current climate and the free, allowed expression of one of the deepest human connection we have could flourish.
Every single healthy BDSM relationship or play is built on a foundation of informed and clear consent. Please tell me more about how sexist society means that clear and informed sexual activity is inherently problematic.
Tashiliciously Shriked
How does your kink exist outside of social context? How is kink NOT a product of the current social context?
How the fuck do you know? Really, you’re making a HUGE claim here about something you cannot know.
Who said so? Also, why do you assume you’re talking to somebody who has no clue about this outside of mainstream magazines?
Does it feel good to beat all that straw?
1. No true scotsman. Really. You just dismiss all the unhealthy, the abusive, the rapy ones and act as ift they’Re not part of your community.
2. Don’t you have the feeling that deriving pleasure from (the) humiliation, degradation, suffering and victimisation (of others) should at least make you pause for a moment?
Tashiliciously Shriked, I wasn’t trying to belittle your orientation and I’m genuinely sorry for upsetting you.
I’m not singling out BDSM as a matter of choice. My stance is that we’re all the products of our upbringing. “Choice” isn’t the important part there. I don’t think people who are only attracted to cis women are consciously choosing that and somehow that makes their attraction invalid. That’s not the point. The point is that we’re all influenced by society. A society where sex is associated with power, where we’ve been breathing in certain ideas about gender roles and certain forms of eroticism in art and entertainment since birth, where some bodies are idealized and others aren’t.
Your sexuality and what sorts of relationships work for you are just that: how things work for you. There’s no arguing you out of it or telling you that you’re wrong for feeling that way. I tried to be very clear about that. You, as an individual, aren’t wrong for enjoying what you enjoy.
But none of us grow up in a vacuum. When the very concept of what constitutes a “man” or a “woman” is built up by society, there’s only so far that I-was-born-this-way can explain the nitty gritties of what we respond to. Were I raised in another time and place, I’m certain that I wouldn’t have a thing for erotic mummification, men in kilts, and kidnapping fantasies.
But I do and while some things aren’t harmful (unless I’m oppressing Scottish men, I suppose), others reflect aspects of rape culture (sexy kidnapping). And that’s something I try to be aware of, to understand, and ensure I’m not promoting bad stuff while engaging in my own happy thoughts.
If I’m deemed attractive because I have pale skin and a thin body, while my sister is deemed unattractive because she has darker skin and a fat body, that’s problematic. Me, being admired for the traits I was born with, is problematic. It’s upholding damaging systems and promoting racist, fat shaming ideas. That doesn’t mean I’m bad for being thin or being paler and it doesn’t mean someone attracted to me is bad. In a perfect world without racism or fat shaming, I’m fairly confident some people would still be attracted to me.
But that doesn’t erase the fact that in this world, at this time, somebody gushing over my “perfect porcelain skin” or putting images of thin light-skinned people in advertisements as the ultimate beauty ideal can cause damage. Just like reinforcing certain ideas about female submission and masochism can cause damage, even when there are women who really love submitting and experiencing pain.
This doesn’t make those women bad. It doesn’t mean what they enjoy isn’t real. But there’s so much else going on and damage that can be done if we don’t recognize that.
Tashiliciously Shriked
I agree with this 100%. However, BDSM porn is not a relationship, it is a product. As such, it only depicts the sex part, not the necessary negotiation and consent that must occur before healthy sexual expression can happen. I’m all for healthy kinky sex, and completely support tearing down all the sexual shaming and lack of recourse for abuse due to legalities that is intrinsic to being a sex worker. How does one do that in a world where the abusive horror that is 50 shades is wildly popular? Where porn producers brag that their film was so abusive that they “broke the pornstar”?
I also agree that there can be and are healthy BDSM relationships. They are based not only on respect and consent, but also on a shitton of safeguards, which should give people a hint that it’s not rope skipping but bungee jumping.
@Tethys:
Aw. Poor guy. And he just wanted a refuge from having to be in control after a hard day CEOing his fortune 500 company.
Now broken. So sad this happens to so many men.
I have read only a handful of comments because I still haven’t finished reading the previous thread. Nevertheless,
Tashiliciously Shriked #464
I’m going to address only this point. Rape is never “problematic”. Rape is inherently WRONG, i.e. it is always an evil act that must be opposed. On the other hand, some “problematic” is something that posses a moral problem, i.e. it either can be right in one context but wrong in an another, or it can be perceived by a third party as such and posses a question about what constitutes a moral right, wrong or “grey” area.
For example, if I see someone whipping a tied and gagged person I will assume (based on common and, dare I say, inherent human interactions) that I’m witnessing an assault, even though that it might be part of a fully consensual BDSM play. This example alone is enough to show why BDSM is inherently problematic. As long as apposition to harm is an inherent good, anything that can be reasonably perceived as harm will be inherently problematic.
__________________________
The Mellow Monkey #462
This isn’t the case for me, but I can trace my sexual preferences pretty well. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark was the first sexy film I ever saw (I saw it in USSR) and since then I’m enthralled with gothic, dark, funny, slightly wicked/impish women.
Obviously that movie is heavily influenced by modern Western views of sexuality, but my own preferences seem to be more a product of chance. Which just shows how difficult this topic is – where chance ends and social influence begins?
_________________________
Crip Dyke #469
Erm, either I don’t understand you, or you misunderstood Tethys.
The broken pornstars were the women who were abused and filmed by the various “Ghetto Bitches” pornsites.
This has nothing to do with 50 Shades of Grey or 500 Fortune CEOs, they are both examples of horrible approaches to sexuality, but are still different things.
I have read only a handful of comments because I still haven’t finished reading the previous thread. Nevertheless,
Tashiliciously Shriked #464
I’m going to address only this point. Rape is never “problematic”. Rape is inherently WRONG, i.e. it is always an evil act that must be opposed. On the other hand, some “problematic” is something that posses a moral problem, i.e. it either can be right in one context but wrong in an another, or it can be perceived by a third party as such and posses a question about what constitutes a moral right, wrong or “grey” area.
For example, if I see someone whipping a tied and gagged person I will assume (based on common and, dare I say, inherent human interactions) that I’m witnessing an assault, even though that it might be part of a fully consensual BDSM play. This example alone is enough to show why BDSM is inherently problematic. As long as apposition to harm is an inherent good, anything that can be reasonably perceived as harm will be inherently problematic.
__________________________
The Mellow Monkey #462
This isn’t the case for me, but I can trace my sexual preferences pretty well. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark was the first sexy film I ever saw (I saw it in USSR) and since then I’m enthralled with gothic, dark, funny, slightly wicked/impish women.
Obviously that movie is heavily influenced by modern Western views of sexuality, but my own preferences seem to be more a product of chance. Which just shows how difficult this topic is – where chance ends and social influence begins?
_________________________
Crip Dyke #469
Erm, either I don’t understand you, or you misunderstood Tethys.
The broken pornstars were the women who were abused and filmed by the various “G**** B****” (redacted to avoid triggering the filter) pornsites – pornsites that pride on abusing and torturing black women as much as possible.
This has nothing to do with 50 Shades of Grey or 500 Fortune CEOs, they are both examples of horrible approaches to sexuality, but are still different things.
Anyways, making BDSM porn isn’t something morally bad. It can be done badly (and it might even be tricky to navigate), but needn’t be done badly.
CD was being sarcastic Alexander. The male abuser in 50 shades is a CEO, and the book itself is a steaming pile of rank misogyny that bears no resemblance to a consensual BDSM relationship.
Brian Pansky
Nobody here claimed that any type of porn or sex work is inherently immoral. The facts are that in the US sex work is mostly illegal, so sex workers have little to no legal protection. Participants are devalued because they are sex workers, and abuse is rampant. Arguing that it doesn’t have to be that way is rather beside the point. There is an excellent documentary made by sex workers on the US sex industry, which is available for free on Hulu. American Courtesans
@Tethys #473
Opposablethumbs wrongly used merely making BDSM porn to automatically morally judge, and their judgement needn’t have been based on any “inherent” properties for their judgement to be wrong. (and, on a side note, they equivocated it with “sexual exploitation”, which is a different thing)
No, we are judging PJ by his multiple comments worth of acting like an entitled git. Pink Jenkins is not an ass because he makes BDSM porn. He is an ass because he started this entire conversation, and responded to everyone who actually attempted to engage in any critical discussion with personal insults and mansplaining. Claiming to be a sex positive feminist while acting like an abusive asshole is an enormous behavioral red flag.
@AlexanderZ, #470; Tethys, #472; and others:
AlexanderZ:
…Tethys:
while everything that Tethys says in #472 is true, my point was quite a bit more expansive, and perhaps subtle, than that.
Since in addition to flipping the gender of the broken, all I added was a common stereotype of the masculine submissive (who just wants a “break” from the manly duty of having to have all that control and responsibility, poor thing) I hoped that people would focus on the fact that in a culture where the masculine is so often the default, how is it possible that Tethys felt no need to describe the “broken pornstars” as female or feminine or anything similar? And how is it possible that we as a community actually understood Tethys? Shouldn’t some of us be using different gendered pronouns or descriptions for the “broken” pornstars?
No?
We all just “get” that if anyone is going to be “broken” by BDSM porn, it won’t certainly be a sub of uncertain gender. Instead, it will certainly be a sub of feminine gender?
Why couldn’t a masculine sub be “broken”? Why couldn’t a porn producer brag about “breaking” masculine subs?
What the gendered fuck is going on here?
Speaking as a feminist fucktoy for a moment, I can empathize with Tashliciously Shriked’s distinction between BDSM being bad inherently and being bad in practice. I feel what’s going on for Tashliciously Shriked in those comments. I certainly make the distinction between inherent and in practice all the time when discussing ethics and morality, not just in relation to porn or to BDSM or to BDSM porn, but to many things.
Nonetheless, even as a feminist fucktoy I don’t know of a way to counter the widespread sexist dynamics that make it possible for Tethys to leave the broken pornstars ungendered and for us to nonetheless understand them as gendered, and correctly gender them! I don’t know of a way to counter the widespread sexist dynamics that makes it possible for a porn producer to think of “breaking” women as not only a good thing to do, but something about which others will be so please that the porn producer’s commercial efforts will be enhanced by bragging about breaking women.
There are certainly BDSM players and even porn makers that would (and do) find that porn producer’s attitudes and words abhorrent. But it’s not like the response to this has been to have a bunch of “feminists” creating BDSM porn that “breaks” the men involved. The response has been to create porn that doesn’t break people and doesn’t want to do so.
Fine. Yay. I get it. I’m okay with you acting out your kink and even filming it for professional reasons (the exhibitionism itself doesn’t even have to be part of your kink and I’m still okay with it).
But there’s still the reality of this culture to contend with as context. Even if you do everything right during production – even if you do everything right during production and marketing – is it possible for such a product as BDSM porn that constitutes “stylized violence against women” to have a neutral or ameliorating effect on society’s all-to-widespread misogyny? That very misogyny whose invasive omnipresence was just proved in this very thread by our own process of gendering “broken pornstars” such that other gender indicators simply weren’t necessary?
How is that final product – however ethically produced – going to interact with that misogyny and how should the existence and nature of that interaction impact our ethical evaluation of the product as separate from the production?
PJ argues that once the production is finished, all the ethical questions are over: the product then stands on its own as an ethics-neutral tool for the use of which others, not Pink Jenkin, must answer.
While that’s a possibly correct position in certain ethical frames, and it’s even an arguably reasonable position to take, it’s not at all clear to me that PJ or anyone else has actually proved that that is the case. I don’t have the kind of evidence I would want to have that the existence of the product is inevitably harmful (because of the nature of its interaction with misogyny or for any other reason) such that I should condemn its makers no matter how carefully they attempted to produce such a product. Not having that evidence, I **DON’T** condemn those makers.
But I do keep an open mind about this possibility because of my acute awareness of the existence of such widespread, putrid, harmful, …sucky? (dammit, where is the intensifier that is sufficient?) … misogyny.
Most of all, while I feel deeply the pain in Tashliciously Shriked’s appeal to the distinction between being bad inherently and being bad as practiced …
…I myself remember that there is yet another, and much more subtle, distinction to be made that is arguably much more relevant. That distinction is this: the difference between being bad inherently and being bad inevitably, so long as certain givens apply.
Yes, something else – those “givens” – can be necessary in order to make certain things “bad” (and thus proving that they are not “inherently” bad), while at the same time those things can be so relentlessly, frustratingly present, and so hard to eradicate, that such things will be “bad” no matter the corner of the earth in which they occur and no matter how much ethical care is used in their creation.
In other words, something can be inevitably bad without being inherently bad.
I think these judgements are very tricky to make, and I do not say that something that constitutes “BDSM porn” that depicts “stylized violence against women” is inevitably bad. But where I am convinced that we may declare that such porn is not inherently bad, I am not convinced it is reasonable for us to declare such porn is not inevitably bad. I’m on the fence, waiting for more information: moreover, I think it’s not very reasonable to be off this fence. What would one cite to prove that I should climb down on one side or the other?
So then, what does this have to do with PJ and the debate thus started, including the feelings running high amongst such people as, for instance, me? (Though, yeah, Tethys, Giliell, Tashliciously Shriked, and others might also be included, at their discretion.)
It’s this: PJ has made the bold statement that once the production is over, moral responsibility ends.
Me? If I were making a product with ethically questionable effects in our society, I would want to spend some of that money and some of my time **directly fighting those effects** as part of a moral duty to provide enough momentum for me to safely conclude that, whether or not the existence of my product on the market has a net negative effect on our society, the moral impact of [the product + the uses to which the earned money is put + the time spent by me that I would not otherwise be free to spend without having a stable income] >> neutrality.
Not only would that be my personal choice, I think the argument is strong that this type of moral action is actually morally mandated. It may not be convincing to everyone, but the argument is strong.
Thus I think PJ’s certainty is UNreasonable. I notice PJ’s stand that people are unreasonable (and prudish and sex-negative and libertarian(??) and whatever the fuck) whenever they dispute the idea that PJ’s moral responsibility ends when the DVD is shrink-wrapped or the .mov is uploaded, and I think that stand by PJ is itself UNreasonable.
I also notice with sadness that Tashliciously Shriked and others (notably but not only Giliell) are talking past each other because of the misunderstanding about inevitable vs. inherent.
Me?
I think all that directly follows from the bizarre ability of all the denizens of this thread to read “broken pornstar” as not only gendered, but femininely gendered.
Thus, when I had things to do for my kids, I thought I’d just drop a bit of gendered snark and let y’all work it all out for yourselves.
But with my respect for AlexanderZ and Z’s confusion at a certain gendering (see what I did there), I though maybe I really should write all this out, now that it’s night & i’ve got some time.
I hope the payoff was worth it. It’s a lot more fun to just drop snark that busts gendered assumptions and run. But I suppose someone has to do this work every once in a while. Right now? It’s you, reading this. And, hopefully, thinking.
@Tethys
I know he needs to be judged for all of that. But opposablethumbs in 412 said this:
and then proceeded to dig their heels into it in later responses. Opposable thumbs never went “oh Pink is only bad because of acting entitled and having no point and being illogical and being clueless about how things should be in public, like facebook”. They went:
Which is very different.
Well I suppose you could make the argument that (because reasons) it is likely to be true that Pink is abusive to the people he films (if that’s what you’re trying to say at here?). But opposablethumbs didn’t do that. Opposable thumbs instead focused on the context that BDSM porn exists within, regardless of how nicely the actors were treated by Pink.
Also, here’s some more great articles and comment sections on related subjects:
Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!)
Sexual Objectification: An Atheist Perspective
CD
Yes, it was a masterful economy of words. :)
I intentionally omitted gender and paraphrased rather than quoting. The actual quote is explicitly feminine and the reason for trigger warnings. I also realized that many people would indeed assume the pornstars were female. How the fuck is what those websites are selling not be criminal, if multiple women needed therapy to overcome the trauma?
Seedy
I think Brian Pansky has you hushed.
If, I, too, am hushed, we could chat behind BP’s back.
,,,,
oops
midnight
gotta go
@Tethys:
Teehee. Yeah, I’m known for that, y’know. My verbal economy.
Well, that and the eternal conundrum of whether I’m a fucktoy in a triad or whether I’m a fucktoy who wears that French maid outfit for non-sexual purposes as well.
I hope you realized that I was criticizing the context that made your decision reasonable, not criticizing you for making the decision. Empirically, it was very well justified.
Empirically, that’s really, really fucking sad.
I don’t know. I won’t click the links. I don’t know the websites and I don’t want to know them.
From a legal standpoint – which I realize is not at all the most interesting standpoint here, but we all have our fetishes – what I would want to know is if they were successfully sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress or the appropriate country’s equivalent.
Whee! That’s fun.
One might assume that I’d be disappointed with bp’s befuddling attitude towards me. They would be wrong.
Actually? I find being ignored really, really hot. Which is quite a bad thing.
I know, you’re thinking, “But Seedy is all about a world where people can be okay with their own kinks – different strokes and all that, right?”
Usually, yes. This time, no. It’s actually a terrible fetish to have if you ever think about what it really means to live in a world of 7 billion people.
ZOMG! Now I have to go masturbate again.
@480 chigau (違う)
At first I was confused who “Seedy” was. But I guess you meant “CD”, or Crip Dyke.
As I previously said would be the case, I haven’t been reading her posts. So you’re right about that.
I also saw Tethys in 479 was talking to her, so I skipped that as well. And similarly for a few other posts.
@ chigau
Then I shall disconnect Their™batteries.
Brian Pansky, accuracy please. I did not say that making commercial BDSM porn for sale is automatically, inevitably, inherently and always wrong – though I think that in practice it very often is – I said it was problematic. And I’m confused by your paraphrase of what you think I failed to say (“oh Pink is only bad because of acting entitled and having no point and being illogical and being clueless about how things should be in public, like facebook”.) Why the fuck should I talk about facebook???? He was acting like an entitled arsehole when he immediately tried to shut down any questioning by the cute trick of accusing people of being SWERF-y prudes (as I mentioned earlier).
He makes money out of the depiction of women being sexually abused and humiliated. This sells by exploiting the context in which that shit happens for real. In what universe is this not problematic?
CD @476 has said it way better than I can. If you’re not reading CD, that’s your loss.
PS apologies to the Horde for the following equivocal semi-flounce: I am honestly not sure which is going to prevail now – the SIWOTI or the nausea. (I don’t really get the reason for your objection, tbh BP – is it that you think people are being groundlessly mean to PJ, or is it that you want to argue that making and selling commercial mainstream het BDSM porn is a good thing?)
Tethys #473
As I suspected. I wish this was a real thing, so I could make less of a fool of myself.
__________________
Crip Dyke #477
Thanks for the explanation!
CD
While I find your comment interesting and informative as always, I think you had a misshap as well. Because the discussion wasn’t about inherently vs inevitably bad, but inherently problematic.
But maybe your observation still stands because bad and problematic got conflated.
I did not use one as a synonym for the other and I did not understand Tashliciously Shriked that way, but it is indeed possible that we were operating from different definitions.
So I’ll state what I mean by “problematic”: Something posing a moral problem that needs careful consideration. I think that we need to ask the question why people get off at humiliation and violence, both as dom and as sub*. And the fact that it needs a lot of ethical consideration to do it is evidence for me that there is an inherently problematic aspect to this. It still does not mean “bad under all any circumstance.” I clearly don’t consider it unethical if two people make sure that everything is consensual.
Now, since the deed is done when people find themselves in those positions, it is not about the individual. It’s about what happened before.
Flattery will get you laid.
I assume.
By someone. Almost certainly not me, given distance if nothing else.
But you can continue to use me as a practice target for your flattery skills.
Correction noted, thank you.
Absolutely. Great definition and explains what I mean by the word when I use it as well. At least when I use it correctly.
Nods along.
…though not quite certain about whether “it” here is BDSM generally, or producing commercial products depicting BDSM…
yep. I agree.
Personally, I find the conflation of humiliation and sex completely horrifying. At such a conflation, I experience a moral outrage as well as lack of desire as well as feelings of fear as well as memories of trauma. The combination and strength are things I can together only call “horrifying”.
And yet some of the things in which I willingly participate and consider hot include things that could, in another context, be violence (spanking, for instance). Finally, I also recoil from doing-the-things-that-could-be-seen-as-violence much more than I recoil from receiving those things.
Again, these are personal tendencies, not moral statements, but I put them out there because I literally do not understand why I would find it okay to be spanked, but not okay to do spanking (this is an oversimplification, but it gets the point across). I don’t judge my partner as morally bad for slapping my bum, why should I recoil in moral horror at the thought of doing it myself? Why would it be morally okay for others to slap a bum, but morally reprehensible for me to do so?
There are layers of desire here intermixed with the morality, and it is difficult to tease them apart.*1 But it’s in the work of finding the distinctions that we gain insight into how our personal desires shape-and-are-shaped-by our larger cultures. That knowledge is important to make better judgements about the rest of the ethical questions before us.
I usually get all flustered if flattery is even approaching could get laid territory, so no need to worry; but really.. who would hush Crip Dyke? Seriously?!
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #91
Taxes too?
(ok, I get out.)
Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought #492
All I learned in school was that flattery may bring you cheese.
(no really, I get out.)
CD @ 491:
I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but for myself, it would be a matter of control. The years of abuse I went through left me with one super-duper* strength: self control. I find myself recoiling from any action which may threaten my ability to keep control. There’s a lot of fucked-upness and rage locked down tight inside, and I don’t (and can’t) risk any of that being out of my ability to control it.
*Thanks to the odious Anne Jones for this.
Beatrice @ 492:
Eh, Brian Pansky has always been seriously slow on the uptake, and I imagine CD’s ferociously swift intelligence leaves him floundering, so he ignores her, which in my view, is one hell of a mistake. Each to their own and all that.
CD
I think the difference might be that when you’re at the receiving end there’s not risk for you to get it wrong. If you want to be spanked you want to be spanked. Now, if you’re the one who’s doing the spanking you’Re the one who might hurt* somebody, that you might cause deeper damage. Because you can’t see into their heads you don’t know if they’re actually freely consenting or not, something that’s pretty clear for you yourself.
*in the broader sense. Stands to reason that the spanking physically hurts
Anyone good at Oriole identification? If only I could figure out where my Peterson’s guide went…
And I think I saw Pye! Rats below, that would be wonderful if he was back.
* * *
On the downside, I nearly dropped my effing camera because a fucking tick was crawling up my thigh. *shudder*
Caine
Such lovely birds. :) I see an immature male Orchard oriole, and a female ” Baltimore” or Northern oriole according to my Petersons.. An immature male has a dark head and is a similar shade of orange to the female. (two names for the same bird) Pye and I have matching plumage! How very cool, I’ve never seen a leucistic grackle before.