What point would a protest have if it didn’t piss someone off?

Amina-Tyler

This well-written article in The Atlantic remarks on a familiar tactic. It’s about the Femen, the topless jihad, and Amina, and the complaints an annoying number of stodgy critics have made. You know the ones: the people who demand that all arguments be respectful, and insist that there are proper channels for debate, and protests that actually rile the establishment are inappropriate.

With its topless jihad and Femen leader Inna Shevchenko’s subsequent incendiary blog post on the event, Femen was both defending one of its own and upholding a right to freedom of expression (to say nothing of life and liberty) flagrantly violated by Amina’s own family and by an angry, largely Muslim, community from which threats against Amina and Shevchenko continue to emanate. It’s worth pointing out that Femen’s critics, several of whom professed concern for Amina’s well-being, did not speak out in Amina’s defense before the jihad, but only post-factum and in passing, all the while pummeling the group standing up for her with stale, politically correct shibboleths and demands to stay out of what they perceived to be their own business.

We saw this in all the battles over accommodationism: there’s always someone on your side who offended that you have chosen to battle antagonistically or unconventionally against oppression and foolishness. I think their favorite word must be “hush” — don’t upset the status quo, even if it’s the status quo you’re trying to upset. And most importantly, they insist that you have to follow their tactics, and they get to tell everyone how to engage, even if their history is one of largely sitting on their thumbs and getting chummy with the enemy.

Guess what is often at the root of that reluctance to actually confront? Yeah, it’s the same old boogeyman everytime, conservative traditionalism in the guise of religion.

There is a problem, however. The media has long fostered the view that religion should be de facto exempt from the logical scrutiny applied to other subjects. I am not disputing the right to practice the religion of one’s choice, but rather the prevailing cultural rectitude that puts faith beyond the pale of commonsense review, and (in Amina’s case), characterizes as “Islamophobic” criticism of the criminal mistreatment of a young woman for daring to buck her society’s norms, or of Femen for attacking the forced wearing of the hijab.

We’re seeing a lot of that lately, but it’s been going on for a long, long time. Point out that transubstantiation is ridiculous, and that Catholics don’t get to tell you to honor a cracker, and Bill Donohue raves that you’re an anti-Catholic bigot; stand aghast at ultra-orthodox Jews spitting on little girls for “immodesty” and you’re an anti-semite; critize the deeply rooted misogyny in Islam, a misogyny that harms men and women in the faith, and you’re declared an Islamophobe.

Just because it’s cloaked in the self-declared mystery of religion doesn’t mean it’s exampt from scrutiny and rejection.

A monstrous regiment of Schlaflys

This sounds so damn familiar.

The problem with feminism, I think the principal problem, is the cultivation of an attitude of victimization. Feminism tries to make women believe they are victims of an oppressive, male-dominated, patriarchal society. They wake up in the morning with a chip on their shoulder.

Oh, right. I’ve heard it a thousand times from all the critics of Freethoughtblogs…a thousand Phyllis Schlafly clones. Every MRA. Every man and woman who thinks women have a place — on a pedestal, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, where ever — and they ought to stay there, where they belong.

You don’t have pockets?

OK, OK, OK…I’m oblivious, but I never realized this before, or thought about the consequences: a lot of women’s clothes don’t have pockets. That would be an intolerable state of affairs for me. Don’t most boys grow up like me with a bunch of pockets that they’re constantly stuffing things into? Candy bars, interesting rocks, pocket knives, frogs, earthworms…until they grow up and replace the cool stuff with boring junk like keys and loose change and wallets. Even now I like a suit jacket with a couple of outside pockets and four in the lining, and I usually come home from a trip with all six stuffed with something or other.

I actually appraise my apparel for the number of pockets it has in it. If I’m wearing a shirt that doesn’t have a breast pocket (which I consider an abomination and a crime against utility already), I pick a coat that has an extra pocket to compensate.

Ladies, doesn’t it warp your brain to have grown up without built in stashing places to nurture your natural acquisitiveness? I’m going to have to have a conversation with my wife about this. I’ve noticed that every time we leave the house together, she always ask me if I have my keys, and I always thought it weird. Of course I have my keys! I always keep my keys right there in my pocket, and the only way I’d leave the house without them is if I forgot to put my pants on.

But now it’s sinking in. She’d only have her keys if she brought her purse with her. Hmmm. Teeny-tiny light bulb flickers and begins to glow dimly in my cranium…

pocketses

For the doubters: this is a view of the inside lining of my suit coat, opened in classic flasher’s pose. The top pocket is big enough to stuff my whole hand in; it’s got a bunch of colored pens in there right now, but at meetings I’ll usually fold the program in half and put it in there, or when I’m traveling I’ll put my itinerary there. The bottom pocket is smaller, but still large enough for my cell phone and a bunch of business cards. And the right side lining has the same arrangement! Little do people realize as I stride through meetings that I’m like Batman, with all kinds of useful things tucked away in my clothing.

The mysterious Tatsuya Ishida

oppressed

He’s an invisible webcomic artist — here’s one of the rare interviews with the guy, and a review of his work. I’ve been following him for many years, and one of the interesting things you can see as he matured is that he’s gone from drawing pimp ninjas and geisha sluts to developing a very feminist sensibility.

Look at his latest, for instance — no words at all, but he still gets across regret at what patriarchal culture has done.

There’s been a striking transformation going on. I’d really like to hear in his own words what’s going on through his head…but his art seems to be doing a fine job of communicating.

Is this some kind of test for creeps?

I watched this ad for a new service unbelievingly. Who at Virgin America thought this was a good idea?

Maybe it’s a kind of psychological test — a kind of video gom jabbar. If you’re watching it and thinking that this is a wonderful idea for all involved — the men get to be generous and charming, the women get free alcohol and compliments — then you’re an animal. If you watch it and are appalled at the attempt to use access to unwilling, trapped women as an enticement to use his commercial airline, you pass the humanity test.

If you don’t see it yet, read this account of a woman who was harrassed on a flight without Richard Branson’s facilitation. Are you getting a little closer to humanity yet?

If not, one more thought. Watch the video. Imagine yourself buying a ticket to get access to hot chicks on the flight. Imagine all the hot chicks watching this same video, and immediately rebooking their flights to a different airline. Imagine boarding the flight to discover it’s entirely occupied by leering lechers who are peering around the cabin looking for the available women.

I know I don’t want to be on that flight. I’m not going to be on that flight. Virgin America won’t be getting my business.

Maybe the right phrase is “revolutionary feminist”

The most “radical feminist” feminist I read religiously has got to be Twisty Faster, at I Blame the Patriarchy. She’s a ferociously passionate writer, and simply brilliant in her insights. So when we had the recent hatin’ and shriekin’ from #radfem2013, I had to wonder (maybe that’s the wrong word; I had high expectations) what Twisty would be saying on the issue. And have no fear, she’s all over it.

So, on a transwoman who was denied admission to Smith College, she writes:

So Wong can’t just declare herself to be whatever it is she is. Woman, they say, is denoted completely arbitrarily by lacking a dick. Not by any of the other factors that might just as easily be employed to differentiate members of the sex class from members of the regular class. Factors such as hormones or chromosomes or giggly head-tilts or — heaven forfend! — personal preference. The genitalia are the only thing anyone gives a fig about.

The carpet must match the drapes. One must be consistent, down below, with what one advertises up top. A girl can’t have a dick. The entire fabric of the universe, in fact, depends entirely on girls entirely not having dicks. No dicks, not of any kind.

That’s right; as is usual in all matters pertaining to everything, nothing matters but pure, unadulterated pussy. So Wong needs a doctor’s note stating that she’s had vaginoplasty. She must become legally penetrable. She has to get a fuckhole installed. That’s because the Global Accords define “woman” as “that which can be fucked.”

On the subject of radfems declaring transwomen as not fit for their movement, she’s got lots to say. Here’s the overview.

There are three aspects of this trans “debate” that particularly chap the spinster hide. One is that it is even considered a debate. Is there anything more demeaning than a bunch of people with higher status than you sitting around debating the degree to which they find you human? I don’t think so.

Go read the rest for her three aspects, but I have to mention her Four Ds:

Oppression is oppression. Race, ethnicity, religion, pigmentation, sex, gender, health, education, class, caste, age, weight, ableness, mental health, physical health, marital status, employment status, diet, IQ, internet access — any combination of these or a thousand other arbitrary markers may be used by the powerful to justify oppression, but the net result is always the same: discrimination, disenfranchisement, degradation, dehumanization. It’s the Four Ds! The Four Ds make all oppressed persons identical enough.

On almost every marker she lists, I’m one of the powerful…which means I have to be particularly careful not to turn my privileges into oppression.

Steubenville hasn’t learned a thing

The football coach who reportedly joked to his team members about the sexual assault on an unconscious girl, who the team trusted to cover up any problems their behavior might cause, who threatened a reporter and her family if they pursued the case, has had his coaching contract extended another two years.

Symbolic of this unholy marriage of jock culture and rape culture was the revered Big Red football coach Reno Saccoccia who didn’t seem to give a damn that his players could have treated a woman this way. Given Coach Saccoccia’s controversial behavior before and during the trial, which drew national scrutiny, many of us thought he at the very least would be shown the door after three decades of service. We all thought wrong. Today we learned that “Coach Sac”, as he is known, has been granted a two-year contract extension by the Steubenville school board. They made this decision despite the fact that a grand jury is meeting next week to assess whether he and others obstructed justice in the case. Saccoccia was legally required to report the sexual assault as soon as he was aware it took place. The grand jury will determine whether or not he in fact knew and tried to sweep it under the turf.

Two members of his team were convicted of rape and sent off to jail. You know, even if all anyone cared about was his win/loss record, this is not evidence of a good coach.

But maybe they should care about more. Isn’t it peculiar that many atheist and gay teachers are terrified to come out because they know it could cost them their job, yet a coach can facilitate a culture of rape with total impunity?

There are no marching morons

For some random reason, this post from the Scienceblogs era Pharyngula, “There are no marching morons“, is getting some sudden attention, so I thought I’d bring it here. Most people have probably never heard of Kornbluth, or read The Marching Morons, but now you can! It’s on scribd, or you can just read the summary on wikipedia. The modern reference is of course, Idiocracy, and I suspect a lot of you have seen it.

I detest Idiocracy, too, and cringe when people bring it up. It’s nonsense. It’s the same failure to recognize that reality is not a possession of the elite that you find in eugenics. Idiocracy and Marching Morons is what you get when smart people are unable to recognize their common humanity with others — when you sneer at whole classes and regard them as inferior breeders.

But onward: here’s the original post. Surprisingly, since NatGeo hosed most of the comments when they transfered the site to WordPress, it looks like a lot of the comments on this article survived, too.

I was sent a link to this editorial by the science-fiction writer, Ben Bova. I like part of the sentiment, where he’s arguing that it’s worth the effort to try and change the world, but a substantial part of it bugs me.

The most prescient — and chilling — of all the science fiction stories ever written, though, is “The Marching Morons,” by Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1951. It should be required reading in every school on Earth.

The point that Kornbluth makes is simple, and scary: dumbbells have more children than geniuses. In “The Marching Morons” he carries that idea to its extreme, but logical, conclusion.

Kornbluth tells of a future world that is overrun with dummies: men and women who don’t know anything beyond their own shallow personal interests. They don’t know how their society works, or who is running it. All they care about is their personal — and immediate — gratification.

I detest “The Marching Morons.”

Bova gives an accurate summary; it’s also the primary plot point of the movie Idiocracy. It’s also the premise behind eugenics and behind a lot of right-wing phony elitism. It’s wrong. It was a very popular story, but the reason isn’t complimentary: it fed into a strain of self-serving smugness in science-fiction fandom, the idea that people who read SF are special and brilliant and superior, we are the technological geniuses and far-seeing futurists, while the mundanes leech off our vision. The eugenics movement built on the same us-vs.-them mentality, that there are superiors and inferiors, and the inferiors breed like cockroaches.

The most troubling part of it all is the attempt to root the distinction in biology—it’s intrinsic. “They” are lesser beings than “us” because, while their gonads work marvelously well, their brains are inherently less capacious and their children are born with less ability. It’s the kind of unwarranted labeling of people that leads to decisions like “three generations of imbeciles are enough“—bigotry built on bad biology to justify suppression by class.

People, they are us.

There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly — if you sneer at the underclass and think your line is superior, I suspect you won’t have to go back very many generations to find your stock comes out of that same seething mob. Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it’s hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn’t despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.

Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they’re breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn’t enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain.

That’s where the Kornbluth story fails. It assumes the morons are unchangeably moronic, and treats the elite as unchangeably special. The only solution to their problem is to get rid of the morons, launching them into space to die. Bova’s editorial, while not as cynically eliminationist, still pretends that the only answer is perpetuation of a distinction that doesn’t exist biologically.

Here’s the real solution to the “marching moron” problem: teach them. Give them fair opportunities. Open the door to education for all. They have just as much potential as you do. Bova complains that people aren’t willing to work for change, but this is exactly where we can work to improve minds — but we won’t if we assume the mob is hopeless.

I have to confess to taking these kinds of stories personally. My family was probably what would be called the working poor nowadays, when I was growing up I was called white trash more than a few times, and yes, I come from a large family. My parents did not have the educational opportunities I did, but they were smart and self-taught and made sensible, practical choices in their life, and they cared to give all of their kids a chance. I can testify from personal experience that if there’s a problem, it’s not in ability — it’s in a culture that dismisses broad swathes of the population because of who their families are, or how much money they make, and perpetuates inequities of opportunity on the basis of bigotry and classism.

I knew this article would bring out the pseudoscientific advocates of facile genetics, and there they are, already babbling away in the comments.

I know there are constraints on intelligence; there is individual variation in capacity, and there are almost certainly some biological bases for that, and also for differences in the kind of intelligence individuals express. This isn’t about that. It’s about whether there are significant differences in the distribution of the genetic constraints on human intelligence between subpopulations, and whether we are justified in writing off segments of our population as incurable morons whose progeny are similarly tainted. I say no to both.

You’d be hard-pressed to argue that the diverse groups marked by ethnic and class distinctions in the U.S. even count as distinct populations in any biological sense. There are social barriers to breeding, but they are sufficiently porous that over the course of time needed to set up genetic differences that matter, they’re negligible.

The other premise of the marching morons scenario, that the underclass would sink deeper and deeper into stupidity, is completely absurd. There aren’t any human subcultures that don’t value problem-solving and cleverness, where apathy and dull-wittedness are desirable traits in a mate (again, there are individuals who are contrary, but we’re talking about populations here.) Growing up, I experienced that social pressure that makes getting good grades in school a problem for fitting in with a certain peer group — but that isn’t about despising intelligence, it’s about conforming to the trappings of your group and not adopting the markers of another class, especially when that class has a habit of treating you like dirt and talking abstractly about how to expunge you, your family, and your friends from the gene pool.

And no, eating brie, going to Harvard, and reading the Wall Street Journal are not indicators of ability — they are properties of class. Drinking beer, learning a trade, and reading Sports Illustrated doesn’t mean you’re dumber, or that there are genes driving your choices — it means you are the product of a particular environment. Yet we all practice this fallacy of judging someone’s intelligence by how they dress or their entertainment preferences, and society as a whole indulges in the self-fulfilling prophecy of doling out educational opportunities on the basis of economic status.

There are mobs of stupid people out there. Sterilizing them or shipping them off to Venus won’t change a thing, though, no matter how effective your elimination procedures are, because you’ll just breed more from the remaining elite stock. Similarly, lining up the elites against the wall won’t change the overall potential of the population — new elites will arise from the common stock. The answer is always going to be education and opportunity and mobility. That’s what’s galling about Kornbluth’s story, that it is so one-dimensional, and the proposed solution is a non-solution.

I have a sudden craving to visit Grandad’s Bar

It was the scene of an unpleasant event recently — a patron shouting anti-gay slurs at another patron. So Grandad’s Bar in Oklahoma City put up a sign.

barsign
Come on, OKC. We’re all in this together. Gay, straight, black, white, plumber, politician, whatever…let’s just all have a drink and be cool. Deal?

Maybe next time we’re in Oklahoma City we ought to meet there. It sounds like we’d all get along.

They’re also recommended highly on Yelp.