If Trump asks Carson to be his VP, the Repubs will have all the deadly sins covered.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
If Trump asks Carson to be his VP, the Repubs will have all the deadly sins covered.
Sady Doyle hits another one out of the park. She discusses the phenomenon of the angry white male public intellectual and their anxieties.
Rather, the root at the problem of this kind of online harassment is that political and intellectual authority has for centuries been the domain of white men. The rise of feminism and civil rights; increased cultural awareness of Islamophobia; and the very real possibility that a woman may soon break the 200-year-plus lock that men have had on the United States presidency are all challenging that authority. Intellectual spaces have become more accessible for everyone. And that’s caused some men to wield their authority more anxiously, and brutally, to those who challenge it.
These anxieties are profound and pervasive. We’re used to seeing them expressed by people with the luxury of anonymity and unaccountability. To see them coming from “legitimate” sources is depressing. But there is an upside. By bringing online harassment out into the open and signing their real names to it, Dawkins, the Bernie Bros and others have let us know that the people ready to attack anyone who threatens the status quo are not necessarily strangers or faceless losers. They can also be people with real power.
That shows us exactly how entrenched ancient attitudes about authority really are. What’s at stake is not simply one election, or what a few people have to say on the Internet. It’s whether marginalized people have a place in the public conversation at all.
Bye.
My wife and I are going to see Deadpool tonight, I think (this may be one time the theater is overcrowded here in Morris). I’m concerned. This is one movie I’ve heard a lot of gushing hype about, and I have high expectations.
That usually means I’m going to be grievously disappointed.
Stay tuned, I’m going in to the 7:00 showing.
I’m back!
This ignorant fundamentalist boxer, Manny Pacquiao, made a comment about gays being worse than animals and deserving of those biblical punishments (he’s lost big endorsements over it, too). But I do rather like Dave Bautista’s taciturn reaction.
Drax is very literal-minded, but empathic at the same time.
You know, I’m a professor at four-year liberal arts college, and I think Mike Rowe is on to something here. The kind of education we deliver is not for every one.
Now, eight years later, unemployment is down, interest rates are under control, and inflation is in check. But the overall labor participation rate is very low, and the skills gap is wider than ever. In fact, the latest numbers are out, and they are astonishing. According to the Department of Labor, America now has 5.6 million job openings.
Forget your politics for a moment, and consider the enormity of what’s happening here. Millions of people who have stopped looking for work, are ignoring 5.6 million genuine opportunities. That’s not a polemic, or a judgment, or an opinion. It’s a fact. And so is this: most of those 5.6 million opportunities don’t require a diploma – they require require a skill.
Unfortunately, the skilled trades are no longer aspirational in these United States. In a society that’s convinced a four-year degree is the best path for the most people, a whole category of good jobs have been relegated to some sort of “vocational consolation prize.” Is it any wonder we have 1.3 trillion dollars in outstanding student loans? Is it really a surprise that vocational education has pretty much evaporated from high schools? Obviously, the number of available jobs and the number of unemployed people are not nearly as correlated as most people assume.
I’m no economist, but the skills gap doesn’t seem all that mysterious – it seems like a reflection of what we value. Five and half million unfilled jobs is clearly a terrible drag on the economy and a sad commentary of what many people consider to be a “good job,” but it also represents a tremendous opportunity for anyone willing to learn a trade and apply themselves.
This is an interesting comparison from David Hillis.
I still see a lot of Ego in the Eco diagram, since humans are the only species (out of 1.8 million species that have been described on Earth) that are represented twice, and over half of the species shown in that diagram are vertebrates like us (even though only about 5% of all described species are vertebrates). I made this version to emphasize that there is a lot of biodiversity on Earth, and all species are connected through our evolutionary history to single common ancestor. The tree shown under “EVO” represents species approximately in proportion to their described diversity, and the circular shape emphasizes that we are all equally distant from our common ancestor.
The EGO diagram is a somewhat accurate illustration of one common perspective that places humans, and especially male humans, at the top of a hierarchy…although I don’t think most people would place whales so high. Cats and dogs would be somewhere just below Noble Man, but distant animals that are rarely seen in day-to-day life wouldn’t rank so highly.
The ECO diagram is a step in the right direction, but as Hillis points out, it’s still grossly vertebrate-centric. But then, the ecologists I know wouldn’t favor that diagram, either — they’d stock it with trees and grasses and insects and bacteria and fungi.
The EVO diagram is the best of them all, but has the problem that it’s also the least easily understood and the most complicated. But then if you reduced it to a smaller number of branches to make it more graphically appealing, you’d have to choose where to prune, and unfortunately for us humans, we wouldn’t be represented at all on a fair and simplified illustration of biodiversity.
Justin Keller wrote an open letter to the mayor and police chief, demanding that something must be done. There are homeless riff-raff cluttering up his streets! They are howling and lying down and collapsing in despair everywhere; why, one even leaned up against his car! The horror…
I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place.
Yes, something must be done. Only I don’t think the solution involves hiding the “pain, struggle, and despair” out of sight of smug dudes with lots of money. It’s got to involve deeper changes that give poor people a living wage and an opportunity to better themselves that might also require fewer luxury cars for the wealthy.
No restraint or decorum, they just go at it out there in public. It’s good to be the squid.
Ken Perrott of New Zealand SciBlogs waded into the controversial Dawkins disinvitation, and wrote a load of typical bullshit. That is, he tries to logic all critics of Dawkins into some kind of fallacy, because they must be mistaken, and we cannot examine the flaws in Dawkins worldview without first dismissing everyone who disagrees with him as irrational. Therefore, suggesting that Dawkins has said some terrible things…
…is so mistaken I think only people who are already hostile or desperately searching for something to confirm their anti-Dawkins or anti-male bias would actually fall for it – or promote it. But that is the sort of thing we get on social media – especially Twitter.
This is the fallacy of faulty generalisation – or more precisely, faulty induction. Very often resorted to by people with a large axe to grind.
