The Trump voter

And here we have the perfect apotheosis of the Trump voter, a small resentful man finding satisfaction by berating a Muslim family and thinking himself bigger because of his religion and his president.

In the viral video, Downing is seen with a clear plastic cup while shouting Donald Trump is my president! and You can try to act like you’re innocent. You can try to fuck with me, but guess what? You will never, ever, ever stop me. My Christianity will rise above your Sharia law. Your Sharia law … don’t mean shit to me!

And here is the next stage in the development of the Trump voter: crying in jail.

You know, since Jeff Sessions wants to keep those for-profit prisons full, maybe he should start jailing more Republicans.

Friday Cephalopod: that’s the weirdest octopus I’ve ever seen

This is the Octoprof. Do not be shocked at its frightful appearance.

The Octoprof is a Lesser Blue-Ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa), who is a postgraduate at the University of the Gulf of Mexico, Shallow Waters (not her native habitat; she’s Australian, but emigrated to be closer to larger populations of her research subjects). Her focus of study is the reproductive biology of the invasive terrestrial species Homo sapiens – an animal which has of course been a source of tremendous concern amongst terrestrial biologists over the past thousand-ish lunar cycles, especially those whose research has a conservation focus.

Owing to a peculiar birth defect which gives her a faint but noticeable resemblance to the detested Homo sapiens (she has a serious malformation of the mantle and of two of her tentacles, which gives her a ‘face’ and ‘hands’), the Octoprof feels a strong and frankly embarrassing affinity for her research subjects. She has been criticized heavily for this unprofessional attitude by her fellow academics, most of whom would understandably prefer all research funds concerning homo sapiens to be focused on eradication measures.

It’s going to appear at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, 3-13 August, and is apparently trying to raise money to attend the event. I hope it can raise a surplus and use the excess to pay for cosmetic surgery.

How does it breathe? I don’t see a siphon, unless it’s those two tiny holes in the front of its cephalon — they’re so small it certainly can’t use them for propulsion. Poor thing.

Calling them transphobic is exactly like dropping a nuclear bomb on them!

I think I know what a metaphor is. It’s where you use a word or phrase that is symbolic of a situation, but isn’t literally a description. It is a comparison of one thing with another thing. You can use a metaphor to relate something abstract or unfamiliar to a concept a person is more comfortable with; hence the too-frequent comparison of the genome to a blueprint. From that example, you can see that a metaphor isn’t necessarily true, and can be misleading.

Another use of the metaphor is for exaggeration. For instance, if a student failed my genetics class, they could make the excuse “The prof was slaughtering students left and right! It was a Holocaust in there!” Perhaps it would be used for comic effect, but even at that, it’s dangerous: the student has both exaggerated the consequences of the course, and has seriously minimized the outcomes of the actual Holocaust. I trust most of you would be conscious of error in making that comparison. The result would not be to think the student is amusing, or to think that I was actually a brutal, unfeeling teacher, but to think that the student was a privileged young asshole. (None of my students have ever said such a thing — this is a purely hypothetical example.)

So what are we to think of the phrase “witch hunt”? There were real witch hunts, although there have never been any people with Satanic powers. As many as a hundred thousand innocent people in early modern Europe and America were falsely accused, tortured, and murdered in horrific ways. People still get accused of witchcraft, the Bible is still used to justify killing people for consorting with the Devil (who does not exist), and there are still benighted parts of the world where people are brutalized and killed for an imaginary crime. Every time you use the phrase “witch hunt” to describe an activity that has no chance of a victim ending up hanged or on fire, you’re diminishing the horror and desensitizing people to an openly evil history and an ongoing crime.

Yet for some reason it has become the first resort in any argument about merely academic dissent. Here’s a fantastic example: an academic wrote an article comparing “transracialism” to “transgenderism”. This is a bad, misleading metaphor, rather like comparing DNA to a blueprint, and people objected. I think it’s fair that sloppy scholarship ought to be vigorously criticized. So a letter was written.

While it is not the aim of this letter to provide an exhaustive list of problems that this article exhibits or to provide a critical response, we would like to note a few points that are indicative of the larger issues. We believe that this article falls short of scholarly standards in various areas:

1. It uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields; for example, the author uses the language of “transgenderism” and engages in deadnaming a trans woman;

2. It mischaracterizes various theories and practices relating to religious identity and conversion; for example, the author gives an off-hand example about conversion to Judaism;

3. It misrepresents leading accounts of belonging to a racial group; for example, the author incorrectly cites Charles Mills as a defender of voluntary racial identification;

4. It fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of “transracialism”. We endorse Hypatia’s stated commitment to “actively reflect and engage the diversity within feminism, the diverse experiences and situations of women, and the diverse forms that gender takes around the globe,” and we find that this submission was published without being held to that commitment.

Savage! Vicious! In an academic way, anyway. It never quite rises to the level of suggesting the rack, thumbscrews, or drawing and quartering, though. And yet, in an article titled This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like, it’s bluntly stated that…

This is a witch hunt.

Well.

Really?

It sort of takes one’s breath away. I guess you can call me Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-finder General, since I sometimes write strongly worded, angry criticisms of bad politics and stupid science, which is now apparently completely equivalent to the torture-murder of innocent women. We’re supposed to completely ignore the fact that poor scholarship of the sort being criticized actually does real harm to people, people who are often already marginalized and oppressed.

At least there’s one funny bit here. These same people who like to fling about the phrase “witch hunter” with indiscriminate abandon, and casually minimize the suffering of accused “witches”, are sensitive to another word: go ahead, call them “transphobic” and watch them squawk. How dare you insult them?

Our American madness

While our congress pats itself on its fanatical dedication to gutting health care, women are dying. This is a chart of maternal mortality in pregnancy per 100,000 live births.

Our health care system, among many other things, is broken. It is not the will of God or manifest destiny or any kind of positive American exceptionalism, because as the chart clearly shows, other countries do not have this problem to the same degree we have, and while they’re working to improve public health, we’re doing our damnedest to worsen it.

Thanks, regressive Republican vermin. You’re all traitors to humanity as well as to your country.

Perfectly innocuous, mundane video inspires hyperbole on the internet

I am mystified — the most trivial things get labeled with extravagant labels on the internet, and I’m experiencing hyperbole fatigue (actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the annoying ads that are generated for this post are full of this crap). The latest example is this “viral video” that is being described as “bizarre“, “uncomfortable“, “revolting“, and “gross“. It’s none of those things. It’s routine and commonplace. It’s just a razor clam on an Oregon beach.

This copy has the most ordinary title: “clam digs into sand”.

My family used to dig for razor clams, and we knew how fast they could burrow. It wasn’t gross, it was wonderful: they dig by anchoring themselves with that muscular foot and expelling water to fluidize the sand around them, and then contracting muscles to pull themselves deeper into the muck, which then firms up around them. They were so fast at burrowing in that you needed special tools to keep up with them — a clam gun, which was a tube you’d push around the clam and then pull up to remove the clam and all the wet sand around it (that could be heavy work), or these narrow shovels that would let you dig fast. We’d walk along the beach or in the shallows, looking for spurts from their siphons or the little dimples they’d leave on the surface, and then you’d race to excavate them before they got away.

Here’s a video from the Washington state parks department on how to dig for razor clams.

They’re delicious, by the way. That clam is just one big hunk of almost pure muscle.

Also, that video shows what I’ve always thought of as a real beach: gray, cloudy, foggy, and wet, and going to the beach meant putting on denim and flannel and good solid boots, getting cold and damp, and coming home to a seafood feast. It was kind of the opposite of glamorous and weird, internet.

One class down

I tackled my big class, genetics, yesterday. Final exam graded, and final grades submitted to the registrar. Two smaller classes to wrap up, probably will get them done today, except that I’ve got another job to do: it’s time for the end-of-the-term lab audits by the discipline safety officer, who is…me. I get to spend my morning checking fire extinguishers and chemical waste containers and ticking check boxes.

Summer is almost here.

It is not pragmatic for a university to suck up to their enemies

I’ve been called tactless, among other things, and it’s a fair cop — I’m not very diplomatic. But I am definitely much more judicious than anyone in the Trump administration, I guess. Trump himself is a blundering nitwit, handling this whole Comey affair like a short-tempered, impulsive twit, and Sean Spicer, who is supposed to be good at public relations, was hiding from the press in the bushes.

And now, it’s Betsy DeVos. Poor Betsy. She gave the commencement address at a historically black college, Bethune-Cookman University. Not only is she the person in charge of dismantling the educational system in this country, but the Trump administration has consistently supported racist policies — Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have I said enough? She should have known what she’d get: students and parents booed her throughout the speech, turned their back on her, and some walked out. It was nuts that she was even there. It was amazingly clueless of her to agree to do it, and even more shocking is that she was invited to give that speech. What was going through the mind of Edison Jackson, president of the university? Not much, it seems. He has given three reasons.

But Jackson has staunchly defended his decision, telling reporters Wednesday, God is on our side, and when he’s for you, what does it matter who’s against you?

WTF? That’s a load of god-bothering fatalism right there. Why bother going to college? In’shallah, God will take care of his own.

He called DeVos’s visit an opportunity to engage and educate the secretary, and said she had met earlier with 12 Bethune-Cookman students who had offered her concrete policy suggestions.

That’s a slightly better reason, but it’s still somewhat delusional. DeVos has a long track record of desiring to happily gut schools, and I don’t think a meeting over lunch is going to change her.

Ah, but here comes the real reason.

But he also presented the decision as pragmatic. We are always about the business of making new friends, Jackson said. Her department controls 80% of the revenue that comes into our school. Why wouldn’t we want to do that?

You don’t want to do that, because her department controls 80% of your revenue. Fight back. Resist. It is inappropriate that these people should have so much power over public education, and it’s administrators who constantly concede greater and greater control who are part of the problem.

The students of Bethune-Cookman University who were vocal in their opposition to this anti-education Education Secretary have more integrity than the president of Bethune-Cookman University.

Look at these students!