We have this lovely old slippery elm in our backyard — it’s huge and thickly branched and towers over our house. This evening we noticed that sometime during the day, we had a visitor.
That is not a good sign. We’ll have to call the tree doctor tomorrow and get a diagnosis.
Any Chinese readers here? I’ll be speaking in Beijing at the end of October, and I also have a day or two for sightseeing.
I’m trying. This helps.
I was just reading this post by Shiv about the expectations of femininity, making the point that there is a huge role for perception in how we react to sex-based phenomena — women are supposed to be hyper-emotional, even when they’re not, and we’ve all got this idea that extremely high level cognitive/emotional phenomena can be reduced to a simplistic measure of how much of which steroid you’ve got in your blood.
Here’s the thing: I’ve read the literature attempting to link estrogen to anything but physiology. It’s quite desperate. It’s EvoPsych levels of bad. The problem is that even if you do find a correlation, there’s a million and one moving parts–the biggest problem being “how do you measure levels of emotionality.” In the absence of anything remotely convincing, I remain skeptical of the exact role estrogen supposedly plays on emotional expression. It is far too convenient for these poorly designed experiments to support cultural stereotypes. The problem runs so deep that we’re asking the wrong question–how, exactly, does one measure the null hypothesis? Are you able to reasonably assess stoicism without the gender of the subject prejudicing your measurement?
Men don’t cry, but it’s not because testosterone dries up your tear ducts — it’s because men are mocked fiercely if they show that kind of emotion. Women are supposed to be emotionally expressive, but it’s not because estrogen somehow disinhibits emotional centers of the brain, but because they’re conditioned by years of expectations that girls are supposed to be this way.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, and different cultures have different expectations of gendered behavior, and that is what shapes us most. One of the best discussions I’ve seen of that is in Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, in which she takes a cold hard anthropological look at the myth of the woman enslaved by her instinct for mothering, and shows that it’s bunk.
And then I ran across this commercial, which is the most fucking macho thing ever. There’s a lot of blood in it, so you may not want to watch it. It’s an ad for feminine napkins.
Who we are is partly a product of biology (but there’s more commonality between men and women than our sexist society wants to accept), but how we think of ourselves is a matter of attitude.
And then shoot them.
Amanda Marcotte writes about the performative worship of the police at the Republican National Convention. Meanwhile, in Miami, a black caregiver trying to help a severely autistic man who wandered away from a group home, was confronted by police who’d been called by someone who said the man was wielding a gun (it was actually a toy truck). The caregiver ends up lying in the street with his hands up and clearly empty, trying to explain to the police that he was trying to help the man, and please don’t shoot.
So shot him, obvs.
“When I went to the ground, I went to the ground with my hands up,” Kinsey said, “and I am laying there just like this. Telling them again there is no need for firearms. He is autistic. He has a toy truck in his hand.” …
“I’m like this right here, and when he shot me, it was so surprising,” Kinsey said. “I thought it was a mosquito bite, and when it hit me I had my hands in the air, and I’m thinking I just got shot! And I’m saying, ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’ and his words to me were, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
Then they handcuffed him. Why, I don’t know. I think the new logic has changed from “if you see a criminal, shoot them” to “if you shoot them, you see a criminal.”
You can find out with the Audubon Native Plants Database. Just type in your zip code, and it’ll tell you what kind of plants were originally in your area, and what birds are attracted to them.
I’ve never been to one, and I’ve never even been invited to one, and this is the first account I’ve read of one, and it’s not quite what I would have expected. Hosting the party was Milo Yiannopoulos — perfectly legitimate, since he is openly gay — and…Pam Geller? Geert Wilders? Praise for Trump, excoriation of Democrats and other liberals, condemnation of jihadis, and…bad dancing?
I am so disappointed. That doesn’t sound open and liberal and joyful and fabulous at all.
The other day, I was briefly harangued by someone named William Peters on Twitter. It was a strange comment that was simultaneously pro-evolution while trying to imply some peculiar doubts — it was just off a bit. He wasn’t rude or anything, but I was intrigued and curious, so I dug a little deeper. He says many things that are slightly off.
Like having a simple mathematical explanation for the evolution of humans from fish.
The world is spherical, not flat! Cartesian math = 19th C. Polar co-ordinate math describes evolution of fish to man https://t.co/OT6ZZtcM3K
— William S. Peters MD (@wllm_ptrs) July 19, 2016
The world is spherical, not flat! Cartesian math = 19th C. Polar co-ordinate math describes evolution of fish to man
Uh-oh. I see trouble coming. This is a common attractor in crank biology, the idea that form is only superficially complex, and that underlying it all is an elegant mathematical formula that will explain all, and of course, the author has discovered the secret equation that will cut through all the shallow trivia pursued by his peers. We saw it in Stuart Pivar, in Vincent Fleury, in Erik Andrulis. I can sympathize with the seductive power of geometry, but at some point, you have to look at the data…and the data trumps all your abstract theorizing every time.
But at least Peters isn’t talking about toruses, the usual crank attractor. No, this guy is into vacuum cleaner hoses, magnets, electricity, and…
@jimalkhalili Quantum biology has arrived #persanguinemnostrum Enjoyed your talk in NZ 2014
— William S. Peters MD (@wllm_ptrs) July 19, 2016
Quantum biology has arrived #persanguinemnostrum Enjoyed your talk in NZ 2014
We have “quantum”, mission control, I repeat, “quantum”.
If you’re in the mood for some grandeloquent strangeness, check out his website, persanguinemnostrum.info. The opening announcement is this:
FISH TO MAN
EVOLUTION
THROUGH OUR BLOOD
COMING SOON
Scalzi has some comments on the banning of Milo, and I particularly like this point.
It’s good that Twitter punted Yiannopoulos, but let’s not pretend that it doesn’t look like Twitter did some celebrity calculus there. Yiannopoulos and pals had a nice long run pointing themselves at all other manner of people they didn’t like, for whatever reason, and essentially Twitter didn’t say “boo” about it. But then they harass a movie star with movie star friends, many of whom are Twitter users with large numbers of followers, and whose complaints about Twitter and the harassment of their friend get play in major news outlets, and Twitter finally boots the ringleader of that shitty little circus.
So the math there at least appears pretty obvious from the outside. You can punch down on Twitter and get away with it, but don’t punch up, and punch up enough to make Twitter look bad, or you’ll get in trouble (after more than a day). Is this actually the way it works? I’m not at Twitter so I can’t say. I can say I do know enough women of all sorts who have gotten all manner of shit by creeps on Twitter, but who weren’t in a movie and had movie star friends or got press play for their harassment. And they basically had to suck it up. So, yeah, from the outside it looks like Twitter made their decision on this based on optics rather than the general well-being of their users.
This is exactly the rule set that fosters bullies, and is going to make the problem worse.
It was just a mistake.
A US air strike killed more than 85 civilians, including children, in Syria on Tuesday after the coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.
Some eight families were hit as they tried to flee fighting in their area, in one of the single deadliest strikes on civilians by the alliance since the start of its operations in the war-torn country.
A slight inaccuracy. A little slip-up. A bit of a faux pas, don’t you know. A blunder. A goof. Flubbed that one. A boo-boo. One brown person fleeing looks like another. They were wearing middle-eastern-looking clothes! If they didn’t want to get blown up, they shouldn’t have been living in a place that has terrorists. How do you know they were all innocent? Not our fault, we had good intentions, we didn’t mean to kill frightened civilians. Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. We have to kill the terrorists, sometimes civilians get in the way. Would you rather let the terrorists win? Collateral damage. Collateral damage. Collateral damage.
85 dead Syrians/terrorists/Islamic State fighters/Muslims. The labels help. Makes it easier to forget these were 85 dead human beings, as long as you don’t use the labels “children”, “women”, “men”, “families”, “people”.
