That’s what I keep hearing about Mitt Romney, anyway. He’s one of those rare Republicans who hasn’t gone full MAGA, Trump-worshipping ditto-head. If he’s one of the better ones, though, what does his recent remark say about the Republican party?
— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) May 3, 2022
OK, Republicans are just bad, every one. There’s no excuse for voting for that party, ever.
I think. But you never can tell.
I just finished my third zoom meeting of the day, and also buckled down and got all those lab reports graded, and then wrapped it all up by calculating my students’ tentative final grades. Tomorrow I’ll write up the optional final, which I expect only a few students will take, and then I’m done.
I gotta say, though, seeing that all the women in the country are being stripped of their reproductive rights did put it all in perspective, making my struggles relatively light work. It would have been nicer to see certain horrible people hauled off in chains, though — it’s hard to whistle while you work when the fascists are taking over, and even now I can’t feel much relief at the finish.
This would be a good day to sit and seethe until I melt down into an angry little puddle, but unfortunately, today is also the last major hoorah of the semester. The lab reports are in, I just have to grade them, and I’ve also got three seminars I have to attend, and then I have to assemble all the grades into a final assessment for the students.
At least I’ve got lots of distractions, I guess.
(Oh, yeah, I also saw the movie with the same title as this post the other day, in a gap in my schedule as I was waiting for more assignments to flood in. It was very good, highly recommended, I want to go see it again.)
It’s happening. The Supreme Court, packed with regressive assholes, intends to overthrow Roe v Wade and throw the country into chaos. A copy of “Justice” Samuel Alito’s decision was leaked, and quotes from this terrible document are circulating on the internet, and we can see where Alito waxed poetic about his decision.
I have wondered sometimes if a man, to be a man, must not master a woman and if a woman to be a woman must not know herself mastered.
No man who has seen a woman in Pleasure Silk, or watched her dance, or heard the sound of a belled ankle or watched a woman’s hair, unbound, fall to her waist can long live without the possession of such a delicious creature.
It is said, in a Gorean proverb, that a man, in his heart, desires freedom, and that a woman, in her belly, yearns for love. The collar, in its way, answers both needs. The man is most free, owning the slave. He may do what he wishes with her. The woman, on the other hand, being owned, is institutionally and helplessly subject, in her status as slave, to the submissions of love.
Perhaps it should only be added that the Gorean master, though often strict, is seldom cruel. The girl knows, if she pleases him, her lot will be an easy one.
It is one thing to own a woman, and it is another to have her within the bonds of an excellent mastery.
Oh, sorry. Those are quotes from John Norman’s Gor series, you know the fantasy novel where men enslave women and the women like it. I wonder if Alito has a basement stash of those horrible old books?
Here’s what he actually wrote. The sentiment is similar, if not quite as openly expressed.
Alito’s draft ruling would overturn a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Mississippi law ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent by seeking to effectively ban abortions before viability.
Roe’s “survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant to the plainly incorrect,” Alito continues, adding that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak,” and that the original decision has had “damaging consequences.”
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes.
Hmm. Well. Roger B. Taney — I mean, Slimy Sam Alito — is right, you know. The oppression of women has a long history in this country — after all, women only won the right to vote 100 years ago, with the ratification of the 19th amendment. Let’s just roll all the progress acquired in the last century to something more like the era when women were chattel. Instead of recognizing that it takes roots a long time to grow, just rip them out now.
Hey, you know what else isn’t deeply rooted in this country? Equal rights for black people. Using Alito’s reasoning, one could argue that we should bring back slavery.
But don’t worry. This decision won’t strip away abortion rights in and of itself, it’s just going to give state governments the right to do so. The Supreme Court will then sit back and smile benignly on every repressive measure the Republicans impose on their citizens.
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft concludes. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
Well then, our elected representatives need to get to work and pass legislation to make abortion and health care a protected right. For once, I might agree with the old fossils of the Democratic party.
“If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans,” read a joint statement from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “… Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation — all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century.”
I notice that they don’t say what they’re going to do about it, other than be outraged and send more fundraising letters to me. At least Bernie Sanders has the right idea.
“Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter on Monday night, calling for an end to the Senate’s filibuster rule to enact such a bill with a simple majority.
In fact, a Democratic bill that would have done just that garnered only 46 votes in February, thanks to the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and the absences of several other Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are more upset that anyone dared to leak the decision.
It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) May 3, 2022
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) deemed it a “a shameless attempt to pressure justices into reversing their correct position that individual states can outlaw killing unborn babies.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called on the court and the Justice Department to “get to the bottom of this leak immediately using every investigative tool necessary.”
Sure, women will die because of this decision, but oh, dear, the decorum! The loss of trust!
Poor guy. Who wants to break the news to him that our trust in the Supreme Court was broken a long time ago? The final straw was when Mitch McConnell decided to deny a nominee so that he could pack the court with the assholes we’ve got there now. It’s a politicized pigsty for the Right.
To be fair, though, obviously there are some citizens who approve of any decision to restrict the rights of other women to get healthcare and abortions.
A woman named Hannah, who declined to provide her last name, stood in the middle of First Street and prayed that the justices “would find resolve.” She said she was “very sad to see people cheering to kill our children” and “was praying that people’s hearts will be softened.”
Yes,” she said, “we also wish to be free.” She smiled. “In every woman,” she said, “there is something of the Free Companion and something of the Slave Girl.
The first textbook giveaway is settled. I’ll be sending a few books away as soon as I have addresses to send them to.
Set A, Essential Cell Biology and the wretched Behe book, goes to logicalcat, the EMT with aspirations.
Set B, Essentials of Genetics with the atrocious Jeanson garbage, goes to Eric on Patreon, who wants to be more up to date on plant hybridization.
Set C, Neuroscience plus Meyer’s narcissistic tome, goes to Crip Dyke, who wants to supplement their knowledge of psychology.
Those will go in the mail as soon as they email me an address.
There are more books to go! I’ll post the next set tomorrow, so if you lost out, you’ve got another shot.
The end is in sight! Then…SPIDERS!
This week is in a curious kind of limbo. It’s the end of the semester, which means the students have lost focus, and I’ve helped them do that. Here’s my general grading strategy:
They’ve got all the information in hand right now to know whether they need to show up for class, and whether anything they learn will be at all helpful in improving their grade. I also announced that Wednesday will be just for administrative sorts of things — final chance to scavenge a few points by arguing with me, or just to discuss whatever they’re curious about in genetics.
So less than a quarter of the class showed up today, I expect it’ll be even less on Wednesday. I’m hoping it’s a calming, quiet part of the term that they can use to study hard for their other classes.
I’m not quite through myself, though. A pile of lab reports will be thrown over the virtual transom at midnight tonight, and I have to get them all graded by Wednesday morning. Then I have to write the final exam, which I expect only a quarter of the class (again) will take, and which will be due on Thursday the 12th, prompting a final, brief flurry of grading, and that’s it. Really, I’ll be officially done next week, but it’s mainly just coasting along for me. Then SUMMER BREAK.
I have plans for that, too. I’m going to be doing some regular spidering stuff, and I have also vowed to strip all the wallpaper from our dining room and master bedroom and repaint by 31 May. It helps to give myself deadlines for the mundane boring jobs.
Except we don’t know what random consequences that would have. After all, Letters from a Birmingham Jail and Mein Kampf were both produced by prisoners. I think that’s also the fatal flaw in long-termist thinking — you can’t plan as if every action has a predictable consequence. It is extreme hubris to think you can derive the future from pure logical thinking.
But that’s what long-termists do. If you don’t know what “long-termism” is, Phil Torres explains it here.
In brief, the longtermists claim that if humanity can survive the next few centuries and successfully colonize outer space, the number of people who could exist in the future is absolutely enormous. According to the “father of Longtermism,” Nick Bostrom, there could be something like 10^58 human beings in the future, although most of them would be living “happy lives” inside vast computer simulations powered by nanotechnological systems designed to capture all or most of the energy output of stars. (Why Bostrom feels confident that all these people would be “happy” in their simulated lives is not clear. Maybe they would take digital Prozac or something?) Other longtermists, such as Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill, calculate that there could be 10^45 happy people in computer simulations within our Milky Way galaxy alone. That’s a whole lot of people, and longtermists think you should be very impressed.
But here’s the point these people are making, in terms of present-day social policy: Let’s say you can do something today that positively affects just 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the 10^58 people who will be “living” at some point in the distant future. That means, mathematically, that you’d affect 10 trillion people. Now consider that there are roughly 8 billion people on the planet today. So the question is: If you want to do “the most good,” should you focus on helping people who are alive right now or these vast numbers of possible people living in computer simulations in the far future? The answer is, of course, that you should focus on these far-future digital beings.
Long-termism is, basically, philosophy for over-confident idiots. Otto would love it, if you know your A Fish Called Wanda memes. It takes a certain kind of egotistical certainty that you personally know all the very best choices which will shape all of the future, and that you know exactly how the future is going to be.
It’s a good article. Only one note struck me as jarringly false.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk sees himself as a leading philanthropist. “SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company are philanthropy,” he insists. “If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy.” How so?
The only answer that makes sense comes from a worldview that I have elsewhere described as “one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about.” I am referring to longtermism. This originated in Silicon Valley and at the elite British universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has a large following within the so-called LessWrong or Rationalist community, whose most high-profile member is Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur and Trump supporter.
That’s not the only answer that makes sense. Another, simpler answer that comes from an understanding that proponents of long-termism are naive twits is that Musk is a narcissistic moron who operates on the basis of selfish whims, and that idea is better supported by the evidence of his behavior. It’s looking at it through the wrong lens. It’s not that LessWrong promotes an influential, principled philosophy, it’s that unprincipled, arrogant dopes find it a nice post hoc rationalization for what they choose to do.
At least not if they’re Russian. All those photos from Ukraine of tanks with their turrets blown off? There’s an explanation. See if you can recognize the design flaw.
“For a Russian crew, if the ammo storage compartment is hit, everyone is dead,” said Robert E. Hamilton, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, adding that the force of the explosion can “instantaneously vaporize” the crew. “All those rounds — around 40 depending on if they’re carrying a full load or not — are all going to cook off, and everyone is going to be dead.”
Yikes. My son briefly drove tanks — American ones — before joining the signal corps, and it’s a good thing his mother didn’t know that job involved driving a large steel-encased bomb. I feel a lot of pity right now for Russian mothers.
