June and July are the peak months for tornadoes in the upper midwest, and June was a bit of a bust, so I guess we can expect July to compensate. One ripped through Dalton the other day, which is less than an hour north of us.
Yikes. To put it in perspective, though, in the 20 years I’ve been here, I haven’t seen one, although they have come close, and I’ve seen the sky turn greenish.
I rather like the woman in the video who tells the yammering guy to STFU, at least.
Trying to figure out why so many TERFs are British, I think this answer hits the nail on the head.
The answer lies in part to the coalescence of a certain set of ideas in a very specific circle of voices in the early 21st century — voices that later went on to hold high profile positions in much of the U.K.’s print and broadcast media.
I’m referring here to the U.K. Skeptics movement of the early 2000s. Despite the fact that it was basically a loose network of people who were far too impressed with themselves for not believing in astrology and homeopathy, they have an outsized legacy. The movement consisted largely of groups meeting in pubs and organising talks promoting a specific brand of scientific skepticism and concerned primarily with the “debunking” of alternative medicine and pseudoscience. So far, so niche, but there is compelling evidence that suggests that both the ideological basis and some of the specific proponents of U.K. skepticism in the noughties are implicated in the spread of transphobic thinking into the mainstream media in this country.
While claiming to be the country’s foremost critical thinkers, the group was riddled with anti-humanities bias and a fetish for a certain kind of “science” that it held to reveal a set of immutable principles upon which the world was built with almost no regard whatsoever for interpretative analysis based on social or historical factors. Part of this mode of thinking was an especially reductivist biologism: the idea that there are immutable realities to be found in our DNA, and if we just paid enough attention to Science and stopped trying to split hairs and discover meaning over in the superfluous disciplines of the humanities, then everything would be much simpler. It’s precisely this kind of biological essentialism — which skirts dangerously close to eugenics — that leads people to think they can “debunk” a person’s claim to their gender identity, or that it should be subjected to rigorous testing by someone in a lab coat before we can believe the subject is who they say they are.
I saw the same thing in US skeptics, of course. But there was something fundamental going on that is also reflected in the British school of evolutionary biology, represented by Maynard Smith and Dawkins, that totally embraced reductive explanations and adaptationism, vs. the American subset led by Lewontin and Gould, who fiercely opposed eugenics and detested the arrogance of thinking biology could be reduced to a catalog of alleles. My experience may also be colored by the fact that there were several prominent UK skeptics (at least, I was told over and over that they were big names) who I had to ban here because they were persistently obnoxious and insistent that there are only two sexes/genders because “biology”.
Then there’s the outcome of all this activity by bigots claiming the mantle of science — some people actually believed them.
Tracey King, a skeptic activist who credits herself with establishing American-style organized skepticism in the U.K., has pointed out that the movement collapsed in the last decade. She attributes this to some good reasons (turns out it was full of sexists, which the rise of social justice concerns helped bring to light.) But these voices did not go away; many of the figures who made up the movement are now prominent voices at one level or another. Helen Lewis, for example, is the deputy editor of the center-left political magazine the New Statesman, and has promoted a barrage of anti-trans articles. Julie Bindel at the Guardian and elsewhere has a well-documented history of transphobia.
Then there’s Graham Linehan, a formerly beloved high-profile comedy writer who has recently been given a warning by police for directly harassing trans women online. Imagine if Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld suddenly started a social media hate campaign against a particular group of people that took up most of their time and you had to accept that was just part of your reality now. It feels a bit like that.
I met Linehan — he came to one of my talks in Dublin. Then, I was quite pleased to see him, but now…oh god what kind of wanker was I inspiring/being inspired by?
By the way, Seinfeld has been a loud voice whining about PC culture on college campuses — if I were him, I’d be wondering why smart young people no longer find him funny, rather than blaming it on a contrived slogan like “political correctness” — but at least he hasn’t carried his obsession as far as Linehan has.
And now for something different. I wanted to experiment with this streaming thing all the cool kids do, so I’m trying out OBS and playing around with YouTube, and the easiest thing to do is to fire up Minecraft and see if I can put it online. Watch! I’ll probably screw up some settings! If it works, you can count on me to die multiple times! You can yell at me over chat!
I don’t know how long I’ll play, since I’m mainly interested in figuring out the mechanics, but if you encourage me to do some stupid thing, I might keep plodding along from disaster to disaster. That’ll be fun, right?
(If you’re wondering about details, this is under Linux, using a Logitech webcam, a Yeti microphone, and OBS software. It should work, with the only question being the competence of the bozo setting it up.)
Hey, that went surprisingly well. All the software worked, I didn’t die in Minecraft, I found a good location to build a house. What could be better? Well, the audio. I was getting an annoying hiss throught, and it would crackle and break up if I spoke too loudly. Maybe I’ll try it again next week, after I hammer out some of the sound problems.
This isn’t going to be a trend towards happy news every morning, but this story on Intransitive is irresistible.
Who knew Godzilla was more tolerant and empathic than some humans?
The University of Minnesota Morris has achieved carbon neutrality!
This year the University of Minnesota Morris achieved a new milestone in its journey toward complete campus carbon neutrality. The campus is now fully carbon neutral in electricity because of on-site clean energy systems.
Over the past decade UMN Morris has built an on-site, community-scale, clean energy platform. In 2019 Environment America recognized that UMN Morris produced the most on-site electricity per student in the United States. The majority of campus power, about 60%, is generated by two University of Minnesota-owned 1.65 megawatt wind turbines. Additional green electricity is generated by several solar photovoltaic systems and a back-pressure steam-turbine at the biomass gasification plant.
I’ve noticed the solar panels sprouting up around campus, so it’s good to see they’ve made significant progress in making our university a bit more green.
I had already known that the number of human chromosomes had been incorrectly reported as 48 (it’s actually 46), and that observers maintained that number for decades, seeing what they expected to see. I’ve used it as an example for years to tell students to clear their heads of preconceptions when making observations, trust what you see, and report your measurements as accurately as you can, because this tendency favoring confirmation bias can corrupt science surprisingly easily. It sounds like a relatively benign example: oops, early investigator makes a mistake counting chromosomes (I’ve done some chromosome work, it’s easy to do), and the initial observation gets perpetuated through the literature until superior techniques make the correct value obvious. Ha ha, don’t do that.
Now Dan Graur digs into the details of the mistake, and it turns out to be a goddamn horror story. There are more lessons here than I thought.
The guy who made the mistake was named Theophilus Painter, and he seems to have stumbled upwards throughout his career by being a terrible person.
The first horror: the specimens he used to make those initial chromosome counts were human testicles lopped off prisoners in an asylum. They were castrated for the crime of excessive masturbation. The methods discuss some grisly details I really didn’t need to know.
“The material upon which this study is based was obtained from three inmates of the Texas State Insane Asylum through the interest and cooperation of Dr. T. E. Cook, a physician at that institution. Two of these individuals were negroes and one was a young white man. In all three cases, the cause for the removal of the testes was excessive self abuse… The operation for the removal of the testes was made, in all three cases, under local anesthesia. An hour or two prior to the operation, the patients were given hypodermic injections of morphine in order to quiet them. This was followed by local injections of Novocain in the operating room. None of the patients exhibited any interest or excitement during the operation, nor did they show any signs of pain except when the vas deferens and the accompanying nerves were cut. One of the negroes went to sleep during the operation.”
Yikes. I guess mutilation of your patients was a routine practice in 1923. No big deal, Negroes don’t feel pain.
The second horror: as you might guess from the passage above, the whole affair was soaking in racism. Painter got the same erroneous chromosome count from all 3 of his victims, but always reported the count separately for his black and white subjects. There may also have been confirmation bias in Painter’s work, because more recent examination of his slides, which still exist, reveal that his methods were a cytological mess and it’s difficult to count chromosome numbers from them at all.
The third horror: Painter later got appointed to the presidency of the University of Texas because he was a reliably negligent creature who would happily turn a blind eye to blatantly discriminatory admission policies, and would allow segregation to continue.
Read Graur for all the details. I’m just dismayed that a point I’ve always used casually as an example of a simple error with long-term consequences is now going to have to be presented as a deeper point about bad science being used for evil. Oh, well, students should know how genetics can be misused for wicked purposes, and here’s yet another case.
I’m still trying to work out the biology of nest building in my spiders — I’ve got some that assemble cunning little nests out of wood shavings, and some that do not. Someday I’ll have to figure out whether this is a different species from P. tepidariorum or not.
Cute, hey? I’ve been looking at spider architecture for a while, and am rather impressed with their work.
I suspect it might be P. tabulata, but I’ve got to do more experiments to be sure. I say more about it on my Patreon page.
So here’s the deal. DragonCon…cancelled, due to the pandemic. Skepticon…cancelled. American Arachnology Society…cancelled. Society for Developmental Biology…cancelled. Convergence…cancelled. Minnesota State Fair…cancelled. Or perhaps, instead of cancelled, I should say postponed, or moved online. It seems a lot of organizations of varying sizes have seen reality and are responding appropriately.
It should make you wonder when you see an event that insists on going on with the show. Like the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, where the organizers seem to believe they actually do live in some kind of faux medieval fantasy land, and are going ahead with plans to open up to the public on 22 August. It was also strange because they teased everyone with an announcement of a big announcement coming “tomorrow”, and I expected it would be an inevitable announcement of a postponement, but no — it was a Very Important Announcement of a discount on the family ticket admission prices. I guess it was essential that everyone know they can get their whole family infected at a reduced price.
Or, when universities announce they’re going to open as planned for the Fall semester. Yeah, fill up those residence halls! Get butts into those seats in the auditoriums! I’m reluctantly going along with our plans for in-person instruction during the pandemic, out of a sense of responsibility to the education of these young people, and also because ICE is goading us by threatening to deport our students who don’t show up, but I have to say that this is another terrible mistake, and I think the whole effort will collapse when the first student comes down with the disease, and we’ll once again have to scramble to rearrange all of our courses.
Wheee.
An example: a man in a restaurant, unprovoked, starts spewing racist slurs at a family.
Jordan Chan, the woman who posted the video, told KION the incident happened as her family was celebrating her aunt’s birthday on the Fourth of July and that man was insulting and harassing her family with racist language, saying, “F— you Asians,” “Go back to whatever f—— Asian country you’re from” and “You don’t belong here.”
The video starts with the woman asking the man sitting one table over to repeat what he had just said to them. The man stares at the camera for a few seconds, then extends his middle finger and says, “This is what I say.”
The man then says, “Trump’s gonna f— you,” as he stood up to leave, followed by “You f—— need to leave! You f—— Asian piece of s—!” A server then immediately yells at him “No, you do not talk to our guests like that. Get out of here,” the waitress could be heard saying in the video.
He gets thrown out of the restaurant. Cancelled! Sounds good to me.
The man turns out to be Michael Lofthouse, CEO of a Silicon Valley tech company (why am I not surprised?). There seem to have been repercussions.
Multiple publications Tuesday identified the man in the video as Michael Lofthouse, CEO of San Francisco cloud computing firm Solid8. A message to the company asking for a statement has not been returned.
A message sent to an Instagram account apparently used by Lofthouse was not returned. In addition, his LinkedIn account appears to have been deleted and his Twitter account has been suspended.
Whoops. Consequences! I’m thinking that must a synonym for “cancelled”.
That was dramatic and obvious, but I think most “cancellations” work like this:
Sounds familiar, actually. I haven’t read any thing by Orson Scott Card in ages, and I won’t in the future, either. My reaction to JK Rowling is the same — nope, won’t read (or buy!) the books, won’t watch the movies, and actually, I just remembered that I might have one or two books on a crowded shelf that could use some lightening. Am I not allowed to throw away my copies of her books? Is consumption of JK Rowling media now mandatory? Am I now not allowed to say, “fuck you, lady”? Whose free speech is being compromised?
It’s always good to see internal schisms within Christianity, but not so great when the guy with a $100 million+ fake boat has all the money and power in the argument. You know, like Ken Ham.
In honor of so-called “Pride Month,” “progressive” Christian author Jen Hatmaker published an episode of her podcast featuring her daughter, Sydney, announcing that Sydney is a homosexual. Her family, apparently, has known for some time and decided that it was time to celebrate this with this world.
Such an announcement should break the heart of Christians. The admission that this young woman has embraced a sinful identity will only bring hurt, brokenness, and pain as she rebels against her Creator and his Word, but also distressing is that her mother—a professing believer—has decided this is something good, to be proud of, and to celebrate. (Really this is Romans 1:32 coming to life.)
If you didn’t know it already, tolerance and acceptance aren’t Christian values in Ken Ham’s brand of religion. I only wish all their hearts would literally break, so we could be rid of them.
