Jordan Peterson and friends

Oh, shut up, Jordan Peterson. He was at this ghastly Turning Point USA conference last week, and he gets to meet Charlie Kirk, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Donald Trump Jr, so he takes the opportunity to lecture them about the wicked left. It’s a bizarre one-sided conversation in which he Petersonsplains to them about the nature of the Left, the Left, the Left, laying all blame on them, and never bothers to consider the oppressive nature of the Right. Bonus: continuous weird hand gestures throughout. Double bonus: Charlie, Kimberly, and Junior look excruciatingly bored throughout. What? You want us to have a serious discussion?

His basic point is that the Left is just as uptight about sex as the Right, so maybe that is a productive avenue for a meeting of the minds. But he doesn’t seem to recognize the differences, that the Right wants to control who you have sex with, and how you do it, while the Left doesn’t care about what individuals do in the privacy of their own home, but are very concerned about individual freedom and autonomy, and that consent is paramount.

The radical leftist types, their basic claim is that anything goes. But at the same time they’re putting forward these affirmative consent regulations and laws in many states, and they’re insisting that we live in the middle of a rape culture and they’re acting as if sex is a very volatile and dangerous enterprise, which actually happens to be the case. And so there’s…even though this issue is extraordinarily tense, partly because people on the left, I would say, would like to let a thousand flowers bloom, let’s say, there is an accruing agreement that there is some deep discussion that has to be had about sexual morality.

There isn’t a middle ground there. What is the compromise? Peterson doesn’t have a clue. He just says They’re upset on the left, they’re upset on the right, therefore they’re comparable, without noticing that they’re upset about radically different things: the Right is upset that they can’t control sexual behaviors, and the Left is upset that some people (including some on the left) still want to control sexual behaviors, and especially control women. That’s the key difference. There is no compromise to be made, no discussion to be had.

His explanation is that it’s all about birth control.

We haven’t adapted to the birth control pill yet. You know it was a major technological revolution, the birth control pill. It’s only been fifty years, and we haven’t figured out what it means for women to have control over the reproductive function and what the consequences of that should be socially. The leftist types, especially in the Sixties, thought you could just blow sexual morality up completely, because now people were free to do what they want but that isn’t working. There’s a backlash against that, on the left, as well, so it would be fun and necessary to think…fun, it would be engaging and necessary to think that through, ’cause maybe there’s room for some real discussion about that.

First, about the Sixties — there was a lot of exploitive crap going on, and there still is. There are always people who think freedom from consequences means freedom for them, but not for you, and that blowing up sexual morality was an opportunity to get more sex, rather than an opportunity for their partners to be liberated. I also don’t think there’s much to figure out about the consequences of ‘allowing’ women to control their own bodies — did we ever have that conversation about allowing men to have the freedom to control their own lives?

But again, he only rails against the sinister Left. I think for the most part the Left is on the same wavelength here: consent is essential, both women and men get to decide what sexual behaviors are rewarding, and that Charlie Kirk isn’t the reasonable, tolerant guy we should have a conversation with.

And Jesus, is Peterson so oblivious he doesn’t realize who he’s openly aligning with here?

Journalism as a high-risk profession

It’s not like being a lumberjack or a commercial fisherman, but being an American journalist does involve risk. We’ve just joined the list of the top 5 most dangerous nations for journalists! You can read the full report from Reporters Without Borders. It’s not a distinction to take pride in.

The report doesn’t place specific blame, but I suspect that having a wanna-be dictator who idolizes tyrants and urges his followers to target journalists might be playing an enabling role here.

How about if we never elect death-cultists, or people who appoint death-cultists, to office ever again

Mike Pompeo promising never-ending struggle until the Rapture:

We are plagued with an ominous number of these evangelical fanatics who are focused on the “End Times”, believe in prophecy, and bend all their effort to making prophecies of doom and death come true. Could we please stop putting them in office where their effectiveness in killing the world is amplified?

Shocking revelation about my core discipline

My whole worldview is in upheaval. I thought I had a Ph.D. in biology, and broadly understood what that entailed, but now I learn that the proper way to parse the name of the discipline is not to read “bio” as “life”, but “bi” as in “two”. I’m a two-ologist!

Isn’t folk etymology fun? Especially when wielded by a conspiracy-theorist, racist, sexist, climate-change-denying, pro-war MAGAt to get the rationalization he wants.

Wow. That boy is stupid.

Are you planning a conference?

Then you need this book, How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports, by Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner. It’s free! My first thought was that wouldn’t this deserve a short pamphlet, at best? But no — it’s incredibly thorough, explaining all the hows and whys of codes of conduct, giving examples and showing the advantages, and also why you’re going to get screwed if you don’t implement one. Since it’s free and comprehensive, you have no excuse for ignoring it…and if you do ignore it, it just means you’re going to have a poorly managed conference.

It also has links to other resources, like this article, No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities. Oy, but that one resonates. Not just for tech communities, but atheist/skeptical communities — we have a plague of “rock stars” who suck resources and may also draw valuable attention to events and movements, until ultimately and seemingly invariably, they turn into black holes of bad PR. Read it before you start inviting speakers.

End of a project

I am now committed. This morning, I got to work and started dismantling my jerry-built zebrafish facility. It was built to last, with annoying bolts everywhere, some of them quite high up on the structure, and now I can’t feel my right shoulder after all the wrench work above my head. We got the bulk of it disassembled and removed, and all that’s left right now is a lot of PVC plumbing suspended from the ceiling and going nowhere, with a huge cattle trough (the water reservoir) and a big ol’ water pump. That’ll go tomorrow, clearing up a whole bunch of bench space, which I think will be home to a new, additional incubator.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the stuff. Mary might use some of it to set up a herb garden in our sun room — it’s a lot of shelving and shallow trays. There is also a great deal of hydroponic gear I used to deliver recycled water to the tanks, and she got a glint in her eye and dreamt of a hydroponic drip system for plants…which may be overly ambitious.

But there’s no going back now. I’m going to be running an arthropod lab, rather than a fish lab, which is a bit of a change. I’m still young enough to change my research focus, right? Although not young enough to do serious physical labor without feeling like I overtaxed every muscle in my upper body.

American inhumanity claims another victim

I had a nice, relaxing Christmas day yesterday. We had my oldest son Alaric over for dinner, and we did a little hangout online with Connlann, Ji, and Knut (he walks now! Watch out, world!), and and with Skatje, Kyle, and Iliana (who was quiet and wise throughout). Christmas has no religious associations at all for me, but the one thing it means is reconnecting with family, and a reminder that my greatest accomplishment in my life is producing three wonderful kids who have gone on to become admirable adults. And now there’s another generation coming along.

The worst thing you can tell me on Christmas, the thing that most violates my humanist, family-focused interpretation of the day, is to tell me that children are dying. So of course, once again, a young child has died in the custody of the US Customs and Border Patrol.

…an agent noticed Monday that the child had become ill. The boy and his father were taken to Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo, N.M, where the boy was diagnosed with a cold, according to a CBP news release.

Later, he was found to have a fever and was held for an additional 90 minutes before he was released with prescriptions for an antibiotic and Ibuprofen.

But the child became more seriously ill Monday night, when he vomited, and was taken back to the hospital. He died shortly after midnight on Christmas Day.

Diagnosed with a cold, and given an antibiotic? That makes no sense. There was something more there in the child’s symptoms, which was basically ignored but for handing him a pill. Colds don’t make you vomit, or give you a fever. There was something seriously wrong with this boy (obviously, given that he died of it), and he got inadequate care.

You know, when you’re dealing with thousands of people, it is inevitable that some will fall ill, and some will die. I’m sure that children in the solicitous care of loving parents die every day. If the Border Patrol were thoroughly humane and careful in their treatment of people in their care, there would still be occasional deaths. But what matters is how well they actually do care for those people — do they take seriously the moral obligation imposed on anyone who takes responsibility for children? I don’t think they do.

That’s the thing about this wall obsession — it’s about building an excuse to deny responsibility for people on your doorstep. Even more children would die if they were isolated on the southern side of a wall, but we’d then get to pretend it wasn’t our fault, despite the fact that the reason there are migrants in the first place is the US has been working for decades to destabilize and wreck countries in Central America. We own that. And if we aren’t working to our utmost to help these people, the dead children are our fault.