I’ve been parked in my office since 6:30, working away at grading. I’ve made good progress, and what helps is keeping the good music pounding away — I’ve found music to be extremely helpful in keeping my mind focused, which probably says something about my brain. It’s been a lot of Bauhaus & Daft Punk, which probably also tells on my brain.
Anyway, while reading all these essays, I also figured out that I want this baby doll for Christmas.
Sometimes, life comes at you fast. One moment you’re moaning over the fact that wanna-be tyrant got elected in the USA, the next you’re watching a wanna-be tyrant getting slapped down in South Korea, and the next you’re watching a full-blown tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, running for a helicopter to flee Syria before the mob gets him. Putin is very disappointed. Chaos reigns! The citizens are looting the palace!
Forgive me, I’m self-centered and too America-centric, but that got me wondering what we could get by descending on Mar-A-Lago with axes and crowbars.
Now we wait and hope that this is a resurgence of democracy and that a peaceful Syria emerges from the wreckage.
Potholer54 has a new video, in which he explains the error of all those people who say “do your own research,” a phrase so heavily abused by conspiracy theorists and cranks that it has lost much of its meaning. To me, “do your own research” means digging heavily into the background science and reading the journals; to them, it seems to mean finding a Daily Mail headline that fits their preconceptions and running with it.
It’s like he’s talking about me, a little bit. When I got into arachnology 6 or 7 years ago, I was a near total n00b — I could apply what I knew about developmental biology and evolution to them, but I couldn’t just catch a spider in my garage and claim to now be an expert on spiders. I have read so many books and papers on them, in addition to continuing to chase spiders all over the countryside, but I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. I think real scientists have to approach any field with a sense of humility, even if they’ve been working on it for decades.
What really amused me, though, what that this was the latest comment on the video, at the very top of the page.
too bad everyone has randomly decided that human minds aren’t subject to evolution. there might be an answer in evolutionary psychology as to why an animal with nothing but sapience to defend itself has to decide it knows what it’s doing pretty early on in a novel situation if it wants to survive… but of course we all know that’s bunk, right? humans didn’t evolve. we’re special snowflakes. god’s dandruff
What a lovely example of a bad scientific argument! I’m pretty sure that potholer54 understands that humans, and human brains, are the product of evolution, and sarcastically suggesting that he has overlooked an explanation that every right-thinking evolutionary psychologist has deduced is a serious error of comprehension. It is a classic example of evo-psych argumentation, though — I have been told many times that because I find evo-psych to be facile, superficial, and a swamp of bogus reasoning that I must be a creationist.
To be fair, though, not all the people who were offended by the video are incapable of following a simple train of thought. For example, this person at least got the gist of what was said:
Does insulting the “do your own research” group have a positive effect on anyone?
What’s the purpose of this video? Genuine question.
Yes, it was a criticism of the “do your own research” group. Very good! Sirtra understood something.
It was not about insulting them, though. It was explaining that they don’t know what they’re talking about, that they’re pursuing information in a wrong and misleading way, and that maybe “doing your own research” ought to involve cracking open an introductory textbook and actually studying the basics of the topic first, and understanding how the authorities in a field derive their conclusions. The purpose is to explain how to do research properly.
Like how zEropoint68 could benefit from knowing the basics of evolutionary biology before explaining tendentiously what evolutionary biologists believe about the human brain.
My last post was a little cryptic. So let me clarify with some illustrations.
I hope that helps!
He’s better than the Bible.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” shouted Moist. “You can’t just go around killing people!”
“Why Not? You do.” The golem lowered his arm.
“What?” snapped Moist. “I do not! Who told you that?”
“I worked it out. You have killed 2.338 people,” said the golem calmly.
“I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!”
“No, you have not. But you have stolen, embezzled, defrauded and swindled without discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You have ruined businesses and destroyed jobs. When banks fail, it is seldom bankers who starve. Your actions have taken money from those who had little enough to begin with. In myriad small ways you have hastened the deaths of many. You do not know them. You did not see them bleed. But you snatched bread from their mouths and tore clothes from their backs. For sport, Mr Lipvig. For sport. For the joy of the game.”
After all, the heterosexual men are terrible in bed.
“I’m not going to have gay sex,” Luke Moody said of sex that gives his wife an orgasm but not a pregnancy.
That stupid man-child. That poor woman. He thinks that any non-procreative sex is “gay”.
“As soon as we’re together, it’s like no birth control, no nothing, because I’m not going to have gay sex. Gay sex is more than just another man and a man, it’s just the idea of looking at sex as such a materialistic thing and just like, ‘Oh well, we just have an orgasm, and that’s fun or whatever.’”
MAGA is a particularly delusional cult.
Today is the last day of classes! I don’t even have a lot to do: I have one class on Fridays, which is all student presentations, and then I’m free. Sort of. I have a bunch of grading to do, which I plan to wrap up this weekend, and I have to assemble a final exam that will be posted online on Monday. A lot of the pressure is off.
I chose to celebrate prematurely last night by walking to the theater to see Wicked. It was good, I enjoyed it, but of course I have a few complaints.
Movies always do this one annoying thing: they take a character who is supposed to be unsettling and scary, and make her gorgeous. It’s the old trope of putting glasses on a beautiful women to signal that she’s ugly (she isn’t, not in the slightest) and whip them off to indicate that she’s now transformed into glorious beauty. I’m sorry, but Cynthia Erivo was stunning in the role of the Wicked Witch. She might have given me a green skin fetish now.
I do miss Margaret Hamilton. Maybe Erivo will stop singing and start screeching in the next half.
I will say that the flying monkeys are far more terrifying in this movie than they were in the 1939 movie, which is saying a lot, since many children were traumatized by the original monkeys.
Now it’s time to do the responsible adult thing and trudge through the ice and snow to get some work done. The semester isn’t really over until the grades have been submitted.
The rich gomers who are in charge of the “department of government efficiency” have floated some of their plans to save money, which mainly seem to involve the wholesale destruction of various government agencies, throwing thousands of people out of work and also gutting important government funded programs, like science. They want to just shut down NIH? Jesus.
Who wants to tell all the veterans who sacrificed so much for their country that we’re going to simply end Veteran’s Administration health care? I imagine they think we can just privatize all the prisons, and that will somehow save money.
There’s more. Let’s dismantle the department of education, starve Planned Parenthood and the IRS, and let’s stop the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission from meddling in rich people’s money. They also want to make massive cuts in NASA funding, specifically to end all those “bureaucrats and contractors unearned bonuses”. Yeah, too many outside contractors are leeching off NASA’s budget…like SpaceX, maybe?
You know, killing established programs within the federal government does not reduce expenses or improve services — it just opens the door to private parasites moving in and taking over to increase their profits.
This spider has a neat trick. It builds a typical orb web, but then it gets behind it and draws it back, like a slingshot…and when it hears a bug buzzing by, it releases it to spring forward and entangle it’s prey.
A) Untensed web shown from front view. (B) Tensed web shown from side view.
It can hear mosquitos and are triggered when on buzzes within range.
As for the web kinematics, Han and Blackledge determined that they can accelerate up to 504 m/s2, reaching speeds as high as 1 m/s, and hence can catch mosquitos in 38 milliseconds or less. Even the speediest mosquitoes might struggle to outrun that.
I haven’t seen any, but their range is basically holarctic — I would like to encourage them to move in around my house.
Let’s ask Amnesty International.
Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Amnesty International said for the first time on Wednesday, calling on countries, especially those with influence over Israel, such as the US and Germany, to take action to bring the violence to an end.
Let’s ask the people living under oppression.
“Here in Deir al-Balah, it’s like an apocalypse,” Mohammed, a 42-year-old father of three, was quoted by Amnesty as saying. “There is no room for you to pitch a tent; you have to set it up near the coast… You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here.”
Of course, if you ask the Israeli government, you’re going to get nothing but denial.
The Israeli government has repeatedly balked at charges of genocide, claiming it takes great efforts to protect civilians while Hamas deliberately puts Palestinians in danger. The US has made similar defenses, and, when pressed, often defaults to its line that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Amnesty found such claims are “not credible,” saying that the presence of Hamas does not absolve Israel from its obligation to avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.
From “the clear pattern of causing intergenerational harm by dropping bombs on residential areas at night where children, infants, parents and grandparents are sleeping,” to “the constant forced movements of populations that are already traumatized by having been displaced and then attacking them once they have been moved,” O’Brien said it is “absolutely not the case” that Israel’s violence can be “understood exclusively as an attempt to defeat Hamas.”
But the Times of Israel says Lebensraum Needed for Israel’s Exploding Population, as an excuse. They actually said “lebensraum,” as if we’ve never heard that before, and as if it is a legitimate excuse for exterminating the people living on the land you want.
Or we could just look at the numbers.
The Israeli military has killed at least 44,532 Palestinians, injured at least 105,538, and displaced an estimated 90% of people in Gaza since the war began. The death and injury toll is feared to be a drastic undercount due to decimated health and tracking capabilities, and thousands missing in the rubble.
With its conclusion, Amnesty International now joins an ever-burgeoning list of people and organizations who have found Israel to be committing acts of genocide against Palestinians.
How about looking at the pictures?
Now that the question of whether Israel is a genocidal regime is settled, let’s ask another question: why are we still propping them up with arms?
