Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
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Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
Warning: Discussion of Butts, particularly squeezing thereof.
I’m going to vent for just a second.
I call them “Renfields” after the vampire’s slave in Dracula. They’re the weak, beglamoured, cowardly, venal, crippled, soul-dead followers of a master vampire: their sense of right or wrong is completely overruled and all that’s left is fear of the master’s displeasure.
PZ wonders if he’s as flawed as the people being accused. [pha] That little bit of effort is part of living an examined life.
I got into a lengthy facebook flail-a-thon [here] with some real live biological determinists, last night. Seriously! I had allowed myself to believe that such people didn’t actually exist. Silly me. Now I remember why my appearances on facebook are brief (occasionally I use a stealth account to do investigations) and are usually followed by years of silence.
I’m slow on the uptake because I usually have my head in the clouds or I’m glaring at some project and not thinking about anything else. But hanging out at pharyngula back in the scienceblogs days helped clue me in to the gender imbalance in tech. (It required a few privilege-checks and beatings)
Go read this, if you haven’t already.
Shiv asks some questions that I, in my cis-privileged way, have pondered while drunk, weary, or otherwise bleary. I frame it differently but, to me, it boils down to “what is ‘hot’?” and it seems to me that a lot of people don’t put very much thought into that. I have, and all I want to say right now is that it’s instructive to think about it.