Anne Truitt on Compassion, Humility, and How to Cure Our Chronic Self-Righteousness.

All of Tumblr needs to read this.

Recently on Tumblr I witnessed someone saying that Aubrey Plaza, who is a Latina woman, is not a “real” Latina since she can pass for white.

This sort of thing isn’t restricted to Tumblr, of course, but a lot of these people do hang out there.

My girlfriend was recently reading to me excerpts from a site about unconventional weddings where a woman with Native American heritage had incorporated some NA elements into her wedding.

A commenter promptly signed on to tell her that she wasn’t a real Native American.

Though I don’t completely agree with it, as I believe in social justice, there’s a reason that “Social Justice Warrior” has become a pejorative. It’s not just the Right attempting to besmirch the name. No, these people do it just fine all by themselves.

This is not a cohesive social movement; this is a bunch of whining babies attempting to one-up one another in the Oppression Olympics and having contests to see who can call out someone the fastest.

If the Left wants the win the culture wars, it’s going to have to do better than that.

Why an all-female “Ghostbusters III” is the reboot we need.

That would be amazing.

My ideal cast for this shares a few with the article. Assuming four Ghostbusters:

Melissa McCarthy

Jessica Williams

Emma Stone

Anna Faris

Anna Faris is the funniest person I know who has been in nearly all-terrible works. Time to change that trend.

Sandra Bullock and/or Kristen Wiig could be substituted in for any of those and be great, too.

Funny how if you say anything bad about Islam, you are Islamophobic but in the very same communities many people are lining up left and right to slam Christianity.

This is why and how liberals get a bad name. The excesses of both Islam and Christianity are worth denigrating.

I haven’t really discussed Islamophobia on this blog yet, but it’s a problem in many parts of the world, from the French government banning head coverings to people assuming that Islam is a violent religion. When in reality, if you compare the two, Christianity is a lot more violent than Islam based on their corresponding holy books. Also more misogynistic. No seriously, the Bible is MESSED UP.

A lot of liberals tend to overlook Islamophobia, especially atheists. In fact, Islam tends to become a scapegoat when liberal atheist men want to pretend they care about women while also attempting to silence women in the US complaining about misogyny in the US.

Such lazy arguments that have about as much logic as an ad lib.

Holy books matter – but practice also matters.  And like many, I care about misogyny in the US and everywhere else, too.

This is the cultural relativism of being “fair to both sides” when one side is just wrong.

We have this problem in our discourse around the most important challenges we face where we feel we have to be “fair to both sides.” But sometimes, one of those sides is subjugation and oppression. If you’re OK with legitimizing that side in the interest of “fairness,” you’re essentially saying you’re OK with oppression as a part of the human condition. That’s some hateful shit.

Millions – literally millions – of women are oppressed every day by the strictures and proscriptions of Islam. Pretending this is not so is simply the most ridiculous bit of unreasoning insensibility I’ve yet seen.

How is this level of stupidity even possible? It rivals the anti-vaccine movement for sheer clueless obliviousness.

No, bombing to freedom does not work and should never be done.

But if believing that women all over the world are greatly harmed by Islam makes me Islamophobic, well fuck me I’M FUCKING ISLAMOPHOBIC.

Yep.

“Islamophobia” is what a lot of people trot out when they went to close their eyes, cover their ears and shout “la la la” and ignore the contradictions inherent in their own worldviews.

Me, I like to pull out my contradictions, put them on the table like action figures and make them fight.

Airstrikes like casual sex.

I’ve been in the danger zone of a Hellfire missile strike. Real missile, training mission. We were too close due to bad planning on someone’s part.

I can tell you, it didn’t feel like casual sex.

I think of all the UI “innovations” of late, the ubiquitous and not-very-tasty hamburger menu button is the one I loathe the most.

Fine, use it on a cell phone UI where the screen is tiny and space is at a premium.

But get it the hell off of my desktop machine.

I have all that space on my 30” monitor for a reason – to have the best blend of chrome and UI affordances that I can.

Not everything needs to be crammed into one menu. Not every button needs to be combined with another button.

In most programs these days it takes me 5-10 clicks to be able to do what I formerly could achieve in one or two.

Just unacceptable.

As a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on.

There was nothing I wouldn’t read. Truly. I’d read medical diagnostics manuals. Airline flight manuals. Lists of obscure facts. Dictionaries. You name it, I’d read it. I once read an entire book that pharmacists use to determine drug interactions.

So one day my teacher was discussing crack cocaine and how we shouldn’t do it. She mentioned something about how  — repeating the urban myth – that crack was more dangerous due to how it was made.

She asked rhetorically (it turns out) if anyone knew how crack was made.

I didn’t take it as a rhetorical question. I answered it accurately because I’d read it in some magazine in the library a few weeks before.

I was nine years old.

Parents were called, parent-teacher conferences were set up and all sorts of other rigmarole. Eventually it was acceded to that I was not manufacturing crack cocaine behind the school in my spare time.

This sort of thing was not an abnormal occurrence. I was constantly in trouble for “having knowledge that I shouldn’t have.”

I got in more trouble more often for this sort of thing than for fighting – and I got in fights nearly every day.

It didn’t make me want to stop learning, but it did make me completely ignore anything that was happening in school.

In a way it was a gift, though a gift with consequences. It means I don’t get as much credit for the knowledge I do possess because I don’t have the right set of papers (aka credentials) to go with the erudition.

But such is life.

This piece from Cosma Shalizi about IQ/g was going around a few years ago. Not being a statistician, I spent several days attempting to understand it.

Eventually, I did.

I was not impressed.

After all that reading and looking things up, though, I grew too bored with it to write about it.

His argument, like many academic arguments with some hidden political agenda, reduces to attempting to define the problem or quality in such a way that no one ever does, and then “proving” this ridiculous definition of the property does not exist.

It’s all obfuscated of course in fancy talk that few people can understand, but that’s what it boils down to.

Luckily I’m clever enough to understand it and then realize it’s mostly bullshit.

To clarify what I am talking about, is there a thing called “love?” Or the “mind?” Or “trust?”

If so, where are they? How do you locate them statistically?

Hint: you cannot.

Therefore in Shalizi’s world they do not exist.

Obvious balderdash like this is what occurs when academic discourse is strained through politics.

Personally, I don’t think g is nearly as important or as “real” as many make it out to be. But I do believe it exists and is measurable, that something is being measured there.

“Proving” that it’s not any one thing you can point to in the real world is about as good as proving that bicycles aren’t airplane pupae – utterly worthless.

For a more nuanced and thorough (and technical) refutation of Shalizi’s hack piece, read here.

Shalizi and his piece are beloved for political reasons.

I don’t care about political reasons.

I care about whether g is useful and what it can tell us. I believe it can tell us something, though it’s over-emphasized.

Defining it in bizarre ways and making category mistakes about it, and then proving that it doesn’t exist using specious methodology, is not really that helpful.

(See also this piece.)

I don’t drink hot coffee or hot tea. Can’t stand either one of them, really, except in very small doses.

I’m a medium super-taster, so both taste as bitter to me as eating raw coffee grounds would taste to regular people. I do drink sweet tea, though, and like the taste of iced coffee as long as it’s 80% sugar and 20% coffee.

I also don’t like plain water especially if it’s in a plastic container as I can taste the plastic. But even in a glass container, I don’t like its taste as it invariably though being tasteless (allegedly) tastes like its container.

It’s probably been 20-30 years since I’ve finished a whole glass of water. In fact it’s been so long now I can’t remember the last time it happened.

Something I’ve noticed is that society as a whole has gotten vastly more prudish since the 80s, when I first started actively observing culture with a critical eye.

I don’t know why, exactly. Is it just cyclical? Is it permanent? I don’t like it much. Feels very puerile. Both the Left (including many/most feminists) and the Right (conservatives and their ilk) seem to support this shift, so what changed?

In one small example, when I was a kid in Florida (where it is very fucking hot), it was not at all unusual to see a woman in a bikini top in the grocery store in high summer. Now it never really happens. No one thought anything of it then, but now it’d be a scandal.

It’s not just an American phenomenon. That’s why I linked to stories about the French also becoming more prudish and Canada with its renewed war against sex workers.

What’s going on? Whatever it is, it doesn’t bode well.

It would take approximately five trillion dollars a year to provide every over-18 adult in the US with a basic income of $20,000 a year.

That seems like a lot of money, but it is completely doable. Especially when you consider that it would mean most Social Security payments could over time be rolled into this and eliminated. That’s around a trillion a year currently.

So, then, four trillion a year to provide a population of approximately 245 million adults with a BI of $20,000 a year.

Well, where would this money come from?

Actually, it doesn’t have to come from anywhere. The US is a fiat currency state; it can create money at will.

Yes, inflation, and all of that. That is an issue. But the main reason that inflation has been made such a bugaboo is that it harms the interests of the rich far more than it is likely to harm the plebeian’s.

In times of increasing structural unemployment, depressed aggregate demand, and nearly non-existent inflation, sending money to people – especially if phased in gradually – is far less of an issue than you’ve been led to believe. A BI would have a large net positive effect on the economy, though it would over time make the very rich less so – which is why it has no chance in hell of seeing the light of day.

Most of the fear of the BI is drummed up by employers who don’t want people to have better alternatives to the demeaning and degrading jobs they now are forced to hold. It’s a lot easier to say “hell no” to that job at McDonald’s if you have $20,000 a year coming in no matter what.

But if you are one of those who naively and against all facts believes that in this case the money must come from somewhere – as if there is a money fairy just blessing the “real” money out there – then consider this: the top one percent of earners control 40% of wealth in the US. By golly, I think I’ve found where it could come from!

I started writing about the BI due to this post. I was going to pick on this person more due to them having bought in – like most people on the Left (and Right) – to the story which the plutocrats have put in front of them.  But then I wasn’t feeling quite as snide as usual and I also realized that the unsophisticated economic views on display are what most people are programmed with so that they do not resist. Not their fault.

As usual, the predictions that the new Apple watch will fail are completely wrong. For so many reasons.

Every product Apple has released has been predicted by large portions of the tech press – who continue to willfully misunderstand why people buy Apple products – to be imminent failures.

But it actually sounds pretty fucking cool to me.

Weather, Calendar, Messages, and Maps are obvious uses for a tiny wrist computer. (The Maps app can use a well-placed “wrist tap” to tell you which direction to turn while it’s giving directions.) You can also sketch a little doodle on the touchscreen and send it to a friend.

Apple continues to do something that no other company has done so successfully for so long: design products that quickly go from, “Why would I ever need that?” to “How did I live without that?”

I’ve learned with Apple and its prognosticators that the more vehemently they predict a product’s failure, the more likely it is to succeed.

Some people never learn.

Apparently the trailer park where I lived out the first years of my life is still around, and it looks much improved from when I ambled through its beer-can-bestudded lanes.

I have only dim memories of it as I was young, but it was squalid and noisy back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Neal Stephenson called North Florida “the trailer park capital of the world.” This is for good reason, though now I think areas like St. Petersburg, Sebring and Tampa compete for this title since so many near-indigent retirees now move to 55+ retirement trailer park communities in those places.

I remember moving away from Paradise Village — what a misnomer! —  and how happy my parents were when we did. I’d never known anything else so I had no idea what to expect.

Because I’ve been reading off a screen routinely since I was four years old, I bet this is not true of me.

Other than a few rich people and those working in universities, I was in the first small wave of true digital natives. This despite growing up very poor. Luckily my dad had labor to trade as a mechanic and was obsessed with computers. (He would’ve sooner sold just about anything than get rid of our one old rickety computer we had when I was 4-7.)

If we’d had no computer in the house, my life would be very, very different and much worse.

I’m a lot more comfortable reading off a screen and always have been. Even more so now that fonts have improved so much due to the availability of high-DPI displays.

For some things – like field guides – physical books are still a bit better. For everything else, just give me a screen please.

One of the main techniques used to allow and permit the rest of the US avoid addressing its racial issues is pretending that all racism resides only in the Deep South.

I grew up in the Deep South, and yes there is a lot of racism there. I knew personally several KKK members in my hometown. However, I left as soon as I could and it turns out there is a lot of racism elsewhere, too.

Surprise!

The main difference I’ve noticed is that the racism in the South is a bit more overt, while in the North/West it’s more covert.

What this means is that if your name is Shaniqua or Rakesha or some other appellation considered stereotypically black, in Seattle or in Mobile you still won’t get that job but in Mobile someone might actually tell you it’s because you have an “ethnic” name or worse. In Seattle, they’ll pretend that you just “weren’t a fit.”

Results are the same, the execution is just a bit different. See the movie Far From Heaven for a good fictionalization of this dynamic.

This isn’t by any means exact, because of course unconscious biases are present and nearly impossible to quantify, but I’d say that in the Deep South, about 60% of those over 50 are actively, consciously racist, while it’s more like 40% in the rest of the US.

While for those under 50 in the Deep South it’s more like 30% and about the same in the rest of the country, too.

But those numbers aren’t really important to argue over. The point I am making is that many activists point at the evil South and say, “We need to fix all the racists over there!” Meanwhile, they ignore all the racists right next to them because the ones in the South are “worse.”