Day: June 1, 2019, 11:45 PM

Temp

Chill Regular-ass Post

Good luck! I am the fucking CTO of my company and I can’t control the temperature of where I work. And, consequently, I freeze every day, even in high summer. The company is contemplating moving completely to a virtual office so when that day arrives, I might become not an ice cube.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, one of the main reasons I am hoping for the office to go remote-only soon is the above ever-present frostbite reason.

When Said

Chill Uncategorized

When scientists say (accurately) that “race doesn’t exist,” they are speaking in genetic and narrow pedantic terms. They are correct in (nearly) all ways that matter in their constrained and socially-blinkered lane.

However, when scientists castigate people for believing in race, the average person is not thinking in genetic or any cogent scientific terms at all, so this is a useless and counterproductive method of pushing back against the idea of race.

To the average non-scientist, race is very, very real and showing them a spreadsheet or a karyotype won’t convince them otherwise — quite the opposite! Assaulting people with data has already been shown to be a terrible, worthless strategy so I am puzzled that is being attempted so often and so persistently. And people are correct to believe in race. Social constructions, after all, are quite real as I argued here recently.

If you don’t think the idea of race is real, if I had dark skin and were waving a gun around on Main Street, how likely is it that some cop would shoot me? Nearly 100%. If I were white (which I am), how likely do you think it is? Much less so, of course.

Don’t try to condescendingly convince people race isn’t real just because it’s “only” a social construct. They know better than the scientists that in all the ways that matter, race is real.

The Below

Chill Regular-ass Post

About the below, my main objection I think is that modern liberalism, progressivism, whatever you wish to call it, has been completely captured by neoliberal thought. It does not and cannot now exist apart from that, and it is utterly impossible for most people to cogitate outside these boundaries. I try, every day, and I have extreme difficulty doing so. Most people don’t try and don’t even realize they should try (even academics).

Trapped inside this labyrinth that looks like the world, all thoughts lead back to the Minotaur of neoliberalistic thought structures.

That is my larger and longstanding objection.

Firmly

Chill Regular-ass Post

I think there are more areas where this is true than ever before, but where I firmly and fully part ways with the current mainstream of liberal wishful thinking is that we should allow someone’s subjective and historically-baseless feelings about their identity to completely define them (unless it is about race, then they are of course terrible and evil).

Society is always a negotiation between one’s felt identity, ones’s culture and history and other contingent attributes that identity originates from and orbits around. Identity, of course, comprises all these factors and more, but allowing the full neoliberal “I choose my choice” version of identity negates the very possibility of a common body politic and is designed to be divisive and alienating.

No, I am not going alt-right. I cannot stand those racist and tediously pseudo-intellectual losers. But much of the left’s current belief structure is unsupported by anything that hews close to any sort of reality of psychology or sociology — or sense.

It Happens

Chill Regular-ass Post

Here’s some of that stuff that people who’ve never been in dangerous situations claim never happens:

I wasn’t in combat, but when I had bullets whizzing by my head (in an army live-fire exercise) I made a joke immediately afterwards, just as that sniper does. Incredibly common.