Via PZ, and various people on Twitter, I read David Brooks’s infuriatingly smug and defensive commentary on Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.

What is the point of saying that? It’s not as if Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t know that. It’s not even as if Brooks thinks Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t know that. For many white people, America was a dream of escape and opportunity. Yes we know that.

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.

And David Brooks wants to explain to him why he’s wrong.

I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?

Actually he doesn’t have to ask. He doesn’t have to make it about him, just for one thing. He doesn’t have to get all “can a white person even speak??” about it. He doesn’t have to do any of this. He chose to do it, just as his ancestors chose to come here – and he gets a fat paycheck for doing it.

If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

Oh blah blah blah. No kidding; things are complicated; there’s not a straight line between lynching and one person’s commission of a crime; there’s good and bad; the good cancels out the bad, let’s all go watch football.

The point is not that violence is “the totality of America,” whatever that silly phrase would even mean. The point is that the structural arrangements of racism stayed in place for decade after decade after decade after the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, and that most of them are still in place. Now, today, in a neighborhood near you. This isn’t some fuzzy mumbling about the totality of anything, it’s literal as fuck. Pointing out that there are some good things somewhere is wholly beside the point.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

Oh no no no no no. That is something Brooks does not get to say. Yes, because he’s white; suck it up. He does not get to say that because he is not the one who would have to “abandon” the “old wrongs” that are still having their effects today. It’s very easy for him to value the future more than the past and to abandon old wrongs that weren’t done to him.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

It’s not Coates’s realism that traps people. It’s generations of residential segregation, neglected schools and infrastructure, and a massive wealth gap. What kind of “dream” does David Brooks suppose can come out of all that? What kind of “guiding star” does he think is even detectable from there?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Dorothy Bishop in the Times Higher on the trouble with jokes about girls.

Personally, I think we should be allowed to criticise the policies of our institutions and to debate robustly with those whose beliefs are at odds with our basic values. However, when we are talking about the fundamental biological characteristics of the individual, it is a different matter.

If we say derogatory comments are acceptable in the context of a joke, this basically allows anything, because anything can be construed as a joke post hoc. Suppose someone said: “Let me tell you about my trouble with blacks. Three things happen when they’re in the lab: (stereotype 1), (stereotype 2), (stereotype 3).” I think most educated people would regard this as unacceptable, even if the speaker subsequently argues that they were being ironic. However, substitute “girls” for “blacks” and for many people it becomes OK.

So very many people.

I also think that academic institutions have the right to dissociate themselves from someone who brings them into disrepute by using racist or sexist language. Gender equality is very much on the agenda of academic institutions and funding bodies. Many universities with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) departments have seriously engaged with the Athena SWAN initiatives to address gender inequality in the workplace; the Royal Society and the European Research Council have come under fire for the low success rates of female grant applicants, and both organisations have taken this criticism seriously and are examining ways to ensure their processes are transparent and fair. Having a high-profile figure make a sexist joke in a public forum undermines such initiatives, and places the organisations in a difficult position whereby they either appear to condone sexism or risk being attacked for political correctness. Sexist language, however jokey, shows an insensitivity to gender issues that is at odds with the core values of most academic institutions. Calling this out is an indication of a commitment to women’s right to fair treatment and not a threat to academic freedom.

That seems reasonable enough, doesn’t it?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Turn everything on its head time. People who take climate change seriously are in denial!!! Says the Federalist.

I, a (distinguished) gray-haired, middle-aged man, was a speaker at the conference. My topic was “The Need To Believe In The ‘Solution’ To Global Warming.” I don’t know if Johnson took note, but it was folks like him that I had in mind. Lot of people who aren’t up on, say, radiative-transfer physics and model-cloud parameterizations, to name just two of dozens upon dozens of need-to-know subjects, are convinced the world is going to end in heat death, because why? Because they desperately desire the proposed solutions—even in the absence of a problem. And what are the solutions? The usual: increased size and scope of government and furthering corporate cronyism.

People who take climate change seriously desperately desire the solutions? The hell we do. The solutions are horrible. What we desire is to avoid destroying the climate needed for humans and other animals to go on living on this planet. That’s it.

This brings us to the crucial question: how do we reach educators like Johnson? We can’t do it with reality. Temperatures aren’t increasing, storms are down in number and strength, sea levels aren’t chasing folks from beaches, droughts are not increasing, parts of the world are growing greener.

I don’t have the answer. Do you?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Amy Schumer’s parody of 12 Angry Men, in which the twelve dudely jurors argue over whether Amy Schumer is not enough to be on tv.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by PatrickG on “Like I actually had a tail”.

Let me try again, since apparently I was unclear (not an unusual experience for me):

1) I consider magical thinking to be harmful in and of itself, whether it be sincerely believing in drinking the blood of Zombie Jesus or sincerely believing that one is not really human. So when you say:

There is no woo in describing how you feel regardless of reality if a person knows that their feelings and reality are not consistent.

We’re in agreement there, but that’s clearly not the case for people who sincerely believe they aren’t actually human, which is the group I’m addressing. Not just “feeling” non-human, to be very clear. If you don’t think that is woo, you might as well just stop reading this comment, because we don’t live in the same world.

2) I am not claiming the non-existence of feelings or sincerely held beliefs, I am arguing against the subsequent claims (e.g. woo-pagan animal spirituality and reincarnation) that are based on those feelings. The fact that someone asserts something is essential to their identity may be a sincerely held belief, but doesn’t obligate me to take it seriously in the absence of compelling evidence or argument. The feeling that someone is not human does not make them non-human, and claiming such deserves no respect. One does not get to hand-wave away basic biological fact on the basis of sincerely held belief (well, unless you’re a Republican Supreme Court justice lying about birth control, but that’s a different topic entirely).

3) When you say:

Because of that society misses the people who meet diagnostic criteria and do just fine with the associated characteristics that we call conditions and illnesses. Many people with Tourette’s Syndrome, ADHD, autism and more are happy to be what they are and are not hurting anyone else beyond giving other people funny feelings that they use for mockery and “jokes” at best. You are taking a very negative stance with respect to people who do not appear to be harming you in the slightest.

I’ll address the TS/ADHD/autism reference in the next point.

The failure of medical science to properly categorize and (if appropriate) treat a specific phenomenon does not automatically mean I have to treat audio-visual hallucinations or similar phenomenon as just part of normal human variation (“No biggie!”). When I read accounts of people who, if I take them at their word, are actually experiencing AV episodes, and wave it off with “but it’s ok, because animals”, I’m appalled. That’s not a good response! When you say:

So apparently most people with audio hallucinations function just fine with them. They might even make reality more interesting.

I’m genuinely shocked at how casually you treat this topic. Sure, this is probably true for certain definitions of “function”, “fine”, “reality”, and “interesting”, but I find this proposition extremely dubious, given our society’s predisposition to miss diagnosable conditions, poor access to evidence-based medicine, and a very attractive network of woo that leads people to homeopathy, psychics, and Dr. Oz. That is what I find so harmful — believing that a possible psychiatric condition can be explained away because of freakin’ mythical animals.

I want to reiterate that I am speaking of people who aren’t making the distinction between belief and reality. Does that mean every Otherkin is in this category? No — but then, most people who use crystal healing or acupuncture aren’t typically suffering from serious medical complaints either, and we all recognize the harm there.

4) Here is the passage that really leads me to believe that I failed to make my point clearly:

MANY cultures around the world have actual respected and celebrated social roles for people whose minds do not function like the norm. You will lose this fight because we are not going anywhere and some of us are even psychologically advantaged when it comes to expressing criticism. I’m perfectly willing to use that in defense of other people like me and the only one that needs to celebrate that for it to mean anything is me.

I’m not talking about people whose minds do not function like the norm — that would be rather silly, since I’m one of those people. I’m talking about people who turn to woo to explain/celebrate their atypical status. This is the difference between the true-believer Otherkin described above and people with TS/ADHD/autism, and comparing the two is ludicrous.

So yeah, the claim that someone is really non-human deserves the same respect from me as the claim that someone speaks to Jesus, regardless of normal/non-normal function, which is a completely different issue.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So I look around for more on “the otherkin community.” I find a piece by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw from a few months ago. I read.

When she was 9 or 10 years old, Jessie read a book that would change her life forever: Julie of the Wolves, a story about a young girl who bonds with a wolf pack to survive in the Alaskan tundra. It precipitated Jessie’s realization that she identified as a wolf herself.

“I could certainly see a case being made that I latched on to wolves because of some difficult times in my life,” Jessie told me. “I saw family in them, I saw protection and familiarity, and I saw an escape from what I was dealing with in my life.”

Plenty of kids are obsessive, but for Jessie, her love of wolves became a lifestyle and a spiritual experience, including “phantom shifts,” or episodes where she felt the physical characteristics of being a wolf.

“I would prowl my room late at night as a wolf, usually when I was restless or agitated. This was comforting to put myself into another place. Whether this is mental or spiritual, I don’t really know. I still do a version of this to this day, and I know it’s felt like both. I’m diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety, and there are many days where putting myself in ‘wolf mind’ helps to relax me.”

Now, see, all of that is consistent with its being fantasy, and I’m all for fantasy. I was hugely into fantasy as a child, and I’ve always felt slightly sorry for kids who weren’t into it.

But actually “identifying as” another species goes beyond fantasy, and yes I think it’s risible in adults.

If you truly believe that you’re not human, people on the Internet will probably be the first to know. That’s where the term “otherkin” first sprang up in the early ’90s, in quiet little online culs-de-sac dedicated to those who believed they were dragons and elves. To someone who thinks of him- or herself as otherkin, the issue is one not of mental illness but of freedom of expression.

There’s ambiguity there. Truly believing you’re not human is not quite the same as thinking of oneself as not human – “thinking of oneself as” is the same as pretending.

But hey – it’s not harmful, it’s just first world special snowflakeism.

You don’t come to the conclusion that you’re a dragon without a certain amount of self-examination. Many otherkin are aware that some outsiders think they’re delusional. The psychiatric professionals I contacted for this story, however, were surprisingly forgiving.

Dr. Marc D. Feldman, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama and inventor of the term “Munchausen by Internet,” told me that otherkin didn’t seem like a good fit for mental health treatment.

“People in advantaged countries like to think of themselves as especially complex, colorful, and special,” he wrote in an email. “The otherkin phenomenon certainly reflects this first-world preoccupation. But it isn’t illegal, doesn’t victimize other people, and isn’t a form of mental illness (unless people become delusional about it), so I don’t see a particular need for ‘treatment.’”

Just so. As I said, I’m all for fantasy…but that doesn’t mean I can’t find some fantasies funny.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Want more Pluto snaps? Of course you do.

NASA ‏@NASA 36 minutes ago
Frozen, craterless plains discovered in heart of Pluto’s ‘heart’ http://go.nasa.gov/1Lr6oIB @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby

NASA ‏@NASA22 hours ago
Pluto moon Charon’s ‘Mountain in a Moat’ is a preview of future close-up images: http://go.nasa.gov/1TFAD1l #PlutoFlyby

Can you find the snow leopard?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The LA Times has been reading the journal of Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez. They found the predictable.

On Abdulazeez’s blog, there were a number of entries dealing with Islam and jihad.

“Every one of them [the Companions of the Prophet Mohammad] fought Jihad for the sake of Allah,” reads one recent post. “Every one of them had to make sacrifices in their lives and some even left all their wealth to make hijrah to Medina.”

Says another recent post: “This life we are living is nothing more than a test of our faith and patience. It was designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire, and to rank amongst them the best of the best and worst of the worst. Don’t let the society we live in deviate you from the task at hand.”

That’s the kind of thinking that makes religion so lethal – that idea that “this life we are living is nothing more than” some test or practical joke or punishment by a magical unavailable god, and that it’s the job of believers to help that god “rank” people and sort the good from the bad – and destroy the bad. That’s probably the single worst idea humans have come up with.

“Brothers and sisters don’t be fooled by your desires, this life is short and bitter and the opportunity to submit to allah may pass you by,” another post notes.

Bad. Bad idea. Bad thought.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

NASA is doing a press conference about Pluto right now on NASA tv.

Right now: what are these polygons?

What are these dark smudges?

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Reuters reports:

Four Marines were killed on Thursday by a gunman who opened fire at two military offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before being fatally shot in an attack officials called a brazen, brutal act of domestic terrorism.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation named the suspect as Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, but said it was too early to speculate on a motive for the rampage, which comes at a time when U.S. military and law enforcement authorities are increasingly concerned about the threat posed by “lone wolves” to domestic targets.

NBC News reported that Abdulazeez was a naturalized American who was born in Kuwait. U.S. law enforcement officials said they were investigating whether he was inspired by Islamic State or a similar group.

Islamic State had threatened to step up violence in the holy fasting month of Ramadan, which ends on Friday.

Happy holidays. Have a nice Eid.

The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist groups, said that Abdulazeez blogged on Monday that “life is short and bitter” and Muslims should not miss an opportunity to “submit to Allah.” Reuters could not independently verify the blog postings.

…

According to a resume believed to have been posted online by Abdulazeez, he attended high school in a Chattanooga suburb and graduated from the University of Tennessee with an engineering degree.

At least we still have our guns.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Since I got Sally Hemings’s relationships with the Jefferson family off by a generation, I thought I might as well look her up and get it straight in my head. From the Monticello site:

Sally Hemings,[1] whose given name was probably Sarah, was the daughter of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. According to her son, Madison Hemings, her father was Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law John Wayles. There are no known portraits of her. Sally Hemings became Thomas Jefferson’s property as part of his inheritance from the Wayles estate in 1774 and came with her mother to Monticello by 1776. As a child she was probably a nursemaid to Jefferson’s daughter Mary (slave girls from the age of six or eight were childminders and assistants to head nurses on southern plantations).

Her father was John Wayles, the father of Jefferson’s wife Martha – so she was Martha Wayles Jefferson’s half-sister. She was Jefferson’s half-sister-in-law. She was the aunt of their daughters. She was a close relative…but of course as a slave, she wasn’t treated as a relative. She was treated as a slave.

That’s how plantation life was. Lots of slaves were close relatives of their owners and their owners’ families, but they weren’t treated as relatives.

It’s such a bizarre way to live. Fanny Kemble wrote about it in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian
Plantation.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This should be something from the Onion but apparently isn’t: Amber Roberts at Vice: Otherkin Are People Too; They Just Identify as Nonhuman.

Well no. If you’re nonhuman then you’re not people too. That’s just definitional, so it’s silly to claim otherwise. People are human.

But that’s not even the silliest part; the silliest part is claiming to “identify as” nonhuman. I can “identify as” Shakespeare if I want to, but I’m not a bit more Shakespeare for having so “identified” than I was before.

Otherkin are people who identify as partially or entirely nonhuman. A dragon, a lion, a fox—you name it—there is probably someone out there who feels like they are more these things than they are human. The otherkin community can be found lurking on Reddit, Tumblr, TV Tropes, and other online forums.

A dragon, a lion, a fox – such a narrow range. What about a 1964 Cadillac, a baked yam, a canyon, a fart, a poem, a hurricane, a red sweatshirt with a hole in the left elbow?

I spoke to John on Reddit, a 19-year-old from Knoxville, USA, known on the web as Noslavic. He introduced himself: “I am a red fox-kin who was, as we call, awakened about a year ago.” He said that awakening felt, “at the very least, relieving,” because “everything seemed to come together for me.

“I started getting odd dreams where I would change physically into a fox, and they were very realistic—honestly. And after a while, in real life, it felt quite real, like I actually had a tail, I actually had ears, I actually had paws.”

And people really think they’ve had visits from extra-terrestrials, or that their teacher took them on a rocket ship, or that there’s an exciting new world hiding behind a nearby comet and the way to get their is to kill yourself.

While some otherkin identify as the animal, others identify with the animal—in more of a spiritual way. This is the case for Ri Na Gach, an 18-year-old “lionkin” who wishes to remain anonymous:

“I feel a special connection with the lion. I feel like I demonstrate many of the same characteristics as the animal. It’s mostly a secret in my day-to-day life, but the traits that I share with lions do help me. In pagan religions of the past, it wasn’t uncommon to believe that humans would be reborn as animals, so the idea that I was, in a past life, a lion, is not as far-fetched as some would think.”

Again with the lion. Notice it’s all glam animals. Why don’t they feel as if they demonstrate many of the same characteristics as the slug, or the oyster, or the pigeon, or the rat?

And the fact that something was believed in a pagan religion of the past does nothing to make it not far-fetched.

I’m going to go knit myself a giraffe suit.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I suddenly took it into my head to go to Google images and type in

london transport poster kew

Mine eyes boggled at the result.

I’ve collected a hefty stack of London Transport postcards over the years, but it’s only a fraction of what there are. They did especially fetching ones advertising the joys of Kew Gardens.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mother Jones reports:

On Wednesday night, demonstrators on the streets of Oklahoma City waved Confederate flags as President Obama’s motorcade arrived, a stark scene captured by a New York Times photographer.

Sure enough:

The New York Times ‏@nytimes 15 hours ago
The scene as President Obama’s motorcade arrived at his hotel in Oklahoma City tonight. Photo by @dougmillsnyt

What a gruesome, terrible place this country is in so many ways. The Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveowner, a guy who kept his daughters’ half-sister as a slave and impregnated her at least once. We’re all about the human rights and we’re racist as fuck.

The incident comes in the midst of a renewed national push to remove the battle flag from government sites after the massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month. Similar counter rallies embracing the slogan “Confederate Lives Matter” were scheduled in Oklahoma City ahead of the president’s visit.

Following the attack in Charleston, Obama delivered an impassioned eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator and one of the nine people murdered, in which the president called the flag’s enduring presence in the South a “reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.”

Therefore it’s urgent to say “but racism is part of our great history and heritage.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

As a public service, sharing a Northumbria police appeal for witnesses.

Beach towel stolen

Dated: 16 Jul 2015

Police are appealing for witnesses following the theft of a towel from a North Tyneside beach.

It happened on Sunday, July 12 from 4pm to 5pm at Tynemouth Longsands beach. A dark blue towel with ‘DRYROBE’ written on the front in red and white was stolen.

Anyone with information should contact police on 101, extension 69191, quoting reference number 43728L/15 or ring the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

Via Kate Smurthwaite

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Hannah Levintova at Mother Jones talks to Tracy Chou, who dug out the stats on gender imbalance in Silicon Valley. The industry has been hiding them for years.

Starting in 2008, news outlets filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Labor, hoping to obtain the workforce diversity data the tech giants refused to release. The companies lawyered up—as of March 2013, most of the top firms (Apple, Google, Microsoft, et al.) had convinced the feds their stats were trade secrets that should remain private.

Their real reason for withholding the data may well have been embarrassment. Although tech employment has grown by 37 percent since 2003, the presence of women on engineering teams has remained flat (at around 13 percent) for more than two decades, and women’s share of what the US Census Bureau calls “computer workers” has actually declined since the early 1990s.

Why? Because it used to be seen as mindless grunt work, suitable for women.

Despite her success, [Chou is] more than passingly familiar with the obstacles the Valley’s sausage fest creates for women—from brogrammer pickup lines to biased hiring and promotion. (Not to mention pay: As of 2011, census data shows, women in technical fields were making about $16,000 less, on average, than men.)

Fed up with the data void, Chou came home from her conference and wrote a Medium post calling for more transparency: “The actual numbers I’ve seen and experienced in industry are far lower than anybody is willing to admit,” she wrote. “So where are the numbers?” With her bosses’ permission, she started the ball rolling: Just 11 of Pinterest’s 89 engineers (12 percent) were women, she revealed. (Today, it’s around 17 percent.)

Her post got attention, and people started collaborating with her.

To keep track of the numbers, she set up a repository on the code-sharing site GitHub and invited all to participate. As word spread, more techies stepped up. Within a week, her repository had stats on more than 50 firms. (It now has more than 200—including GitHub, whose 104 coders include just 14 women—making it the most comprehensive available source of coders’ gender data.)

The numbers were as bad as you might expect: Just 17 of Yelp’s 206 engineers (8 percent) were women, for example. Dropbox was barely better, with 26 out of 275 (9 percent). Nextdoor, a social-media tool for neighborhoods, had 29 engineers—all male. Change.org, which bills itself as “the world’s platform for change,” had less than 13 percent women engineers; it has since changed for the better, with 20 percent.

Cue the anti-feminists saying this is because women choose to arrange flowers instead.

When she started out studying computer science as a Stanford undergrad, “I felt really out of place,” she told me. “There weren’t many other women.” The coursework was tough, and the guys in her classes talked a big game. “My self-calibration was off,” she explained. “There’s research on how guys are generally inclined to give themselves more credit. So their calibration was ‘I’m awesome; this is super easy,’ when I felt like I was doing poorly.”

Concerned she wasn’t qualified for CS, Chou switched to electrical engineering. But the more she excelled, the more pushback she got. Male classmates would interrupt her or tune out when she spoke. During group projects, guys would reject her proposals and debate alternatives for hours before returning to her idea. “It’s okay to have a girl in the class if she’s not very good,” she said. “But it felt like once I became better than they were, it was not okay anymore.”

And it wasn’t any better in the world beyond school, either. Maybe in another…100 years? 500? In colonies on Pluto?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)