- Universal basic income: This nonprofit is about to test it in a big way.
They’ll be providing 15-year basic incomes to thousands of people in Kenya, to see what happens. It’ll take years, as any good study of this kind would, but I’ll be very interested to see the outcome. - If Basic Income creates dependence, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
- Magical Thinking: Sanders, Clinton, and the Federal Reserve Board | Beat the Press
The snark about Arthur Brooks that opens this column is pretty generic, but the final two paragraphs are really interesting. “Given the views of [The Federal Reserve], any candidate who indicates a desire to substantially lower the unemployment rate without addressing the Fed’s plans is engaged in magical thinking.” - It’s Confederate History Month?
A post gathering links to David Neiwert‘s series on Confederate history (and against the lost cause myth). I haven’t read these yet, but Neiwert is usually excellent. (Thanks, Mandolin!) - On renaming the Woodrow Wilson School: The standards of his time, and ours | Economic Policy Institute
I don’t agree with the author’s opposition to renaming the building, but the discussion of why the “standards of his time” argument is historically ignorant is very good. - A woman could be replacing Jackson on the $20 bill — and Hamilton stays on the $10 – Vox
Presumably, all the people who say that buildings can never be renamed will be against replacing Jackson. Funny point: Jackson himself was opposed to paper money. - All the things that people say about millennials’ relationship to social media have been said about other media. / Boing Boing
- The Sheriff Who Wants the Public to See How Brutal His Jail Guards Can Be – The Atlantic
As is too often the case with prison reform efforts, the union is on the side of wrong here, trying to keep prisoner abuse secret. - Muslim anti-Isis march not covered by mainstream media outlets.
When someone says “why don’t any Muslims object to” blah blah blah, have they considered that maybe the media doesn’t report it when they do? - I Was a Men’s Rights Activist — MEL Magazine
One man’s journey from MRA to feminism. - Pro-War Dead-enders and Our Unending Wars | The American Conservative
“To make matters worse, every intervention always has a die-hard group of dead-enders that will defend the rightness and success of their war no matter what results it produces.” - Some decent counter-arguments against EvoPsych | SINMANTYX
- What would the end of the gender wage gap look like?
- Ghost in the Shell & Scarlett Johansson
There’s been a lot of justified criticism of the movie’s producers for casting a white woman in the lead (the comic is about an Asian woman). But this person argues, persuasively, that Johansson – who can afford to turn down roles – should be criticized as well. - And see also this: ‘Ghost in the Shell’ Producers Ran SFX Tests to Make White Actors Look Asian
Andrew Wheeler commented, “We now have confirmation that Hollywood thinks Asian people are a fantastical mythical race that must be built in CG, like elves and orcs.” - 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants? – The New York Times
- ‘You want to know what they’re writing, even if it hurts’: my online abuse | Technology | The Guardian
” Five tales from the frontline of online shaming.” Includes an account from former Feministe blogger Jill Filipovic. - Statistics about Abusive Comments at The Guardian
“Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men.” - The Guardian analyzed 75 million internet comments. What it found explains an entire culture war. – Vox
“The organization’s approach to moderating comments is a good start, but it won’t work for the bulk of the internet.” - The real reason mass incarceration happened – Vox
Shorter Vox: Because voters wanted it to happen. - Ted Cruz helped defend Texas ban against sale of sex toys in 2007 | US news | The Guardian
“Cruz and the state argued that masturbation (and/or sex for pleasure alone) is not covered by the right to privacy and thus is subject to state regulation.” This was from when Texas (with Cruz as its Solicitor General,) was trying to ban sex toys. But conservatives are all about small government, and protecting liberty.
UPDATE: Ted Cruz Says He Won’t Ban Dildos If He Becomes President – BuzzFeed News. Phew! - Some thoughts about identity and the Democratic primary – Lirael
- The Cultural Revolution: An Anniversary Steeped in Embarrassment | The Diplomat
- official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women – The Unit of Caring And then read this rebuttal.
- Video shows white cops performing roadside cavity search of black man – The Washington Post
As Popehat points out, this is a form of rape. - Are Most Body Cavity Searches Even Constitutional? – The Atlantic
“What I can’t fathom is why Americans tolerate this when it happens so frequently that multiple examples have now made their way onto YouTube.” - The Strange Case of the Woman Who Can’t Remember Her Past—Or Imagine Her Future | WIRED
- You Can’t Whitewash The Alt-Right’s Bigotry
An article by Cathy Young, criticizing the “alt-right” for racism and anti-semitism. It’s nice to see something like this coming from someone in Cathy’s camp. (Although, unsurprisingly, a section of the article blames the alt-right on the left.) There’s a follow-up on Cathy’s blog in which she answers some alt-right critics. - The Mess That Came After Nintendo Fired An Employee
- A National Report Card On Women and Firefighting
Pdf file. I’m including this link because the issue of women and firefighting – and in particular, the controversy over the strength and physical standards – comes up fairly frequently, and there’s a section of this report giving a basic overview of the issue. But there’s also other stuff on interest in the report. - Taking an deeper look at Clinton’s record as secretary of state. | The Diplomat
A longish overview, focused entirely on her record as it pertains to Asia. If Clinton is elected, I think we can expect to see a renewed emphasis on relations and trade with countries in Asia. - The Secret History Of The Photo At The Center Of The Black Confederate Myth – BuzzFeed News.
Fascinating longread about the life of the man often identified as a Black confederate soldier. “Not even death could prevent them from being forced to serve the Confederate cause one last time.”
Re: Cathy Young’s piece.
Yes, it was quite informative, indeed, until she starts blaming it all on “the left” (where I feel whatever larger point she’s making dissolves into another blame-everything-on-Democrats/liberals/progressives/”leftists”). And that last is really not surprising at all: Conservative pundits and political “strategists” (read: Republican party loyalists, campaign staffers and managers, and consultants) have been blaming Trump’s rise on the left, and particularly on Obama, for months now. “The left” is now becoming the meme because apparently some on the right are twigging to the fact that after January 20, 2017, he’s not going to be president anymore so they have to blame someone else for their failures and the boorishness of the crowds they’ve whipped up.
It’s sort of their new parlor game.
The article against evolutionary psychology strikes me as being a little bit straw-mannish; moreover, some of the things it criticizes essentially come down to “evolutionary psychology is not yet refined enough to come up with consistently good predictions.”
So what? Evolution itself when applied to specific events (e.g. where did this feature originate) is constantly coming up with plausible ideas that are then shown to be wrong. Our understanding of biology is constantly shifting.
I think the general idea of evolutionary psychology, that behavior is influenced by genes, and selective pressures have a large influence on those genes and thus behavior, is pretty much true. The alternative is to believe that humans are blank slates and that unlike all other animals, our genes have nothing to do with our behavior.
That lots of ideas that evolutionary psychologists predict turn out to be wrong – that’s the same as every other broad category of science. Practically all scientists believe in evolution, but almost every specific idea of how a particular trait evolved winds up having to be modified. And certainly no one has ever argued that all fitness-reducing traits completely disappear.
I think almost every argument against evolutionary psych could be tweaked slightly to argue against evolution itself. It seems to me it would be better to frame the argument as to how much we actually understand evolutionary psychology rather than to argue as if the field itself were useless.
MJJ, your comment made me go through and read that article, and I didn’t see anything that I would say boils down to “not refined enough yet.” It seemed to be more like “shoddy methodology,” “refuses to self-correct,” and “makes baseless assumptions referring to historical anthropological evidence that does not actually exist.” The shoddy methodology bit got the most attention. I would think that science as a whole is refined enough by this point that even a brand-new field can avoid shoddy methodology, can’t they?
re piece #27
“She has no episodic memories—none of those impressionistic recollections that feel a bit like scenes from a movie, always filmed from your perspective.”
I also have no recollections that feel a bit like scenes from a movie. Is this actually a thing? Like really? I’ve always wondered – in books people are always vividly remembering events, but I’ve never had a memory even close. People in books can always remember what it felt like “as if they were there” or they can remember “the clothes he was wearing” or “the smell of the smoke” or they notice something in the memory they didn’t notice before!! What!! Can that really happen, honestly?
Unlike the person in the piece, I can remember basic autobiographical details and specific pertinent facts about events but I definitely don’t think I remember as much as most people. I only really remember stuff I’ve strongly reinforced through repeated recollection.
I went to a psychologist a few times for anxiety, and she kept harrassing me about the fact that I didn’t remember more than a handful of events from my childhood, and those events had no details. She was trying to infer all sorts of meaning into the things I didn’t remember, or insisting that I MUST be able to remember various things, like she thought I was being deliberately obstinate or something.
I think this type of memory is probably some kind of spectrum like many other human abilities.
Sarah, I think you are missing my larger point.
There is a difference between attacking the current state of evopsych research and attacking the very concept of evopsych.
“shoddy methodology,” “refuses to self-correct,” and “makes baseless assumptions referring to historical anthropological evidence that does not actually exist” refers to the state of current evolutionary psychology research. That very few people, if any, are doing research into evolutionary psychology that uses proper methodology does not mean that there is nothing to research.
Most of the arguments he uses against the concept of evolutionary psychology itself (rather than against the current state of research) seem based largely on strawmen. He suggests that selection is not an important factor because negative traits such as color-blindness and lactose intolerance have not been eliminated. That ignores the fact that negative traits with a strong genetic component such as colorblindness do not seem to dominate anywhere. In general, he seems to argue that either a particular trait will be exhibited by all humans everywhere or else it cannot be genetic. As far as I know, most evolutionary psychologists would argue that at best you can predict statistical tendencies.
Also, his statement that we don’t have strong evidence linking behavior to specific genes – okay, such research is, I would imagine, going to be rather complex and expensive. But we know that you can breed personality traits into dogs; is it that unreasonable to assume that humans also have a genetic component to their personality?
I guess what I am getting at is that he seems to be arguing that if you reject genetic determinism, you have to reject the idea of any genetic influence at all. But does the blank slate theory really make sense?
Re: #27 — Who cares about the size of Cruz’s hands? We have clear evidence that, with respect to his dildo, Cruz is a flip-flopper!
MJJ,
I agree with Sarah’s reading, and I don’t think she is missing your point so much as you are misunderstanding the article.
His argument is sort of the opposite of strawmanning. He is describing and objecting to the specific theoretical framework and research practices of an actual scientific movement composed of actual researchers.
His argument is not that it would be impossible to study the evolution of human psychology. His argument is that the group of researchers and body of actual research practices and theory that make up the movement of EvoPsych is not actually doing valid scientific research on the evolution of human psychology, He argues that their framework is not in agreement on modern evolutionary theory, that their methods are sloppy and fail to address at all the difficulty of the field they claim to be researching, and that even their claimed results are thin and weak.
As far as I can see, he never argues for a blank slate theory. If you think he is, please quote exactly where you are getting that from.
In additional charity news, there’s a big project starting up to try and get mosquito nets over every bed in two of the four regions of Uganda.
https://www.againstmalaria.com/NewsItem.aspx?newsitem=AMF-funds-10.7-million-nets-for-distribution-in-Uganda
This whole Evo-Psych debate is getting tiring.
It’s all well and good to demand more rigor in a field of science, but the linked article does a little more than that. A quote:
Emphasis mine. This is going too far. A climate change denier could create a similar laundry list of bad theories within climatology, poor methodology, models without strong predictive powers, and even a little misconduct here and there. If such a skeptic were to declare “climate change science isn’t really science at all,” that would be unfairly dismissive of a very large and very important body of science.
A more well thought out demand for rigor in EP can be found here:
http://www.science20.com/rationally_speaking/evolutionary_psychology_jerry_coyne_robert_kurzban_and_socalled_creationism_mind-118195
One of the things that always strikes me as odd about claims, like Young’s, that the bad behavior of “SJWs” is substantially responsible for the rise of Trump and/or the alt-right is not so much that they’re categorically false or wildly implausible[1], but that there never seems to be any recognition that the alt-right or, for that matter the more mainstream center and center right, might be driving the formation and radicalization of the contemporary social justice left in the first place.
I’m a ton more sympathetic to so-called “SJWs” than I used to be, and the reason, I have to admit, has a lot to do with counter-mobilization. Some of it is the new saw about how the best arguments for feminism are the comments on articles about feminism[2,3], and a lot of it is how many supposed examples of (especially) anti-free-speech behavior from said SJWs are nothing of the kind.
[1] OK, in the case of Trump it’s wildly implausible, but the issue there is one where the alt-right is being given too much credit for Trump IMO.
[2] Ms Young’s followup blogpost suggests, similarly, that the best arguments against the alt-right are comments on articles about the alt-right.
[3] Even better, I’d say the best arguments against control are the comments made by gun control opponents, and vice versa.
“Evolutionary Psychology isn’t a science” seems to me to be a hyperbolic way of saying “If Evolutionary Psychology purports to be a science, it’s doing a very poor job of it at the moment.” Climate change deniers could be similarly hyperbolic about climate science, true, but that wouldn’t make them correct.
You say EP is doing a poor job of being a science. How would one measure that?
I really have no idea myself, but if forced to answer, I would rate a given field according to it’s ability to create theories with the predictive power. By this measure, Climate change scientists aren’t really doing great science compared to Quantum Physicists and the like, but given the difficulty of studying a single system with the massive complexity of the earth’s climate, I give them a pass. I think people should do the same for social scientists of all stripes, including EP. Recognize that it is hard, be wary of poor science, but avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
With something like EP, the validity of the field is hard to measure, as the topics under discussion include pretty much every aspect of human behavior, from sex, to eating, to sleeping, to socializing, etc. In order to get anything like a grasp on the utility of EP to make predictions, you’d have to read massive amounts of material. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone who has time for that except maybe an evolutionary psychologist, and we already know where that person is going to come down on the question. You could read the kinds of people who do have a grasp of the material. Tooby and Pinker come to mind obviously.
I think a big probem here is that people on opposing sides of the “nature/nature” debate like to generalize their opponents into one big category, and project the most extreme views on all the members of this category. For example, the article of this piece refers to “core assumptions” of EP, but many big-time proponents of EP would disagree with these assumptions. Meanwhile a commenter here did the opposite by assuming that the author of the piece must be a “blank slatist.” The truth is, almost everyone who spends time reading and thinking about these things comes down somewhere in the middle. It’s just so much easier to delegitimize an entire field of study when you paint them with an extremist brush.
Jeffrey,
“It’s just so much easier to delegitimize an entire field of study when you paint them with an extremist brush.”
I do agree with that, and I certainly don’t have the time (or background in social sciences) to make a proclamation about the overall rating of EP as a science.
I want to note that I didn’t actually say that EP is doing a poor job of being a science; I said that I thought the quote from the article that it isn’t science was an example of hyperbole, and made a stab at rephrasing the gist of what I thought the article’s author meant to say.
I only read the original piece because MJJ’s first comment struck me as likely an unfair reading of the piece – and I think I was right – but, aside from being swayed by some of the arguments in that piece about specific cases of evolutionary psychologists using poor methodology, I do come down firmly in the “nature-which-is-by-its-nature-flexible-and-therefore-influenced-by-nurture” camp, and I intend to avoid making any stronger statements about the status of evolutionary psychology as a science.
Part of my skepticism about EP comes from the size of the claims vs. what we know about variability in behavior. Anatomically modern humans have existed for ~40,000 years. Depending on how you define a human generation, that means there have been something like 2000 generations of anatomically modern human. That isn’t a whole lot of generations, but it is enough for evolution to be observable, at least for things we can see genetically. Given that connecting phenotype to genotype is very difficult (but yet easier than connecting genes to behavior), and that human psychology is demonstratively very flexible considering the diversity in human behavior we see even in populations considered genetically homogeneous, EP needs strong evidence for its claims in order to be convincing. On top of that, we have written records for some parts of the world that could MAYBE be used to extrapolate behavior for 6000 years (if we push hard on limited samples of very early records), corresponding to 300 of those generations, meaning we have no real baseline for comparison.
Teasing out the evolution of human behavioral patterns under these conditions is an enormous challenge, even if we had an accurate idea of how our ancestors behaved. We only have an inkling of behavior for maybe 300 generations, which isn’t much. For much of that time, the historical record is extremely hard to interpret for factual events (i.e. there was a plague here) let alone actual human behavior. Comparing the behaviors of currently alive humans and extrapolating back seems like a very crude tool to discuss the evolution of human behavior, especially since it ignores that flexibility in human behavior across populations and requires A LOT of completely unsupportable assumptions.
On top of that, many EvoPsych proponents make the completely unsupportable claim that there has been no evolution in human behavior since the start of agriculture. If the ability for adults to digest milk could evolve in that timescale (at least twice!), then surely other human characteristics could as well, including behavior. The assumptions behind EP seem very arbitrary, which casts doubt on currently accepted EP conclusions.
FWIW, I do believe that both nature and nuture produce observed human behavior. I just don’t think we know enough to begin teasing out how human behavior evolved, given that we have no clue about what assumptions we can make about past behavior.
The reason these Islamic marches aren’t mentioned by the press is pure Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry. And it’s not just the press doing it, Arbaeen and the Day of Ashura are the multicultural faith festivals which for some reason never ever get mentioned – even by supposed liberals and multiculturalists. Teachers will happily educate children about Diwali and Hanukkah in schools, but anti-Islamic hatred shuts down the discussion of these Muslim celebrations. It’s almost as if they don’t want 7-year-olds looking them up on google image search.
I absolutely love this quote. It’s just pure Left-Islamism, I just can’t comprehend the level of delusion which could possibly lead to someone writing something like this.
On top of that, many EvoPsych proponents make the completely unsupportable claim that there has been no evolution in human behavior since the start of agriculture.
I don’t think many evolutionary pscyhologists seriously believe this, and I can think of many who argue otherwise. But you cannot really argue for recent human evolution without having the get into the controversial topic of race, so it’s generally safer to try to assume that there has been no recent evolution.
That last Twitter link has been recast by the always-amusing Manfeels Park.
#9 How did the yearly Arba’een procession, commemorating the grand son of Mohamed, his death in battle over the succession over the realm of Islam, and the traditional Shiite shite slinging at the Sunni all of a sudden become an anti-terrorist march?! I mean, sure, Shiite opposing a Sunni caliphate is really novel, they have only been doing it for about a millennia…
And how did Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib all of a sudden become a Social Justice Warrior? Oh my, I must have read the wrong history books.
MJJ, I’m with you.
Early Pinker (before the genome project) did indeed suspect that human evolution slowed down or stopped among populations that developed agriculture. I’m sure many others did as well, since this was the consensus among many anthropologists at the time. When this idea was challenged, it was often the case that the challenge came from a scientific racist rying to bolster their racist views. It’s worth noting that the evidence for late human evolution is pretty overwhelming these days, and that Pinker has openly stated (at edge.org and other places) that he’s abandoned those old ideas.
Jane:
First off, those numbers you cite about generations and the dawn of modern man are in dispute. I’ve seen it written that modern man is 200,000 years old- but all of this is sort of beside the point. Presumably, if human behavior is largely the product of evolution, one would expect to find behaviours whose evolutionary origins predate modern man. If there really are hard-wired modules in our brains that evolved to improve fitness in a small stone-age tribe, then it seems likely that such behavioral evolution would predate homosapiens. Heck, there are EP researchers who study similarities in ape and human behaviors
I think it’s important to understand that EP does not require evolution to have ceased in the stone age. If anything, continuing evolution makes the field easier not harder because there is better data from more recent times. Pinker himself describes this newer view of EP as “EP on sterioids.”
IMO too great an emphasis is placed on the “just so stories” that are so common among proponents of EP. I find these annoying just as most critics of EP do. If you want to know how a certain behavior evolved, the current state of EP is going to leave you disappointed. Speaking for myself, I don’t actually care HOW behaviors evolved so much as IF a behavior is evolved. EP is a great tool, not because it explains our origins, but because it works to explain our nature. By viewing behaviors as possibly evolved, researchers can work backwards- instead of researching the human behaviors we all observe on a day-to-day basis, a researcher can ask questions like this: “what behaviours should we expect to have evolved?” Then they can go out and look for them. I’m not saying that this way is better, or that all social sciences should utilize game theory to make testable predictions. I’m not saying that this tool is more or less vulnerable to the biases of the researcher. I’m just saying that this is one more tool we can use to study human nature.
We can determine that behaviors are evolved without knowing the original conditions that led to their evolution. In the early days of evolution, one didn’t need to know under what conditions the retina evolved to make the case that it was a product of evolution. The same is true with behaviors and other aspects of human nature.
I have a hunch that EP skeptics are mostly informed by blogs they like to read or possibly a science reporter or two. This may be a bad way to hear the very best case for EP by the very best thinkers. I’m not a scientist, I’m a plumber, so I can’t just dive in to journals and published papers. I often go to Edge.org to get started on a topic I’m unfamiliar with, and then I listen to college lectures while I work (my job gives me this luxury). Anyone who wants to dismiss EP would do well to start out at Edge and let the very best defenders of EP make their case.
I find this attitude so weird and counterproductive. It sounds like you don’t actually want Muslims to speak out against ISIS, if when they do you find excuses to dismiss it.
Jeffrey:
I mostly agree with you. We certainly have inherited evolved behaviors from ancestral species. I am 100% sure that human behavior has evolved over time, as in your retina example. I don’t really think anyone who is not an evolution denier in general disputes that. I just don’t think we can say all that much meaningful about evolved behavior in humans right now. There is too much flexibility in the behavioral machinery we have right now to really point to common evolved behaviors. Even separated twin studies (sometimes) show huge variability in behavioral responses between people who share genetics. Of course, sometimes they don’t. :-)
Comparisons between human behavior and great ape behavior aren’t much help either. Given that we parted ways evolutionarily millions of years ago, there is as much chance that shared behavior is an example of convergent evolution as that it reflects evolved behavior from common ancestors.
That fact that EP has been used in the recent past to justify racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination based on genetics means that current researchers have that much more of a problem making their case. Pretending that recent evolution is not happening to avoid discussing race doesn’t make me more likely to believe in the results presented to date. That strategy is also used to promote “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” biological reductionism, so it is just as much of a trap.
This isn’t really my field (I am more of a physical scientist), but even the social scientists I know are very suspect of the current state of EP. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. When your field is hijacked by people who want to justify “just so” stories, you have a higher hurdle to jump. This has happened in my field when there have been scientists who falsified experiments, dooming that subfield of research to backwater, underfunded status regardless of its actual merits. Given that much of the general public eats up the “Just So” sort of EP, I feel for serious scientists in that field. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have seen anything convincing yet from EP that make me believe anything other than humans have evolved behavior, and studying that is so difficult with the tools we have right now that we may as well be blind. IMHO, the field should be focusing on methods development, since nothing I have seen so far seems like it will lead to any sort of robust result.
Getting back to the linked article: I don’t think that EP is not a science, I just think the current state is poor, and that the article linked had many valid points. I don’t think the author of the article says that EP in general is totally useless. The article says to me that EP in its current state is useless, which is a different thing.
I find this attitude so weird and counterproductive. It sounds like you don’t actually want Muslims to speak out against ISIS, if when they do you find excuses to dismiss it.
I do want Muslims to speak against terrorists, sure. I have absolutely no beef with the ones holding the posters. But how many “Мы хотим мира!” posters would it take you to declare a Soviet military review a peace rally?
These people did not get together to decry terrorism. They got together to restate their opposition to the way proto-Sunni took power from proto-Shiite. They did so at a time when Sunni have once again, taken control of large swathes of lands inhabited by different branches of Islam, and stated that they are coming for the rest. While explaining how the Sunni stole the inheritance of Mohamed, the Shiite also attacked the ISIS Caliphate. This rally has been going on every year. Look at other pictures of the event. Contrary to what the linked article wants you to think, there are some. The included picture is of a rather strong concentration of anti-ISIS posters. They are not so thick in the others. First and foremost, this is a rally for one branch of Islam to rail about another.
Going from here, to proclaiming that this was an anti-terrorist rally is quite a stretch. Declaring Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib a warrior for Social Justice would give anyone a sore groin.
And finally, I am not dismissing their hatred for ISIS. I know they hate them more than I do. I just do not, for a second, believe that Shiite clerics in charge of my country would be much better than Sunni ones.
I come from a country where Muslim were collecting the devşirme tax after slavery was abolished in the United states (illegally even according to their own law, but the sultan did nothing to stop those to whom he had given the Bakans). I come from a country that saw its Christian population 20% slaughtered… and got off lightly, compared to another Christian nation subjugated by the same Empire. I have ancestors who converted to Christianity from Islam, and then had to flee in their thousands to a different country because of persecution, despite the fact that they were technically part of Christian empire at the time. I have met people who have been subject to ethnic cleansing in World War II, by Muslims working with the Axis. I have close friends who have had their houses fire bombed by Muslims in a land under NATO control, and still bear the scars from the glass… for being atheists. I also have friends with whip scars courtesy of the Revolutionary Guard. And finally, I actually know what Erdogan is doing in what used to be a real secular country inhabited by Muslims.
I hate Islam, applied literally from the Koran, as much as hate Christianity applied literally from the bible. I see more of one that the other. I have met more Muslims whom I have liked than whom I have disliked, and I have more Muslim close friends at any my parties that most of you probably interact with in a month, and I know that any of them would want to live in a safe world where religious extremism is a thing of the past. There are plenty of Muslims who work for it, and most of them are doing so against the will of those who implement American foreign policies. Without Western intervention, Islamic fundamentalism would have been a lot less powerful in SE Europe, the Caspian region, and pretty much everywhere.
This does not mean that I have to believe the drivel about the Arba’een procession. I have absolutely no doubt that there were people there with whom I would agree 100% on everything but the existence of God. But the procession itself was not an anti-terrorist march, and I doubt most of the people in it see eye to eye with the misty eyed person who wrote the linked article.
EP is very much much devoted to the idea of common humanity. That why they are strongly committed to the idea we have stone age brains which were basically fixed 100k years ago at the african population bottleneck (and there must be some psychological substrate from that era). I know they are disliked for their essentialist views on gender and anti-blank slate views (you can legitimately say they are sexist and anti-liberal), but they’re are not racists. Their whole program was deliberately and conceptually universalist and anti-racist.
Now, evidence for recent evolution is building up and damaging the post-war consensus, but the HBD fanboys who are eager to see the validation of scientific racism are a different group of people – that’s not the EP research program.
Tautology watch: I regret to report that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is the artist formerly known as Prince.
Is there anyone in this conversation, or anyone of note in the wider world, who actually favors a “blank slate” view – that is, the view that personalities, behaviors and attitudes are a total blank slate, based only in “nurture” and with no effect from “nature”? Because if not, the constant citing of a powerful “blank slate” status quo that EP sorts have to fight against seems like a strawman.
That’s really sad about (tafka) Prince – I thought he’d have many years of performing left.
Re: #6 – the founder of the Democratic party is being removed from the $20 to be replaced by a gun-toting Republican black woman who – like most of the other people on our paper money – supported armed resistance against an oppressive government. Works for me! Hopefully they’ll use a picture that depicts her as she was in the days of the actions that she is famous for instead of from her dotage.
Of course, there are objections from at least one feminist.
Okaaaaaaaaaaaay. Because in absence of capitalism, those who are worst off in society usually benefit from elites allocating resources in the absence of the price signal, right?
What most of these overbroad critiques of capitalism with an identity politics bent fail to grasp is that the revolution is never going to end with Feminista Jones as the head of Gosplan USA, doling out goods and resources according to the sacred and inviolable principles of intersectionality. It doesn’t happen that way, ever. Everybody wants to be the central planner, but nobody wants to live under central planning.
Good god, that’s the opposite of capitalism! Just because America is a “capitalist” country doesn’t mean that everything that has happened in our history is “capitalist” by nature. I’m afraid that word is going the way of “neoliberal” as a catchall for everything we don’t like in society, stripped of all descriptive meaning.
So the take home point from the EvoPsych article is that EvoPsych is on par with most other social science research?
Funny, she objects to Tubman because she does not think Tubman would want to be on the bill.
I don’t know if that’s true, but, if so, she certainly has that in common with Jackson. So, maybe she is the perfect replacement for the president that fought the banks and paid off the debt.
-Jut
And religious! She was overtly religious: A gun-toting Jesus freak.
I’d go with nobody.really’s description. Jesus freak is a lot more applicable than the implied meaning of “Republican”. The Republican Party of the 19th century has very little in common with the Republican Party of the 21st century.
Things I realized during this exciting past long weekend at the Squid household:
1) Kidney stones can be incredibly painful. I now know what 10 on the pain scale is. Now, some 10’s can hurt more than others but once you’re unable to communicate you’re at 10.
2) I fucking hate the paranoia over drug seekers that’s infected the medical world. It took quite some time to get an effective narcotic because of a) my appearance and b) my non-traditional performance of agonizing pain. They weren’t willing to do a whole lot for me until they were able to see the stone on the CT. Nearly 5 hours after I arrived in 10 level pain.
3) I’m annoyed daily by the hysteria over e-cigs. Fortunately, my e-cig uses no tobacco based or derived products so I wasn’t violating the Hospital’s policy. Even if they didn’t think that was the case. Tobacco smoking is about as low as it will ever go. Time to move on to harm reduction, anti-tobacco groups.
4) Proselytizers at the door are more than just annoying. Do they think I haven’t heard about God/Jesus/Satan/their particular sect’s beliefs? It’s insulting. I’ve heard about your base religion nearly every day for the nearly 50 years and I’ve heard plenty about your idiosyncratic differences from the base. I’ve heard and decided that you’re wrong. I’m not going to be nice to those assholes anymore.
5) It’s really strange that a hospital’s “Heart Healthy” menu contains pretty much zero meals that can be eaten by a vegetarian. Apparently, “Heart Healthy” means no pork products.
6) “Mad Max: Fury Road” completely lost me when they had a beer commercial in the middle of it. I don’t think they intended for me to start laughing there, but I could be wrong. I made it about half an hour past that until I was so bored that I couldn’t stand it any more.
7) I may be one of very few, but I still really like “Jupiter Ascending”.
The Republican Party of the 1860s bears as much resemblance to today’s version as Herve Villechaize did to Wilt Chamberlain. It’s always amusing to see today’s bigots claim to be the “party of Lincoln.”
Someone has obviously never seen Herve Villechaize’s fade-away jumper.
You have to admit, that was a fairly risque line of women’s wear.
Jake Squid:
Ow! Ow! Ow! I’m so sorry that happened to you!
Hey! The Royal College of Physicians says that e-cigs are a pretty fine thing! (Note this is from a publication that’s run a years long crusade against e-cigs).
Jake:
1) and 2): Amen, brother, Amen. I’ve now had 3 of the damn things, 2 about 20 years ago and one last year. My wife had one and compared it to childbirth, the latter of which she has experienced twice. What I’m told about #2 specifically is that various governmental authorities watch the prescription of narcotics like a hawk and that a physician will under-prescribe pain medications because they’re rather avoid attracting the attention of such authorities, even if they have good answers to their questions.
Drink lots of water every day. Given the composition of my stones (CaC2O4) I was told to avoid spinach. What did your doctor tell you?
I would ask why people think that an appellation of “Jesus Freak” is suitable to describe someone with a strong Christian faith. How acceptable would it be to describe someone with strong feelings about racism or gay rights as a freak?
LTL FTC:
“the revolution is never going to end with Feminista Jones as the head of Gosplan USA, doling out goods and resources according to the sacred and inviolable principles of intersectionality. It doesn’t happen that way, ever.”
What our Founders realized was that regardless of their personal beliefs about the Christian faith, one of it’s precepts has proven accurate; man is fallen. It seems to me that when confronted with the failures of Communism, Socialism or highly centralized government in general the response is that the wrong people got in charge of it and corrupted it. But what the Founders realized is that the wrong people will always get in charge of government. It’s inevitable. So they designed the central government to be as weak as possible and to devolve power down to lower levels that would be more accountable to the electorate. History, both of the world in general and of the U.S. in particular has shown this to be wisdom, and why so many people resist the call of the left to continue to arrogate power to the Federal government.
Perhaps opposition to e-cigs should start being referred to as “abstinence only?”
Thanks, Ron.
Jake Squid:
7) You are not alone.