Atomic Nerds

I do have several more substantive and less choleric posts in the pipeline, but I’m running on limited time and ranting is easier than constructing “science and you” posts.

There is a phenomenon that I have repeatedly and gallingly encountered, which is of people that want to tear someone a new one but somehow want to do this by Queensbury rules. To wit, it is apparently okay to say any vile and insulting thing you wish to another person, so long as you do it without using any profanity whatsoever. Should the other person’s reaction involve profanity, you have therefore risen above them on the civility scale and anything else they say may be dismissed as the intemperate rantings of a lunatic. (I am interpreting these rules based on inference.) The exchange tends to go something like this:

*issue generating disagreement and friction*

“Your opinion on this issue can only indicate that you were dropped on your head as a child, and furthermore you are a filthy miserable liar who probably spent the last hour before posting on this thread receiving oral ministrations from an entire flock of goats. I hate you and and everyone who resembles your pusillanimous, sheep-faced self.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with (substance of disagreement), asshole?”

“If you’re just going to swear at me I don’t see how anyone can discuss anything with you.”

What the unholy fuckballs is the point of this? It’s not as though people will not understand they’ve been insulted and react like they’ve been insulted if the insult does not, technically, involve profanity. Insult is insult whether you use words you can’t say on television or not, just like an explicit sex scene is an explicit sex scene even if you replace all the “cock”, “prick”, “cunt”, and “fuck” with “penis”, “vagina”, and “thrust”. Granted, one is a dirty phone call and one is a Regency novel, but either way people aren’t going to agree it’s appropriate material for children merely because the language has been rearranged.

Profanity has a purpose, and that purpose is generally to be a verbal shorthand for an underline and a set of exclamation points. When you curse, it’s generally either to indicate strong emotion or to indicate powerful emphasis; it’s also a way of saying “I don’t care who my opinion offends”. Well and good. The point remains, however, that you can achieve all of the same goals in more words without using any profanity at all- it’s a signal device, not a self-contained Insult Missile. As anybody with much of a reading habit knows, it’s entirely possible to grotesquely and elaborately insult somebody without ever once using a word that couldn’t be spoken on Good Morning America.

It gets even more bizarre in my head when I try to look at it from a religious point of view*. Okay, saying bad words is something you’re not supposed to do as a serious practicioner, I get that. I may just be an atheistic rube, but I was under the impression that saying nasty things to people just because you disagree with them and venting anger and spite on them is emotionally satisfying was a bigger sin anyway. You’re not *supposed* to gratuitously abuse your fellow man, and if they aren’t fooled as to your meaning and intent because you didn’t use any Anglo-Saxon four letter words, the odds that God is going to be fooled are substantially lower.

Either way, what really irritates me about the practice is that it’s a game the person using it is playing with themselves and demands other people play too. No one is actually fooled and it accomplishes nothing except make that person feel satisfied because a completely artificial and arbitrary standard has been met by themselves but not by the other person; it’s like declaring that you won a footrace down a corridor because your opponent stepped on a black tile and the black ones are lava.

Throw insults if you mean them, fine. There’s no hall monitor and we’re all adults here. But if you’re going to act like an adult and be treated like an adult, you have to own them.

*One point of theology I have never, ever understood is why certain words are profane. I understand the concept of taking the Lord’s name in vain and why this is bad, but not why you’re not supposed to use certain words as opposed to others because they derive from an Anglo-Saxon root instead of a Latin one. Fuck, shit, piss, and cunt all fall into this category and I can’t for the life of me understand why they’re included next to an exclamation of “BLEEDING CHRIST!” or “OH MY FUCKING GOD! under “profane, don’t do that”.

So recently there was a kerfuffle in which “Doctor Laura” Laura Schlessinger, radio advice show host, bitch-slapped a black caller as being “hypersensitive” to her neighbor’s race-based taunting and elected to illustrate her point by tossing “nigger” around eleven times in the course of the call. As one does when one is attempting to demonstrate one’s philosophical superiority* and authority as the mature advice-giving party. In any case, the predictable shitstorm occurred and Schlessinger apologized and said she had said “the wrong thing”. I didn’t feel it worth comment at the time, since Schlessinger has been verbally abusing callers from a very socially conservative position for years and it would be a bit like waking up and making the horrifying discovery that Keith Olbermann had said something misogynistic about a conservative woman. You don’t excuse it, but you’re not SURPRISED by it, and at this point nobody who calls in can really expect to be shocked when she tears them a new one, fairly or no.

But it seems Schlessinger has felt so wounded after this experience (which is hardly a new one for her, as she’s suffered major media shitstorms before over other “direct” things she’s said) that she’s leaving radio. Why? Because, she says, she wants to regain her first amendment rights. No shit.

During an interview on “Larry King Live” on CNN, Schlessinger said, “My contract is up for my radio show at the end of the year, and I’ve made the decision not to do radio anymore.”

She added: “The reason is, I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special-interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.” ……

Although she said her sponsors and affiliates have backed her, Schlessinger, 63 — who holds a PhD in physiology from Columbia University — told King that she lived in “constant fear” that critics would attack them for her remarks.

“I never called anybody a bad word. I was trying to bring — and obviously it has become a national discussion now — I was trying to make a philosophical point,” she said. “And I made it wrong, but I wasn’t dissing anybody. I was trying to make a point, and for that to say that I should be silenced is the reason why I’m saying to you that I’m obviously losing First Amendment rights.”

It’s more or less obligatory to note at this point that Schlessinger has no fucking idea what the First Amendment actually means; she’s made a long and very renumerative career out of broadcasting and publishing whatever she thinks. At no point has anybody of relevance ever, ever, actually suggested that she can or should be legally prevented from expressing her opinions. She can say whatever she likes without legal restriction so long as it is not libelous. This right is fully protected by the First Amendment whether you’re an internet crackpot, a street-corner preacher, or a radio show hostess, and it has never been restricted for her.

What she seems to THINK she has a right to is to be able to say whatever the hell she thinks and for her and her sponsors to experience no consequences for it. The First Amendment does NOT guarantee a funded soapbox, and it does not immunize anybody from criticism. It’s every bit as much the right of people, scary “special interest groups” or no, to engage in speech expressing their displeasure with her speech, and to withdraw monetary support for her speech. If she is so very worried about her tender little sponsors, who are making a monetary bet that more people will enjoy listening to her than not, she can think about what she fucking says before she says it. Her entire career is built on an audience, and nothing in the Constitution guarantees her that audience, and her sponsors’ monetary contribution is made because they are betting on that audience. Audiences have every bit as much right to react to what she says as she has to say it, even if she may regard those members of her audience who are minorities of varying sorts to be icky people that shouldn’t be able to influence her life.

This confusion about “freedom of speech” equating to “freedom from criticism that actually affects the speaker in any way” is a common one, and ordinarily I wouldn’t regard yet another instance of it as worth much comment. What pops the vein in my temple is that Laura Schlessinger has built her entire fucking career on outspoken criticism of others. What she evidently feels she deserves is complete freedom to say whatever she thinks of them without having to experience any negative backlash involving what others think of her. If you make a business out of acidic criticism, a lot of people will think less of you for it and if enough do they may make you feel it financially; if you want to be in that business, you roll with the punches. I don’t see Rush Limbaugh tearfully taking his ball and going home when people say nasty things about him and try to boycott him, and his media profile has always been far above hers.

Schlessinger should take one of her own book titles to heart and stop whining. And for that matter, if she wants to go out as a martyr and get anyone to take her seriously at all, maybe she shouldn’t have chosen such an unfuckingbelievably stupid hill to die on.

*Her point was that black comedians say it all the time, therefore it must not actually be a bad word. Which, no; there are some words that members of a group can say and out-group members can’t without the context and felt intent changing drastically. Culture and context aren’t run on a playground definition of “fair”. However, this is not the point of this post.

Dr. Venkman, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of “dodge” or “hustle.” Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman, and you have no place in this department or in this University.

Here at the Nerd Ranch, if you want to start a serious no-shit look-for-your-teeth brawl, a statement akin to the above is your best bet to getting there. That said, if you replace the name “Dr. Venkman” with “Dr. Erich Ritter” you will have a 100% accurate statement.

Erich Ritter is a behavioral ecologist with his PhD from the Bangladesh Post Office Zurich University*, and according to his biography is “is the only professional applied shark-human interaction specialist.” He is a poor scientist.

One of Dr. Ritter’s main tenets is that most shark bites are not attacks, but accidents. The shark was not out for human blood, but was curious, stepped on, had PMS, or was actually reflected light from Venus in a pocket of swamp gas. To a point, I agree with this. White shark attacks on surfers have frequently been chalked up as a case of mistaken identity, as the profile of a surfer paddling out strongly resembles the shark’s preferred seal prey. Further, he has in the past postulated that he can control interactions with sharks simply by modifying his heart rate.

In 2002, while filming for Discovery Channel’s annual “Shark Week,” Dr. Ritter achieved applied shark-human interaction with a bull shark and his leg.

In an attempt to demonstrate his theory about heart rates and the complete safety of being around sharks, Dr. Ritter employed the methodology of wading out into waist-deep water populated with a high concentration of bull sharks, and chumming the water. Yes, the same bull sharks responsible for more applied shark-human interactions than any other species. The same bull sharks with more testosterone at ambient levels in their blood streams than Mark McGuire in a batting cage. To call this experiment poorly designed is an understatement.

At any rate, the predictable outcome occurred and Dr. Ritter was dragged to shore sans most of his leg. After his recovery, since blood sells, Discovery gave him another show, “Anatomy of a Shark Bite.” In this bit of popular tripe, Dr. Ritter uses “state-of-the-art robotics” and computer animation to recreate the event and, supposedly, analyze the mechanics of how shark bites physically work, presenting the work in the context that this is somehow very poorly understood, despite a myriad of studies, papers, and research that did not originate with a video clip that should have appeared on MTV’s “Jackass” instead of any show claiming to be serious and remotely scholarly. It’s been many years (thankfully) since I saw the show in question, but some of the more egregious design flaws included using steel for the shark’s teeth in the robot, ignoring the mechanical force multiplier of a lever and considering air-line PSI to be the same as applied PSI in the pneumatic shark-jaw, using fixed jaws (ignoring the rather significant motion and mechanic from the fact that real shark jaws extend and rotate through different angles during the biting process, rather than just the “Hungry-Hungry Hippos” model used in the “state of the art robotics”), and reproducing the vigorous nuanced shaking motion sharks normally create via their entire bodies by having Biff and Slab push the robot back and forth. The computer modeling was essentially “Here’s a CGI shark! Ain’t it pretty?” On the plus side, they did put a fair degree of effort into getting the shape of the teeth right between the various shark species they were “recreating” the bites of.

When the show originally aired, I was so astounded at the lack of effort to bring anything to the table other than flash and shock images from the original attack, that I wrote to Dr. Ritter. As this was several computers ago, I no longer have either my original letter or his reply, but I detailed the above flaws with the bite-model he used along with some others that I’m sure I’d recall if I re-watched the show, asked about some obvious mathematical errors presented in the show, and in general asked what the fucking fuck he called that piss poor excuse for modeling, and could you maybe own up on a few things that are just flat wrong, though amazingly I did so politely. His response was essentially “Piss off, I have a PhD and you don’t.”

Now as I said, in broad principle I agree with Dr. Ritter. I don’t believe many shark attacks on humans occur out of malice or predation, and that sharks overall have very clear body language. Fins stiff and down, swimming slowly? Good sign not to keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve waded in a school of leopard sharks and emerged without any damage, though I don’t believe for an instant that it had anything to do with properly controlling my heart rate. Not chumming the water might have been a factor, but I digress. Given this position, and that I sincerely do believe that the overall message that we should not fear sharks and should protect them, I chalked Dr. Ritter up as a pompous blow-hard who on the balance probably does more good for sharks than harm (at the very least, he’s directly contributed to the nutritional needs of one bull shark, which is more than I’ve done) and let it go.

Those in the audience of the TV watching persuasion have probably noticed that once again it’s time for Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week. I can’t really say that this has been the event to look forward to that it was in the past, and ever since the laughable spectacle of a show described above, I haven’t paid much attention to it. This does not preclude catching bits and pieces during dinner, or while channel surfing in the evening, however, which brings us to another point of why Dr. Ritter is a poor scientist. Flipping on the boob-tube the other evening, LabRat and I came in on the Thrilling Dramatic Conclusion to a show I missed the title of revolving again around shark bites. The Thrilling Dramatic Conclusion in question? Dr. Ritter will reproduce the experiment that led to his tragic accident!

Except there were only nurse sharks (a species noted for being extremely docile, especially compared to bull sharks, the odd lemon shark (inquisitive but also not noted for high aggression levels), and maybe a blacktip reef shark out at the edge of the bay.

And there was only Dr. Ritter in the water instead of him and the camera crew and a couple other guys.

And he was moving much more slowly and cautiously.

And there was a spotter watching the sharks from safety calling out positions.

Oh, and there was no chum in the water. That might be a little factor.

One of the central features of real science is repeatable experiments. If you say you managed to start up cold fusion, but can’t ever duplicate it, then that pretty much goes in the column headed “Bullshit.” If experiment A is dropping a baseball from a height of ten meters and measuring the amount of time before it hits the ground in order to determine acceleration due to gravity, and experiment B is pushing a baseball across a table with a spring, these experiments are not equivalent. They do not contain the same variables, they do not measure the same things, and the — do I even need to keep hammering this point? They’re not the same experiment, and the outcomes are not outcomes that can be measured against each other.

Look, Dr. Ritter’s original stunt was to have Steve Urkel march into a group of Hell’s Angels with a baggie of meth around his neck knocking over their beers and calling them all sweet-cakes. The “recreated” experiment was telling Nigella Lawson that unfortunately the butter for her toast was not pre-softened, we’re terribly sorry ma’am, so breakfast is on the house.

Sure, there are disclaimers all over the shows about how you shouldn’t jump in the middle of shark lagoons yourself, and those really are pretty good warnings for once. These didn’t-make-the-cut clips from “Jackass” are dangerous, whether you know what you’re doing or not. Dr. Ritter trying to prove his theory via this methodology is disingenuous at best, and at worst… well, take a look at his leg. There are much better ways to go about analyzing and observing shark body language and stimulus response. There’s something to be said for stepping away from the cage, since they do obviously provoke a curiosity response from the shark, but the flailing ape with bubbles coming out of its head is sort of a fin-scratcher to our toothy friends too. Honestly this guy’s body of work is like a “how-to” for anti-science. Really, I’d like to suggest that if he’s going to keep at his body of work in this manner, he step things up a bit, get a wet suit, and go prove his theory with the great whites. Someone else even helpfully made a template for how a show like that should look. I bet the endings are almost identical, too. This one will just be wetter.

*In all fairness, ZU may actually be a very good institution. Its alumnus and his holier-than-thou attitude and camera-seeking behavior, however, does not present a stellar image of the institution.

Via Popehat, whose own pungent commentary on the subject is not to be missed, a Bruce Walker column over at American Thinker whose basic thesis seems to be “almost all Americans are secretly conservatives and there’s only an appearance of rough equality of liberals and conservatives because liberals are so mean conservatives are afraid to admit it”. To wit:

The institutional stranglehold that the left has on American society is almost Orwellian in its breadth and intensity. Why would anyone in America willingly call himself a “conservative” when the left has so insidiously smeared conservatives with the failed leftist malignancies of National Socialism and Fascism? Conservatives, to the omnipresent organs of leftism, are like Dalits in India: untouchables, loathsome and despised. So the upper-caste leftists think nothing of privately joking about Rush Limbaugh in agony or gratuitously smearing Fred Barnes or Karl Rove as racists. Leftists are simply terrorists. Many closet conservatives, I suggest, are too frightened to be open and honest about what they believe.

The first and most obvious point to make is that “conservative” and “liberal” are blanket terms that describe varying degrees of loose tribal affiliation to gigantic baskets of ideas and philosophies, some of which are in direct conflict with each other, and thanks to that self-identified conservatives and liberals may have more in common with each other than than they do with other conservatives and liberals. I generally call myself a conservative if pressed to make a political identification without time to explain in depth, but that’s because it’s the identification I see as most relevant given the priorities I put on my various values, current majority face represented by liberals, and today’s battleground issues; anyone who’s read me for awhile knows I have a lot of “liberal” views as well and that I don’t think much of any of the most popular figures on the right.

What I find so amusing about the article is that if I went in and did some search-and-replace functions on “conservative” and “liberal” and changed the language to fit leftist tropes, it could have been published in Nation and been about how the vicious right-wing attack machine was preventing the progressive views that are really dominant from gaining political traction. Goodness knows I’ve read dozens of such posts and pieces in varying places I visit that lean leftward rather than rightward, and they are all quite sincerely meant. Whenever Republicans or Democrats win a big political victory and manage to gain a substantial majority in Congress and an executive of their own brand, they generally tend to behave as though they believe this is true and the bulk of America approves broadly of their flavor of agenda and promptly make a bunch of policy overreaches that lead to a backlash in the following election, and then everyone involved instantly forgets what lessons there might have been in that and repeats the cycle endlessly.

The right and left attack machines both exist. There are vicious demagogues of every imaginable political flavor, and in my experience neither side is markedly more civil than the other; press the right buttons and the venom flows, usually with a justification about fighting fire with fire or rationalization about being “brave” if questioned. Shutting down opposition by making it unpleasant to be the opposition is so tempting a tactic no philosophy is immune, though some tend to be more passive-aggressive and self-deluding about it than others.

My major objection to the Walker piece, though, is the implicit attitude that being criticized for your politics, even unfairly and mean-spiritedly criticized, is such a devastating experience that it equates to terrorism. Leaving aside the loathsome practice of borrowing actual atrocities where people die to make your hurts seem more serious, it’s just astoundingly whiny.

This just in! Having strong opinions and beliefs about anything will mean getting criticized for it, sometimes by people who are meanypants doodoo heads about it. Whether it’s your politics, your religion, or your feelings about semiautomatic handgun models, if you are at all outspoken about them someone at some point, sometimes even a someone in a position of power relative to you, is going to hand you a ration of shit about it. Absolutely nobody has any sort of right to even be insulated from this. No matter how profoundly you believe yourself to be in the right, being right grants absolutely no special privileges or immunities to you and your beliefs. The Great Pumpkin isn’t real, and being sincere about things counts for absolutely nothing in terms of what rights you have in the way others treat you, so long as they aren’t actually assaulting you.

And this is not that big of a deal. If you’ll stop reacting to insults with temper tantrums, you might find that you now have the time to realize they’re actually a much less unpleasant experience than throwing tantrums is. I’ve been called all manner of things and had my beliefs characterized in all sorts of inaccurate and insulting ways, and the worst consequence is transitory irritation followed by writing some people and forums off as possibilities for reasonable conversation. This has overall resulted in my staying friends with a lot of liberals and remaining a regular in several places dominated by liberals, because I really don’t mind being basically regarded as mildly insane and somewhat misguided- after all, I think the same of them. Astoundingly I have suffered no consequences whatsoever from being open about my politics aside from the occasional tiff with people that just can’t return civility if they think they are In the Right.

The ability to be secure in your opinions, values, and beliefs even if someone is mean to you about them is an adult life skill. If you are not in possession of it, I don’t recommend advertising it through national media.

DisturbedLoyal readers may remember a while back we lost a good chunk of content thanks to some DNS issues and a migration to a new server. A recent post at Kevin’s had me looking for one of those lost posts, and was finally motivation enough to actually go through the raw SQL version of the missing material. Various technical issues prevent an easy splice back into where the article originally appeared, so since we’ve got an early raid tonight and not much time for actual thinky-thinky content, y’all get a rerun of my original thoughts about Yuri Bezmenov, the state of modern education, and the current political landscape. Enjoy, and cross your fingers I can dig out some of the other popular-but-missing posts from this monster too now that I’ve finally dug into it.
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Some time back, Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority put up a post involving a video clip of a fairly noteworthy Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov. Kevin’s point was one regarding our education system, but my Reynold’s wrap beanie is telling me there’s a little more going on here. Wander over and watch the clip and read the post & excerpts.

Earlier tonight, we recorded the first of the New and Improved Vicious Circle (link coming soon). Why new and improved? Probably because Alan is actually going to get around to posting this one (we hope), but I digress. Originally one of the topics for the evening was going to be “why the fuck are the Democrats determined to try socialism when it never worked anywhere else?” It being the Vicious Circle, we of course didn’t stay anywhere near what was originally planned for the most part, and since I actually thought I felt a neuron fire on this topic earlier, I figured I’d trot it out here instead. (Edit: Holy crap! He did it!)

Now let’s just take a minute and think about our elected officials, be they democrat, rino, or pretty much anyone other than Ron Paul, who has his own set of problems anyway. Some senators can’t manage to drive across a bridge without killing someone. Others think their staff sent them an internet. Bluntly put, congressmen and senators are too busy diddling page boys, evading their taxes, drowning their workers, going out with mistresses, explaining that barrel shrouds are shoulder things that go up, and generally demonstrating as frequently as possible that between all 535 of them you could find more intelligence and general competence (in ANY field other than getting elected) in a lightly stunned ground squirrel. Seriously, look at ‘em. They’re really fuckin’ dumb if you hadn’t noticed! And when they flaunt that idiocy, it’s not in an isolated incident! They’ve admitted frequently, especially since President Leave Britney My Presidency Alone took office, that they don’t even read the bills they’re voting into law.

Again, consider their frequent demonstrations of idiocy. I cannot believe this is a new and recent development. Now think about who is writing and reading these bills, if not our dully (sic) elected officials. Why, that would be their staff! People not elected, but hired based on, essentially, their ability to bullshit and look good, and for some specialists, manage the press when the Senator decides to test the float-mode on his car and comes up light one passenger. There’s obviously some degree of oversimplification here, but how much is anybody’s guess. These hired bullshit specialists have been crafting our laws for quite a damn few years, based simply off their ability to get hired.

Kinda like schools have to hire teachers.

Today I received a letter from Los Alamos National Lab’s HR division, informing me that I had not been selected for a job I applied for with them.

A job I applied for a full year ago.

Thanks, guys, but I kinda guessed.

So there’s a discussion over at Querencia about breed standards and their utility or lack thereof, that has me thinking again along the lines of what a “breed” actually is and how breeding should be approached. If you’ll recall I denounced the logic of closed registries some time ago as an inevitable population-genetics suicide pill, and there was some discussion then of how we should define dogs as a breed, if not by their parents and increasingly narrowing gene pools.

The most obvious reply to “closed registries are bad” was and is “if you just define any dog as a breed as one that kinda looks and acts like one, you’ll quickly lose all consistency and probably functionality as well”. This is true. As I pointed out in that post, inbred genetic disease problems and consistency of form and working ability are achieved by precisely the same mechanism: deliberately narrowing the gene pool. The upshot of the post after all the genetic discussion is that you can’t create a group of small-to-medium fast-moving dogs with consistently high aptitude for moving sheep around (or insert other breed form and function) without also accepting a higher rate of genetic disease than you would find in a population of randomly breeding dogs; it’s just that closing registries also closes a lot of the options breeders have to mitigate and do some repair work on those small, tailored gene pools they’ve created.

The line of logic this leads to, at least in regards to how dog breeding is accomplished in the majority of the Western world, is to rely more heavily on breed standards in making our definition of what a breed is. As John Burchard and Steve point out, standards have a great number of problems inherent in them as well, some of which are systemic in that human nature tends to err consistently in the same directions over time. Immediately in comments, the same family of counter-argument as the one above is presented: if we don’t have standards, then we immediately lose consistency, and the entire point of having breeds at all is consistency.

Well, yes. Even the most ardent working-dog devotees, the commenter points out, have a sort of overall shape and form of dog in mind when judging the worth of a dog and its potential contributions to a breeding program. But none of that detracts from Dr. Burchard’s point, which is that breeding to a written standard of questionable interpretation is what has lead to Bulldogs that can’t give birth or mate naturally and can’t survive heat for long, German Shepherds that look like recognizably normal canines from the shoulders forward and victims of severe scoliosis from the shoulders back, and Pekingese that can barely breathe because physiologically speaking, most of their snouts are in their throats. That standards have led to severe deformities being enshrined as “breed type” and actively bred for is inarguable: the evidence is struggling around the show rings every year. Not even the favored savior most frequently put forth, working ability, is any guarantor- the German-bred GSDs must pass a working test to be shown and bred, but as the photos show, have become every bit as deformed as their American counterparts. They merely dumbed down the tests to accommodate for dogs whose grotesque structures had finally compromised their ability to move enough to start failing, as Dr. Burchard notes.

What are these people thinking? Most surely it is not “I think it would be the best thing for the breed to cripple it”. Not, likely, of money- dogs that look like this don’t make such great candidates for milling out and selling to the public. Status? I’m certain it’s a motivation, but again, most people in breeding and showing are there out of love for the breed- ribbons are a nice thing to chase, but there are much cheaper and easier ways to go about status. I suspect, however, that the thought process begins with “an English bull dog is a dog with a skull that should be very large, and in circumference, in front of the ears, should measure at least the height of the dog at the shoulders. Viewed from the front, it should appear very high from the corner of the lower jaw to the apex of the skull, and also very broad and square. Viewed at the side, the head should appear very high, and very short from the point of the nose to occiput. The forehead should be flat (not rounded or domed), neither too prominent nor overhanging the face.” To borrow from one mangled breed’s current standard. Reading it does not directly suggest this- but it is what has resulted over multiple generations of breeders breeding for exactly what was prescribed.

And if they defend their results as what the breed is? Are these dogs descended from those in the original studbook? Yes. Do they fit the standard, are they not exemplifying the standard as directly as they can? Yes, they’re doing that too. The problem is, the standard is constructed around traits that described this animal as distinguished from all other dogs quite accurately… and over generations of a contest that compared bulldog to bulldog depending on how they distinguished in these traits from other bulldogs produced this animal. They have done nothing but create a bulldog that is most purely and essentially a bulldog as they understand the state of bulldogness to be- and love of bulldogs was the primary driver.

Work is not necessarily the cure, either. Work will be more consistent in weeding out dogs that are outright deformed, but a bird dog who cannot be sane unless he runs for miles and miles each day and wrecks his own frame through constant hard use (and yes, maybe because the frame was not that sound to begin with) is as much a dog who is suffering from what his breeding as wrought as one who cannot run for more than a few minutes because he can’t breathe very well to begin with. Likewise dogs that run their paw pads off because they are so stimulated by the prospect of doing whatever it is they fire so hard on that they don’t notice pain until major damage has already been done.

Likewise, such a dog can only exist in an environment in which the work is there for him to do- and the spaces for this kind of work are narrower and narrower with each century. Surely they and their work is worth preserving, but wanting a dog that makes a reasonable companion is by far the commonest modern motive in evaluating dogs, and far from an ignoble one. If work were the standard cure, what to do with vast swathes of breeds that WERE created specifically to be pleasant pets? It certainly wouldn’t move the desire for dog ownership exclusively to people whose particular monomanias make a field-bred hard worker a good choice. In terms of total pet owning homes, even if we could somehow exclude all idiots and irresponsible people, far more would be better off with a carefully bred Bichon Frise from a mindful show-and-nothing-but-show kennel than a terrier from working lines or a field-bred setter. They have no less reason to prefer a purebred to a mutt than a family that wants a dog for a specific job; they may want the dog to be consistently stable, consistently friendly, of a consistent easily managed size, and with a consistent coat that is nice to pet and maybe doesn’t shed so much dander. These are far from selfish or stupid desires or reasons to have a breed.

If you think I’m leading up to a better solution than standards, I’m not. Just because you point out deep and systemic problems in a given system doesn’t mean you have a much better solution. The best I can do is emphasize that when breeding any animal to create a consistent type, the first priority should not be endlessly chasing essentialism, but what makes this breed and what you want it to do- now, in the future, ten generations from now. We cannot eliminate the human qualities of politics and short-sighted terminology from standard-writing, but we can push within the culture to keep these concerns first and foremost. The degree to which individual kennel clubs and overall communities for breeds has done this has made a great deal of difference in how various breeds have fared over the century.

In a lengthy comment on my Chromosomal Radio post, commenter Geodykt pointed out that I am explicitly suggesting some fairly deep differences in communication style between the sexes, when previously I’ve been pretty unforgiving of articles designed around Decoding Woman Language or Man Language. I answered there- the bottom line reason I’m so down on the article I fisked is because it not only treats women as some sort of other species, but explicitly rests on the premise that the only form of meaningful interaction for a man with a girlfriend is sex, he’s entitled to sex, and the rest is just her screwing around to get stuff, but it deserves a longer treatment.

Yes, I do think there are meaningful and deep differences between men and women, some of which are no doubt rooted in biology, some of which are rooted in culture, and some of which are rooted in other aspects of socialization, like the way we effectively sort into two different camps of interaction from early childhood to puberty and then gingerly re-integrate. (I suspect this period combined with culture of birth is what creates single-gender “radio”- a long period of learned nonverbal signals and unspoken social mores that may not overlap at all.) The reason I’m so quick to question any and all products, books, articles, and the like that explicitly rest on the premise of “men and women are different, time to explain the differences so we can finally get something done” is that while it’s trivial to recognize that there ARE differences, the human urge to set things into neat categories leads to a tremendous amount of gender essentialism. It’s one thing to recognize that your wife/husband whoever is different from you in ways you may not understand, it’s another thing altogether to forget that you are close friends and you both speak English; the closer and more intimate the relationship, the more the right answer to a question or point of friction is not to figure out how the other person’s Man/Woman Nature is causing it, it’s to talk to them. Yes, communication can be difficult, especially when one or more of the people involved never really learned some advanced communication skills that a lot of people don’t because no one explicitly sets out to teach them, but making assumptions that turn out to be wrong is condescending at best and can be disastrous at worst.

This doesn’t just apply to relationships; a disturbing amount of the time, once you oh-so-bravely bring up the question of “are the sexes fundamentally different, perhaps in ways we don’t remotely understand”, the answer seems to be “yes and it’s biological and happens to line up really well with the gender paradigms of the 1950s”. To give an example, Larry Summers (late of the Obama administration) managed to get deposed as president of Harvard for remarking that the reason women are not found as often in higher levels of academics in math and science may be that women simply don’t tend to be as biologically equipped for math and science as men. He was pilloried for it.

From where I’m sitting, he deserved to be- but not because it was sexist in and of itself to suggest that men and women may be biologically different and even have (very) broadly different aptitudes across varying cognitive domains. It was for being a pure-and-simple sloppy thinker. YES, genetics and biology influence us across both temperament and personality; we should know this simply by the fact that we’ve managed to create different dog breeds that vary dramatically in behavior as much as they do in shape and form. However, humans are also the most profoundly cultural species on the planet; we literally require massive doses of cultural interaction to grow to adulthood and be sane and functional. To assume off the bat that a difference between human groups is genetic without seriously considering culture is just plain lazy as well as highly likely to lead anyone wrong.

No, he wasn’t wrong for the making the suggestion because it was sexist on its face- but to make such a suggestion without sitting down and pondering what exactly a person needs to do to achieve a high level of success in math and science was. For one, academic science requires a person to devote basically the entirety of their young adulthood to work, to the exclusion of much in the way of a family life- unless you can secure a partner willing to shoulder most of the load for you on the home front and be understanding about your relative absence. Does Larry Summers, or anyone else, think that there are no gender differences whatsoever in the pressure a man or a woman experiences to be the primary homemaker? Or, for that matter, in socialization to value career over family or vice versa? Or in remaining single to a certain age versus settling down at a certain age?

For that matter, he’s also off his nut if he genuinely thinks the only measure of your ability to succeed in academic math and science is your talent for math and science, even once you admit it’s also measured by your willingness to lock yourself in a laboratory until you’re at least thirty. I would invite anyone under this impression to walk up to someone on a university campus currently involved in trying to get tenure, or just retain their jobs with any prospect of career advancement, and tell them that success in academic science- tenure and the peer review system- is all about merit and that politics have nothing to do with it. I would also caution this person to pick a day when their subject is in good humor and more inclined to laugh in their face than to try and choke them with their shirt.

DO men and women differ broadly in their respective talents for math and science on a genetic basis? I have no idea. I do know that women rapidly achieved something much closer to parity of representation in another environment where you have to be scientifically inclined but the system is much less political and has much more defined endpoints for the “become a totally career-focused cavedweller” phase- medicine. You could continue to argue the point on the basis that medicine is less “mathy” and therefore not the same, and you might even be right, but the fact that Larry Summers apparently considered absolutely none of this before making a politically loaded statement means he deserves every bit as much contempt as any of his detractors who did nothing but shriek “SEXIST!!!” at any suggestion of biological differences between the sexes other than the obvious.

IQ testing and supposed cognitive differences between men and women, or for that matter among racial groups, suffer from a lot of similar problems, and other problems that have to do with the fact that while you can always be pretty sure that you’ve got your hands on discrete genetic differences between men and women, the same assumption is much less safe between racial groups. It’s well and good to presume that cognitive abilities and differing cognitive abilities among individuals, and perhaps among distinct genetic groups, exist. Good so far. It’s also fine to assume that there ARE some distinct genetic groupings even in a species as global and as inclined to intermix as humans. Also good so far. It’s an entirely other assumption that you can measure groups whose identification both in self and from outside is deeply culturally defined as though they represented genetically distinct groupings. “Black”, to pick an obvious example, describes the entire indigenous populations of the continents of Africa (which contains more genetic diversity within it than the rest of the world put together), Australia, which was genetically separate from the rest of the world for thousands of years, any and all mixtures thereof with any other population group on the planet that seems sufficiently melanistic, plus a completely unknown percentage of blends with other population groups that resulted from spending a couple hundred years as property with sex being one of the perks of ownership for a man. Latinos are even worse as a sample group, as the racial category exists specifically to describe an unknown blend of the entire indigenous gene pool of the Americas plus anything else, mostly European but not all.

It’s one thing to, say, measure the cognitive abilities of dog breeds, but when one of your “breeds” is “all shelter dogs of unknown history with black coats”, and another is “all other shelter dogs of unknown history with curly tails and erect ears”, and another might even be Border Collies with a twelve-generation pedigree, measuring them against one another as though they represented equally known and distinct genetic groupings will get you nowhere useful.

Compounding this difficulty is the nature of IQ testing itself, which tends to be spoken of as though it were a very known and consistent quantity but isn’t remotely. The traditional IQ test model, such as the Stanford-Binet, was designed with a very specific purpose in mind, which was *not* to give the tester a true assessment of the test-taker’s overall native intelligence- but rather to identify students that were deficient enough not to succeed academically with their peers. Not to scale all takers across all cognitive domains- to pick out children who, for whatever reason, could not succeed in school at their age level. Other tests were designed later for other reasons, but all of them until quite recently have focused on identifying *lack* of cognitive ability commensurate with whatever level of society/activity they would theoretically be participating in. Modern intelligence testing has produced a much broader variety of tests, some more and less “culture-neutral”, but they run into the problem that they are all massively inconsistent with each other. I’ve taken quite a few myself just to amuse myself, and apparently my own IQ varies as much as sixty points depending on which test you give me and what the author thought was a good measure of overall cognitive ability. Due to the variety of tests and historical practices, scores from children, adults, and many different tests are all too often treated as equivalent in the data from broad surveys of IQ results across the world…

If you present to me the idea that there may be genetically based differences in cognitive capacity, I’d say you were stating the obvious. If you then expound there may be measurable differences in cognitive capacity among distinct human genetic groups, I’d say go on. If you THEN tell me that the evidence for a specific theory of measurable difference between groups lies in results gained from studies in which the groups may not be perceptibly genetically distinct, the testing of differing methodology and not necessarily designed for the purpose used, and the results extremely variable not only across tests but from one test to another in the same subject, I’d tell you to go back to the fucking drawing board- and maybe make some equally devoted efforts to develop some hypotheses related to the common variable we CAN see and understand to be very powerful- culture.

In the end I’m in fundamental agreement with Eric Raymond even if we have rather radically different outlooks on The Bell Curve; it is extremely likely to be the case that there are differences in various kinds of capacities among different genetic groups and among men and women, and it will gain us nothing to slink around this idea in fear of what we might find out those differences might be, and perhaps much to find out what really is truth.

However, I think I’ve got pretty ample reason to put any such claims under the microscope, because as obvious is the truth that biology affects temperament and cognition and these things are heritable is the temptation out of bigotry, laziness, or honest good intention to lay a template of expectation over the whole investigation that obscures and renders worthless the results more often than not. For all that, the power and prevalence of socialization, deliberate and not, is every bit as obvious- and should always be investigated with equal rigor.

*If the author thought it was abstract reasoning and reading comprehension, I’m a genius. If the author thought it was math, I’m average. If the author thought it was spatial reasoning, I’m retarded- or, sorry, deficient. For reasons of language and cultural barrier, most “culture-neutral” IQ tests tend to be built on spatial reasoning. Perhaps we can expect equal degrees of variance among varying cultures and racial groups for spatial reasoning ability and perhaps not, but I’m pretty fucking leery of equating it with general intelligence. Maybe I just don’t want to be stupid?

Via Holly, who has already fisked it admirably, a particularly abominable article that can pretty well be predicted from the title: Reasons Women Withhold Sex. She covered it fine but damned if it isn’t cranking up the rantmachine anyway; forgive me if I repeat many of the same points.

I like how even the title manages to be both fundamentally offensive and wrong. “Withholding” something from someone implies that this thing is either an accepted default state, or that the someone being withheld from has some sort of basic right to the something. I know the article is broadly meant to address men in relationships or men in marriages, but it still manages to say, basically, “reasons women deny men their happy fundamental default of having sex with them”. It is nearly an afterthought to point out that men in relationships and marriages sometimes “withhold” sex from women too and that this frustrates the women just as much, but overall it’s framed as a “woman problem”.

One of the benefits of being in a long-term relationship is that you have someone that you can readily depend on for regular sex. For guys especially, this is a very important part of a commitment to another person. However, it is precisely when you start to expect sex from your girlfriend that she starts using that presumption against you.

Translation: “In exchange for commitment to a single person, regular sexual service of the man is contractually expected, but women frequently default on the contract.” I could get more mileage out of this if there weren’t so damn many men and women alike who see relationships as EXACTLY THIS.

Some women make a habit of withholding sex from their partners, while some only do it under very specific circumstances. To men, this seems like cruel and unusual punishment.

Not having sex with you is not cruelty. It’s not having sex with you, which is the default resting state for every human being on the planet including ones with which you are in a relationship. Having sex is an intimate act between two people, not some kind of allowance for the guy in exchange for fidelity.

What’s actually extra sad about this is that I DO regard mutual sexual satisfaction as a critical component of a healthy intimate relationship, and view the lack thereof as a problem that needs to be addressed. The difference is that I definitely do NOT regard it as a service dispensed for the relationship satisfaction of the man, a transaction to be repaid in some kind of female relationship currency, or a right.

Of course, there is a difference between a woman simply not wanting to have sex and purposefully withholding it.

Oh good, I’m so glad we’re making some acknowledgment of the forgivable condition that is simply not wanting to have sex right now versus the cruel and unusual sort of not wanting to have sex.

When a woman withholds sex, she’s trying to send a message. Here are some of the reasons she might cut you off and what you can do about it.

Is it honestly this fucking impossible to tell there’s something wrong in any way other than her refusing sex? Or, for that matter, for her to send messages not written in Pussy Code?

She’s pissed

This is probably the most common reason that women withhold sex.

Sweet bleeding Christ on a chariot-driven crutch. Holly already covered this one, but again it bears repeating. If I am angry with someone, I do not want to play Guitar Heroes with them, I do not want to chat about Kirk vs. Picard with them, I do not want to do any of the relaxed, affectionate things I otherwise like to do with them when I’m NOT angry with them. This most definitely includes having them physically inside me. That is not withholding. That implies something I would otherwise be doing if only I weren’t actively seeking to punish.

If you’ve done something that made her furious, she may not be above punishing you by keeping the one thing you really, really want out of your reach.

You know, if my partner were so completely fucking uninterested in me that he didn’t care I’d stopped being friendly with him, didn’t care that I was upset, and only noticed anything was wrong because the Pussy Tap had oh so mysteriously shut off, I really wouldn’t want to have sex with him then, or ever.

The last thing a woman wants to do when she’s feeling any kind of negative emotion, whether it’s mad, sad, frustrated, annoyed, stressed, or worn out, is get busy between the sheets. While many guys can turn off the unpleasant feelings and get down to business, a woman finds it more difficult to push those emotions aside and get aroused. You might be satisfied with angry, violent sex, but she wants to work out her angst before she jumps into bed.

I like how this starts out with an acknowledgment of what I said above- that being pissed at someone generally excludes feeling amorous about them- and once again makes this out to be some sort of moody chick problem. I like a lot less the last sentence, especially as it seems to rather miss that “angry, violent sex” has COMPLETELY FUCKING DIFFERENT connotations and experience for a man and a woman.

The solution to this is to find out why she’s upset and try to fix it. Sometimes simply acknowledging that you’ve done something wrong is enough to make her calm down. Other times, the only way to get out of the doghouse is to participate in one of those long, heartfelt conversations in which you share feelings.

So, finding out what’s wrong and trying to make it right is the throw-yourself-on-your-sword solution of last resort to get the pussy flowing again. Why do people who think like this have relationships at all? It would save everyone a lot of grief.

She’s asserting herself

If she’s keeping the good loving from you, it may be an attempt to assert her power over you and the relationship.

Again, this has been pointed out by people who are not me (this time in Holly’s comment section), but exercising your right to refuse to allow someone to stick a body part in you isn’t really much of a power trip, especially if you’d enjoy it otherwise, which “withholding” implies. If this is her only form of power in the relationship- perhaps because, say, he doesn’t give a shit about anything else she does and considers her feelings something only to be dealt with if absolutely necessary in order to have sex with her- I don’t think this makes her all that powerful, or gives him much to fairly complain about.

She’s manipulating you

Another reason women withhold sex is to get something out of you. When no other methods of getting what she wants are working, she might resort to revoking your sex privileges until you agree to what she’s after. This will usually be a pretty big thing. Generally, she’s not going to bother holding out on you in order to get you to take out the garbage.

Ah, now we’re getting explicitly to sex-as-transaction. Normal humans don’t actually need to communicate desires and negotiate things using sex-no-sex Morse Code, but then again normal humans don’t usually form relationships with the idea that you’re making a regular-sex-for-fidelity contract rather than because they are fond of the other person for reasons unrelated to sex as well. I won’t say that no woman has or would ever tried this- but if she’s only using sex as currency and so are you and you’re getting the short end of the stick, why the hell would you want to stick around?

And again, sex is not a privilege. If I let you drive my car and we assume this is always the case unless I tell you otherwise, that’s a privilege. Sex is something we DO TOGETHER. Each time discrete.

She’s bored

To get around her sex ban in this case, try suggesting something new sexually. Take her to a sex shop and buy something fun for both of you. Buy a book with suggestions on how to spice things up. If you show some interest and put some effort into making some changes, she may open up again.

Alternatively? You could ASK HER WHAT’S WRONG. Which would also be showing some interest and putting in some effort, only without the guessing games that may well just feel like pressure to turn the Pussy Faucet back on if you guess wrong. That tends to breed resentment, and resentment and desire are incompatible emotions. But then again, so does having the completely correct perception that you are being kept around because you are the Pussy Faucet.

She’s tired

Maybe she’s not putting out because she’s just too damn tired. Perhaps you want to do it more often than she does, and she just can’t keep up. Other life demands might be stressing her out and keeping her busy too, making her too worn out to enjoy sex as often as you’d like.

Yes, being tired tends to be incompatible with desire as well, and sometimes people’s sex drives are just plain mismatched. It would be nice if it was acknowledged that this happens with high-drive women and low-drive men too, but far too much to expect from an article whose advice on how to deal with this is….

To get her back into the idea, pamper her with some relaxing treats beforehand. Draw her a bubble bath or give her a massage. If she’s relaxed, she’s more likely to feel sexy. Or, you could be truly unselfish and devote your time entirely to her pleasure for one night, making her more likely to want to return the favor another time. Also, you might consider cutting back a bit on the frequency. Instead of going to her every time you’re aroused, take matters into your own hands every now and again.

“Don’t be completely and utterly selfish, occasionally treat her like something other than a sex vending machine that keeps breaking, and she might then tolerate you doing it only most of the time.”

Playing games

Women withhold sex because men let them get away with it.

….Get away with refusing to have sex? You know, as basically misogynist as this article is, this sentence still makes my jaw drop.

It’s pretty clear it’s the one thing that most guys can’t live without and that they’ll do pretty much anything to keep it coming on a regular basis.

It’s pretty clear that single men who aren’t spending their disposable income on prostitutes are, in fact, living without sex with a woman. Something you want is not equivalent to something other people are inherently wrong not to give you- it still belongs to them, and nothing moreso than their own bodies.

All of that ranted, I honestly don’t mean to demean or belittle the situation of people who are in relationships or marriages in which the sex is very rare or altogether nonexistent. As I said before, I think mutual sexual satisfaction is an important component of a relationship; it may not always be 100% attainable due to that problem of people having differing drive levels plus drives changing over time for varying reasons, but I do regard it as an important thing. Relationships are hard, and said sex life can be difficult to maintain for a thousand reasons, not least of which is that dominant cultural memes hold that talking about sex or feelings about sex is humiliating and the absolute last resort, and that sex is something women shouldn’t want unless there’s something else in it for her, whereas sex is something guys should ALWAYS want and should also be entitled to. It is all too easy to run into problems maintaining a satisfying sex life WITHOUT being a shallow, selfish fuckhead. These are, however, relationship problems, not problems with men or women- and being a shallow, selfish fuckhead will get you there every single time.

All that said, I’d like to go back to “sex as transaction”, which sadly is an all too common thing with both men and women. I’ve heard men complain about wives/girlfriends who explicitly expect gifts in exchange for any sex at all, and compare them to whores. To which I would reply, just like the tango, every transaction involves two people. If she’s treating sex like any priced good or service, and you’re still sleeping with her, so are you- and you have nothing to complain about. Service on demand, as any professional knows, is expensive. To modify an engineering adage, good, cheap, honest- pick any two.

Sunday, we got a call from Kang’s breeder. The shows were done and it was time to pick her up. Arrangements were made to meet in Santa Fe the next day in the evening, and given the time, LabRat and I decided to pick up dinner while we were there, try out one of the myriad places we’ve yet to test out. After a bit of digging, we found the Blue Corn Brewery in the right neck of the woods. Being brewers ourselves and thus easily tempted with beer, it seemed like a plan.

Unfortunately, the Blue Corn Cafe & Brewery is a giant pit of fail.

Shortly after being seated, our vacant-eyed waitress arrived to take drink orders. We both wanted beer. As one does in a brewpub. Being vacant-eyed and of usefulness marginally above that of a potato, this maybe-nineteen-year-old was unable to recognize us as obviously above the legal drinking age, and carded us. Not particularly bright, but thus far no actual problems either, right? Well, LabRat’s ID was expired, and thanks to the magical sands of time instantly reversing by several years, she was of course once again twenty years and 11 months old again. The manager arrived to explain that they don’t serve expired IDs, and generally acted as though he were doing us a favor even letting us remain in the establishment with such a cardinal sin upon the table. While annoying, this still hasn’t stirred any actual problem. As the law is spelled out, if they want to be pedantic about the expired ID of someone obviously of drinking age, that’s well within their right. Better safe than sorry, all that jazz, and still only a minor inconvenience, albeit an annoying one.

My beer arrives. I imbibe and comment. I pass to LabRat so she may sample. She consumes one swallow, and returns the beverage. At this point, we have unknowingly departed from the rails of civilized customer service.

Moments later, the manager reappears. I look up, possibly expecting something along the lines of “I’m sorry, you’re clearly of legal age, this has been a mistake,” or some similar act of positive public relations. Instead, our officious arbiter of all alcohol appears highly annoyed, and belligerently declares “You’re not allowed to consume alcohol here!”

Sitting in a brew pub, only a few feet from the equipment for the production of alcohol, I was a bit taken aback.

“Excuse me?”
“She cannot consume alcohol on these premises! Her ID is expired and it is illegal for her to consume alcohol*. The waitress saw her drinking from that beer!”

The beer was on my side of the table. Full, less the two swallows above mentioned.

“Yes. She had a swallow to taste it. She’s not drinking it, I am.”
“She was drinking that beer and she is not allowed to consume alcohol here. You are not allowed to share and she cannot drink here.”
“I can’t offer my wife a drink of beer to see what she thinks.”
“No! She is not allowed! VERBOTEN VERBOTEN VERBOTEN WOOP WOOP WOOP GET YOUR ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE! SIT UP STRAIGHT!”

I exaggerate only minimally.

After a bit of further less-than-friendly conversation on the topic, while the manager vacillated between whether it was state law that she had magically regressed in age, or merely local policy, I opined that either option was low on common sense, and attempted to point out that all this fuss was over one single swallow. Had his mother been so obliging, perhaps our evening would have not been so marred, but I managed to bite my tongue on that point.

Without any exaggeration, the amount of spectacle our little reject from the food court produced would have been more adequate if we had been caught red handed giving a case of beer to a kid on a bike. Even the barest shred of sanity would dictate watching the situation to see if she had continued drinking in her magically age-regressed state, rather than stamp over and behave as if she had been doing rails of coke off the table, but sanity was clearly in short supply for our tireless defender of Because I Said So.

To head off the obvious, protecting a liquor license is clearly well worth a restaurant’s energy. They’re difficult to come by, and the fines can be steep for infractions. And to that end, as I said, we had no objection that they declined to serve LabRat. However, when your zealousness extends to verbally berating a customer over one mouthful of liquid, you have somewhat departed the realm of reasonable protection of the license and landed very squarely in the realm of gigantic asshole with minimal power exerting it simply for the thrill of the thing.

With service that rates as openly abusive, and food that would be complimented to be described as mediocre**, the Blue Corn Cafe & Brewery is very firmly off the list of places that will see our dollars in the future.

*It’s not. I looked it up.
**Discussion after our pot-bellied liquor nanny departed, we unfortunately arrived at the conclusion that for the sake of scheduling it would be more convenient to finish the meal there anyway. I was all in favor of leaving, and the subsequent heartburn made us both wish we had.

To kick off the second half of this beast, here’s one that can apply equally well to either side if you change some words around, and then for bonus kicks even has an equally double-sided conceptual cousin.

(Religious/atheistic) mass movements and governments have committed horrible atrocities!

Well, yes. And? They were composed of humans, what else did you expect? The irony of this one is that one thing both most religious people and atheists agree on is that human nature includes a pretty major nasty streak. Christianity calls it original sin and I call it Angry Monkey (okay, that’s what I’m calling it THIS week), but aside from disagreement on the origin of the nasty streak, everybody is in agreement that it’s there. What’s yet more ironic is that the structures that atheists tend to loathe most passionately- theocracies- and the structures that the religious loathe most passionately- communist/socialist totalitarian behemoths- have vastly more in common than they do distinguishing them from one another. What should warn us about the purpose and likely outcome isn’t whether an overreaching state believes in God and says you should too or else, or says there is no God and you should agree or else, is that they’re both trying to stamp out individual conscience and will probably have no compunctions whatsoever about anything else done to individuals.

It doesn’t just apply to states; give me just about any bit of historical “excitement” and I can probably find churches of various flavors, as well as various representatives of “reason” (difficult to do with a concept that has changed so much over human history), on heavily the right side and heavily the wrong side of the issue.

The flip side is this: (Religion/reason) is responsible for this moral evolution in society and there would be no morality without it.

Mkay. The problem here is that once you claim your favored ism is an unmitigated force for good rather than claiming the other guys are an unmitigated force for evil, you then have to explain all of its failures. If you’re going to claim, to use an example from a series of arguments I’ve had elsewhere, that Protestant Christianity gifts a civilization with industry, honesty, and clarity in a way that’s impossible without it, you then need to explain every example of a culture that has achieved these things, either before or after its conception, and then explain every society in which it didn’t “take”. Every “yeah but” you use to explain how an example somehow doesn’t count weakens both your argument and your credibility- and here’s the really important and- your religion’s credibility. Remember, we’re arguing about a philosophical and cosmological standard of right and wrong- if you use weak arguments, appear arrogant, or use intellectual double standards, you’re doing so in its name and by its standards.

Not fair? You were the one claiming to have the superior moral standard that elevates all exposed, what were you expecting but to be judged by it?

The above applies just as much to atheists attempting to demonstrating that freeing people from the “shackles” of religious belief makes them smarter, more rational, and more humane. Every time you claim that you become responsible for every dumbshit atheist or “skeptic” in existence that chases conspiracy theories, denies all inconvenient history of religion’s history of scholarship, and worse yet, every cute little bright spark who had a “rational” justification for something morally horrific. HEY EVERYONE, YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE AWESOME? EUGENICS! STERILIZE THAT POOR IDIOT BEFORE HIS KIDS ROB US! This is perhaps best encapsulated by Richard Dawkins, poster boy for vicious, ignorant, attacks on religion, putting forth the blue-ribbon idea that atheists should start referring to themselves as “Brights”. Thanks, Dick, I really fucking wanted that can tied to my tail.

Too long, didn’t read: if you put a book of spiritual text or reasoned philosophical argument before someone, what you get back out of them tells you more about them than it does about the book. The same book
“produced” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Phelps- or rather, provided the structure to one man’s crusade for justice and humanity and another’s overwhelming hatred of his fellow man.

Arguing on the internet, religious-flavored version: You stupid, miserable heathen, what you need is to embrace my faith of peace, tolerance, and honesty.

Your standards. I’m lookin’ at ‘em. You’re violatin’ ‘em in the exact same breath of telling me they produce superior people. Fuck off and see if you can find some honesty, patience, and compassion before you go telling me you’ve got what I need for that. I’m no better? Doesn’t matter, you were just in the process of telling me you were. You’re not perfect, you’re just forgiven? Oh, so that means you’re harassing me for your own selfish self-satisfaction and not out of any desire to be a good person or improve my life. Way to witness. Now die in a fire.

Arguing on the internet, atheist-flavored version: You stupid sheeple need to take off your fucking blinders and wake up to the truth instead of the numbing pap the church feeds you.

Yes, it’s not as though there weren’t hundreds of fucking years, thousands if you count any religion at all instead of just Christianity, in which the educated clergy were, y’know, the overwhelming bulk of humanity’s intellectual effort. Of course it can’t be that they’re STILL major forces in education and literacy if only so people can read the damn texts. Only the entire philosophical foundations of Western civilization, including the philosophies that led to the Enlightenment that let us atheists speak up in the first place, were founded in scholarship by the religious or explicitly intended to understand the world in a religious framework. Just because you met some stupid people who believed in someone apparently called JAYsus does not mean you can therefore discard everything religion ever touched as obviously retarded that you needn’t spend any effort on understanding.

Because smart, scholarly people believed something doesn’t make it right- Newton didn’t validate alchemy- but neither does it mean that because some explicitly anti-intellectual people believe something, there can be nothing there of intellectual worth.

Oh, and also thanks a whole bunch for holding up that “atheists are assholes” stereotype. Especially if you actually come right out and say nobody’s daddy in the sky is making you be nice. YES. THIS WILL PROVE YOUR SIDE IS THE FORCE OF MATURITY AND REASON.

Here’s one from the religious side: See, this is what happens, if people don’t fill the void in their lives with God, they’ll just find something else to worship and fill it that way.

There’s no “void”, okay? I’ll grant you some people seem desperate to fill themselves up with somebody else telling them what to do, but they don’t actually tend to produce healthy practicioners of faith, either, since they’re looking for somebody to give them an excuse to STOP thinking and taking responsibility. Most atheists are rational adults who either discarded something they no longer (if ever) felt to be true and fruitful in their lives, or never felt a need or desire for it in the first place.

The more pernicious variant of this is any statement that contains the assumption faith is something people are deliberately trying to run away from, either because they fear the responsibility or because they actively favor the other side. Look, I understand God and faith may be hugely important one person’s life, but in mine it’s just not relevant. I don’t go around yattering about evolution and arguing for gay rights to defeat the Bible’s teachings, it’s just not even on my radar screen.

Short version: telling someone they’re an atheist because they fear God or favor sin/Satan is like me telling you you don’t believe in Odin because you’re a Loki partisan and secretly crave the day Fenris will eat the moon and begin Ragnarok*.

Atheist inversion: accusing religious people of being religious because they NEED someone to tell them what to do to live rather than taking responsibility, i.e.the “crutch” school of argument. I can mostly invert what I said above to apply, but it also has one more extension: if you go up to someone and kick something you think they’re leaning on out from under them, two results are possible. One, it’s not actually a crutch, and he’s going to beat your skull in with it. Two, it is, and you’re a huge asshole.

I think I’m starting to ramble and rant a bit much, so I’ll close out on one thing that annoys me intensely coming from either side: sex obsession.

Religious people are not miserable, stunted, dour people who’d throw off their shackles and revel in perversion if they ever but gave themselves permission. Atheists are not screaming perverts who run from God because it means they’d have to give up fucking everything that moves and twice on Tuesday for good measure. NOT EVERYBODY ORGANIZES THEIR ENTIRE GODDAMN WORLDVIEW OVER WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING OR NOT DOING WITH THEIR GENITALS. STOP IT!

*Stingray, in fact, favors this.

There are people coming across our border illegally who are there to take advantage of our much looser class structure and freer markets to carve out a better life for themselves and their families on raw work ethic and force of will. They are a tremendous asset to our economy and, if all of them could be deported at once today, several industries in several border states and port cities would likely collapse immediately. They would be citizens if they thought they could.

There are people coming across our border illegally who are there to take advantage of our generous public benefits in the realms of education, health care, and welfare for the unemployed. They have no intention of working as hard as the first group or maybe at all and they are a constant drain on our public resources. The only relevance citizenship has to them is more secure benefits access.

There are people coming across the border illegally who have no intention of either sponging on our public services or attempting to become a full member of American society. They are there to do work for much better money than they could at home, then send all of it home that they can afford. They have no intention of becoming citizens and while they have a fairly neutral effect on the US economy, the support they give to their home economy can be enormous.

There are people coming across the border who are dangerous criminals with every expectation of exploiting both native US communities and the community of immigrants, legal or illegal. They are professionals at mayhem, mostly involved in the drug trade, and account for disproportionate amounts of violent crime.

There are people coming across the border who are or aspire to be terrorists, and use the shelter of their host country to damage it.

There are people coming across the border who fit into none of these categories in particular, or a few of them at once, who have mixed loyalties and are basically just trying to have a better life, whether or not that includes honest work or criminal.

All of these things are true at the same time. Some of them are true of the same families at the same time. This is how immigration has always been, because immigrants are always people, same as the native inhabitants. If you structure your argument around how the other side is just racist/bleeding heart and totally deluded about the nature of immigrants, you are full of shit, because immigrants are people no matter what color they are and what language they speak. They aren’t a uniform pack of Oliver Twists with funny accents and they aren’t a conspiracy of cartels/mafia/jihadists either.

Any realistic proposition to handle immigration must acknowledge this truth, or else it’s just political grandstanding.

I have no serious expectation of anything other than grandstanding out of Washington for the forseeable future.

So this morning I see over at Tam’s a story about something ever so unexpected, epic quantities of fail in TSA. Specifically, some simpleton giving a bad name to minimum wage mouth breathers everywhere went through one of those new-fangled bodyscanners that have absolutely zero potential for abuse or unsavory behavior ever, really, we super-extra-promise now shut up and bend over, and his boss had a few choice remarks about the size of the monkey’s nightstick. The monkey was upset. The monkey expressed his upset via hickory shampoo.

Since it was TSA on TSA violence, I have no particular beef with this particular incident of conflict resolution. The supervisor was a dipshit (but he works for TSA, so that’s a redundant observation) and mouthed off in such a manner that in days past a quick application of remedial “being polite means you don’t get hit as much” would’ve sorted things out. The monkey was a dumbass (but he works for TSA, so that’s a redundant observation) for either getting caught, escalating to the point where now the entire nation knows he has a little winky, working for TSA in the first place, or not just taking it higher up the food chain like normal people (select all that apply).

Anyway, moving along past the stunning display of competence and quality from those in charge of keeping our skies safe from the semtex underoo brigade, we can find my main issue with this. Allow me to quote the final sentence of the article:

But if this latest incident is any indication, the scanners sound like good news for anti-terrorism and bad news for less-than-average men.

What.
The.
FUCK.

There is so much fail expressed there by Willard Shepard and Brian Hamacher that it makes me want to punch kittens and swear at boobies. “Oh, gosh, it sure is funny that these bumbling fucksticks who can’t even make it through THEIR OWN FUCKING TRAINING with any sort of professionalism, dignity, or impulse control suitable to avoid going to jail will be looking at the genitals of everybody trying to get on an airplane! That’s right comedic right there!”

Now that the Do It To Julia Pep Squad have weighed in, maybe it’s time to consider some other illusion ofsecurity devices we could bring in! How about the roto-rooter rectal-explosives detection system? “Sorry, ma’am. We’ve gotten a lot of 80 year olds claiming to be going to their grandchildren’s graduations loaded to the gills with semtex and metamucil!” Perhaps we could change the hiring standards to give those poor registered sex offenders a chance to get back on their feet! I know! let’s just get Brian and Willard there to explain how the new federal penis inspectors are going to prevent terrorism! It’s all very scientific, I bet. See, according to Dr. Phil, if you really want something you just have to think about it really hard. And if you want to blow up a plane, you’re busy thinking about that, and so you don’t think about other important things like keeping all your body bits phased in to this universe. So if they see someone go through without a penis then it means they’re going to blow up the plane! It’s sheer elegance in its simplicity! What flaw in the plan? “Women?” I don’t follow. Shut up, this will totally work.

Time to go put another five bucks in the jar of bail money we’ve set aside in case I ever have to get on an airplane again…

So two years ago to the day I had a bit of an automotive mishap.

Today, I was putting fresh tires on the same car. Guess what happened on the very last lug nut of the day.

From now on the tools stay in the box on 5/5.

So y’all have had a chance to go over LabRat’s more cerebral take on the cinematic wet turd Lil’ Jimmy Cameron plopped out to nearly take Best Picture. By popular request (two people), it’s my turn. Let me preface my review with the note that I was across the room from the screen and (thankfully) couldn’t hear every last syllable over the tattoo machines, and the fact that rather than try to absorb the whole showing of “Fern Gully” I frequently had my nose buried in either a tattoo magazine or a book. So no, I didn’t see the whole thing, in all it’s, um, “splendor.”

And thank fucking $deity for small favors.
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It strikes me that a core breakdown in political logic stems from seeing “the government” as a completely separate entity from “the people”. It’s true that it is, unlike people, an abstract entity whose structure does not depend on the people actually running it, and the people running it tend to develop a certain self-interested detachment in the wishes of the people they have power over.

Problem is, no matter how you move the boxes on the org chart around, the government is always people. Smart people, dumb people, uninformed people, drunk people, blue-nosed people, amoral people, ideological people, apathetic people, people just like the people all around you in your neighborhood and at your job whose decisions you normally wouldn’t give any particular credit. Under this system, we pick special people from the people who volunteer for the process, and in other systems they’re born into it or mostly selected, but at the end of the day it’s still people in the jobs and people picking them for the jobs. Some governments try to get around their people problem by proposing to put God in charge, but either because He doesn’t exist or because He has expressed complete disinclination in micromanaging humanity instead of making them manage themselves, it never seems to work and we wind up with systems every bit as venal and corrupt as we did when the people were reading from a different book. Other governments try to get around it by declaring all the people to be in charge, but when you look at it they pretty much seem to have individual people actually in charge the same way as in all the other systems.

We can’t trust the government to make better decisions than people because it IS people. We do try to put a better class of people in there than we think of when we think of the people that need to be regulated, but since all of us have radically different ideas of what actually constitutes smart people and better people there’s a pretty big cross-section of people anywhere that, when you peer at them closely, look an awful lot like the people around us but with more law degrees and fewer trade skills.

If your plan to improve society depends on the right people being in charge of it and will fail utterly or actually make things worse if the wrong people are, the plan is a conceptual failure out of the gate, because not only will the wrong people eventually be in charge, the chances are that you don’t even have the ability to identify the right people from the wrong people when you see them.

We’ve still got to work with being people, seeing as how nobody has graced us with a second option. This is what civilization, governments, and politics are for. But no law or government will ever be able to get around the people problem- it’s not just a flaw in the system, it IS the system. This is not subject to legislation or philosophy. If you proceed as though it were, the fundamental people nature of the system will reassert itself immediately, often quite creatively.

So, I finally got around to seeing James Cameron’s shiny, shiny story of awesome blue cat-people in space versus human marines. It would be something of an understatement to say that I did not like it. I will grant it was a rather unique experience in that it made me furious from a diverse array of political perspectives, however.

A disclaimer: Yes, I know it was very pretty, and I probably would have been visually enthralled had I seen it in a theater. I did not see it in a theater. I saw it when the other artist in my tattoo studio decided that that would be what played on the shop TV during my and another fellow’s session, as apparently both he and Jason are of the “works better with something blowing up in the background” school. I sympathize, as I used to do homework with James Bond movies on in the background for this very reason. However, it also turned the experience of the movie from something I watched on a very large screen in comfort with popcorn, which puts me in a forgiving sort of mood, into something I watched on a rather small screen while Jason spent all three hours of it drilling on me, followed by a 90 minute car trip spent brooding on the movie rather than the throbbing in my leg. This did not put me in a forgiving sort of mood.

So, if you liked it, or feel it was awesome just as long as you remember not to take it seriously, this is probably not going to be the post for you, as I am about to take it spleen-bustingly seriously. Archives are to your right.

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It occurs to me in that “no supporting evidence but my own observations” way that there is a distinct pattern in which people develop their prejudices and bigotries large and small, one that revolves around the degree of experience that person has in interacting with an identified group.

If it’s a group you have very extensive experience with and know very well, real bigotries don’t develop because you know that group too well; either you identify with the group yourself, or you simply have enough broad experience within it to know that the people making it up vary a tremendous amount and developing hard-and-fast good/bad stereotypes is not only undesirable, but pointless. You might know that group’s usual foibles and good and bad tendencies and have opinions about those aspects of the group, but you don’t think about them in terms of “(group name) are (adjective)”.

If it’s a group you don’t know and have no experience with, then you generally don’t have bigotries about them because there’s no *point* in developing much in the way of stereotypes about a group you don’t interact with. You might have some hilarious misconceptions or simplified mental pictures of them just because you lack information, but they’re not typically value-laden unless and until you mentally sort them into same basket as some other group you DO have experience with in order to integrate/simplify your worldview a little more. No American would have reason to be bigoted against, say, members of the Kikuyu ethnic group of Africa, but they might fold them into a broader group of “black people” when attempting to create a Grand Unified Theory of Race to justify his stereotype of the black people he’s familiar with. Americans generally have no stereotypes about, say, ethnic Mongolians at all, simply because they have no reason at all to.

Prejudices positive and negative, as well as real bigotries, tend to develop in that area of overlap between “people I identify as part of my world” and “people that are strange to me”. It’s easiest to observe in areas where a particular prejudice isn’t broadly socially unacceptable- witness the incest and stupidity jokes that come out of the woodwork when an urban liberal is discussing anything that poor white Appalachians or Gulf Coast southerners do. People that wouldn’t dream of doing anything but respectfully studying the culture of any group seen as “foreign” enough feel more than free to paint a group they see as an unfamiliar aspect of their own culture in cartoonish stereotypes- up to and including ones they see positively. Noble-savage stereotypes about American Indians are typically rooted in exactly the same mental processes as the cousin-humping redneck ones, they’re just colored by admiration rather than contempt.

Racism tends to work this way as well; whatever immediate experiences you have of it tend to go along the lines of the larger minority groups in your area. If you live in the Southwest, hispanics are the “relevant” ethnic group, and most of your experiences of racism probably relate to them, but not as much if at all to black people. If you live in the South, the opposite is probably true, and if you live in Alaska, the experience most likely shifts to natives. Only the people rubbing up against you, but not closely enough to be seen as “family”, are relevant enough to be worth bigotry.

Cross-posted between here and Paladin Pants since it was a kerfuffle in the WoW blogosphere that inspired it but it’s a general subject. Original kerffufle found here and commented further upon here.

It is not uncommonly observed that people shrieking “I’m OFFENDED by that!” are a general boil upon the ass of society, as they use the tactic to shut down any speech, expression, institution, or even person that they dislike. Any and all conflict with their worldview is treated as personal assault and satisfaction is demanded, always in the form of the removal of the “offensive” sentiment or person- preferably after a meek apology has been extracted. It’s a bully’s tactic for muzzling people and opinions the bully doesn’t like, and it is indeed quite commonly abused.

As a consequence, there are a great number of people out there, trying NOT to be bullies, that question themselves extensively when they ARE offended by something someone does or says. Most people do not want to be the jerk in any given social situation, and even if someone said or did something flagrantly assholish, people are frequently reluctant to make waves by saying they were offended at all, let alone calling the other person out on their behavior.

Further along the line are people who are sick of the scolds and make no bones about their willingness to say exactly as they think no matter whom it might offend. Some even go so far as to make being offensive a point of pride in and of itself- and to react to anyone who complains that they were offended by telling them to grow a thicker skin, not be a wuss, not be a bleeding heart, and generally not react.

Where it gets interesting is that it’s also not uncommon for this opposite-end-of-the-spectrum attitude to be used to bully in the exact same fashion as the sensitivity screecher: as a tool to define the conversation exclusively on their own terms. Most people don’t particularly want to put on a suit of metaphorical armor as a precondition of social interaction- and would prefer to be treated well with people they interact with- and will choose not interacting over attempting to become more competitively combative. The person willing to be most boorish controls all terms of interaction, every bit as effectively and selfishly.

This has its place; when a space is yours, you get to set the rules. I can and do say whatever the hell I like on this blog, and I’m not terribly concerned about who might find the language or my opinions offensive. I don’t generally go out of my way to stomp on toes because I get no particular joy out of toe-stomping, but I’m also not afraid to fight with my commentariat over one of those opinions- or tell them to get the hell off my porch, as this is indeed my space, owned and paid for. You don’t get to come and dictate to me how to act with that space. If I want to convert this space to a gallery of baboon asses it’s no one’s business but mine.

If I adopted the attitude that I should be able to set the terms of interaction so completely in someone else’s space that they owned, I would be the asshole, not anyone who was offended. I will not go to my grandmother’s house and use the same language I do here, or discuss some of the same topics, because that would be fucking rude and she would be completely justified in telling me to get my little ass sorted out or to get out of her home. Grandma’s house, grandma’s rules. If grandma and I were to, say, join the same book club, that’s not anyone’s owned space in particular- but the rules of interaction are tacitly sorted out by the people who make up the social system of the club. This is a pretty normal social-species thing; the rules aren’t written down and constitutions aren’t established because making cultures and setting social norms is something we’ve been doing since before fire.

In the book club, things might trend more toward grandma’s tastes and we might be skipping Titus Andronicus and doing Jane Austen instead, or it might trend more my way and grandma will just have to live with the rape and cannibalism being included in the discussion, but neither grandma nor I has any more right than the other- or the other members- in deciding what’s appropriate. Attempting to exert control anyway, either by my turning up in a “FUCK PIG” t-shirt and telling anyone who’s bothered to grow a thicker skin or grandma telling the rest of us we’re going to hell for torturing little old ladies and making baby Jesus cry, would be bullying.

Anyone who wants to start a FUCK PIG, or G-rated book club is of course free to do so- and also free to set their own terms with the like-minded. But trying to bend the terms of acceptable interaction in order to get out of having to see anything you don’t like OR having to exert any self-control is being an asshole, not upholding any kind of principle- and hiding behind that principle is just plain cowardly. If you take satisfaction from being an asshole and just don’t want to censor yourself for anyone for any reason, just own up to it. If you really don’t care what other people think, you shouldn’t have any need at all to waste your time telling them to think differently- unless, of course, you care enough to want to be validated for your behavior anyway.

So this afternoon I’m plugging along merrily doing computery things, I get up to get more iced tea, and as I return to my desk, I touch my mouse.

*KAZAP*

Static discharge. Not too uncommon, it’s very dry around here and between the dogs’ shaggy coats and my own long hair I do tend to collect static. This one was enough to make the computer beep in protest, which is also not too terribly uncommon.

What was less common was that the zap was, apparently, enough to kill my mouse dead. Disconnecting and reconnecting the USB connection didn’t revive it. Neither did rebooting. As it turns out, Stingray’s mouse (same model) works with my computer, and my mouse does not work connected to Stingray’s computer.

I killed the fucking thing with a touch.

I am not amused, given it’s my new Razer and for a frigging eighty dollar mouse it’s awfully goddamn fragile. It’s not as though mine is the only household in America with dry weather; computer mice have been around for just about long enough to be expected to stand up to this kind of thing.

This is not new for me; I have a talent for destroying things in ways that simply should not be possible. I don’t fuck with things I don’t know how to use and I don’t do stupid “didn’t change the oil for three years” crap, things just break around me for no reason that can be determined.

Doesn’t mean I’m not still pretty damn ticked about it. As unique abilities go, it’s not exactly the most productive one out there.

In the meantime, I demand to be addressed as Thor, Wielder of Lightning.