Atomic Nerds

So I was whining to Spear about having nothing to post because everything political lately is making me incoherently angry and nothing else interesting seems to be getting my brain juices going. He suggested I do that “Five dream guns” meme that made its way around awhile back; I replied that I had skipped it at the time because compared to most of my blogosphere I know very little about guns and care even less about them beyond their being fun to shoot and useful tools. He indicated that would be why he’d like to see my version. So be it.

1. (categorical answer) A 1911 for every occasion. A super-slick custom 1911! An authentic milsurp service 1911! A beater 1911 to fuck with! A compact 1911! A 1911 tricked out for goblin zapping! A 1911 tricked out for target shooting! If we ever lucked into sufficient disposable cash to do stupid shit with, a gift 1911 presented in a box alongside a fox with some socks, with little 1911s sewn onto the socks!

I’m not going to participate in the pistol equivalent of the Cola Wars; 1911s have a number of drawbacks compared to similar pistols used for similar purposes. I just happen to like them, they fit my hand well and point naturally for me. Not the best, but pretty much the best for me.

We are already well on our way to this goal, minus the fox, socks, and box.

2. A .30-.30 lever action rifle. Lever actions are just great fun for me, it’s got a lot of historical appeal, and they can be carried around relatively painlessly and used to shoot whatever needs shooting, be it game, zombies, or goblins. I already have one of these and enjoy shooting it more than anything else I own. Only drawback is I either need to find a very good pair of tight-fitting gloves I don’t mind beating up, or accept the sacrifice of one of my thumbnails.

3. A Mosin Nagant, preferably of Finnish or Russian make from the 30s. This is pure historical battle rifle geekery; I find something just plain neat about a weapon made to be used to either shoot, stab, or beat Nazis to death with no appreciable ill effect to the weapon. There’s also the slightly mad (and more than a little masochistic) idea that if you can get minute-of-bad-guy accurate with one of those things with iron sights, you can shoot anything. There are certain orthopedic ill effects associated with this plan, but a possible solution may involve an equally regional tradition of wearing a coat made out of two sheep and a boat sail.

4. A shotgun that points swiftly and naturally for me and runs reliably. I also already have one of these. (Actually two, but one of them is OMGWTF long and wears me out faster than the other.) After having shot many shotguns I have mostly concluded the make and model are not actually all that relevant.

5. An AR-15 built specifically for me according to my preferences in weight, sights, barrel length, stock length, handedness, shoe size, and zodiac sign. This is the purest expression of the guns-as-legos desire, basically the rifle version of my 1911 fetish. Once this goal is accomplished I anticipate feeling vague shame about still liking the .30-.30 more. Goal in progress.

Talking with NFO about “pathological science”, the anti-gun movement, and what we usually describe the same thing as today- pseudoscience. He’s part one; I’m part two.

The first thing I want to talk about is the notion that there is a single, real thing called Science and any confusion between it and pseudoscience (or “pathological science” as Langmuir codified it, which I had not encountered until recently and rather like) is like misidentifying species. It’s not true; it’s closer to true now that it ever was historically, although we often talk as though science has been an unchanging edifice or force, but it’s a reification of a collection of processes, models, and methods rather than a thing unto itself. The idea is to make a model for acquiring reliable knowledge that is robust against all the cognitive biases and fallacies of human thought processes; however, given that the entire enterprise is still done by humans, it’s merely better than less careful approaches, not infallible.

To give examples, here are some things that, within the lifetime of many readers, were either still serious scientific debates or were seriously held and debated theories: status thymicolymphaticus (died out for good in the 60s), whether plate tectonics is a real thing (considered crank science until the late 60s, seriously debated by the credible well into the 80s), whether menstruating women secrete toxins into their blood and sweat (didn’t start to really die out until the 1980s). Science and purely rational processes can come to completely wrong conclusions if the data or assumptions are bad.

That said, there are some things that are fairly telling markers of pseudo, or pathological, science:

1. Not only is falsification of the underlying theory not seriously tried, it seems to not be thought of at all.

It’s not enough to make predictions about things that happen, real science needs to make predictions based on theoretical logic that can be fully laid out and also account for cases in which the theory makes predictions that fail to happen. Predictions that fail don’t in and of themselves falsify theories, but they do call for explanation and investigation; in real science, predictions that fail wildly are a major engine of further research and progress.

Or, to return to what we were speaking of, when people predict an uptick of gun violence in states or cities where greater legal access to guns is granted, their next interest should then be whether that actually happens or not and if it fails to, investigation into exactly why. If it fails to happen over and over again, that should be the hottest topic in the field, not a minor detail.

2. Proponents of the theory treat every event as being clearly and solely about it.

Again to use an example NFO brought up, the Loughner shooting case is a case of gun violence, and a case of a dangerously mentally ill man having been able to get his hands on a gun. But it’s also a case of fixation and stalking, and all of the implications of “a mentally ill man was able to do a thing normal citizens are” are thought through, it raises a serious debate about freedom and security and how we logistically expect to differentiate “dangerously mentally ill” from the vastly more common “just mentally ill” and what justifications we may invoke to lock someone up and drug them against their will. There are also issues of privacy and the question of what happens to people who work with guns for a living, such as the danger for law enforcement and military in fearing mental health services due to a rational fear of being diagnosed mentally ill and thus potentially being diagnosed out of their careers. For professions with serious risks of depression and PTSD, no small concern*.

When it remains reduced to “access to guns” as the sole issue, that’s a sign there is something wrong.

3. Relevant experiments conducted by outsiders are ignored or only selectively acknowledged.

See the first point. In the case at hand, “experiments” are done nationally and locally on both a legislative level and a “local reality” level. This is much more glaring when said experiments are only noticed when they appear to confirm the theory; to give an example of an “experiment”, we have Japan, a country that has always had very strict gun laws. According to the theory that the presence of guns is a controlling variable for violent deaths, low/strict access to guns leads to fewer homicides and fewer suicides. Japan has a substantially lower homicide rate than the United States, which is touted as a fulfilled prediction- but its much higher suicide rate is left unaddressed.

Now, both the anti-gun/Violence Policy Center/Brady position and the pro-gun/NRA/Second Amendment Rights positions are politics, not science. Ultimately, they both start from an explicitly ideological position** and exist to justify their own existence. The reason I’m holding it up to the mirror of pseudoscience is that a great deal of anti-gun argumentation uses social science as its justification, and that social science must be judged by scientific standards; ignored evidence, ignored variables, manipulated data, and arguments based on faulty or disingenuous assumptions all count. This goes for the pro-gun side as well, and they have their own problems (OH JOHN LOTT NO)***, but ultimately their argument rests on the idea that access to tools for effective self-defense is a human right, not that private ownership of guns will make society better or is even in all cases a necessarily good idea for an individual.

The argument that private citizens should not be allowed to own guns because they shouldn’t be allowed to own/do anything that could result in the death of another citizen, no matter the circumstances, is not psudedoscience. Pseudoscience does not mean “disagrees with me”. Treating the presence or mere existence of guns as a strong controlling variable in ostensibly serious social science about violent acts and deaths, no matter the the circumstances, is.

*See this VPC editorial on military suicides. Note that the VPC position is unambiguously that anyone diagnosed as mentally ill at any point should be barred forever from owning firearms; note also the complete lack of concern or acknowledgment that such a policy might make veterans suffering from PTSD, depression, or plain old serious life issues reluctant to seek help or even acknowledge there is any sort of problem.

**Ideology is not inherently wrong just for being ideology. My position that we should under no circumstance put puppies in blenders is pure ideology, which does not make it in any way a bad idea, belief, or value.

***Or, more seriously, the domestic violence issue, on which both sides can be awful. The presence of a gun is not a bigger variable than the presence of an abuser willing to threaten or kill, but likewise its presence is not a magic talisman against the specter of killing a loved one. If abuse victims are often reluctant to report explicitly because they fear ruining their abuser- a loved one’s- life, how willing are they likely to be to shoot them?

Or at least, that seems to be the real title of this article about the military looking at expanding its mess hall options and including more vegetables, whole grains, lean meat, and lower-fat options.

Now, stripping away the political-tribe warpaint and chest-beating, this is an entirely sensible thing for the military to do. There’s a massive amount of difference in the calorie and nutrient profile needs of a 20 year old in infantry training and a 50 year old driving a desk (or for that matter a destroyer), and this isn’t *replacing* the high-octane fuel those soldiers under intense physical demand need, it’s *widening the available options*, to which the only drawback will be the expense during a time when the military is rather strapped for cash.

But oh man does the first lady manage to make it annoying.

The first lady toured a gleaming cafeteria line, then announced the program in a dining hall filled with service members whose plates were overflowing with salad greens, broccoli and whole grains.

“You all look really good, really fit,” she told the airmen. “Thank you for eating your vegetables. We need you strong.”

She encouraged healthy habits during a visit with individual airmen at their tables.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be a vegetable guy soon,” she reassured one airman.

She stressed that it’s not just about giving members of the armed services a more svelte profile: There are big national security and budget implications.

Eat your vegetables like a good little boy! You half expect her to pick up a spoon and make fighter-jet noises as it heads toward someone’s mouth. After all, we’re paying for your ass!

I like vegetables, genuinely and truly, and this makes me want to have a tub of deep-fried popcorn in butter and lard sauce with bacon bits for dinner. (In actuality it will be tri-tip roast and turnips sauteed in butter and herbs, but the preparation of dinner began before I found this article.) There’s just something about having someone come along and congratulate you for making a choice as though you were a seven year old who’d spontaneously taken her plate to the sink after dinner that grits the teeth and inspires spite.

As a side comment from the “vegetable guy yet” remark, there is also a very weird sort of gender war going on in a lot of the comments I’ve read on other articles/posts talking about this story. Apparently this is somehow emasculating, and or we have to have fruit and green leafy things because we have female soldiers now and they require salad to survive.

OK, look. Men need meat and fat and protein to build and maintain their physical base, including bone and muscle mass. Women need meat and fat and protein to build and maintain their physical base because they also possess muscles and bones, and additionally to maintain the ability to become pregnant and sustain it. Children of both genders need meat and fat and protein because they are growing. Men and women and children need fruit and vegetables because they need the vitamins and possess lower digestive tracts. There is absolutely nothing biological about food types as gender signaling, it’s a very bizarre kabuki dance that sometimes involves people getting way more or way less of what they need* and occasionally produces the specter of diminished masculinity via imposed cruciate vegetables. Real hunter-gatherers (usually) have division of labor, not division of food**.

*Ladies, if your diet involves losing basic reproductive function, IT IS BAD FOR YOU.

**There are exceptions to this, but it’s usually in societies with a deep misogynistic/patriarchal streak. Their fecundity outcomes tend to be a lot worse as a result.

A few days ago NFO posted about Sgt. Reckless, a hero of the Korean war. Watch the video at his place if you want a fuller version of the story, but the short version is that she was a locally purchased filly who ran ammunition and other supplies to and from the artillery line, often through heavy fire.

The video begins with the line “Can you imagine this little, sorrel filly in the middle of all this (warfare scens)”?

Knowing that she was a Mongolian horse, and that she was purchased at a Korean racetrack? Yes, I sure as hell can.

Americans and Europeans are used to thinking of war horses as particularly big and powerful examples of their kind; our idea of mounted warfare is usually of a big, heavy animal meant to carry a soldier with a lot of equally big and heavy gear. Thus, Reckless’s relatively small size is often mentioned in a slightly marveling tone.

In Asia, however, war horses were for light cavalry that could move quickly, didn’t carry much heavier than a javelin or a bow and arrow, and could survive and thrive at very high altitudes and relatively poor fodder. The big European draft horses and warmbloods* would either break their legs, starve, or have a heart attack under some of the conditions that Mongolians and Koreans put their war horses through. Reckless was exceptional, especially in the sheer degree of her nerve and her willingness to protect humans, but she wasn’t that special- Mongolian horses are meant to be tough, extremely strong for their size, fearless, and highly intelligent. Her ancestors were shuttling Genghis Khan and his raiders down the battlefield; the Korean war wasn’t that foreign a setting. In many ways it was what her lines were originally bred for, though by the time the Marines came along looking for a pack pony they were far more often found at the race track. The breed is old and little-changed, though, given that that gene pool is more left to fend for itself than not, and horses that humans did get their hands on that WEREN’T fast, tough, smart, and loyal were food.

The Marines got a war horse rather than a pack pony because by breed, that gene pool has maybe the best claim to the title of horses still living. It was luck and training that they got a great one, but still.

(Half credit for this post should go to Farmgirl, who gave me an education on the breed in an unrelated conversation a few weeks back. Sadly I did not remember the anatomical and conformation portion of that education well enough to justify expanding on it here.)

*note for non-horse people: “warmbloods” refers to a class of midsized horses used for work and war, with the term coming from “cold blood” to describe heavy draft horses and “hot blood” to describe light, fast saddle horses.

Earlier I was laughing at what is a sadly not-uncommon thread of discussion in gamer communities that are not particularly moderated, which is gamer dudes lamenting the apparent injustice that video games sometimes have female characters that aren’t damsels to rescue and even sometimes makes the player play as a female character. The part that got the actual horselaugh out of me as opposed to “roll eyes, move on” was one guy playing “what if” a woman were realistically the character in a first-person shooter; apparently it would be hilarious because she couldn’t lift the rifle without dragging the barrel, load it, or hit anything, and if she shot it anyway she’d break her shoulder or something.

Someone did the usual “we apologize for the abominable trolls in our nerd culture because they’re socially awkward and inexperienced with anyone who is not a fellow unsocialized troll exactly like them” thing, and it occurred to me that the inexperience speaks for itself- not merely with women or anyone that doesn’t have to brush the cheeto dust out of their neckbeard when trying to look swank, but with real-world physical skills in general.

Shooting is still a boys’ club, so are most strength-based fitness sports, and for very obvious reasons they attract a lot of macho, competitive young men. But it occurred to me that I very rarely hear gender based “women can’t shoot/load/rack/shoulder (blah)” from men who have trained, competed, and especially taught a lot, in much the same way that I see very little “women are frail/weak” talk in areas where people are training seriously for strength/speed/power and not guys who’ve done a little at the Globogym to try and pump up.

The reason why isn’t an onset of enlightenment or even growing out of any sexism or misogyny, it’s experience. If you work seriously to train a skill and don’t isolate yourself, you are going to get outperformed, by lots of people who’ve trained more or smarter than you, and even in areas where men as a gender really do have a physical advantage (in shooting they don’t, unless you’re shooting elephants) some of those people are going to be women, and it’s not just going to be when you’re just starting out.

I’m not saying there aren’t significant gender differences in certain physical domains; anatomy and endocrinology make that Just Fact. What I am saying is that the curve of training is a very long one, much longer than people with no experience of it tend to imagine, and the two places it’s most relevant are the ends- completely untrained individuals, and top-level competitors. In a physical contest between a man and a woman who’ve trained roughly as hard and roughly as smart, the man will almost always have the edge*- but there’s so much distance in between the two end points that big experience and development gulfs that easily exceed any theoretical innate advantage exist, and often.

Or, to put it in much shorter terms, if I see someone saying something along those lines, what I actually read is “I live in the basement and never lift anything heavier than a cereal box, and neither do the six or so other people I know.”

Super TL;DR: Yay Dunning-Kruger effect.

*Though not in cases where the most important thing is not actually raw power, but strength to mass ratio. When two athletes are both strong enough to do things like handstand pushups and pullups for reps and speed and are competing on those terms, the male upper body strength advantage may not be enough to give him an edge when he weighs 220 pounds and she weighs 105. This is, I think, why I see such a near-total lack of gurlz-are-weak in Crossfit boxes as compared to bodybuilding circles; a lot of their workouts are structured like that, so guys get smoked in workouts by tiny women often enough to make an impression.

(Stingray Sez: This is not my post even though it’s under my name. We’ve thrown a few annotations in with, more or less, Indy’s permission. See if you can find all (e^pi)-pi of them!)

Hello, world! I’m Indy, a long time friend of LabRat and Stingray’s and your “shooting noob” guest blogger. I recently moved to an area proximal to the Nerd Ranch for a graduate program in human evolution and genetics. I’ve taken the opportunity to spend lots of time harassing the nerds and monopolizing Tank. This year, they were kind enough to host Thanksgiving for myself, Spear, and Farmgirl. Given some recent experiences in my less-than-perfect neighborhood, Stingray and LabRat had suggested that I might want to learn to shoot while I was up there. I’ve been interested in learning more about guns for a while, but my last experiences involved grouse hunting when I was a kid. All of my (somewhat limited) experience was with shotguns, and I hadn’t shot a gun in 10+ years. We made a trip out to the range while I was there for Turkey Day. Stingray suggested my “noob” experiences might be fun for some of you to read, given that it’s probably been a long time since many of you were brand new at this! (LR- It’s easy to forget what being a new shooter is actually like when your day to day experience involves forum and blog wankery on the theoretical exercise of new shooters.)

We decided to stick to the indoor range since the wind levels were questionable and I was interested in trying out handguns. Spear started me off with some basic safety instruction and a quick lesson on stances and sights. We geared up (noise cancelling ear protection! so cool!) and I shot a rifle (Stingray Sez: Remington 514). Stingray and Spear decided to start me with something that I gather was sort of geared for beginners; it had almost no kick and was easy to shoot. It was frankly a lot less complicated than I was expecting. Much like many beginning shooters, I was a little nervous about the kick and bang aspect of things. Luckily, the first gun I tried didn’t have much bite to it. (It was actually easier than shooting something like a nerf gun or a water pistol.) I realized pretty quickly that what I’d thought was going to be my problem (kick) was not in fact a problem, whereas things that I hadn’t actually thought about (sighting and stance) were posing challenges. It took me a while to get used to the stance with the rifle. I imagine I’m going to need a lot more practice with it to feel comfortable. Leaning toward your target puts your center of gravity in a place that doesn’t exactly feel normal (Stingray Sez: Spear shoots all tactical high speed drag. Stingray shoots all fussy match precisiondork. WHITE PEOPLE SHOOT LIKE DIS. CANADIAN PEOPLE SHOOT LIKE DAT.). (Actually, as a dark admission, the only reason I was really able to figure out the balance problem is because I do yoga. Go figure: crunchy granola hippie activities and shooting, two things that actually blend well together.) It was also a little hard to getting used to focusing in multiple places for the sight, but that turned out to be something that was relatively easy to pick up with practice.

One of the most important things I learned from the rifle was basically that I needed to adjust where I was shooting to account for visual distortion between my eye and the target. Spear pointed out that I was a little off from where I wanted to be, probably because of differences in my vision and sighting. I found that if I was shooting for, say, point X, I needed to actually aim a little to the right. (LR: Ironically, she was the only uncomplicated, straightforward right-handed right-eye dominant shooter in the room.) I ended up shooting Farmgirl’s rifle (Stingray Sez: Winchester 94/22), which was fun but – at least to me – seemed relatively similar to the first gun I’d shot. (I suspect that with more practice, I’ll be able to tell more of a difference between guns. At the moment, not so much.) Somewhere in there, we backed up so I could try from further back. I frankly couldn’t tell a huge difference between the two distances we tried. Aiming was slightly different, and it was a little harder to get things to go where I wanted. The real difference seemed to be in how much my breathing impacted the spread of the bullets. (LR- She’s not kidding. We stood there and watched her trace several little triangles depending on where she was on inhale-exhale.)

The most challenging part of the whole day for me was probably the stance for firing handguns. We tried isosceles stance first. I couldn’t quite get my body not to lean in the wrong direction. Farmgirl suggested I move one foot back to try weaver, and that was a lot easier. I’m relatively tall for a woman (5’8″) and my center of gravity just wasn’t lining up somehow. I had to make a conscious effort to lean forward every time, but it did get a little easier as I shot more. (LR- I was the only person there who’s happiest in isosceles. I’m also the shortest and the one with baby bearin’ hips. Anatomy matters a lot, as we’re going to talk about in a later post.)

I really liked firing the handguns. They were more fun than the rifles for me. (LR- This was not an expected result.) We switched to a white paper target so I could get a better idea of where I was shooting, since apparently I was doing a bit better than expected at this point (Stingray Sez: Damn freak was shooting a quarter sized group from 20 yards on her first day with everything she picked up. We’re gonna put her in a box, poke some air holes, and ship her off to Tam with a note that says “Enjoy your new padawan.”). I was, again, worried about the kick, but I discovered that it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. To me, a lot of the handguns felt relatively similar in how they fired and how I aimed them. I started with something relatively small caliber, a Ruger MK II, which was honestly really easy to shoot. I had a lot of fun with that one. It was kind of cool to actually move up to a point where I needed to start worrying about my breathing while firing. (Which I’m not entirely sure I ever got the hang of, but oh well, there’s always next time!) I also tried a few bigger guns. I found that the heavier guns with large grips were more my speed. I have big hands but small wrists. On guns without that weight, my wrists were effectively acting as shock absorbers for the impact. (For example, Stingray and Labrat have his-and-hers Les Baer 1911′s. I vastly preferred Stingray’s. (Stingray Sez: Monolith Heavyweight- extended dust cover = more weight up front) (LR: The “hers” in this case was my Kimber compact. Mama Baer didn’t come out to play that day. There are actually four 1911s in the household.) The only two guns that really stood out to me were Stingray’s revolver (Stingray Sez:S&W 25-5 .45lc) and a tiny handgun (Stingray Sez: Kel-Tec p32). Neither was impossible (or even difficult) for me to fire, but they both had a lot of recoil. I had a harder time reaiming after shooting a round. The really small gun was the only one I didn’t actually enjoy firing. It was one of the last guns I tried. At that point, my wrists and shoulders were getting tired.

As a whole, shooting was a lot less complicated (and a lot more fun!) than I’d initially anticipated. (And, obviously, thanks to the Nerds & Co. for taking me out.) If anyone has any questions for me, I’m more than happy to answer them in comments!

From the “Inbox that we check shamefully infrequently” files, a question about this study and how legit it is. Asked, answered.

The title of the article: “Researchers find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence”. We can just dispense with that right there and wonder if the reporter felt any twinge of shame, or merely glee, at crafting that headline.

Content of study: Researchers did brain scans of chimps that threw stuff a lot versus those that did so less often, also tracking how often they actually hit what they were aiming at, and found that chimps that did more throwing showed more development in an area of the cortex had more development in the areas associated with motor functions, and also with Broca’s area, which is associated with speech in humans. The researchers in question go on to speculate that throwing stuff has more to do with communication than anything else, and that getting really good at throwing stuff might have supported our progression to speech as hominids.

Credibility of study: Middling to low. The journal it’s published in is not all that high-profile in primate circles, and doesn’t seem to be getting much buzz or traction in primate circles.

My major reaction to this thing is that it’s kind of an odd approach and an odd reaction to take from that data. It’s been known for a long time that motor functions and language functions are very tied up, neurologically speaking, and that the circuitry we have for observing actions and learning from observation seem to be tied up with motor functions; if you’ve ever heard of mirror neurons, they’re neurons that fire both when we perform an action, and when we see someone else perform that same action, as though we’d done it ourselves. These neurons were first discovered in monkeys, seem to also exist in humans, and occur for us in Broca’s area and in other primates in the area where Broca’s would be if their brains were but bigger and more developed. Broca’s area is where language seems to live.

We know that motor functions, our ability to imagine doing things, our ability to articulate doing things, and our ability to imagine another’s perspective are all tied up in Broca’s and in these motor neurons, but we don’t really know a whole lot more than that barring various tentative stabs. One general idea that has at least some traction is that speech and language in general are an exaptation- a repurposing by evolution of a structure meant to do one thing, into another thing- of very fine motor control, since the hardware required to make our hands and limbs do very precise things seems to be the same hardware that lets our lips, tongues, and vocal chords do other very precise things for the purpose of communication.

In light of this, taking from this data the idea that throwing things is specifically related to communication, and that throwing things is primarily communication, is rather odd. Certainly throwing behavior is something that humans are really good at and seems to be a uniquely human skill- but so are a lot of other things that seem to be dominated by very fine motor control. Chimps are crap at it, even if some chimps are slightly less crap relative to other chimps at it. A human can combine speed, power, and control into a 80 mph fastball that goes straight through a strike zone from sixty feet away; a chimp is fairly lucky to hit a target from six feet away.

From this angle, a chimp who can throw things better being also a chimp who communicates better don’t look like a statement on throwing things, they look like a statement on that same fine motor control- two consequences of the same developmental advantage, rather than one driving the other. It’s just easier to test a chimp’s throwing abilities than their writing abilities.

We have posted about Veterans’ Day before. I do not think we’re going to improve on it.

Go there instead.

Short on time today. Took Tank to the vet for his next round of boosters and checkup (he was very good for the vet, and he is fine), did some other chores, got a raid tonight. Tomorrow we’ll do some genetics fun.

Today, I’d like to put some more eyeballs onto Slavering Beast Theory, because it’s very good and very much food for thought. Holly is writing about how we think about rape and rapists, which as I’ve touched on before is a crime we have a lot of difficulty thinking about without hindsight like a funhouse mirror, but it’s an applicable theory to a lot of different scenarios of crime and violence. We tend to categorize bad behavior as bad things that bad people do because they’re bad and they enjoy doing bad things the same way good people enjoy doing good things, but what predatory behavior usually boils down to is the temptation to gain some form of satisfaction despite its being at someone else’s direct cost, and that IS something normal ordinary people we know can and do do. If you can imagine someone else lying to others and also to themself about something selfish and maybe just kinda bad they did… this is a more logical extension of thought than trying to imagine them being monstrous. Very few people actually enjoy being cruel, but a lot more people will ignore the cruelty of their own behavior, or minimize it, if the satisfaction is big enough and the cost in facing up to it great enough.

So. There’s a compelling argument that both zombies and mall ninjas have jumped the shark. This leaves us as a society currently without a socially acceptable Monster Du Jour.

I believe I have found a replacement.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make sure all the doors and windows are locked before Christina tries to thank me for posting that with a baseball bat.