Transiting Sex and Race

If someone can be 'transgender' or 'transsexual,' why not 'transracial'? A young feminist scholar made the mistake of asking. It's likely to destroy her career.

I hope that Prof. Tuvel consults a lawyer about this defamation; and while it looks to me like defamation per se (i.e., damages are presumed since the critics are impugning her competence in her profession), I would imagine showing damage would not be hard. How can Prof. Tuvel, for example, now use this repudiated but allegedly peer-reviewed article as part of her tenure process? Indeed, how can her department or college support her for tenure when she has been so vilified as a scholar and professional by people who work in her fields? I wonder did any of those professing solidarity with those who specialize in taking offense consider the very tangible harm they are doing to the author of this article?...

We have been living with an "atmosphere of reckless attack" in philosophy (as one correspondent put it to me in 2014) for awhile now. I hope this proves to be the final straw, and that the community will finally stand up and denounce this misconduct that should be anathema to a scholarly community. If Prof. Tuvel does decide to seek legal redress for what has happened to her, I will organize fundraising on her behalf. It really is time to stop this madness.

More here.

The thing is, as everyone knows, sex is a huge biological fact that impacts everything about us. Race is, at most, a heuristic way of talking about genetic differences in groups; more likely, it's a fiction largely created to sell early Modern Europeans on being OK with re-introducing slavery. It has a big social reality, but refers to nothing that is biologically real. Thus, if one can 'trans'it sex, one could surely 'trans'it race. To say otherwise is to hold that this social fiction has more impact on us than what is probably the single most important biological characteristic.

I suppose one could argue that this is in fact the case: that race, even without a real biological referent, is socially so important that it does indeed trump sex. Charles Mills, cited in the hated article, might make that argument; his latest book points in that direction. (I should note that I have met Charles Mills and heard him speak, and whatever you think of his subject matter, he is a consummate gentleman and unfailingly courteous.) I doubt that argument would pan out, but one could make it.

No one is bothering to try. The intent is simply to put this woman's head on a spike, as a warning to others. It has already worked with the board of the journal that, after double blind peer review, published her work. They are cowards, of course, but that is only to be expected of them. Only cowards survive in their field.

As said by Sir William Francis Butler: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." Well, there you go.

Corruption and Esteem

A scathing criticism of American liberalism, which ends by asserting that the corruption is completely understandable. Well, perhaps it is; but it is corruption, is it not?

Rights and Wrongs

I've heard this proposal before, but I think it was coming from a sophomore. In High School.

The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial. Therefore, using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights.

Everyone has a right to walk down the public street without being robbed or killed, too. Any citizen has the right, and something of the duty, to try to stop such a violation when he or she encounters it in progress. Whether this is a case of "self-defense" or defense of a fellow citizen is immaterial.

A polity exists in part in order that its members might defend each other from just such violations, whether by criminals or by Vandals. It is the mark of a very strange set of priorities to suggest that citizens ought to prefer protecting the rights of the Vandals to protecting each other. The reason to protect rights even for Vandals, after all, is that such protections serve as a further fortification of the rights of the citizenry. To throw aside the citizens' rights in favor of the Vandals' is to miss the whole point of why Vandals' rights are protected at all.

Beltane Fire Festival

Out Edinburgh way, they had quite a night last night.

'Oss 'oss, wee 'oss!

The Padstow Day Song ("Unite and unite, oh, let us unite, for summer is a-coming today") and Night Song ("Oh, where is King George?  Where is he oh?") are the traditional May Day songs for Padstow in Cornwall.  The Hobby Horse (the "Old 'Oss") is a giant cylindrical black  creature that tries to capture young women under its skirts, meaning they'll be married within the year.





This is my favorite rendition of the songs.  'Oss 'oss, wee 'oss!  'Oss 'oss, wee 'oss! 'Oss 'oss, WEE 'OSS!

The Merry Month of May

The joy associated with May in the old tales may be associated with the more northern climes in which these songs were written; here, it was April in which everything broke into riotous flowers. Now, summer is here if you judge by the trees instead of the stars.

Still, May and October often have the best weather of the year even here.



The change of season provokes thoughts about the importance of using time well.



Here is a song about the first of May from a medieval troubadour and, later, knight.



I hope the day finds you well.

On Station

Well, this week wasn't as much fun as I had hoped, but it was eventful. I have learned, for example, that in addition to the two things that I knew could cause power steering to fail -- burst hydraulic lines, and a failure of the pump/reservoir -- a third thing that can happen is for a solid steel bracket to fail for no apparent reason and drop your alternator on the whole assembly.

Since the bracket may be attached to a major component of your engine, such as the timing chain cover, the cost of labor could make repairs prohibitively expensive. You would, after all, have to take apart a large part of the engine to install a replacement -- if you had a replacement.

Because the failure was due to a design flaw (you engineers should know better than to use a thin single point of cast rather than forged steel to hold an alternator, which is under tension from the belt driving it), you'd think there would be a recall. However, as Fight Club explains, AxBxC=X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, the company won't do one.



Just because the cost of a recall can involve repairs that are each individually prohibitively expensive, often times they aren't done. But the part you'd need to repair the vehicle, were you inclined to pay the prohibitive cost, will be discontinued. Thus, not only is it prohibitively expensive, it's nearly impossible.

So anyway, I bought a used truck this weekend. It's a Ford. The old one wasn't. That's all I'm going to say about it, but you can take that for what it's worth.

Bliss

I have no words to describe how wonderful was the Sacred Harp two-singing I attended this weekend.  These videos aren't from that event, though they are from the same location four years ago, and both feature songs we did.  This is very much the same sound:





There were 80 people present on both days, including at least 40 or 50 active singers. Even better, the active singers included a hard core of old-timers expert in their singing. Almost best, a dozen very young children got up to lead. Some were so young they couldn't quite remember that they were supposed to call the song by its number. Some stood up with an adult to support, but others got right out there on their own. I've been attending these singings for nearly 30 years; I see no sign at all of their decaying.

At certain points in the program people stand to announce singings in other locations, not only here in Texas but all over the country. (There were singers present from a dozen or more states this weekend.) One old fellow announced his Alabama church's upcoming annual singing as its 179th or some such wild number, then explained that the number for "consecutive" annual singings was a little less than that; there was a period of a couple of years when they weren't able to have one, during the 1860s.

Schlichter: I Am a Victim of Your Hateful Hate Crimes, You Hate Criminals

I've often thought that the right needs to turn the left's rhetoric against lefties, and Schlichter takes a good swing at it. He begins:

As a person of absolutely no color who embodies an intersectional reality that includes my utter lack of genderfluidity and my unemployment-questioning, differently-veteraned, and non-pagan experiences, I am totally oppressed by progressivism’s hegemonic power structure. I am also the victim of a systemic system of hostile paradigms that denies my truth regarding my phallo-possessory identity. 

Now, some may consider this a form of sarcastic reductio ad absurdum. I, however, see it as a new paradigm of discourse when talking to those on the left who have already reduced themselves to absurdity. When in Absurdistan, do as the Absurdis do, right?

Wasting Time on a Rainy Saturday

XKCD Identification Chart

Report cards

Scott Adams has the best take I've seen so far on the famous first 100 days.

Make El Chapo Pay for the Wall

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced the Ensuring Lawful Collection of Hidden Assets to Provide Order (EL CHAPO) Act on Tuesday, intending to cover the cost of the southern border wall by seizing more than $14 billion in drug proceeds from infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

Being Helpful

Sonny Bunch at the Free Beacon has some suggestions to help the Democratic Party connect with "most people":

The real problem isn't that Democrats are out of touch with common folks; it's that common folks don't understand that the struggles of the out-of-work coal miner are intricately linked to the struggles of the bisexual transgendered pronounless twitter user who feels oppressed by the mainstream's refusal to admit that zir exists and that zir's problems are not trivialities. A nationwide ad campaign explaining the intricacies of intersectionality will bring Democrats one step closer to showing that progressives really do have the problems of you, the people, in their hearts.

Spot on, man! And he has more.

Wow. If they follow his advice, the Democrats may be on the road to dominating the federal government for a generation.

Talk about things you like to hear

"Bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble talk . . . ."  Politico joins the ranks of professional media types grasping for an explanation of how they could have blown the last election so badly.  Clearly it's not deliberate bias, that would be wrong, but plausibly it's that the bubble they all live in has grown more extreme over the last decade as local newspapers disappeared and were replaced by e-journalism.  It's not our fault!  We might have guessed that the rise of internet news would have a dispersive effect, but in fact it's only concentrated the higher-paying journalism jobs in the usual coastal and urban bubbles.  So, yes, we talk only to those in our highly-paid, progressive bubbles, but that's only natural.

Politico's proposed treatment for this malaise is not particularly compelling.

The best medicine for journalistic myopia isn’t reeducation camps or a splurge of diversity hiring, though tiny doses of those two remedies wouldn’t hurt. Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them. If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won’t change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.

Do they really?  More than they hate preening and congratulating themselves and their colleagues?  More than they hate moping about how the profit motive contaminates discourse, just as they'd always suspected?  (Here, the author throws in a little salve to Politico's vanity by noting that Breitbart's news site does a surprisingly robust click-business, though of course nothing to equal Politico's own.  If you want to talk about being the popular kids.)

I've been reading "Shattered," about the disastrous Clinton campaign.  The authors may be unsparing in their description of the awful candidate--the only character who's getting kid-glove treatment so far is Bernie Sanders--but they're still 100% in for their poor lost Hillary.  It's pretty amazing, really, how much time they can spend wringing their hands over how difficult it was for the poor woman to identify and communicate her message.  She could not seem to articulate why she was running for president.  She kept berating her campaign staff for failing to accomplish this task on her behalf.  As if it were not obvious that would-be President "It's My Turn" wanted the office because it's only fair, dang it, not to mention pretty convenient and lucrative and flattering.

Sanders appears in the narrative as an admirably honest fellow; it's only unfortunate that "most Americans" don't cotton to socialism.  If the authors make a connection between the lovely, caring policies Sanders would try to implement and the horror that is now overtaking Venezuela, I can't detect it.  They simply are drawn to Sanders because they can't quite escape the conviction that Clinton is a stone-cold liar without a trace of self-knowledge, with no identifiable political convictions other than that governing is a tough exercise in smart policy of some kind or another that, to our collective sorrow, cannot easily be communicated to a lot of mouth-breathing voters.  Meanwhile, Trump effortlessly channels the ugly Zeitgeist.  Woe to the republic.

This aside in the Politico article made me laugh, too:

Unlike other industries, the national media has a directive beyond just staying in business: Many newsrooms really do feel a commitment to reflecting America fairly.

They . . . ? Well, unless "fairly" means looking in the mirror.  What's so hard about learning something of the viewpoints outside one's own bubble?  Is the job of a journalist really limited to cocktail party chat, or do they occasionally find time to read a book or frequent a website with opposing views?  Even if they don't have the leisure or the budget for a safari through wildest I-30 corridor-land, we have tools in the modern world for communicating with distant strangers, available to anyone with a bit of curiosity and a gift for tamping down the smugness for a few hours.

At church this week, a co-parishioner announced a new chat group that would attempt to bridge the unidentified political divide (guess which side she's on) and foster more respectful communication.  I told her I'd almost stopped trying to talk to family and college friends on the other (still unidentified) side of the political landscape, not because I couldn't restrain myself from insulting them, but because I was tired of listening quietly while they loudly and persistently insulted me.  It wasn't that the conversation foundered when I adopted her advice of listening respectfully.  All I do now is listen and try to stem the worst of the oblivious attack-speech by gently suggesting that there are other points of view, and that my interlocutor might want to consider that she might be in the presence of someone who holds them.  That, combined with my pruning of my Facebook feed, has meant I spend no time explaining myself to these people, and less and less time listening to them, either.  Increasingly, I get my limited information about their views from more impersonal outlets.  As far as I can tell, they get no information about my views from any source, unless you count their assumption that a second-hand description of what Limbaugh said this week accurately sums up my own views.

Why would I attend her gatherings?  Will she have taught any of her fellow travelers to listen to someone like me without drifting into insult?  Will she even learn the knack herself?  Her anecdotes of success included the breathless report that she mentioned to a friend how much she disliked Rush Limbaugh, only to learn that her friend unexpectedly was not that crazy about him herself.  A blow for communication and solidarity!  They went on to learn that her friend wasn't actually that crazy about Bill O'Reilly, either.  See, they really are people!  You don't have to be afraid to talk to them!  They may turn out to share your views on some public personalities, and then you won't even have to hear what they think on any of the scary issues.

But then the national votes come in and remain perennially astonishing.  "We may never know what motivates these people . . . ."

Agnus dei

Detective stories

It turns out Audible.com has quite a few free books on offer.  At first I stuck to classics, some Jane Austen and so forth, because I'm suspicious of modern fiction recommended by sites like Audible or Kindle.  In desperation during a long painting job, though, I took a chance on an author named Colin Cotteril, who turns out to be terrific.  Imagine John Le Carre on antidepressants and channeling Roger Zelazny.

So far I've listened to the first two in a series about a Laotian coroner, The Coroner's Lunch and Thirty-Three Teeth.  Unlike many coroner-based procedurals, this one doesn't try to gross the reader out.  The protagonist, a disillusioned 72-year-old doctor who finds himself the reluctant national coroner without training or facilities in post-revolution socialist Laos in 1978, is cynical but not in the least hard-hearted, more of a Jane Marple than a Sam Spade.  Actually a bit of Obi-Wan Kenobe.  The Audible version is especially enjoyable for the accents, which are all Brit.

Seasick Steve on a Friday Night

Good for all of your howling-at-the-moon needs.

Life Advice from Old Cowboy Movies

There's three times in a man's life when he has a right to yell at the moon: when he marries, when his children come, and... and when he finishes a job he had to be crazy to start.

-Red River

Today I finished something I was probably crazy to start, which I've been working on for seven years. I'm going to be offline for a bit; perhaps a week. I don't know that I'll yell at the moon, but I'll definitely celebrate with some time doing something else.

Enjoy yourselves. I'll be back.

Cybersecurity, the Old-Fashioned Way

Vice points out that our nuclear missiles are almost completely secure from cyber attack.

The technology that currently powers these nukes is notoriously antiquated. Most of the systems were designed and built during the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and ’70s, with the last major overhaul completed during the Reagan administration. Some computers in the missile base command centers still use eight-inch floppy disks....

U.S. nuclear missile base technology is ancient by modern standards, but the old machines offer almost maximum cybersecurity simply by virtue of their age. With everything hardwired and analog, the system is uniquely impervious to intrusion and meddling. That leaves some nuclear experts to ask: Why spend billions switching from a system that is relatively safe to one that’s potentially more vulnerable?

That strikes me as a good point.