In Which We Try to Aid Our Species.

I always feel a bit weird commenting about sexism.

I mean, I am male, cisgendered, only sexually attracted to women so far, and 10 out of 10 people would identify me as ethnically "white".

What could I possibly say about institutional discrimination, when it never directly touches or affects me?

So a fellow named Gabby Schultz crafted a funny comic about a recent debacle.

It intrigued me, so I thought I'd say some things about sexism, for the same reasons that anyone says anything ever on any blog. I want to create something, something to engage people's minds and create debate to engage my own.

Now, Gabby didn't link to the original issue. He wanted to avoid inflaming the specific debate again, and distracting from his comics message about sexism.
But I reference back to the original situation, and my blog has never been read by anyone I don't know personally, so I'm linking to a place that's collected the original comment by Kate Beaton.
Heh. I don't find it quite so inimitably polite as Gabby portrays it.

I had an insight as I wrote this post. At first, I didn't see the problem with the very initial exchange. Generified: an artist puts up a piece of work, and someone compliments them on it by saying they find the artist's talent attractive in a romantic/sexual way.

They're taking the subject away from the artists talent, really, and making it about their suitability to be their mate.

Is this sexist? I mean, I see the same attitude from women often enough. (Not that women engaging in a sexist behavior makes it non-sexist....)

But as much as I'd like to, I can't pretend that a societal distinction between women and men, and their respective capabilities and life goals doesn't exist. A comment like this, made to a woman, in the context of our society, can't help but be perceived as degrading. As if, as Kate Beaton said, the woman were just partaking in this quaint hobby to engage sexual attention.

Even if it weren't sexist, the reply from "A. Dude" definitely was. I'm not even going to get into it right now (though I do wonder how much of his posturing was inspired by personal hurt feelings).
If someone tells you that something you have said to them has made them uncomfortable, you apologize, say sorry for the misunderstanding, and promise to attempt to be more considerate of their feelings in the future. This is the basics of politeness.

And all of this is distracting from the rest of Kate Beaton's point, which was that women creators and professionals do often have to deal with their capabilities and talents being sexualized and diminished, even by people who are oblivious to what they're doing.
The literal comment, "OMG I love you and want to have your babies," from anyone to anyone, is just popular hyperbole. But when women on professional forums get treated like they're there to troll for dates, you have a problem.

So this kind of stole the spotlight from my original opinion of the comic. Personal growth through blogging, who knew?

As to the comic itself, I must admit to some remaining ambivalence.
He has a very important point (which he helpfully elucidates in his final panel): "The system makes us slaves." That is, there are cycles of behavior in our society that reinforce themselves, and from which we can not break out without awareness.

But on the other hand, just reading the comic, it feels so devisive.
Sure, it's true, you can look at the Pew Research polls. Identifying as white, male, and heterosexual has a decent amount of correlation with having sexist attitudes.
But does harping on this really help, rather than divide?
In a piece of what is essentially entertainment, doesn't this focus lead people to want to make judgements of individuals based on their group membership?
Prejudice can really only retard useful action, and starting out with statements like, "People — straight, male people, in particular — sure can have some strange misconceptions about how the world spins," seems like it's going to raise more hackles than bridge gaps of ignorance.

Women, if you want protection...

rely on police, on government, on education and on basic human decency. No. TME. cover yourselves!


I can't even muster up the appropriate amount of rage here. This is from an Egyptian campaign trying to prevent rape by asking women to wear headscarves.

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there are actually statistics collected here. That women not wearing headscarves are raped more often. That just in case this might be a causative relationship, they're advocating this as a recommendation.

But I don't think that kind of thinking would've lead to this image. The hideous implications that men are like flies, and that as a potential victim, you should cover up or you're as good as inviting violence.

I think I'm going to be sick.


Black Mamba on Tunisia.com via Pharyngula

PZ Myers... I am disappoint.

I suppose this could be taken as an objective lesson in the fact that sometimes, you should only spout off about what you know.

[pause for hypocrisy to fade out]

PZ Meyers, noted humanist, skeptic, atheist, and researcher of evolutionary developmental biology, has tossed his hat into the ring hosting an old/new battle of opinions. On one side, gamers, lead by Penny Arcade (who say that games can be art). On the other, wizened warlocks, lead by Roger Ebert (who says they cannot).

To summarize, Ebert, and now Meyers, seem to feel that it is appropriate to compare video games to chess, mahjong, or basketball, in terms of a means of expression. Tycho does not.

I don't want to speak to the debate at large. It's a ridiculous terminological dispute, with meaning apparently generated only as a side effect of more ponderous, pointless statements.
Define art one way, video games are included. Define it another way, they are not.
I've spoken here before about what a destructive influence different connotations of words have on reasonable discourse.
If someone, say Roger Ebert, starts with the definition that 'Art' includes only, "things that I'm interested in, and cannot have a winner or loser," then obviously video games will not be included. But this trods quite firmly upon the emotional toes of anyone that defines it as an emotionally engaging and significant piece of media.
The effect is doubly strong when you consider that despite it's nebulous definition, 'art' is something spoken of with reverence by most of humanity. I'll admit it, when beauty is captured in ways that inspire creativity and invoke my emotions, I call it art, and mean something great and numinous by that. It seems to be a word that encapsulates the meaning within a subset of our experiences, and these sorts of arguments seem an attack, an attempt to invalidate your experiences.

I seem to have ended up talking about it anyways. Not everyone gets what they want I suppose. But I just couldn't keep quiet after seeing statements as perplexing as: "imagine recording that game, and wanting to go back and watch the replay again sometime. That's where games fail as art."
I wonder speaking up like this is some kind of instinct. If I were an evolutionary psychologist, perhaps I'd say that it must have been advantageous to confront people spouting nonsense, to make sure they haven't eaten poisonous mushrooms.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Because to me the situation he is describing is a bit like saying that literature cannot be art because no one would want to listen to an audio recording of a person reading a book.

Ching chang wing wong

From the time I realized that, "Ching chang, wing wong," was not exactly authentic Chinese, I wondered what noises children in other lands used to make fun of the noises we USians used to impart meaning to one another.

Prisencolinensinainciusol

This song was written in 1972, by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and is supposed to sound like English. The thing is, it does! Now I wonder if I recorded my hit single Ching Chong Wing Wong, and released it in China, would I get a bunch of letters saying (after a trip through Babel Fish) "Great song! But in the end what you say? I do not understand!"*

The answer is no, no I would not.

(Via BoingBoing)



*(Lame, normally double Babeling gives much more amusing results.)

That's Racist!

It continues to amaze and depress me how terrible thoughts and opinions seem to be so deeply rooted in our culture.
Even if there were studies that showed children of a homosexual marriage were worse off than other children (which there are not), this would be an inappropriate metric to determine whether or not that couple should be granted the legal rights of marriage, but only, perhaps, a consideration in adoption.
As for children from previous marriages, we do not remove children from poor households or from single parents, where they are demonstrated to perform more poorly, emotionally and mentally. So why should that affect our decision to allow two men or two women to derive the civil benefits of a certain legal status?

The fetishistic power of simple words in the hands of idiots also depresses me:
It is very simple, either "marriage' is a legal status, and thus we are obligated by morality, ethics, the law and our constitution to extend it equally to all people of our nation; or it is not a legal status, has no civil benefits, and is purely a religious status, which any given church may choose or not choose to bestow based on their criteria (race, creed, sex, age, orientation, etc).

Fallible

The spirit is willing but the will is decidedly unspirited. One of these days I'll be a real blogger, blaging on the blagosphere from my dirigible.
Until then, this!

Earlier today I saw a fascinating video about the human blind-spot:



God is such an awesome designer, he decided to have our optical nerves bore up through the base layer of the retina, then splay out it's layer of nervous tissue, and grow the optical receptor cells pointing downward, meaning they catch light after it's already bounced off of the back wall of the eye ball.
Now, evilutionists may point out that there's an entirely logical progression to this structure along well studied evolutionary pathways; that these even expose some of the reasons for it to sport the structure it has today; and that only an incompetent would actually design an eye from the ground up to work like that for humans; but, um....

Okay, okay, I'll stop taking the easy potshots at creationists now, and return to the original tangent.

(After this one: when it becomes possible to have my selfness extracted from its current meat matrix and installed in a body of my design, would you all still be my friends if I had a smooth visor where my eyes, forehead, and temples are now, concealing some sort of multiple aperture or plenoptic lightfeild camera? That or maybe just gave myself mantis shrimp eyes.)

So because the nerve has to punch all the way through the retina before spreading its tendrils, there are no optical receptors in that small spot.
You'd think you'd notice when, however small, there's a pair of circles of your field of vision to which you are truly, literally blind.

Humans are blind to a lot of things though:

Kinda trippy but not interesting right?
Open this picture in a program with a color picker (The GIMP, Photoshop, etc), or use a stand alone color picker program.
Pick the green spiral and the blue one.
No, you didn't mis-aim (unless you did and got the magenta or the orange). Both spirals, blue and green, are the exact same color.

The point that this video and the image really brings home, at least to me, is that the information we receive from our senses is heavily filtered well before it gets to our higher level consciousness.
And being a very meta-cognitive sort (why do I think so much about why I think about the things I'm thinkin' of?), I start to wonder what else our brain does this kind of filtering to. Is this really just an artifact of how our brain processes visual information? (Well, yes.) Is it something to be amused by, and then pass up as a mere trick, an optical illusion? (I don't think so.)
Maybe this is simply my bias, short circuiting those mental circuits I've attempted to build, to use to evaluate the world logically. But every time I see an optical illusion, it connects, in my mind, to all of the magical thinking humans participate in, through time and around the world. A belief in the supernatural, in philosophies unsupported by evidence, in policies that foster a result directly counter to the aims that built them. It's all based on humanity's ability to filter the information they receive, to alter it at a level that they're completely unconscious of. The things we think rewire our brains as we think them. Deep tracks worn on crackling neurons with the continuous application of self-feeding networks of varying voltage.
The executive center of our brains isn't "designed" to apply rigorous, logical thought to the information it receives. It isn't "designed" to come up with the best solution to complex social issues that decide our quality of life.
The human brain evolved because it was a powerful tool for feeding a tribe of pre-humans enough to raise another generation. What gazelles do before they run away from, or are felled by, your rocks, and what the ones you don't eat do, that doesn't matter. It doesn't really affect the pre-human's ability to catch and eat it, so why not believe they gallop across the sea at night. (Or, as Aristotle thought, that birds hibernate under swamps and seas during the winter).

I can only see one path out of this morass. Or rather, one way to find that path. Measure, measure, measure. Nail the world down with facts, trap the structures and inter-relations with chains of words. Remove our conceptions of the world from our flawed psyches, and we can begin to see things as they really are. Step back, and appreciate the glory of the world exposed in a way unique, so far as we can tell, to humanity. Examine yourself with rigor, ask your friends to help (help me?), find the discontinuities, and create rules to reduce the impact of perceptual or cognitive error on your life. Shine a light in the dark corners of existence, and when our flaws are exposed, sadness and suffering can be reduced to the lowest level mathematically possible.

Of course, I could be wrong. Humans are fallible after all.

Ben Goldacre (whom you should be reading regularly, if you are not already) has written an interesting piece today. He does that voodooscience that he does so well, and talks about reality. In this case, the reality often obfuscated by deliberately fuzzy thinking on the part of record industry mouthpieces.
A big part of Ben's job is heaping scorn on lazy and credulous journalists. And this is a doozy. Apparently, piracy of music costs the UK's recording industry 10% of the Gross Domestic Product. You would think that as this number were bandied about that if mystic fairies came from beyond the veil and abolished music piracy forever, the entire economy of Britain probably wouldn't suddenly regear itself into a mechanism designed to feed money to recording companies.
(One of the biggest obstacles to rational thought is wishful thinking. Keep that in mind.)

Or concurrently, you'd think they might realize that music albums are ludicrously expensive, what with about 70% of their cost being overhead that goes to the production companies. Raise your hand if you think any of these journalists took the numbers as an impetus to explore the world of mass market music. Why do we pay so much for musically jejune preprocessed garbage? What alternatives we could explore? what might be looming on the horizon?
Put your hands down.

As a whole, the heaviest downloaders of music do so because they love music, and are also among the heaviest purchasers of music. There's a rising tide of "amateur" music artists, who love creating music more than anything. The Internet is creating a place for these groups to come together, one where the greedy siphon of middlemen have no place. I'd be scared too, were I the recording industry. But this is just undignified.