So a friend just verbally relayed a bit of wisdom she found on the internet yesterday. The core is, therefore, not mine, but she couldn’t remember the exact wording and thus the exact phrasing you find in this post can be blamed only on me.
So in this great conversation we’re having that began with discussing whether TERFs are feminists ultimately required addressing the question, What is feminism? I gave an answer here:
if you work to end sexism, you’re probably a feminist.
After Hj Hornbeck posted a riff on Siggy’s original question (that riff is found here), I felt compelled to create my own post, with failed sarcasm calling this discussion a Fiiiiiiiiiggghht. In that, I repeated my proto-definition of feminism where Hj Hornbeck and others found it, furthering the conversation by discussing the perils of gate-keeping as well as other topics.
But let’s allow those topics to continue being discussed in their original venues. I’m interested in this astute reply to my definition delivered by Hj Hornbeck:
Science journalism is failing us in important ways. This post will be far shorter than I might like it to be, but I want it to be readable, and in any case I plan on following up soon with more information and also, I hope, a detailed action plan.
Here I simply want to point out a single article. In another post, I’ll also be discussing an article on the dismissal of Francisco Ayala from UC Irvine and the pattern of sexual harassment that led to that dismissal. But right now, let’s tackle an interesting article with a headline that is … terrible, in ways we will investigate later. The headline reads thus:
In the coverage of recently published research revealing that stone tools in China – which research suggests were crafted by individual members of Homo erectus – date back 2.1 million-fucking-years, we get this gem contributing to our understanding of why this finding is so important in understanding the habits and abilities of our ancestors and not just their birth dates:
Another key finding is that the new dates show that “already before 2 million years, hominins were able to cope with a range of environmental conditions,” says archaeologist Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who is not a member of the team. During the long span of occupations at Shangchen, which is about the same latitude as Kabul, the climate fluctuated from warm and wet to cold and dry. “They must have been freezing their buns off,” adds paleoanthropologist Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
That’s right, just try reading that entire last sentence out loud and in one take without interrupting yourself laughing. Pure brilliance.
So, apparently some folks have known about this for a long time, but I just came across a reference to orca gathering together several members of a pod who then swim, dive, and surge synchronously to produce a wave displacing several tons of water.
Why would they do that? Well, it turns out it’s a good way for orca to wash prey animals who rest on ice floes – mainly seals – off the safety of their floating islands and into the open water where the orca can eat them.
Here’s one video which culminates in three orca using the strategy:
However, there are others. I came across a 45 minute TV program that would be inconvenient to use in demonstrating the tactic. Still if you’re willing to scan through and find it, you can see five orca swimming, diving, & surging synchronously to form a massive wave. While synchronized action isn’t unusual in the animal kingdom (think of birds migrating in V formations or schools of fish turning in near-unison among other things), this involves not only planning, but very possibly also either communicating a plan to one’s companions or, even more spectacularly, a theory of mind where the means to communicate a plan are absent, but other orca recognize what one orca is attempting to achieve in the future, then thinking about how to enhance the success of that other animal’s plan. Thinking from that other animal’s perspective, if that’s what’s happening, is a stupendous intellectual feat.
It would not be the only time one can see theory of mind operating in non-human animals, but the operation of theory of mind is rare.
And yet, the thing that completely disarms me intellectually is the thought that in this instance, the very water in which they swim has probably been rendered into a tool, which would challenge the very definition of the word. Wikipedia’s discussion of tool use by animals has a brief discussion of the difficulties inherent in defining “tool”. The first example they present, though, is sufficient to the point:
The external employment of an unattached or manipulable attached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself, when the user holds and directly manipulates the tool during or prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool.
Is the seawater an “environmental object” or the orca’s environment itself? I’m not sure, but this is an incredible bit of cooperative hunting a raises a great many questions about orca, their intelligence, and even the nature of tool use itself.
The AAP is not down with what’s been happening to immigrant children of immigrants (both those who seek to cross within the law and those who seek to evade it). In addition to putting out a statement,
And what did Kraft find?
The shelter in question held 60 beds and had a little playground for children. Rooms are equipped with toys, books and crayons. …
But the child who caught the paediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. This little girl – no older than two – was screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. Yet staff members could not comfort the infant because of the rules prohibiting physical contact.
That’s right: no hugs for toddlers is the law, because Democrats and their awful, no good, very bad refusal to capitulate to everything the Orange Tyrant wants, forever.
Or at least, I guess that what the Rs are saying today.
Ishtar fucking Inanna with the Strap-On of Birth Control, there are no words.
Pat Parker is a particularly awesome poet, although it’s true that we all tend to value most highly those things we can’t do ourselves, and whatever talent I have with language, it certainly doesn’t include a gift for brevity. So maybe I overvalue Parker because she’s able to make a point much more succinctly than I?
Hmm. Let’s see:
From a friend whose field is closely related to linguistics and whose master’s program required a whole damn lot of it:
Simba is instructed by his father about the territory (not the map)
It’s hard to even even on this one:
I respect all human beings. I even have to respect, you know, criminals. But I’m sorry I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation. …
So Stormy, you want to bring a case, let me cross examine you. Because the business you’re in entitles you to no degree of giving your credibility any weight.
Oh, but that’s not all.
Leonard Cohen wrote the title of this post, but many of those depraved on account’a they’re deprived might have first encountered them when Brian Williams wet his drawers on national TV over the awesomeness of US warships launching missiles with big, big fire. For Williams, the awe at the destructive power of the missile was somehow an affirmation that the US was right, that the US was working good.
Of course, Cohen never intended to mean anything like this. Cohen’s the kind of person who might have said this sarcastically, meaning to satirize the Brian Williams of the world, but in fact he didn’t even intend that. Instead, in Cohen’s song First We Take Manhattan he’s talking about changing the world not militarily, but through individual effort: