I’ve always detested those stupid trolley problems — all I see is a ridiculously contrived situation. But maybe they do provide some insight into ethical thinking. At least, that’s what I take away from this one.
There are just too many people who are happy to tell you they think the trolley should keep going straight.
It has been pointed out many times that there is one almost perfect correlation in the US’s mass shootings: it’s not that they’re done by Muslims (that would be laughably false, if it weren’t a conclusion that is harming innocents). It’s that almost all of the mass shootings are done by men. Soraya Chemaly points out something that is almost as terrible: most of their murder sprees begin with killing women and children.
As Huffington Post reporter Melissa Jeltsen wrote last year, “The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence.” According to a conservative estimate by the FBI, 57 percent of the mass shootings (involving more than four victims) between January 2009 and June 2014 involved a perpetrator killing an intimate partner or other family member. In other words, men killing women intimates and their children and relatives are the country’s prototypical mass shooters; these killings are horrifyingly common. In fact, on Sunday, while the world watched in horror as news poured out of Orlando, a man in New Mexico was arrested in the fatal shooting deaths of his wife and four daughters.
Even when intimate partners are not involved, gender and the dynamics of gender are salient. According to one detailed analysis, 64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children, and yet the role that masculinity and aggrieved male entitlement plays is largely sidelined. Schools, for example, make up 10 percent of the sites of mass shootings in the U.S., and women and girls are twice as likely to die in school shootings. Gyms, shopping malls and places of worship are also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and girls are predictably present in greater numbers.
Also chilling is how we look the other way.
The Washington Post reported Monday that “although family members said Mateen had expressed anger about homosexuality, the shooter had no record of previous hate crimes.” But that depends on how you categorize domestic violence.
There are people who think domestic violence doesn’t even count as violence. The Bible condones beating your wife, so do some factions in Islam, and there are always idiots who argue that rape in marriage is impossible.
It makes me wonder how much courage it takes for a woman to enter into any kind of relationship with a man.
Who knew? The latest Tropes vs. Women:
Sarkeesian dissects and exposes the ludicrous rationales gamers use to justify keeping female characters running around half naked. Expect an eruption from the usual suspects any moment now.
Like the president of the United States of America.
As you might guess, some are losing it over such a simple, rational statement.
A conservative wackaloon who is very concerned about who uses the bathroom dares us: How to Stump a Liberal: Are Sex Chromosomes Real?. Wow. Do they really think that most of us would be baffled by that question?
The basis of their belief that we can’t answer it is, of all the ludicrous sources, Camille Paglia.
In a 2013 debate at American University, dissident feminist Camille Paglia told a remarkable story of an argument she had with fellow feminists in the early 1970s. When she remarked that males and females have hormonal differences, her colleagues told her that hormones are not real, they were only made up by a conspiracy of male scientists.
Is it possible that Paglia was among a group of left-wing loons? Yes, they exist. Is that view representative of most liberals or most feminists? No, it is not.
Brock Turner raped an unconscious woman. His dad called it a “20 minute action” and seemed to think losing his appetite for steak was punishment enough. Have you been wondering what his mom had to say? The court documents have been released, and now we can read what his heartbroken mother wrote to defend him.
Those happy family times are gone forever, replaced by despair, fear, depression, anxiety, doubt, and dread. I don’t think I have been able to take a deep breath since this happened. My first thought upon wakening every morning is “this isn’t real, this can’t be real. Why him? Why HIM? WHY? WHY?” I have cried every single day since Jan. 18. This is on my mind every moment.
Why HIM?
, as if this was something horrible that just happened to her happy innocent son? He’s a rapist. He raped someone. This wasn’t something that happened to him, it was something he did. He is the subject of the sentence “He raped her”, not the object.
I am sure this event has made her family miserable, but let’s not get confused about who is responsible.
Just when you thought it was safe to get back on the internet, Dan Waddell reminds us of the explosion of nastiness in the Tim Hunt sexism affair. The short summary:
The first part of an in-depth account of how the Tim Hunt saga developed into a furious online backlash against his critics, and escalated from casual sexism into a dangerous mix of racism, misogyny and political and cultural warfare.
The interesting part of this review is that while some are quick to blame a PC culture, what started as a civil rebuke of a sexist remark was enflamed into a conflagration of viciousness by the introduction of alt-right bigots like Yiannopoulos, Mensch, and gamergaters into the mix, and when they refocused the complaints about a safe, secure Nobel prizewinner onto a black woman journalist, all the racism and misogyny by others than Hunt was allowed to flower.
That’s the only positive spin I can put on the awful story of Brock Turner. For those who’ve missed out on the outrage, Brock Turner was a Stanford athlete who found a drunk woman passed out behind a dumpster, and he proceeded to do what any privileged male asshole would do: he raped her. He was caught in the act however, and tried to run away, and was put on trial.
Awful enough so far. But then once he was convicted, the judge decided to give him a light 6 month sentence, because prison would have a severe impact on him
. Yes? Isn’t that the point? Of course, the judge, Aaron Persky, was also a former Stanford athlete, so this is clearly a case of a judge seeing someone who looks like him, so he must be a good boy…
So injustice is compounded. But then, just to make me truly sick to my stomach, Turner’s father made a statement. This is why I say fathers matter — because Dan A. Turner is an oblivious asshole who raised an asshole. This is appalling.
Since form is a consequence of differential growth of tissues, and since different tissues grow at different rates, one of the ways evolution can shape morphology is through changes in growth rate, so changes in timing can produce very different forms. There are genes that affect specific tissues discretely; for instance, the gene ASPM regulates mitotic activity in regions of the brain, so mutations in it can produce smaller brains, or microcephaly. There are also global regulators of growth, and just changing the rate of maturation of the organism can produce changes in the proportion of different tissues, because of allometric variation in different regions.
So, for instance, if developmental maturation of the somatic tissues is slowed, while sexual maturation is maintained at the standard rate, individuals retain juvenile characters at reproductive age, a process called neoteny (similarly, you can get a similar effect by maintaining a standard rate of somatic growth, but accelerating the rate of sexual maturation, a process called progenesis.) Note that what’s key here is that different tissues are regulated differently; if you just slow the rate of development of both somatic and reproductive organs, you get individuals with the standard morphology, it just takes longer for them to get there. Everyone who knows anything about development and evolution understands that neoteny/progenesis requires independent regulation of different tissues.
One of the factors thought to play a role in human evolution is neoteny. Compared to other primates, adult humans retain a juvenile morphology: heads large in proportion to our bodies, larger eyes, smaller jaws, etc. This is not particularly controversial, although I’d really like to see more specific identification of the genes involved. Our shape could, after all, alternatively be explained by character by character changes in gene expression. The neoteny hypothesis implies that a large cranium and small jaw are correlated, that is, by changing one regulator of growth you get both effects. It would also be possible that they’re uncorrelated, that (as a simplified example) one gene that generates larger brains evolved, and that a second gene for reduced jaws evolved completely independently.
Neoteny can also be a mosaic process. Big head and small jaws are a retention of a juvenile character, but other features, like our bigger noses and ears as adults compared to babies (creepy visualization: imagine a baby with a nose as big in proportion to its head as an adult’s; all cuteness disappears). Even if the neoteny hypothesis is generally valid, it can’t explain all the features of an adult human, and does not imply that humans are all big babies in every respect. Donald Trump excepted.
That’s the background. Now for the pseudoscientific appropriation of a concept from development and evolution.
I don’t think I knew him — but then, I’ve met so many people in the atheist movement I might have — but suddenly, many of my other friends in godlessness are openly distancing themselves from Dan Linford. Worse, I’m hearing that there has been a lot of whispering about him for years, with women quietly telling each other to watch out for him…and, as I’m usually totally clueless about these things, I didn’t know about it at all (just as I knew nothing about the warnings about Shermer for so long).
And now Linford has confessed to coercing and assaulting students from his position of authority as a professor of philosophy. Here’s a public comment from Heina Dadabhoy:
