Let’s slap ENCODE around some more

Since we still have someone arguing poorly for the virtues of the ENCODE project, I thought it might be worthwhile to go straight to the source and and cite an ENCODE project paper, Defining functional DNA elements in the human genome. It is a bizarre thing that actually makes the case for rejecting the idea of high degrees of functionality, which is a good approach, since it demonstrates that they’ve at least seen the arguments against them. But then it sails blithely past those objections to basically declare that we should just ignore the evolutionary evidence.

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The virtues of polarization

Scalzi has made an announcement and revision.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on my personal feminism, in which I noted that while I can be considered a feminist on the fundamental level of “women are entitled to the same rights and privileges as men, with everything that implies in terms of access to education, economic opportunity and personal liberty,” I usually didn’t call myself one, for various and what I thought at the time were perfectly reasonable reasons.

Then 2014 happened, and those reasonable reasons now kind of feel like careful, rationalizing bullshit to me.

So, as an update to my thoughts on my personal feminism:

Hell yes, I’m a feminist.

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Road to ruin

The Atlantic has a rather depressing article on The Tragedy of the American Military. Here’s the kernel of the story: the knee-jerk idolatry of the military by the American public is leading to a decline in its effectiveness and to wasteful expenditure of human lives.

If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

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Twitter management is incompetent

It takes a lot to get me to try to report a twitter user for offensive content — I’m usually happy enough to simply be liberal with the block button (I block, on average, 3 or 4 people a day). But there have been a grand total of two occasions on which someone was so egregiously awful I thought it necessary to report them. One was a guy who was spamming with over-the-top death threats from multiple accounts, and taunting me with his knowledge that Twitter would do nothing about it. Another time, it was someone who was sending me explicit crime scene photos — rotting bodies, bloody suicides, decapitated or disemboweled people. So I tried to send complaints.

The Twitter complaint submission form is a nightmare — it’s a perfect example of putting up a bureaucratic roadblock to prevent people from complaining. These two cases were so extreme that I struggled through several pages of ridiculously detailed inquiries, submitted the final form, and sat back, thoroughly convinced that this was a cynical pretense by Twitter and that nothing would be done.

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I’ll forever fight the war on Christmas in my own way

There’s a furious argument going on between Tom Flynn, who hates Christmas and thinks no right-minded atheist should have any truck with a religious holiday, and Beth Presswood, a confirmed atheist who loves the Christmas holiday. I agree with Flynn that the day is thoroughly tainted with ongoing religious garbage, but I also agree with Presswood that the season is in the process of being totally secularized, and that we ought as atheists to keep up the pressure to strip away the superstition and reconstruct the day to serve our completely human needs.

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