Who had a bad day?

I noticed quite a few people yesterday trying to argue that the fact that a murderer walked into three Asian-American businesses and killed 6 Asian-American women wasn’t an act of racism, which kind of blows my mind. Of course it was! It was also an act of misogyny. And also of gun fanaticism. And puritanical religious self-loathing. And ignorance. And general hatred of unfamiliar cultures. It can be all of these things at the same time!

Have people never heard of the concept of intersectionality? Or have you just swallowed whole the conservative rejection of the idea?

Here’s another dirty concept to the conservative brain: Critical Race Theory. In part, that’s the idea that white supremacy exists, and is supported by our legal system (and, by the way, needs to be rooted out). The law turns a blind eye to racism. Hoo boy, does this Georgia police department do that. Why did that murderer kill those women? He had a “bad day” (I’ve been having a lot of bad days lately, never thought to vent by going on a killing spree). He was mentally ill (oh my, isn’t that a familiar refrain?). He was a sex addict (who focused his addiction on Asian women). The police asked him if his crime was racially motivated, and he said “no”…and they believed him. Why would a white boy from a good Christian family lie about that? The police department is rotten to the core. I’m going to guess that many of the officers are closet white supremacists themselves.

Watch this dissection of that appalling press conference.

Then there’s this Facebook post by Captain Jay Baker (the bald fuck in the video), in which he chortles over Trump’s claim that the virus was imported from “Chy-na”.

Jesus. Fire him. Cut out the rot. Defund the police.

Although he does provide a beautiful perspective into why Critical Race Theory is important and valid, I will at least say that for him.

When the worst of bad takes comes from a former friend…

It stings when someone you once considered a friend, who you respected as a thoughtful, philosophical feminist, goes off the deep end into TERFdom and starts making shallow, irrational arguments. You might be able to figure out who it is — she used to have a blog here. Now she likes to sneer at trans people. It’s very disheartening.

She’s responding to the recent article about Elliot Page. That’s a good article; her response, not so much. Even the first sentence is a sneer.

So, in the article, Page mentions being emotional about talking about his transition. Clearly, this is wrong.

No, because men don’t cry, especially not before the interviewer has even said anything besides “Hello.”

So he can be dismissed…with a gender stereotype? Seriously? I’m a man, brought up in the era of repressed masculine emotions, and I have a hard time expressing my feelings. I don’t think this is a strength at all. I’m glad Page has escaped that trap.

Then the article mentions that more people are transitioning now: “1.8% of Gen Z compared with 0.2% of boomers”. This, apparently, is bad.

Let’s think about this. “Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans”…which can be seen as tolerance and liberality, or as social contagion that encourages “young people” to make drastic and irreversible changes to their bodies. It can be seen as both.

I just mentioned how I, a boomer, have difficulty expressing my emotions, and that I don’t consider this a good thing. I am caged up in old notions of masculinity. Why would a feminist dislike the idea of a new generation liberating themselves from stereotypes?

And then, this idea that transitioning is a product of “social contagion”…what nonsense. Does she think men just wake up feeling feminine one morning, and on a whim, toddle down to the local clinic to have their penis snipped off, and the clinic cheerfully obliges? Or that, because several of my friends are trans men and women (or gay, or ace, or bi), that I decide to change my sexual identity to conform? You know, the majority of the people I associate with are still cis het — note that 1.8% of the general population is considered a soaring frequency — why aren’t we considering that all the social pressure from friends and family and TV and the internet is forcing everyone to conform to a pure masculine/feminine dichotomy and not be who they want to be?

As for drastic and irreversible changes to bodies…medical transitioning, the irreversible bits, is preceded by months and months of clinical evaluation. I really can’t walk into a clinic and ask to have it snipped off. I couldn’t even get a vasectomy without doctors tut-tutting and insisting that I make sure this is what I want, and refusing to do the procedure. I know women would have even more examples of the medical establishment refusing to carry out surgical sterilization.

So you think people just do this because they saw a post on Instagram or an article in Time magazine? This is nuts.

it’s not just conservatives who see that “increased social acceptance” can be a euphemism for “social contagion” and that the latter is not always beneficent. Given the inherent absurdity of what people mean by “trans,” it’s inevitable that it’s not just conservatives who think the whole idea is futile and destructive. Constantly framing “trans” as the latest expansion of human potential rather than a perverse and anti-reality daydream just throws more wood on the fire.

Again with the sneering belittling. Being trans is not a product of “social contagion”, nor is it inherently absurd. The people who make this change are acutely aware of what reality is, experience huge amounts of pressure to accept a socially determined gender role — even trivial matters like “men don’t cry” are fiercely enforced — and are taking deliberate steps after much thoughtful consideration to be who they want to be. Respect that. Accept people for who they say they are, rather than demanding that they be what you want them to be. Like this:

Nobody is debating anyone’s existence, what we’re disputing is the description. We think you’ve got the description wrong.

My god. Who are you to tell another person how best to describe themselves? Can I also dispute some descriptions?

She goes on to defend JK Rowling, who opposes transgender equality in the name of feminism.

No, not in the name of feminism. She really is a feminist, she’s not faking it. It’s funny how fans of the ideology think changing sex is completely real while feminists who call themselves feminists are fake.

Oh. JK Rowling really is a feminist, because she says she is one. But someone who rejects stereotypes, who goes through the pain and expense and social stigma of transitioning, can’t be who they say they are, because a TERF declares that you aren’t allowed to change sex.

I note that she does not disagree that Rowling opposes transgender equality, which is the real reason she is disliked. I’ll take that as stipulated, then, that JK Rowling is an opponent of equality.

P.S. Changing sex is completely real. People do it all the time. Why do TERFs deny reality?

Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God…and racism. Mustn’t forget the racism.

I grew up with a grossly racist grandfather — he survived the Pacific War of WWII and came out of it with alcoholism and an abiding contempt for the Japanese. I heard so many racial slurs! He knew them all, and hated them. What I got out of it, though, was the stark contrast between what he said and what I knew. This was in the Pacific Northwest; I had many friends of Asian descent, I worked my way through summers in high school in the employ of Taki Nagasawa, who’s ethnicity you might guess from the name. What I learned from the experience was that my drunken grandpa was full of shit. That’s all. That when a racist starts spewing racism you should simply disbelieve everything he says.

So when Donald Trump started babbling about the “Chinese Flu” or the “Kung Flu”, what I saw was Drunk Grandpa raging from his armchair, sloshed to the gills on Budweiser. He’s wrong. I can ignore everything he says. Unfortunately, I can’t ignore the criminally moronic people who believed him, now fueling a wave of anti-Asian violence.

Hatred against Asian-Americans is being expressed far more freely now.

Asian Americans reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents during the pandemic, a number that experts believe to be just a fraction of the true total.

From 19 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, Asian Americans from all 50 states experienced everything ranging from verbal abuse to physical assaults, from getting coughed on to getting denied services because of their ethnicity, according to a report released on Tuesday by Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition tracking incidents of violence, discrimination and harassment.

More than 68% of the abuse was verbal harassment or name-calling, while 11.1% was physical, the report found.

Once again, I find myself looking from my Asian-American friends to these abusive assholes, unable to comprehend how wrong they are. It’s madness. Why are you saying these outrageous untruths, why are you treating your fellow citizens with such contempt?

I haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of the hatred. Yesterday, a man deliberately walked into three Asian-American businesses and opened fire, killing 8 people, including 6 women of Asian descent. It’s a clear case of racial targeting and mass murder. They’ve caught the murderer, a scraggly-bearded 21 year old white man. We’re already hearing what a good kid he was.

Long was described as a religious person by a former classmate at Sequoyah High. The 21-year-old graduated in 2017. The classmate said Long’s dad was a pastor, and he had seemed “innocent” and “nerdy.”

“He was very innocent seeming and wouldn’t even cuss,” the classmate told The Daily Beast. “He was sorta nerdy and didn’t seem violent from what I remember. He was a hunter and his father was a youth minister or pastor. He was big into religion.”

Social media posts from the Crabapple First Baptist Church show Long and his family had a lengthy history with the church. Long’s father is not listed as a pastor at the church. The elders of the church released a statement to Heavy.com, saying they were “grieved” and “heartbroken.”

“We are grieved to hear the tragic news about the multiple deaths in the Atlanta area. We are heartbroken for all involved,” the statement said. “We grieve for the victims and their families, and we continue to pray for them. Moreover, we are distraught for the Long family and continue to pray for them as well.”

Posts indicate he attended the church with his mom, dad and his younger sister. His mother organized events at the church, like a movie night with a cotton candy machine.

He wouldn’t even cuss! But he could draw a gun and cold-bloodedly kill young women.

His mom sponsored movie nights! With a cotton candy machine! I bet the movies were all rated “G”, too. But she raised a son with a broken moral compass.

Long was also involved with the church’s Student Ministry Team as recently as 2018, according to minutes from a meeting of the elders. He was one of 11 people who served as team members, which “exists to see students receive Jesus Christ as Lord, and walk in Him, being rooted in the faith.”

The Daily Beast reported an Instagram account that “appeared to belong” to Long professed his love of God and guns.

“Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life,” a tagline for the account said.

Maybe the church and his family taught him the wrong things, and failed to teach him the important things.

You know what else perpetuates the bigotry? That we know this much about the shooter, that we’ve been served up these little dollops of presumably worthy things about him — religion, cotton candy, guns, prayer, nerdy, innocent — and we know nothing about his victims, who are all faceless Asian women who worked at a spa (wink, wink), and whose lives aren’t summed up with a list of trite objects. Now they’ve been reduced to objects themselves, the murderer is the subject, the verb is “killed”. Maybe eventually they’ll send a junior reporter off to get a quick summary of their lives, but it won’t be a front page story.

I wonder if some editor is thinking now that it would be a good idea to send a young Asian woman reporter off to cover that story (and get traumatized all over again) that’ll get buried somewhere in the back of the paper, and looking over the newsroom, is dismayed to notice they haven’t hired anyone to fit that role.

They also need to find someone to rewrite the puff pieces they’ve done on the murderer, to point out that he was a hate-filled gun-waving homicidal Jesus freak from a morally bankrupt family, with no excuses.

How do you keep on keeping on?

If only this weren’t a common response.

It is an actual quote from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country, Mr Morrison told Parliament.

This is a familiar defense of the status quo. You want equality? With ME??!? You should be grateful that we didn’t shoot you. It is the ubiquitous old white man defense of their privilege, which allows them to perpetuate the inequities that exist now, because they can always find someplace else that is much worse. The existence of a sliding scale of misery is used to justify itself — that protesters are shot in Myanmar allows us to smugly pat ourselves on the back when people in our country protest injustice because This is a triumph of democracy when we see these things take place, and not do anything. Then why are they protesting?

It’s the same old story, substituting an old white man from Australia for an old white man from England.

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

We are reduced to comparing the weight of the chains of the oppressed so we can ignore the existence of the chains altogether.

Definitely a senior moment

I’m puttering about in the lab, waiting for students to show up, and was mainly just cleaning a lot of glassware. Then I had to make up some solutions and culture more flies, and then as reflex dictates, I had to label everything.

This is a rule. Every time you make a bottle of something, you slap a label on it that says what’s inside and the date you made it. If I didn’t, I’d probably have a seizure trying to get to the container, even if gorillas charged in and snatched me away. It really is that important.

So tape goes on, sharpie comes out, I start writing. “16 March…”, and then, brain freeze. I forgot the decade. “81”, my fingers itched to write. I was in grad school. This is when I got into this habit. It must be…

No, that’s ridiculous. It’s not the 20th century anymore, that’s over. “01”? Maybe?

20 fucking 21? NO WAY! That’s the distant future, I’m a young man working in the lab. After a brief discombobulation, though, I realized it really was 2021, a date that belongs in a science fiction novel, and most of my life had just flown by. It’s going to take a while to get used to this.

So that must be what senility is like, just a whole series of shocks over the most mundane moments. Maybe my brain is going.

Nah, not really. I got very little sleep last night, work has been piling up again, I’m dog tired and stuck doing the most mindless routine tedium. I’ll mention this incident next time I see a doctor for a checkup (that should happen next month, once I’m fully vaccinated), but I think what I really need to do is catch up on my sleep and put a lot of work behind me. A nap and a vacation, that’s what I need.

Well, that was challenging

Today I tried to lead my students through some simple genetics problems over Zoom. In class, it would be easy: put up the problem, have the students pull out a piece of paper and try to solve it, while I wander the classroom seeing what they were doing, offering hints and suggestions as I go, and at the end I’d have an idea of where the individuals were struggling.

On Zoom, nope.

I’d present the problem, and then…no, I have no way to observe the process. I told them they could let me know their answer over the private chat, and if it looked good, I’d call on them and they could explain how they solved it.

First difficulty: these are smart students, and they quickly figured out the flaw in my plan. If they gave the answer, I’d call on them; simple solution: sit on the answer for as long as possible. The first problem I put up produced a deadly silence, with all those black rectangles not showing anything, and my chat window being totally blank. I’d try to nudge them along, but not knowing where they were in the problem meant I had no idea where they were stuck. Or if they even were stuck.

They started to warm up as the hour went on — probably as they realized these weren’t really that hard, and they were seeing how to reach the solution — but it was still agonizing. It took us the whole hour to do 3 problems. And I’ve promised/threatened to do it again on Thursday. As it stands, they’re getting an exam next week and I’ve had little opportunity to interact with them to work through even simple problems.

Stupid virus. Let me get back into a real classroom again.

It’s not too late to shower us with rubies

Last year was our 40th wedding anniversary, which we had to spend apart because Mary got caught by the lockdown in Colorado. This year, Tuesdays are my heaviest teaching days, so I’m just spending the whole day on zoom and in lab.

We’re such a glamorous couple.

I note that the traditional 40th anniversary wedding gift is rubies. If you’ve got a few you can spare, drop them in an envelope and send them here. You all forgot to send them last year; to be honest, I didn’t even notice then.

I think there’s something wrong with this place

In Morris, there is a 4-way stop at the intersection of Columbia and 7th Avenue. I usually avoid it, because 4-way stops ought to be a crime in Minnesota, but I mistakenly went that way the other day. I came to a stop last at the intersection. Three other cars were stopped there, their drivers all smiling and waving at each other to go ahead. It was an impasse. Who would be the first to be less nice and proceed?

It was me. I let them have about 2 seconds of indecision before I gunned the engine. I blame it all on 7 years of driving in Philadelphia, which is kind of on the other extreme of impoliteness.

Anyway, this video reminded me of fairly typical Midwestern norms.

Birds vs. Spiders

It’s been snowing all day. The birds have been frolicking in my backyard. So I aimed a camera at them and recorded a timelapse video.

I have a sneaky purpose, though. Do bird videos draw in more viewers than spider videos? I’ll let you know in a few days.

Or a few hours. Within 3 hours, a video with just birds in it passes the traffic count accumulated by a spider video over 3 days.

I could just cry.

Republicans steal money…FROM PUPPIES!

You’re sinking pretty low there, Lara Trump.

A dog rescue charity with links to Lara Trump has spent as much as $1.9 million at former President Donald Trump’s properties over the last seven years and will drop an additional quarter-million at his Mar-a-Lago country club this weekend.

According to a permit filed with the town of Palm Beach, Florida, Big Dog Ranch Rescue estimates it will spend $225,000 at the club where Donald Trump has taken up full-time residence since leaving the White House. All the profit from that spending winds up in his pocket.

Lara Trump, the Donald’s daughter-in-law, wants to run for the US Senate from North Carolina. Do North Carolinians hate puppies? I hope they remember this grift.