Finished Meditations. Important to remember that a man I admire to some extent could note that it was meritorious that he did not focus excessively on natural science, when that is to a large extent my raison d’etre. Now reading Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. This is part of my conscious attempt to refresh my familiarity with domains of science outside of genetics, a major oversight since I began graduate school. At some point I’ll branch out to physics, as Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here is in my stack, but I’m always worried that I’m really missing most of the essential aspects of a science the further I go out from my own area of core competency.
I will be traveling a bit before Christmas. Today I am in Austin, meeting up with a few people, mostly hanging around downtown.
Camille Paglia has resurfaced to attack Taylor Swift and her “obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine.” I can still remember seeing her speak extemporaneously on C-SPAN circa 1994. I was captivated, and pretty much immediately read Sexual Personae and Vamps & Tramps. Honestly I am not sure if I agree with her argument, but she was awfully entertaining, and skewered the people who I already instinctively detested. In hindsight her ethnic animus toward icy cold blonde women grates on me, but at least she’s transparent and honest about this bias. Sexual Personae is heavy going from what I recall, but Vamps & Tramps is an easy and entertaining read. Recommended if you aren’t familiar with her oeuvre.
Nearly two years ago I read an article in Rolling Stone, Love and Death In the House of Prayer. The piece strongly implied that Tyler Deaton, a gay man (in that his sexual attraction is toward his own sex) who led an evangelical Christian group was somehow involved in the death of his wife. More precisely, he may have precipitated her murder by a follower. I was curious what happened to this case…and I stumbled onto the original Rolling Stone piece. There is now an update which totally exculpates Deaton of any wrongdoing, and admits that his wife almost certainly committed suicide. So for years people were led to assume that Tyler Deaton was involved in a murder, which resulted in an inability to obtain work. Now, it turns out that he’s totally innocent, not just legally, but perhaps ethically and morally as well. I invite you to read the Rolling Stone update, because I suspect very few of those who originally read the story will do so.
There’s a lot of hatred on my Twitter toward Abigail Fisher from liberals who I follow. That’s fine I suppose, but it is sad that many liberals now think that any opposition to affirmative action is ipso facto evidence of racist intent. Yes, people tend to be ideologically insulated, both on the Left and Right, but at some point it will come back and bite people in the ass. Abigail Fisher isn’t the world’s worst monster; she happens to represent a substantial proportion of the electorate who hold different policy positions than the regnant liberal dispensation.
The New York Times has an op-ed about Canada welcoming refugees. Look, even Germany and Sweden’s efforts are drops in the ocean. I have a friend who works between Turkey and the United States. He has seen the impact of a mass inflow of refugees on the streets of Ankara, and it’s not a pretty picture. If humanitarianism is the ultimate end, then the gusher of money needs to be unleashed on the millions of refugees in Turkey and Lebanon. The ones who make it to the West tend to be more privileged on average for various reasons. Also, it should be noted that the lauded Canadian refugee policy is discriminatory; I happen to agree with discrimination in this case, but I’m not one to make a big fuss in general about filters of this sort. But some might ask why we’re discriminating. It’s 2015.
Pew has lots of data on opinions of Muslims. One of the major problems that Left and Right in the West have is that they have their own simple stylized conceptions, and don’t engage with the data. For example, there isn’t a dichotomy between moderate and extremist/radical/jihadi Muslims. Islam is a diverse religion with many factions, sects, and positions along the spectrum. On the whole radical extremists are a minority, but a non-trivial one. Additionally, a substantial number of Muslims are not violent radicals, but harbor views broadly in sympathy with their aims. Then, there is the genuinely liberal minority, not in relation to their view of Islam as much as their attitude toward the role of religion in a polity and the balance between collective and individual rights.
I plan to be at the spring Evolution Meeting in Austin this year. Very excited.
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