Chinahand's Random Stuff

[finlo]

Not if it was the Yanks.

[Chinahand]

Thought this was an interesting take on Transgender and racial issues from Jerry Coyne:

Once again: why is it okay to be transgender but not transracial?

Quote

 

"Rebecca Tuvel in the academic organ Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy ... examines the arguments supporting the acceptance of transgender people, and finds them similar to the arguments supporting acceptance of “transracial” people like Rachel Dolezal, who, though of white ancestry, claimed to be black. Tuvel concludes this:

In this article, I argue that considerations that support transgenderism extend to transracialism. Given this parity, since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races."

 

I have to say I step into the issues of identity very cautiously, but think there is a problem with both the idea there are immutable genders and everyone is either one or the other and also the idea that you cannot critique or examine the political and social issues surrounding identity politics.

The regressive left is very intolerant of people examining these issues - as is clear from the backlash Rebecca Tuvel has faced.

Jonathan Haidt wrote this:

Quote

Marx is the patron saint of what I’ll call “Social Justice U,” which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what I’ll call “Truth U,” which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In the process, all become smarter. Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.

Something very interesting is happening with ideas of Social Justice and liberalism.  I'm not certain the dichotomy is quite as stark as Haidt is making it, but I'm troubled by the regressive left and its identity politics, while accepting ideas of gender and race are far more socially complex than the typical conservative right would claim.

[llap]

With a non-answer like that, you should consider running for public office.

[Chinahand]

Lego: wonderful toy ... really weak structure.

 

[Albert Tatlock]

What?

 

The lego man survived...though we did spend 15 minutes looking for him and eventually found him behind one of the cushions on the settee.

[doc.fixit]

...............about thirty years ago we went on a land rover trip to Nord Cap in Norway...............3500 miles there and back, brilliant..............check my book, 'Muddy Memories',....................we were climbing the fabulous pass by Garanga Fiord and I was enthusing about the massive waterfall down the middle of the sinuous road and how we were approaching a snow cave and..........a voice from the back pronounced, 'I've lost my lego man and I'm not happy'................oh the joys of being young .............

Edited May 26, 2017 by doc.fixit

[Chinahand]

The challenge is not to laugh.

 

[Chinahand]

Not quite sure what to think about this:

 

[Chinahand]

Being a bit bored last night, I browsed through the iPlayer's Science and Nature section and found this Storyville documentary:

Shooting Bigfoot: America's Monster Hunters

After finishing watching it my initial impression was that it was an incredibly depressing piece of work which was a terrible indictment of American culture, but also I felt it risked devaluing it own genre with the ambiguity of the ending leaving you questioning whether the documentary maker had compromised his truth telling for the sake of mystery and a good story.

The cryptozoology of the Bigfoot or Sasquatch is pretty much discredited.  Modern biologists using camera traps have good evidence of Jaguars living in Arizona and Cougars in LA and have, sadly, used DNA testing to show that reports of a Tasmanian Tiger were in fact a fox, but when it comes to the Bigfoot all they have found is evidence of the cupidity and gullibility of humanity.  

The touchstone of good science, as Richard Feynman said, is "that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."  There are also the different meanings of the word "faith" - the scientific version where faith in, say, a plane being able to fly comes from the overwhelming collection of evidence to warrant that our understanding of the world is accurate verses the religious version where faith in something that is maintained not only in the face of a lack of evidence, but even when confronted with confounding evidence.  The documentary follows three sets of Bigfoot hunters who clearly don't understand these nuances.

The film is very much in the style of The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife, or Louis Theroux, where the film maker with his seemingly naive and innocent questions lets the subject, through his own actions and words, show up not only their hubris but also their humanity.

The first set are two old true believers out in the woods of Ohio.  In some ways they are the most authentic of the films subjects, two cranky, bickering old men who are convinced every shadow and noise they hear are families of Sasquatch watching their every move.  Your suspicions of mental illness and the damage of booze and bad diet are slowly confirmed as they tell ever taller tails about their encounters and speak of how they have a calling to use shaman powers to commune with the beasts.  But there is also a humanity in these two old boys, clearly visible when talking about the time when one could work building bridges before an industrial accident ended a career or when they come across a friend now so riddled with alcohol she has given up on food and one presses some money into her hand and asks her to go and eat.

The second is a so-called professional Bigfoot hunter, with a logo'ed trailer, an internet profile and three documentaries to his name.  As an aside if anyone has kids of a certain age and hence gets asked to put on CBBC's The Deep of an evening this guy is what Devil Daniels will become after 30 years of failure!  He's pompous, rude, a desperate self-publicist, who so wants to be seen as authentic despite his involvement in a previous hoax.  He's assembled a rag tag band of true believers who guide him into the woods convinced the evidence is right there to be found.

Finally there is a young guy mid-way between the other two - he'd been caught up with the second character's earlier hoax and wants the fame of a professional Bigfoot hunter, but is still full of the hope and religious faith that Sasquatch exists and he's been chosen to find and kill it.  It is his story in the brush of Texas which makes up the core of the documentary and also make the most disturbing watching as a lonely, obsessed man, caught between true belief and fraud fondles his gun and hunts shadows in the night while the homeless and hope-abandoned of Texas move in and out of the story.

Mental illness, abandonment and religious faith are strong underlying themes and the homeless boy with his mutilated dog are genuinely disturbing as the film reaches its climax and our third young hunter fires his hunting rifle into the night.

But it is at this climatic moment that the film maker decides to use ambiguity and a lack of clarity to bring his story to an end.  It is in someways good story telling, but, in my view, it is not a good way to end a documentary where the film maker is seeking to explain.  There is an attempt at that with quickly passing text and news reports, but overall, no, the truth is obscured, left unexplained and commentary deliberately left unsaid as camera continues to roll.  That frustrated and annoyed me, devaluing the ending.

Overall the documentary is simply sad, a sad example of how people can become obsessed and waste their talents on wild-goose chases with almost no possibility of value.  And they are supported in this by the faithful and also those they can huckster into paying for their schemes.  Oh, America, the land of the Free, where the mentally ill and homeless are left eking out a peripheral existence while hucksters, half believing, half not caring, milk them for money.

6.5/10

[llap]

12 minutes ago, Chinahand said:

The cryptozoology of the Bigfoot or Sasquatch is pretty much discredited.  Modern biologists using camera traps have good evidence of Jaguars living in Arizona and Cougars in LA and have, sadly, used DNA testing to show that reports of a Tasmanian Tiger were in fact a fox, but when it comes to the Bigfoot all they have found is evidence of the cupidity and gullibility of humanity. 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Edited August 6, 2017 by llap

[paswt]

but "abstinence does make the heart grow fonder"

[Chinahand]

What is evidence of absence?

All you can do is systematically look and that allows you to bound the likelihood something exists, the more you search the lower the probability comes if no evidence emerges.

The absence of evidence that there is an elephant in my bedroom does tell me something useful about the world.

 

 

[Chinahand]

It is the 6th of August.  On this day 72 years ago the city of Hiroshima was destroyed by the first use of an atomic weapon in anger.

Humanity has committed mass murder in war since before history could be written down, but we have become ever more efficient at it.  The fission bomb, and its far deadlier younger brother the fusion, or H, Bomb, marked a terrible advance in our ability to kill.

The only thing standing between us and mass destruction is the ability of people to solve their problems peacefully.  Something we are terrible at.

Japan is the only country to have borne the destruction a nuclear weapon can unleash - at Hiroshima 72 years ago today and then at Nagasaki 3 days later.  This Youtube video documents, with scarce mention of the hundreds of thousands of deaths, just what a nuke can do to a city.

North Korea is currently making blood curdling threats and insisting on its right to control such weapons as these and the missiles to send them half way across the world.

On an anniversary such as today, just spend a few moments pondering the state of our world and hope against hope such weapons will never be used again.

[the stinking enigma]

North Korea have the right to defend themselves, as do all countries. Without a nuclear threat they are history, 

[the stinking enigma]

As Dan Coats would agree.

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/29/dan-coats-north-korea-nukes-nuclear-libya-regime-change/