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Academia Free-For-All Science Sports

You’re Reading The Comments, Right?

January 9, 2023 115 Comments

Where, for instance, pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.

Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.

No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction,

These playing fields… are never theoretically far from plantation fields.

Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million.

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Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (659)

January 6, 2023 143 Comments

How to lose your shoes. || Crown flash. || It fell from the sky. (h/t, Damian) || Fungus of note. || How to measure very tiny forces – say, the push of a laser pointer. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || On the benefits of British colonialism. || A very modern mindset. || An excruciatingly simulated heist game. || Moog dancers, 1971. (h/t, TDK) || As seen by meteorological satellite Himawari-8. || How was your day? || Because it can be done. (h/t, Dicentra) || The British Vintage Wireless and Television Museum. (h/t, Things) || Looking sharp. || Lighthouse location. || “Ready to drive away today.” (h/t, Julia) || A compendium of Japanese portable record players. || An attempt was made. || And finally, an illustration of life’s modern complications.

You can, should you wish, follow me on Twitter.

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Academia Free-For-All His Pretty Nails

Incantations

January 4, 2023 94 Comments

Time to dip a toe in the world of Clown Quarter poetry. Specifically, a colossal work titled Everyone Is A Little Trans, by the University of Connecticut’s visiting assistant professor, Trace Peterson:

Everyone is a little enby. Everyone is a little gender-fluid.

Everyone is a little twelve-inch pianist. Everyone is a little cis.

Everyone is a little circular rubbing motion.

Everyone thinks they’re Billy Ocean.

No, wait – don’t go. There’s more.

The full, four-minute version can be experienced here.

The author of the above has “been working at the forefront of trans poetry & poetics (and queer poetry & poetics) for the past two decades.” As will doubtless be apparent.

Via Christopher Rufo.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Anthropology Auto-Erotic Radicalism Food and Drink

Tongue Action

January 3, 2023 52 Comments

From the pages of Bon Appétit, where Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha is determined to overshare:

My First Time Eating an Oyster Was an Act of Queer Intimacy.

Ms Maratha’s first time, in Boston, during college orientation, is recounted in some detail:

My own acquaintance with the oyster started off memorable — hot and vulnerable, in public, and somehow profoundly intimate. The oyster covers most of your face when you eat it, and it’s usually alive when you do. It can keep a secret. In it, there is something uniquely unspoken between the eater and the eaten. 

If anyone’s getting aroused by this, I’m fetching the hose.

When the server brought out a tray of shaved ice, my peers looked on, nonchalant and delighted. I slipped on a facade that I too, was well-acquainted with the mollusc. I wasn’t about to give an arbitrary group of strangers at my liberal arts college the benefit of knowing that I — the only Indian girl I had seen on campus thus far — would be performing the act for the first time. 

If madam’s outpourings seem a bit much, be assured things do not get better on that front.

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Reheated The Year That Was

The Year Reheated

December 27, 2022 250 Comments

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a lesson in pronouns and pretending, or dishonesty-on-demand, courtesy of the suddenly ungendered Laurie Penny – now, it seems, a they, depending on who’s nearby and how fashionable they are. And so, we pondered animal pronouns, clown pronouns and pronouns that can change randomly, depending on whim, several times a day. Such is the hamster-wheel world of competitive self-definition.

We also flicked through the pages of The Atlantic, where senior editor Honor Jones, a woman oppressed by comfort and fidelity, shared a somewhat bewildering account of her divorce from a loving and faithful husband. Chief among her reasons were a desire to “be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy,” a feat no married woman can apparently hope to achieve, and a dislike of crumbs – a recurring topic, mentioned seven times.

And we witnessed the denouncing of racist traffic cameras. Which is to say, devices that record which demographics speed and run red lights, and endanger lives, much more often than others. Writing in ProPublica, Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez conjured a remarkable series of excuses for repeat offenders, who were presented as oppressed, as “activists for racial equity,” and all but heroic, despite some committing 11 offences in a single year. Humdrum notions of personal responsibility were of course avoided, leaving readers to suppose that the only conceivable explanation for the lawbreakers’ behaviour, and consequent fines, was “structural racism.”

 

In February, we were treated to cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja, whose artistic immensity has enthralled us before, and regarding whom, the Los Angeles Times gushed, “Kierkegaard comes to mind, as do Sartre and Dostoevsky.”

We also witnessed the mental unspooling of San Francisco school board members, among whom mismanagement and conspiracy theories are elevated to an art form, and for whom two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad is sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee is a perfectly normal use of one’s time.

And via The Independent, we heard of the latest moral crisis and cause of deep mental “trauma” – namely, aircraft seatbelts and insufficiently commodious plus-size bath towels.

 

March brought us the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white, along with an implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.

Pale devilry cropped up again, as educator and activist Maia Niguel Hoskin, writing in Forbes, told us that when a black millionaire celebrity publicly slaps another black millionaire celebrity, this is all the fault of white people and “white supremacist culture.” You see, for an educator and activist, the way to be “anti-racist” is to erase any agency, and any expectation of self-possession, from people with brown skin.

We also witnessed a display of intersectional ruggedness, thanks to Ailish Breen, a being with pronouns, and her troupe of ostentatiously “queer hikers,” who regard a simple walk in the countryside as both “quite political” and a basis for complaint, and for whom the very air is yet another a form of oppression. Among the troupe’s many grievances was the phrase “conquering the outdoors,” a term whose weight bears down on their delicate souls. That the expression refers to overcoming one’s own limitations or imagined limitations – which among the less pretentious is generally regarded as a good thing – somehow escaped their notice.

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.