jlc

I am more of the opinion of freedomforall. To have both girls and boys in an organization is not the knell of doom.

I imagine that similar outrage existed when grammar schools were made co-ed; I remember such rhetoric when colleges became co-ed. It has not meant the end of colleges.

The key is to make the Scouts still mean competence and responsibility - which is eroding because of our culture. Having girls in the troop is trivial. I read several comments below about the presence of girls meaning that boys could not be strong and capable. Huh?

Jan

But...but...it never showed the memo...

Jan

My Firefox loaded a paper full of John Does just fine. You might want to check your settings a chose one that has a lower level of automatic scrutiny - and then run Malwarebytes more often.

Jan

Abaco -

You understand the essence of chivalry: that a prerogative of having strength is to use it to protect those who are weaker than you are. This is not just physical strength, of course, the woman you protected might have gone on to get her MD and perform a pro bono operation that saves your life; she may have become a lawyer who takes your case against great odds. There are many ways of being "6' tall/ 220lbs and a boxer"!

There is also an option to 'not' use your power for good and another choice to use power to be a bully. The people we are reading about or - as you point out - not reading about are people who have made the choice to be bullies or to do nothing.

I am concerned that women are using this MeToo to unjustly brand men who are innocent - women can be bullies too.

I have taken to holding doors open for people and giving my seat on shuttles to older people. I note that the men around me are not doing this, as a rule. That is their choice; this is mine.

Bravo for you for stepping in. I am glad that there was such a wonderful and ironic coda to your story.

Jan

Yes. The 'stupid little people' meme.

Jan

I think that is making the answer too complex. To me, it seems more likely that the individual people who work for the CDC are overwhelmingly liberal and disapprove of guns. The company begins to reflect, as its stance, the opinions of its personnel. (Take, as an analogy, the behavior of Google when one of their employees wrote a polite, accurate, but politically incorrect email.)

It is more important to many individuals in science that their Political Correctness be approved than that their Science be correct. I lament!

Jan

This is my reaction too. I was increasingly leaning towards the 'bah humbug' side of things (admitting that some really bad stuff had occurred but that much of the #MeToo movement was 'sound and fury symbolizing self-aggrandizement' (to paraphrase slightly)). When I read this article, I had a No Sh!T! reaction. So I thought I would share it as a good example of a case that is well documented.

I knew about the archaeology grad students, and I knew they were real (from about 3 years ago); this was also a lot quieter (unless you were an archeologist/anthropologist, in which case it turned your world upside down).

Jan

It is sad when an agency that has the scientific credits to be able to be impartial is subverted to political causes. Now we have to worry about whether the CDC's reports on pathogens such as malaria and dengue have been corrected to reflect the political reality they want to portray.

Jan

Bravo for you. I was a sergeant in the USAF from 1975-1979; I never had that type of trouble. I come from a long-time military family, however, and am familiar with the ways in which individuals who seem to be embedded in a matrix of military regulations can still take action unofficially, for good or for bad.

You fought the good fight.

I have some stories...

Jan

It is difficult to cow a woman martial artist. We have to be aggressive to succeed at our sport. For someone of the caliber to get a bronze medal in Taekwondo in the Olympics to be put in such a situation validates that secretaries and grad students have kept silent for that amount of time or longer and should be heard now.

Mandy had the courage to file a formal complaint about her coach's actions. In return, the Taekwando organization threw her out and condemned her. A grad student who is told "Cooperate or you will never work on a dig again." probably was correct in thinking that the threat was real. If you can intimidate a bronze medal martial artist, you can probably intimidate most grad students.

The threat certainly was real in Mandy's case. Her life was ruined by her filing a complaint.

Jan

Essentially, yes.

Jan (just learned that 'essential' is considered the antonym of 'existential'!)

The test rated me as Existential.

Jan

It is a nice article, and while its headlines are sensationalistic, the article itself is valuable in that it does not try to make a complex subject too simple. At the risk of doing 'just that', let me opine that it is correct to say that while the concept of race has value, any historical or modern perception of race has been hugely inaccurate. For example, the San (Bushmen) are genetically distinct from the Watusi but both are labeled as Black/Negro because they come from Africa.

If you add to that the fact that there has been tremendous gene flow amongst populations over the last 3,700 years we return to the point that - medically - what is important is if you have the gene in question, not whether your appearance matches a population norm. For example, "an incidence [of sickle cell trait] of 0.2% in white infants" was noted in the US in 2010. Being labeled as 'black' is not a prerequisite for having Sickle cell.

Jan

"Regarding race "There is no biological distinction between race and if you don't believe that you have been grossly misinformed." For all your reading, you obviously have never studied medicine or biology to go with your geology. It is medical fact that sickle cell anemia is a condition almost exclusively found in blacks. Skin pigmentation is a quality stemming from one's racial heritage. So is hair texture. I think it is you who are grossly misinformed."
__
I wish that liberals did think that. To the contrary, it seems that the pin everything to gender or race bias. I would be quite happy if they stopped doing this.

In real terms, the GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) is different for men and for women; and for African-ancestry patients vs non African-ancestry. Most of the time, however, what is reported to the physician is both the African and non-African reference ranges. This lets us skirt nicely around the problem that, depending on 'how much black ancestry' an individual has, his muscle fibers (and hence Creatinine elimination rate) may more closely resemble African - or not.

What really matters is not if you are African or not, what matters is if you have the particular genes that code for a denser muscular structure. Right now, there is a valid positive association of that gene set with a blacker skin, but as intermarriage continues that will be less true. There is nothing genetically incorrect with postulating an introgression of the genes for increased muscle density into someone who otherwise looks Nordic. (And that is not even taking genetic engineering into account.)

Jan

""Regarding gender" "honeybees perform three separate genders." Uh, no they don't. They have two genders, but the vast majority of the female gender are sterile (only the queen can mate)."

I have done a bit of research on the genetics of honey bees and it is more accurate to say that the sexual maturity of the female worker bees is suppressed by the pheromones of the Queen.

Those females that are physically more distant from the Queen in the hive may become assertive and even lay eggs - which are then destroyed by the other workers.

The most interesting thing about the sex of the honey bee is that the drones have no genetic identity - they are haploid. They contribute nothing to the content of the eggs. Drones are essentially 'bee shaped envelopes' that one Queen uses to impregnate another Queen.

Jan

I believe that you are correct. The source of Nitrogen is interesting but irrelevant to the topic of global warming. There is abundant historical (inc prehistorical, as you point out) evidence that the Earth cycles through warm and ice ages irrespective of the number of human campfires burning.

Jan

If one must have bank robbers, then certainly courteous ones are preferred...

Jan, smiling

That has never been true. Words - we call them "slander" - can do great damage. This has been acknowledged since ancient times, and is one of the reasons that "fightin' words" exist. If your ability to interact with the people around you depends on your family's reputation, then anything that decreases the respect for your family is serious business.

Jan

If you were a teller in a bank, you would!

Also, if someone came up behind a person they knew was really afraid of snakes and pointed at a pile of debris and yelled, "Watch out! Rattlesnake!" and that person jumped away from the 'snake' and into the path of a car, then the person who yelled, "Snake." is responsible.

I think we have to keep from letting our frustration at the snowflake 'you used the wrong pronoun to me and I am irreparably hurt' subset of society polarize us to an irrational degree. There are cases where 'words hurt'...it is just not what a lot of people are referring to when they use this phrase.

Jan

I believe that, if a person comes toward you (physical action) and says, "I am going to kill you!" (words) that what he has said is considered to add weight to his intentions in judging whether you were justified in kicking his kneecaps into concave formations.

Jan

That was a very interesting survey, thank you for posting a link to it.

It is inescapably true that words can be a form of violence: Shouting "Fire!" in a movie theater is the most often quoted example, but I will provide a different one.

I could walk up to you and say, "I just wanted to say that I am very sorry. What? You don't know? I work in your doctor's office and I saw from your chart that you have just been diagnosed with cancer. Oh. Well...your doctor will probably call you today..."

That is definitely using 'words as violence'. These words do not literally break bones, but they could ruin your relationship, your finances, or your job. Even when you find out that "I" was lying, there would be real damage done.

That being said, most things that are labeled 'violent words' do not fall in that category. We need a better definition of word violence.

Jan

So, the remaining Roman aqueducts will never fail...!

Jan

First, I don't see anyone commenting on the name of the coffee shop: "Until Death". So, to begin with, these folks are a bit off kilter.

Second, I feel that it is their right to not sell their products to LE or anyone else, on whim. So a cop going into Hasta Muerta for a cup of coffee can be banned. However. A cop going into a public building As A Law Enforcement official (ie not to buy coffee) cannot be.

Therefore, the police should simply find whatever reason is legal for them to need to go into Hasta Muerta a few times per day - formally. "Sir. I noticed that your car lights are on. Oh they are off now - that's fine." "Maam. The registration on your car is expired. Here is your ticket."

Jan, likes jujitsu

Yes. Trading with one another creates wealth.

Spot on! And exchanging ideas creates more ideas - 'ideas having sex' (per Matt Ridley).

Jan

I do not think that any physical congregation of objectivists can avoid detection; the world's tech is too high for that. We are surrounded by satellite surveillance and any mystery with a visible presence, heat signature, or grid connection (including internet and radio) will be detected - and probably in not too long a time.

If we tried to isolate ourselves from any contact with the rest of the world, we would very soon be sub-par in technology. No matter how many fine minds we attracted into our group, we still have to buy our chips from a factory. I think that the Earth's population supports one such factory for every billion people - because that is what you need to make the elaborate clean room environments profitable. Similarly, no isolated group of a few thousand people is going to equal the progress of 7+ billion minds, even if those minds are encumbered by bureaucracy and ours are not.

The only way an enclave of objectivists could exist in a non-objectivist society is if there were a legal loophole for us to nest within a larger element. This is the idea behind 'taking over' a state, which works in a democracy. If we were a tech and innovation 'cow' that a socialism found worthy to 'milk' then we might be granted a 'commune' or 'Reservation' status and allowed to have our non-communist ideology where it could produce useful items for the outside society and where we could be contained and not contaminate other people with our views.

If we had a super-weapon, we might be able to make a Duchy of Grand Fenwick - a scrappy pocket nation that was independent. We would have to have our finger always hovering over The Button, though. That does not sound pleasant. Since we have no such weapon, it is not very workable.

I think that the most realistic approach is the one we are on: Stay steadfast. Talk our philosophy to people who are interested and will listen, so that they at least know that there is an alternative. Make movies and write books with strong, competent heroes who show integrity. And if, IF the pendulum ever swings back to our favor, get as many people into Education as we can.

Jan