Social Nonsense in Action

Well, shul is back in session, the gym was once more populated with educationalists this morning although they seemed rather subdued, which was a boon. I suppose they spent their spring break doing the same things they did in college?

The podcast this morning was an episode of CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, an interview with a Northern Irish poet named Muldoon (sp?) It was rather a failure. The poet himself was interesting enough, except when he read his poetry, which is a rather boring thing under almost all circumstances, but enhanced when the poetry isn’t to your taste. I fear mine is rather too dated to accommodate modern poetry, much less actually enjoy it. But what rather ruined the whole program was the program host conducting the interview. He is good at his job normally but interviewing is one of his weaknesses and it shone particularly brightly in this one.

As a result, I had a bit of attention span to spare and I noted on one of the audio-visual electromagnetic receivers silently glued to the walls that today is International Eradicate Radial Discrimination day.

My first two thought about this were that it is bogus and mayhap even evil. First of all, all of the blather that governments participate in about ‘race’ based on skin color, eyelid shape, hair texture, whatnot, are all false and whacked. Simply put, the only ‘race’ that makes sense is the human race or species since we arguably only have one species of genus homo around today. So in that context, dignifying the distinctions between people based on external physical characteristics (and a few minor internal) is the sort of stupid, incompetent thing that only organizations can perpetrate and propagate. (And bog organizations at that!)

If you pick up a decent anthropology text, that is, one not ruined by liberal social engineering correctness, there is either one race or twelve, and quite frankly twelve is too many. The bogs can’t keep up with that many and the nerds are too busy to make use of such a taxonomy unless it serves some purpose, which hasn’t been demonstrated. So can we get past this race thing?

The second whackedness is that humans are programmed to divide the rest of humanity in ‘us’ and ‘them’ and observables like skin tint and hair texture and eyelid shape are low hanging fruit to accomplish that. So having a day to do away with racial discrimination would be great but the best we can ever do is get rid of the racial part but we can’t dent the discrimination part without ceasing to be human. So grow up and get past the adolescent idealism.

Which is the bad thing. Most of the species, the alive part, is bogs and they aren’t really capable of handling this. You can tell the bogs this and one of two things happen. They either ignore you, because discrimination serves some perceived purpose in their lives, or they take it up as a religion and get frustrated when everyone else doesn’t do the same, ignoring for the nonce that religion is itself the sternest form of discrimination, except maybe for money.

Not that there aren’t geeks and nerds who can’t handle it either but more of them can understand it. And we’ll ignore for now that the folks who only left Africa in the last kilo-year or so lack any neandertal DNA. That’s a small difference but enough for those who enjoy discrimination to reinvent ‘race’. Or something equally nasty.

The only race I want to have is the one to keep the human species from going extinct.

socialism, social engineering, biology, genetis, anthropology, society, humans

Brain + Mind = Bad Measure?

OK, this one is a bit strange, or at least the sort of thing we know exists but the traditional media only displays it on the weekend when they are hard up for what they consider to be “real” news and have to find anything to fill print space/program time.

I read via Reuters [Link] that a German woman has been granted a divorcement on the grounds that her husband is excessively neat and tidy. Part of what makes this unusual is that it rather contradicts our stereotypes of the gender relationship of tidiness. After all, hunters are naturally messy, bringing back whatever they first find that meets nutritional needs, while gatherers have to neatly bring back what is optimal in terms for freshness and ripeness. Of course, that sort of changed with the adoption of sedentaryness and agriculture, it has only been in the last century or so that rows are not plowed in a strict rectangular raster pattern. But, that adoption has only been for a decamillenium or so which is almost lost compared to a goodly fraction of a megayear.

Still, we have this social concept that women are the ones frantic about cleaning of homeplaces and men are somehow slobs who clean only when forced to. So tthe news that a woman finds some sanitomaniac unlivable seems extreme. Having been an undergraduate in the ’60’s when men were just beginning to get peeks of women’s dorm rooms I know better. My dorm room was a mess but not the chaos that so many of the coeds’ rooms were that I saw. Not that some were not as neat as Martha Stewart’s pretensions, but the mean was decidedly less tidy than the mean of men.

On a similar note, having to do with stress, I read that poor kids have less working memory than rich (?) kids. [Link] Getting past the mediaese, it seems that working memory in children is positively correlated with family income. The hypothesis then is that being poor creates stress and that stress must be the reason for the memory reduction.

I have no problem with the correlation. After all, family income and (some estimation of) working memory are quantifiable and observable. But stress? No psychologist I ever had dealings with indicated that there was a quantitative measure of stress. So unless this is some sort of whacked, almost meaningless scale, like the one rehabilitation therapists use for pain, which is highly individual, subjective, and untestable quantitatively, the stress hypothesis is shaky to specious. And I shan’t belabor the correlation equals causality leap.

What is attractive about this theory is that it helps explain why humans have taken so long to get what little we have done today, and why we seem to be continually burdened with mental parasites like mysticism and tyranny. But to go into liberal social engineering terminal hand wringing because the recession is damning children to stupidity? Better blame poor parenting as the root cause of permitting the recession to occur in the first place.

Lastly, I see that scientists have pinpointed regions in the brain that they associate with wisdom. [Link] Aside from the obvious question of how you quantify, even qualify, wisdom, I was taken with the statement

“Modern neuroscience is shifting towards a view of voluntary action being based on specific brain processes, rather than being a transcendental feature of human nature.”

Does that mean that science is replacing mysticism and superstition in medical research? How amazing. Someone go inform all those mystic ‘research’ facilities that they have to mend their ways or go out of business, not that their business is actually understanding.

Built on Sand

There is a fine line between skepticism and cynicism. So I am of a bit of a mixed mind about an article I picked up on the London TIMES feed. This article details how some houses built in Nowth Flawrida by Habitat for Humanity and our former chief executive, the gosh-aw-shucks of peanuts, the brother of bad (even for America) beer. [Link]

It seems that a group of such houses was built on a land fill (rubbish dump in English terms) and as such things do with land fills, the land is less than adequately stable. So now the homes are falling apart. And the owners of the homes are litigating the builder.

This is a real stream of worms -annelids as it were- which is to be expected since this part of the Yankee republic is prime territory for worm grunting. The metaphor however refers to a problem somewhere in between cat herding and amoeba marching in difficulty.

The first thought that occurs has to do with the timing. The standard period under which builders are liable for error is five years and in this case the actual period since construction is eight. And have not these people been performing maintenance on their houses? Or are they not only impoverished but ignorant of how to maintain a house. Or is their inability to pay for maintenance some fault of the builder? I can well see why I had to read of this in a furrin newspaper; the Yankee press would never touch this with their insentient servitude to the (modern) democrats and their social engineering.

But what kind of bog builds houses on a land fill? And what kind of bureaucrat certifies the site that is obviously so out of code? Could this be a case of do-gooder social engineering organization, whose primary purpose seems to be photo opportunity as much as house construction, being above the law and simple common sense?

I am reminded of a statement that the only good thing about the Carter administration is that it made the Regan administration obviously necessary.