Can We Stop Pretending It’s About Tyranny?

 Musings On Present Day  3 Responses »
Dec 172012
 

stinger-missileI don’t want to get too involved in the gun-control debate, because I don’t actually know which side I support. Obviously fully-automatic weapons should be banned, as should high-capacity magazines, as the only thing they’re good for is indiscriminate mass carnage. Aside from that, I don’t have a strong degree of confidence in either side’s claims.

I am intensely annoyed by one thing though – the occasional refrain by the pro-gun side that the 2nd Amendment is there to protect the American populace from a government-imposed tyranny. This is complete crap, everyone knows it, and yet it’s still brought up sometimes.

Maybe in the day of muskets and cavalry charges this was true (maybe). But it’s obviously absurd to claim that now. Small-caliber handguns cannot compete with a modern military force in any way. A military force can field tanks, long-range artillery, attack helicopters, and unmanned drones. And (aside from the drones) that’s all ancient technology. To actually resist a military incursion the 2nd Amendment would have to allow private citizens to own heavy ordnance and high-explosives at the minimum. Every successful modern resistance has been supplied and/or supported by a foreign nation.

No one believes that the 2nd Amendment SHOULD allow those things. So it’s not about stopping a domestic tyranny. Stop pretending it is.

Evo-Psych: Clean Your House

 Musings On Present Day  No Responses »
Dec 052012
 

There’s a bit of a dust-up on the interwebz – Evolutionary Psychology vs Feminism. The below was originally posted by me on Less Wrong.

If there was a scientific field (Evolutionary Sociology) that declared rationalism is harmful for humanity – that Less Wrong need to be destroyed, long-time readers found and re-educated so they will not be a threat to society, and the pursuit of rationality in general to be shunned or persecuted – I suspect that the vast majority of us would not accept these claims at face value and would look to see if their research was flawed, or their conclusions didn’t follow. And if we found such evidence, we’d probably shout it from the rooftops.

Evo-Psych is, not infrequently, used as a weapon against women.

The case made for these claims is often very bad.

Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.

This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.

So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mechanisms in men. Then you can tell me why navigating by distance and direction is actively shut off in women. You’re the ones who like purely adaptive explanations: why would there be an advantage to individuals having each only half the suite of potential genetic navigation tools switched on?

If Evo-Psych is used by sexists the same way that Eugenics was used by totalitarians, it will suffer the same stigma and be abandoned for decades the same way. Seeing as this is a self-defense move by a traditionally oppressed group, I don’t blame them. Unless the crap is weeded out quickly the whole field will be disgraced. The victims are currently only pointing out all the crap, they didn’t allow it to get in there in the first place. The gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job, rather than trying to defend their prior shoddy performance.

SF/F Review – Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

 Book Club Review  No Responses »
Dec 042012
 

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Phillip K Dick

Synopsis: Living in a police state, a famous and genetically superior man is suddenly stripped of his identity and erased from everyone’s memory. As far as he can tell, he never existed. He struggles to regain his past and avoid the attention of the corrupt authorities.

Brief Book Review: It’s hard to evaluate this book, because it isn’t really a novel. There isn’t a plot really… there’s just a thing that happened. A lot of words are used on introspection and silent despair without a lot happening. When things do happen, they often don’t make much sense. The writing itself is clumsy, and none of the characters are very likable. That being said, all this seems to work together to make this book a compelling and fascinating exploration of helplessness. It may very well be worth it for that alone. Some books try to make you feel a certain way, this one tricks you into it while you aren’t looking, and does so well. However overall – Not Recommended.

Club Review: And yet, for book club purposes, this book is ideal. While none of the characters are likable, they’re all memorable, and their actions can spark quite a lot of discussion. Criticism, empathy, dissection – all are likely to be applied to any single character, sometimes all three from a single reader. It is a disjointed and confusing narrative, and as such it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. It is this sort of fertile soil that nowadays leads to fan theories and fanfiction, and it makes for great discussion. Many of the things that make it a poor novel actually make it quite a good Book Club book. It’s likely that most readers will be ambivalent about the book and unsure what to make of it, but there will be plenty to talk about. Recommended.