I appreciate Elton John speaking loudly about his opposition to the Russian anti-gay legislation in Russia. I also think this is an elegant justification for Elton John to circumvent a boycott.
It also happens to be a justification that probably makes Elton John a whole lot of money.
Don’t get me wrong, it is excellent to see pop stars expressing their politics. And I think Elton John is a super bad-ass. (Remember that he stood up to some heavy bullying and blackmail from a newspaper in the UK). And I think that he has credibility and status for his opinion to be widely amplified.
I enjoyed an essay by David Dobbs in Aeon Magazine about genes. Key to the argument is a call for more complex understanding of the relationship between genes and evolutionary change.
The gene-centric view is thus ‘an artefact of history’, says Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist who researches fruit flies at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘It rose simply because it was easier to identify individual genes as something that shaped evolution. But that’s about opportunity and convenience rather than accuracy. People confuse the fact that we can more easily study it with the idea that it’s more important.’
The gene’s power to create traits, says Eisen, is just one of many evolutionary mechanisms. ‘Evolution is not even that simple. Anyone who’s worked on systems sees that natural selection takes advantage of the most bizarre aspects of biology. When something has so many parts, evolution will act on all of them.
‘It’s not that genes don’t sometimes drive evolutionary change. It’s that this mutational model — a gene changes, therefore the organism changes — is just one way to get the job done. Other ways may actually do more.’
It seems to me that the arguments that the genetic code are read in different ways most challenges the notions about predictable genetic modification.
Describing Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s arguments about genes, Dobbs notes:
She does have her pithy moments. ‘The gene does not lead,’ she says. ‘It follows.’
There lies the quick beating heart of her argument: the gene follows. And one of the ways the gene follows is through this process called genetic accommodation.
I appreciate that it comes down to a battle of articulation — simple vs. complex. Communication, it always comes back to communication. Some ideas corrode against others and in this case the gene-centric model pushes out the ability to explain that ideas like the selfish gene . . . might be a little more complex than we think.
Yet West-Eberhard understands why many biologists stick to the gene-centric model. ‘It makes it easier to explain evolution,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen people who work in gene expression who understand all of this. But when they get asked about evolution, they go straight to Mendel. Because people understand it more easily.’ It’s easy to see why: even though life is a zillion bits of biology repeatedly rearranging themselves in a webwork of constantly modulated feedback loops, the selfish-gene model offers a step-by-step account as neat as a three-step flow chart. Gene, trait, phenotype, done.
Science video blogger Emily Graslie has a crisp response to the nasty emails she receives. Graslie hosts her show the Brain Scoop. I like the performative readings of the emails themselves.
Thanks to Laurie Penny (author of Cybersexism: Sex, Gender, Power and the Internet) for a few insightful quotes about fighting sexism on the internets. I happen to agree about the rising moments of accountability.
Look. The internet makes dicks out of us all, but it means that for a few people, the perceived costs of extreme douchebaggery are far lower than they would be otherwise. But that sense of inviolability is beginning to erode. Men — and I do believe that it’s mainly men, even though I’ve had troll encounters with women and others — are beginning to realize that there are actual consequences to behaving like this. It’s happening in “the real world,” too. Comedians now think twice before making rape jokes. Tech conferences think twice before lining up scads of all-male panels. And it’s happening because of the internet. I think.
Capitalist patriarchy hurts everyone, not just women. What I really hope is that this explosion of debate and discussion about gender and sexuality, facilitated by the internet, will give men permission to speak honestly about what capitalist patriarchy does to them.
Right now, though, it seems men only feel empowered to speak of how gender affects them when they’re directly attacking women and girls or bawling artlessly at feminists. I meet a lot of MRA’s who genuinely seem to believe that an attempt to make the world fairer for women and freer for everyone is a direct attack on men, and that calling someone sexist is worse than actually being sexist. Those are lies, and we need to stop treating them as adult arguments.
If women are shamed and harassed out of full digital participation online, everyone loses.
And perhaps one of the greatest approaches to internet trolling:
But none of that is terribly helpful when all you want to do is slam the laptop shut and never look at Twitter again.
At which point I’d advise a long walk, a strong cup of tea, and a healthy dose of spite.
Spite is underrated. Sometimes, on dark days when I believe every awful thing mouth-breathing misogynists say about me online, when all I want to do is give up, I remember how important it is not to let the fuckers win.
Consider this a juxtaposition to the clip about Paul McCartney and Fela. Here is Fela narrating a portion of his life. Included in this film are some great musical moments and some insights about what made Fela so dangerous.
In my opinion the liberated space he embodied and willingness to share risks make him a poignant anti-colonial force. Of course I have problems with Fela’s sexism, but the quotes from the queens in this film give us some insight into their experience.
Of course when you google “Fela’s queens” you get western women reprising the roles of the women who married and risked with Fela. Perhaps this is colonialism, that I can’t find any interviews with the “queens,” but I can find interviews with Americans playing Fela’s wives on broadway. Some communications pushes out other communications.
I’m impressed with the arguments presented criticizing the moral panic about gun violence in Chicago. I don’t live in Chicago, but I’ve certainly read a number of heavily negative media stories in the last year. Prison Culture blog has the critique and it seems persuasive to me.
It’s certainly true that in some parts of the city, you are more likely to be shot or physically harmed than in others. However, on the whole, Chicago is actually “safer” in terms of public shootings and homicides than it’s been in decades. The city is in fact nowhere close to being the so-called “Murder Capital” of the country. Check the statistics, you’ll see that I’m right.
But you notice that I said “safer” in terms of public shootings and homicides, not “safer” in terms of “violence.” Because in very real ways, in terms of structural and institutional violence and overall oppression, things are pretty terrible for a lot of people. But we don’t discuss this with nearly the frequency or sensationalism that we do when we catalog the dead and the injured (as important as it is to memorialize those precious lives).
I also like that they address the militarized language that influences the way we understand poverty and policing in Chicago.
When we use these terms (which may or may not accurately describe how we live based on our own subjective experiences), we inadvertently legitimate a military response from the state (though the state needs no excuse to crackdown on the marginalized).
I would suggest that even more insidious is the way that these terms condition our own thinking about ourselves and each other. We trap ourselves into responding to these structural problems with a punishment mindset and a war footing. And this has devastating consequences for communities that are already over-policed, militarized, under-resourced and ravaged through decades of disinvestment. Using this terminology ultimately contributes nothing to ending interpersonal violence & may in fact exacerbate it.
We naturally associate criminal activity with secrecy, with conspiracies hatched in alleyways or back rooms. Today, though, foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash. If we live in an era of openness, no segment of the population is more surprisingly open than 21st-century gang members, as they simultaneously document and roil the streets of America’s toughest neighborhoods.
Brent Cunningham has a fascinating write up about last meals in Lapham’s Quarterly. Consider some of the distancing methods articulated during the execution phase:
The last meal as a cultural phenomenon grew even as capital punishment faded from public view, and in less than two centuries the country has gone from grisly public hangings, in which the prisoner was sometimes unintentionally decapitated or left to suffocate, to lethal injection, the most common form of execution in America today, in which death is “administered.” The condemned are often sedated before execution. They are generally not allowed to listen to music, lest it induce an emotional reaction. Last words are sometimes delivered in writing, rather than spoken; if they are spoken, it might be to prison personnel rather than the witnesses. The detachment is so complete that when scholar Robert Johnson, for his 1998 book Death Work, asked an execution-team officer what his job was, the officer replied: “the right leg.”
Good observation that the act of eating the food provided by one’s killer is really a kind of communication to justify the act.
What unites these customs is an emphasis on the needs of the living, not just the dead; so too with last meals before an execution. When Susanna Margarethe Brandt sat down to the Hangman’s Meal, she signaled that she was cooperating in her own death—that she forgave those who judged her and was reconciled to her fate. Whether she actually made those concessions or not is beside the point; the officials who rendered and carried out her sentence could fall asleep that night with a clear conscience.
Of course Run the jewels is competitive over-the-top rap music. In the effort to make the best art — artists attempt to outdo each other. In the genre of hip hop this means bigger, harder, louder, and more outlandish.
The financial claims of most rappers have grown to ridiculous levels, with a number of artists simply shouting out expensive brand names to convey their own particular shopping allegiances.
It makes sense that the claims about violence, drugs and sex would also become more and more outlandish.
MF DOOM always seemed like a hip-hop critic. His villainous characters (and in particular the masked versions of DOOM) always seemed pitiful — articulated as a mockery of other rappers whose representations of criminality seemed shallow in comparison to the lyrical work of the clever DOOM.
In the same way modern hip hop can be critiqued from the traditional morality perspective. It might also be performed and overdetermined (made excessive and taken to the extreme) in order to achieve a very similar moral critique.
Which works as a basic introduction for “36” Chain,” a video which contains violence against old women, violence against young women, gun violence, violence against Andrew W.K, and a dual sense of mockery/sincerity that will probably excite some people and deeply offend others.
Noting the character Killums — the kidnapped puppet plays such an important role it might be worth including the El-P video for “Full retard” in this discussion.
Of course this video contains some drinking and driving, a lot of drug stuff, violence against moms, nudity, and of course, the lightly disturbing choice to have the puppet Killums lead in most of the debauchery. We can note that the expressive fiction of a puppet gives liberty . . . a kind of implicit defense. At the same time thumbing the nose at the idea of childhood as an innocent time.
Killums seems to be El-P’s id. An expression of what he would like to do . . . the unfettered brain presented as a sex and drug obsessed squirrel. Some artists make up Tyler Durdin . . . El-P chooses a one-eyed junkie squirrel.
Dave Chappelle’s sesame street mockery Kneehigh park runs through some of the same transgressions. Pushing buttons with ever-increasingly crass discussions voiced by puppets that seems to be giving humorous versions of public service announcements.
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Life of refinement 
The Brain Scoop on bullying
Science video blogger Emily Graslie has a crisp response to the nasty emails she receives. Graslie hosts her show the Brain Scoop. I like the performative readings of the emails themselves.
Thanks Feministing for the link.
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