Another Holy Bungalow II Repository

A place to put things, thoughts, and links to get you thinking about thinking.

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For those who think genitals are all there is to sex, desire, and pleasure, google Buck Angel and Bailey Jay and ask yourself who you would rather. Then ask yourself some deep and hard questions. And then lower the barrier.

[crossguild]

(x)

Saw the video floating around so I gif’d it for anyone who doesn’t wanna actually watch it haha.

[thereversecoconut]

the last one though. so accurate.

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This got me thinking. When I was a lot younger, and slightly more ignorant than I am these days (I dare not say I am much wiser), I used to 'hate' feminism, even though I never really knew what it was about. Somehow, I just knew I was supposed to be against it because only crazy hippies were into it. I am slightly disturbed at how this attitude came about, because I never sat down with anybody for or against it had had the views explained to me. Somehow, as though through osmosis, I just absorbed and integrated myself into anti-feminist discourse. And I have to admit, I used to think "how come there are no men's rights movements around". 

And then I learnt more about things. I learned that there is no one single feminism, that there are just various discourses deploying a range of concepts, and these different bodies of theory and practice get lumped together as 'feminism', for better or worse. And that feminism doesn't HAVE to be just about women, but it can be about gender equality more broadly, and the feminism part is more to do with the fact that women have historically and continue to be worse off than men in many different circumstances around the world, and this is the most 'visible' form of the problems produced by gender inequality, but not the only form. And I learned how you can coherently argue that gender is 'socially constructed' without denying the fact that biological differences exist. In short, there are lots and lots of micro variations between human bodies. In the long run they tend to cluster around two most common forms, one with a penis and the other with a vagina - but the possible forms of human embodiment are not limited to those two singularities. And in fact, when you accept the principle that a physiological body is a necessary but NOT sufficient condition of embodiment, you can start your gender-awareness journey. 

So, the point about houses burning and people drowning really resonated, given my personal journey of discovery. 

But, ultimately, at the end of it all, even if you disregard all of this, why do people get so uptight that "men" are "supposed" to act a particular way, and "women" are "supposed" to act a particular and different way, and heaven forbid they act differently. WHO THE FUCK CARES IF THEY DON'T ACT THE WAY THEY SHOULD? What the actual fuck is at stake, please tell me?? Are macho men worried they might mistake another man for a woman and express a latent homosexual desire through an inopportune erection? They should go check out some trap porn and then ask themselves some seriously hard questions about what they think they believe about gender. 

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Multiple knowledges multiple world

I have realised that one of my professional aims is translation. Not from Spanish to English, but inter and intra disciplinary translation - translation of ideas, theoretical frames, methodologies. We are all in this together, clutching at straws in a complex and multiple universe, and I think we should all be sharing our stories and knowledge.

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As a fourth generation white Australian, whats my culture?

Retired English cricketer David Gower said Australia had 'no culture'. Well, I agree with him.

I've heard the "no culture" accusation hurled towards the USA most often, as well as Australia.

Firstly, if you want to get technical, the argument that a country has no culture is incoherent and does not make sense. For example, culture is defined as "The social production and reproduction of sense, meaning and consciousness. The sphere of meaning, which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics). If you are planning to use the term culture as an analytical concept, or if you encounter its use, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to fix on just one definition that will do for all such occasions... The term culture is multi-discursive... you cannot import a fixed definition into any and every context and expect it to make sense" (O'SULLIVAN, T., HARTLEY, J., SAUNDERS, D., MONTGOMERY, M. & FISKE, J. 1994. Key concepts in communication and cultural studies, Routledge London).

Wikipedia reckons that "the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings:

the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and

the distinct ways that people living differently classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively."

So, accusing a country of having no culture needs to be heavily qualified, explaining just exactly what is meant by such a claim. Leaving it at that is like saying that an entire country, (whatever that means!), experiences no processes of the production and reproduction on meaning, processes that intersect with economic process and political processes. That a country lacks the human capacity to represent and organise its experiences through language and communication. And that is just absolutely preposterous. I suspect the accusation more specifically meant that (modern, white) Australia lacks any history that is longer than a couple hundred years, and as such, lacks any ancient traditions and identifiable cultural practices and products beyond the kitsch. Which itself is a slightly nonsense argument. While it is true that the Australian society of today, which would seem to ignore the rich culture and history of its Aboriginal people, lacks a thousand years of (Western) history, to deride its cultural products as not respectable is a hasty value judgment. Furthermore, it is an elitist value judgment poking fun at the image of Australians as unrefined yobbos. As Bourdieu has argued, taste plays an important role in distinction between social strata, and taste (in culture) is deployed as a stratifying principle. As a pretty poor and rough example that makes sweeping generalisations - bogans are socialised into liking pub rock, and the production of pub rock is simultaneously geared towards bogan markets, whereas middle and upper middle class folk are socialised into rejecting those sorts of tastes and seeking out things like the theatre or opera, and the production of these things simultaneously targets middle and upper middle class tastes and sensibilities. This is probably a clumsy example but I think you get the drift. What is interesting in the newspaper article in the link is the point that Australian culture is a becoming culture - it is open to change and less sedimented in its ways. It is a culture that is less bogged down by the chains of history and authority, one that is possibly more negotiable by the body politic, and not absolutely dominated by elite taste-makers. Perhaps this is the perceived 'problem' that leaves some people suggesting that Australia has no culture - that the culture is to vulnerable to interference from the uneducated proles. Of course, there are always elites and gatekeepers and taste-makers, but it is conceivable that it is not necessarily the same in all societies at all times. Unfortunately, an interesting aspect of Australian culture is a sense of shame at its own culture, an assertion of its lack of culture, and the outward look to the 'motherland', to Britain, to Europe and the USA, as more legitimate sources of culture. What has been labelled the 'cultural cringe'. Maybe it's due to the fluid sense of self that Australia as a country has, but shouldn't we recognise, fluidity, adaptability and egalitarian leanings as key elements of Australian culture, rather than decrying these elements as the cause of a perceived lack of culture? As the article concludes: "Our history is our future. Our culture is what we decide. Please, let's not stuff it up. We are the lucky country."

I'll let the ironically inappropriate use of 'lucky country' slide for the sake of making a point. Yes, we do not have a sedimented and ancient set of traditions (well, at least ones we haven't incorporated effectively such as those of Aboriginal cultures). But Australian culture is a space of possibilities and that in itself is a way of 'doing' culture. Or perhaps we should speak of cultures in the plural.

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Haters gonna hate

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Minutephysics is a channel that does brief, lucid and cheeky videos about physics (no shit). If you're bored enough to be reading this, you should really check it out.

This one is on one of my favourite things to think about. The other thing is consciousness and from what I'm told, you don't want me to go there. Not just yet anyway.

It's probably pretty easy to think of the universe as a kind of abstraction, divorced from your experience on the surface of the Earth. Full of galaxies, black holes, nebulae and a bunch of big boring space in between. 

Don't take the easy road. Go on a journey with me. It's fun.

The universe is not an abstraction. It is your environment. In the same sense that the trees in your backyard, your friends and the air you breathe are part of your environment, so too is the sun.

You experience its warmth on your skin as if it were an object mere meters from you. How strange. Oh wait a sec, yeah that's right, it IS only meters away from you. 149,600,000 meters away from you. That might look like a large number of meters, but what matters is that it is only a number of meters! The sun is a number of meters away from you. Think about that next time you're getting your dose of vitamin D.

It's only meters away and yet light takes eight minutes to reach you from there. Surely that's not the speed limit of the universe? Eight minutes is ages. Ever had to wait eight minutes when you're busting to pee? It's like an eternity. I dare you to sit and stare at the screen right now for eight minutes. You won't do it. Do it. You so won't even do it. Light travels seriously slow. To get from the Sun to the Sun's closest neighbouring star system, Alpha-Centauri, it would take four years, four months and almost two weeks to get there. Fuck that. Why is light so sloooowww??

The Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter (and its moons) are also all a part of your environment. They physically interact with you constantly. Everything in the entire universe is interacting with you. Tossing you from side to side. It's pretty important, if you think about it. Your body is, right now, under the influence of everything in existence. Ah don't worry, I'm not going to tell you that you are small and puny and that you must bow down to the awesome wonder of the universe. No, no. That's boring, and depressing, and not even true.

Thing is, it's all under the influence of your body also. All of it. The whole universe. Not in some bullshit, minuscule, insignificant way. I mean you have a real, concrete and physical influence on everything. You exert a gravitational attractive force on all surrounding bodies (YEAH you do!). You glow bright (mainly infrared radiation). You are the size of an entire planet (seriously, check out how big you really are once you're done with minutephysics: http://youtu.be/DkzQxw16G9w).

You're part of the noise. Your behaviour, at this point in space, right now could be the random trigger of a powerful solar flare. Or a frightening Neptunian storm. Neptune is that big blue one, it's blue because of methane and methane is a form of carbon. Your body is full of that stuff. Who's to say that there isn't some guy over there, also made from carbon, a number of meters away on Neptune, getting blasted by that storm you started.

You should really be more considerate.

p.s. every time you take a shower, I'm a number of meters away from you and I'm completely unapologetic about it.

[sexologist]

The news media is particularly bad at reporting on scientific inquiry. Science is complex and doesn’t make for a discussionless, sellable sound bite. But that certainly doesn’t stop the media from trying. It’s exactly like this PhD Comic:

Here’s the text if you can’t read the picture:

1....

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A great piece about the problems of correlation, causation and the reporting of research through popular media.

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There's nothing wrong with requiring accountability from sponsored science. But when policymakers' questions misjudge science's role, we have a problem.

Very interesting read and, for me at least, many agreeable points. "Asking the NSF, NIH, or the Census Bureau to provide persuasive rationales for their use of public funds is not itself a signal that the nation’s science policy is going off-track. But if the questions asked seriously misunderstand the basic workings of science, which is my claim, then the new science policy being shaped will derail a government-science partnership that has worked for more than a half-century." "Science is not a series of discrete, unrelated projects. It is an interconnected enterprise, which is why research on schoolyard bullies can unexpectedly explain suicide bombers, or why studying government decision-making under uncertainty—for which a political scientist, Herbert Simon, received a Nobel Prize—is applicable to explanations of failed states, which in turn are home to terrorist cells.

A science policy that poses narrow questions gets narrow answers. This, I fear, is the likely consequence if Congress embraces the Coburn criteria, especially if it inserts itself into the actual choice of research projects."

Science research is 'political' enough without injecting more 'Politics' into it. I dread the day when a congress of parliament, regardless of how democratically elected or represented it is, deeply involved in the decision making process for investing in research without really fathoming the nuances and complexities of what research, in practice, really entails.

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Think Outside The Box - Resistance to Research

Stumbled across this as a 'response to creationism'. However, I also think this is a cute way of dealing with a) the partial nature of all knowledge; and b) the public perception of what 'science' is and should be, compared to how 'science' actually gets done in practice - with implications of the public and political response to research. The same happens in social research. A lot of the 'opponents', or critics, of social science are much like the bunny on the left - resisting the research because it is missing many jigsaw pieces. That is not the problem per se. But the problem is compounded in that many critics fall back on notions they take for granted - notions about human nature, or how society 'really is', or even what science 'really is'. In other words, critics of research, regardless of what aspect of reality examined by research, tend to 'refer and defer to the box', in multiple and numerous ways - regardless of how the picture is unfolding as the pieces are put together.

PS. I highly recommend NOT reading the comments under the article in the link. You WILL smash your face into a brick wall and risk death upon reading them. This goes for the 'religious' comments, and the 'anti-religious' comments. Idiocy does not discriminate between creeds or lack thereof.

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Should We Change the Way NSF Funds Projects? | Wired Science | Wired.com

Should NSF funded science projects have to demonstrate that they are useful? I say no.

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Three Science Words We Should Stop Using | Wired Science | Wired.com

I think we should stop using the words: hypothesis, theory, law in regards to the nature of science.