Phylum of Alexandria

Perhaps tangential to the thread given your interest in sedans, but when factoring in safety, people in the US should really think about people outside of the vehicle as well. We've got a plague of SUVs and rising pedestrian fatalities as a result. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tall-trucks-suvs-are-45-deadlier-us-pedestrians-study-shows-2023-11-14/

Is a smash burger a type of burger, or is it just the name of a chain? I could go for some boujee fast food right now, like a haute dog...

Oh come on guys. Enough with this simplistic purity talk. I feel like I've gone back to high school. Yes, it would have been better if Oskar Schindler and many other Germans had resisted the Nazis when they took over. It's also very easy for you to say that when you never had to make such a choice. Such words don't make you sound tough or morally righteous; words are wind. Scot's point stands that Schindler and some others did ultimately act bravely and do great things despite being in the Nazi party. He's not saying we need to make a national holiday out of his life work, he's saying he was a flawed human being who ultimately tried to redeem himself in light of his previous cowardice.

It's a bit overbearing for omusubi in my opinion, but I like the idea of using it in fried rice.

I've never been to the UK, but y'all have butchered my understanding of what pudding can be.

It really is. I just had to get over my impulse to gatekeep what pizza can be.

Having a wife from Japan has generally kept me on my toes with respect to food (although chicken feet comes from a Chinese friend). Fish eggs and mayo in pasta? Leftover pizza topped with tuna, corn, seaweed, and mayo? Slimy fermented soy beans? I used to call it weird, now I can even call it breakfast.

Fish skin is delicious, sometimes it's the tastiest part. Just had some, in fact! Next you're going to say you don't eat chicken feet...

Rest in Peace, Steve Albini. Dead at 61. So fucking sad. Here's a playlist of some of my favorite albums produced by him.

Any problems with doctors swarming you as of late?

Obviously there are profound and ancient reasons behind the gamete binary. No human would be here to contemplate the nature of sex if not for genetic recombination via sexual reproduction! But still, it's worth asking, why is it not also important to consider the many other aspects and dimensions of sex, sexuality, and gender? Why should they be subordinate to gametes in discussions about human life? I mean, most people on this forum don't want to limit sexual intercourse to reproduction, right? The conservatives who prioritorize baby-making over pleasure can be said to keep every other aspect of sex subordinate to its primeval ultimate function of binary gamete bonding. I don't think that you're doing that here, by the way. But the question of "why gametes as most important aspect of sex to focus on in discussions of human living" is a pertinent one to ask.

I'm not going to search a whole bunch of scientists for the nuance of their language use, but I did stumble upon this post by Jerry Coyne. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/08/17/sex-is-not-assigned-at-birth/ And, lo and behold, his post uses some qualifiers when talking about sex: "a nearly complete binary," and "almost completely binary." In the comments, someone argues that bimodal is the better description to fit the data than binary. And Coyne agrees! He says his main beef is when people say that sex is on a spectrum. (the x-axis of a bimodal distribution can be thought of as a spectrum, though, so it's not completely wrong. it's just an incomplete picture, as "spectrum" doesn't give people an idea about what options are more pervasive than others) Language, attention to detail, and a desire to communicate effectively with people are all really important here. I humbly suggest that insisting on binary without further explanation or qualification, is not the most productive hill to die on.

The black civil rights protestors of the 50s and 60s would have loved to sit down and have a serious discussion with state figures about rights. Unfortunately, black Americans in the South were brutalized for looking at white people the wrong way. There was no way to have that sort of discussion, and there was no way for their votes to count. So they took extreme measures. But for the record, I don't think of this stuff, whether contemporary or historical, as "violent." I think Biden's usage is concept creep at work.

My wife always gives the skin from her hot cocoa to me.

Speaking of a rather broad brush... this is the Mark Rothko of presidential assessments!

Lol, I'd say skim milk for me! I drank whole milk as a young kid, then eventually switched to skim milk. Then I gave up dairy for soy milk in my young adulthood. Some time when I was grad school (2007-2012), I had some cookies with whole milk and fell back in love, and I haven't quit whole milk since! And this is coming from someone who's lactose intolerant. I do need to watch my intake, of course. I grew up in a fairly big blue collar family (2 parents, 5 siblings, foster kids cycling in and out) and so we had a lot of cheap food options. My mom was also not a great cook, and a lot of our meals were bland. So the main thing that I tend to steer away from is instant food. I found that I love Brussels sprouts (my ancient enemy), as long as they're cooked fresh and at least lightly seasoned.

Lol, you've basically illustrated my original point. You're using binary in a looser sense ("basically" a binary) to focus on the broader dominant pattern. While folks who want to emphasize the exceptions take umbrage, and often prefer "spectrum"--which has its own problems. I don't care for pedantry (and I can accept both binary and spectrum as rough models in a discussion as long as other facts are acknowledged). But if you want to be careful with your language as you say you do, you should only use "binary" for something that literally has two possibilities and no more. Binary code doesn't have any intermediary digits. Just 1 and 0. Maybe gametes are binary. And most aspects of sexual reproduction speak to a sort of functional binary between male and female. But when you dig into the details, it's usually a little fuzzier than a pure binary.

So you're saying there are zero exceptional cases with regard to sex organs? Even if they're rare cases, it's not really a true binary if exceptions exist beyond your two possibilities. Even if bimodal distribution itself is not quite the right framing (as its distribution is across one continuous variable), it gets closer to the reality than binary does.

I can't say for sure, but I am assuming that at least some of the disagreement in the binary/spectrum debates is that some people use binary when they really mean bimodal (or "basically binary"), while others invoke a "spectrum" to mean the same thing. In the former case, the person is accentuating the dominant pattern among the majority of people, while in the later the emphasis is on the room for exceptions and intermediate cases. But the underlying idea is the same, despite those different emphases.

My comments haven't even focused on the Gaza protests. They are more general. By that logic, every other comment on some other topic has distracted from the horrors the students are protesting. Why am I singled out? I wasn't trying to be condescending; just confused and exasperated with this suspicion around my comments. If you don't want to follow the particular thread I've been responding to, by all means ignore it.

Ooookay. Let me put it more simply. Would you disagree with the take that civil rights groups like SNCC were better disciplined and better organized as a whole compared to the later student antiwar protests? I'm not talking about the justice of the cause, nor am I making blanket criticisms of all of the antiwar protesters. But because they were less disciplined, they had more variation in how people approached protest. My point was to say that SNCC and similar groups had their shit together, whereas protest later resembled a herd of cats. No need to get distracted beyond that simple point.

Well, if that's inaccurate, I retract it. My most recent encounter of this era was Will Bunch's After the Ivory Tower Falls. It could be that my memory of the exact details are fuzzy, but there was plenty of undisciplined and outright bad behavior done in the mid to late 60s by student antiwar protestors. My point does not rest on the truth or untruth of vet spitting.

Yes, as I said earlier, how one protests and organizes does matter. Not all student protests were created equal. The student protestors of SNCC shouldn't be lumped in with the brattier students burning books and spitting on returning vets. The civil rights protestors were more disciplined and methodical than a lot of the later antiwar protests, effectively commandeering the media narratives rather than playing into the narrative of the opposition. And they were more tenacious too, waging a sustained campaign the change narratives and policies. Most importantly, they engaged at all levels that were available to them. It wasn't just demanding to be heard, it was a coordinated strategy to implement change.

Yes, and this shit has brought us closer to authoritarian government, no doubt about it. Regardless of that, our government is still a far cry from fascism as it currently is.

I'm not trying to say this stuff is in any way easy. Real, substantive change is really, really hard. But the 60s did produce some huge gains in civil rights, albeit following tireless, dedicated, multi-pronged approaches to protest and activist outreach. And maybe Nixon was part of the backlash to that, not to mention the assassinations of King and Malcolm X, and others. It's no wonder people were disheartened. But the fact is that sustained campaigns of action did influence our nation for the better. On the reverse side, and in more recent history, look at the Tea Party. I sympathized more with the Occupy Wall Street protests, but other than the viral "1%" framing, what did those protests actually achieve? As for the Tea Partiers, I mocked them for their stupid hats and retrograde comments. And of course Tea Party rallies got some major help from wealthy donors. But importantly, they were used for real political organizing: attendees registered to vote, got others to vote, signed up for local and state offices---and they swept into power. We're only now starting to weed those fuckers out. So how one protests and what one does with one's time does matter in terms of how much political power a movement can amass. Despite their silliness and their scariness, I think we can learn a lot from the Tea Partiers in terms of practical politics. The Indivisible movement has the right idea. I think sustained bottom-up involvement is one of the best paths forward.