Thursday, April 5, 2018
Caption competition
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The bottle is then riddled, so that the lees settles in the neck of the wine bottle... Manual riddling is still done for Prestige Cuvées in Champagne... mechanised riddling equipment (a gyropalette) is used instead. (Wikipedia)
15 comments:
To show how mathematically im/perfect their facial architecture is? Or, to describe the degree to which they adhere to or deviate from some wholly-imaginary phenotypic norm relating to racial ancestry?
I'm sorry, it's just that I was reading about that thing with Sam Harris & Charles Murray (who should really just cut the flirting and get married already) that happened last week & I think I lost my mind.
You know that David Brooks was one of the biggest boosters for 'The Bell Curve', back in the 90s? He was co-sponsor of the WSJ advertorial in which various believers in human biodiversity explained why they thought that the concepts of racism and eugenics were perfectly valid topics for academic research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intelligence
So there you go, two of the things you despise most, wrapped together in a single bundle for time-saving convenience!
The main instigator of that WSJ advertorial was Linda Gottfredson. I mainly know her through her work in the occupational psychology area, which is all about characterising people by their vocational aptitudes, and characterising occupations by the aptitudes they require, so that square pegs can be driven into square holes and so on. It's a field roughly on a par with phrenology in terms of intellectual rigour, but is normally harmless. Gottfredson, however, progressed from there to being a full-on white supremacist.
that thing with Sam Harris & Charles Murray
Harris has no idea how dated he seems, like he has been frozen in a cryogenics experiment for the last 40 years. I have a copy of Sprague de Camp's essay from 1976, "The Breeds of Man". De Camp starts out by satirising the would-be respectable racists of the time, and how they whinged about only wanting to Follow the Truth, but Political Correctness and Sentimental Egalitarian Dogmas were standing in the way of Objectivity (de Camp was allowed to satirise them because he himself had taken racial inequality for granted until he got interested enough to look at the literature). He could have been writing about Harris or Sullivan.
Racialist revivals seem to follow a 20-year cycle. Someone should blog about it.
You know that David Brooks was one of the biggest boosters for 'The Bell Curve', back in the 90s?
David Brooks and scientific racism; two great tastes that taste great together. No, I didn't know that, but I will revise his Soft Fascism score accordingly.
I don't think Harris knows much of anything, to be honest. I was impressed by how expertly Ezra Klein trolled him, just by refusing to be budged from the actual debate, when all Sam Harris wanted to do was address the LIES and CALUMNIES that had been leveraged against himself and his friends by his IRRATIONAL ENEMIES. White dudes who overreact because they're being judged by the color of their awful opinions rather than the content of their craven character are my spirit animal. And when I say "spirit animal," I mean "a coherent argument for the advancement of nuclear winter across the whole of the Earth."
I looked at Harris's Wikipedia page (I only know him as a New Atheist Islamophobe), and I discovered that he'd acquired a PhD in neuroscience by using various imaging techniques to try & pinpoint which little squishy bit of the brain causes people to believe in God. Apparently this is a real thing that people study. In a hundred years, these sorts of things will look like phrenology. In three hundred, they'll become alchemy, only funnier. Those alchemist fucks only wanted to get rich and live forever.
I've never heard of Linda Gottfredson or Sprague de Camp, who I will now go research in the interest of becoming informed about something nobody should ever have to even think about.
It's very easy for idiots like Sam Harris to understand that when God gives mankind a directive that contradicts common sense, there must be something wrong with God; I don't know what posses people like that to exempt "science" from the same rigorous skepticism.
Someone should blog about it.
Well, I'm not the one who speaks 900 languages and possesses expert-level knowledge in fields as diverse as genetics, HIV research, linguistics, and oncology. Just saying.
Oh my god, I've just realized you're actually Robert Langdon! 😨
No one else has those skills!!! 😰😥😢
I suspect those masks are designed to thwart facial recognition systems.
In a comment on another blog, I'm about to drop the boom on Jordan Peterson, with his evo-psych bafflegab. Bitches, Amirite? isn't a firm foundation for a coherent academic career.
I've never heard of Linda Gottfredson or Sprague de Camp, who I will now go research in the interest of becoming informed about something nobody should ever have to even think about.
de Camp is best known for some dodgy 'Conan' pastiches and 'posthumous collaborations' with Robert E. Howard, all perpetrated with Lin Carter, who I love as an editor but loathe as a pasticheur. He also wrote less-than-well-received biographies of REH and HPL, and a bunch of popular science books and nonfiction essays.
His fiction output sometimes has stupid, cringeworthy content. Here's a verbatim quote from 1951's The Tritonian Ring:
Vakar felt an urge to leap up and seize the swaying white figure of Porfia in imitation of Asterio, for though small she had a form that practically demanded rape of any passing male.
UGH.
de Camp's best fiction was written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt. I'm of the opinion that the most fun you will ever have reading de Camp is 1940's The Roaring Trumpet, which is loosely based on the Prose Edda, and formed the basis of Gary Gygax' Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and Hall of the Fire Giant King, which are more fun that The Roaring Trumpet because characters named Fonkin Hoddypeak and Gleep Wurp the Eyebiter are objectively cooler than characters named Harold Shea and Reed Chalmers.
Image is originally from a FT story about Chinese facial-recognition industry, though it has been extensively plagiarised by Chinese media reports on the law-enforcement possibilities of the facial-recognition industry.
I suspect those masks are designed to thwart facial recognition systems.
Oh shit, I didn't know they were actual masks. I thought they were cgi image overlays. Whoops!
In a comment on another blog, I'm about to drop the boom on Jordan Peterson, with his evo-psych bafflegab. Bitches, Amirite? isn't a firm foundation for a coherent academic career.
Maaaaan, but somebody needs to bring down the wrath of god on that irritating motherfucker like yesterday. I actually tried to read his awful Theory of Everything book last month! It was like Joseph Campbell got hit by a bus and no one noticed, and he staggered across the street to the public library with blood running down his head, and he read nineteen pages of The White Goddess, and three chapters of The Golden Bough, and then the last two-thirds of Émile Durkheim's Wikipedia page, and suddenly he understood the shape of the world beneath its shroud of falsehoods and deceits. And also he lost about 50 I.Q. points. And Peterson's fans are all so dumb they're unable to notice that not only is their Emperor naked, he's actually a horse. I don't know how that anthropomorphized clownshoe has been able to pass himself off as an intellectual for all these years. Are the hiring standards at Canadian universities a lot different than ours, or what?
Sorry, I just really hate the guy. I hate the attitude of rueful superiority he's adopted to deal with criticism that he can't meaningfully address, because he's a moron and has no idea what he's talking about. I hope you'll post a link to that comment on your blog, so I can read it & gloat.
But! I am now officially frightened of Sprague de Camp. I'm nearly as offended by the formulation of that sentence as I am by its content (not really, but it's bad). I also think "Fonkin Hoddypeak" is what Jordan Peterson's trans students ought to call him, in lieu of "professor."
Who is "REH"?
REH is Robert E. Howard, the guy who created 'Conan the Cimmerian'. I actually thing he was even more racist than Lovecraft, having a Texan's racism rather than a New Englander's.
I would suggest reading the linked de Camp and Pratt story to see what he was capable of at is best, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend the rest of his oeuvre. He was also a looming figure in the SFF publishing industry, and his sins were pretty much widespread in the genre.
Regarding my comment about Peterson, I just reiterated that he was a purveyor of pseudoscientific evo-psyche bafflegab and linked to the MacLean's article about how he was the stupid person's idea of what a smart person is like. I'll refrain from linking to the morass of shit-posting and nerdrage where I posted it, but suffice it to say that I was dragging a creepy incel guy who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.
I didn't know they were actual masks. I thought they were cgi image overlays.
And you would be right!
I think the image was someone's simulation or dramatisation of how facial-recognition and perp-spotting would work -- possibly from a demonstration of the software to the Chinese gubblement -- and it's become a stock photo for any news story on the general topic.
I have not read this Jordan Peterson guy and you are not inspiring me with any desire to do so. Not even with the "Joseph Campbell hit by a bus" comparison. Still, I second the request for a link to BBBB's comment.
Brooks is recycling shit. Peterson is a recyclee.
This profile should suffice in lieu of my comment, which was basically a smackdown of a right-wing asshole who fancies himself a STEM guy:
http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jordan-peterson-the-stupid-mans-smart-person/
I am a bit shocked that you haven't heard of Peterson, he's exactly the sort of pseudo intellectual that you typically take to the woodshed.
I would suggest reading the linked de Camp and Pratt story to see what he was capable of at is best, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend the rest of his oeuvre.
I couldn't get it to load yesterday, but I'm suffering from Weather right now so I'll try again tomorrow.
If the creepy incel guy was all that smart, he wouldn't have to blame women for his own problems. There's a big difference between "racists who threaten your safety and human rights" and "people who just don't want to fuck you."
Peterson is a recyclee.
I don't even think Peterson is well-read enough to be familiar with David Brooks. Or, I mean, Peterson might know about Brooks now, since he's switched professions from "educator" to "full-time conman," but I doubt he was heavily influenced by Brooks's giggly, passive-aggressive 'conservative' fascism on his journey toward Truth and Justice and The Unqualified Subjugation Of Women.
I will see that awesome article and raise you this one, which contains some actual excerpts from his miserable book & which I found just now via googling (Peterson probably doesn't approve of women using Google without permission; it distracts us from thinking about and caring for infants):
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
Also:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/jordan-peterson-enlightenment-nietzsche-alt-right
Peterson is heavily critical of "sociology" and "postmodernism," which, I mean: Fair enough. But it quickly becomes clear that he hates them because he doesn't understand them, and that thinking about them threatens his adolescent worldview. Like, he equates postmodernism's emphasis on plurality/subjectivity and arbitrariness with a "lack of meaning," and he really does seem to have based his "meaning-generating communities" on a (very) brief survey of Émile Durkheim's ideas about collective consciousness and social facts.
Also, he's pretty sure he discovered, and elaborated, the universe's Ultimate Truth. And he thinks that Step Two down the Path To Atheism is "burn the world down," so that even if you don't believe in God you should behave as if you do.
Again, I'm sorry, but I really can't stand the guy. Just looking at his hollow-eyed serial-killeresque face darkens my day. It's like saying "Niagara Falls" in front of Moe.
Ah, I see that Peterson is part of the "Big-5" psychometric-testing scamwagon, except that he has devised his own version of the tests as a branding exercise. With courts refusing to accept it and calling it junk science. I guess that places him within my wheelhouse. Whatever a wheelhouse is.
I KNEW YOU'D SAVE US, UNCLE SMUT!
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