This opinion piece from Ross Douthat is part of the widespread debate within journalism about the NYT’s decision to publish and then step back from an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. I’m posting it not because of its relevance to that particular debate, but because he makes an interesting argument that “the force transforming Western liberalism” — ie the social justice movement ie woke culture — is, for better or for worse, no longer a flavor of liberalism but a separate ideology. His particular take on that comes from an unsurprisingly conservative perspective, but I think the core idea is a fascinating one that I’ll be mulling over for a long time.

The surge of feminist and #MeToo activism in the last decade, for instance, has advanced a longstanding and admirable liberal goal — the right of the individual to be free from rape, assault and unwanted sexual aggression. But at the same time it has generated new disciplinary structures, primarily on college campuses, that point us toward a post-liberal system of sexual regulation — a bureaucratic supervision of intimate life, often built on the presumption of male guilt rather than due process.

The same duality exists with the advance of gay and transgender rights. In their liberal form, these causes seek an individual right to live one’s life without facing unjust discrimination. But when other constitutional rights long considered essential to liberalism — freedom of speech, freedom of religion — come into conflict with the movement, it’s assumed that the old rights must inevitably give way. And the movement’s vanguard increasingly rejects debate entirely, expanding its definition of a “transphobe” to encompass anyone with doubts about the widespread use of puberty blockers or the movement’s ideologically freighted view of sex and gender.

Likewise with anti-racism and Black Lives Matter. Many of the people participating in this month’s George Floyd protests have goals that are meliorist, reformist, liberal — demilitarize police departments, weaken police unions, change police tactics, hire and promote more minority officers. (Many of these are goals that libertarians and conservatives support as well.)

But part of the anti-racism movement is seeking much more than just changes to policing. It’s interested in spiritual renewal and consciousness raising — something evident from the revivalism of so many protests in the last week — and its capacious definitions of racism imply, in the end, not reform but re-education, not interracial dialogue but strict white deference, not a liberal society groping toward equality but a corrupt society being re-engineered.

Opinion | Ross Douthat: The Tom Cotton Op-Ed and the Cultural Revolution – The New York Times

You have to install the Serial Box app (or read them in your browser); it wants an email address but doesn’t require any permissions to work.

One of the debates currently taking place over various creative spheres of social media is when it’s appropriate to write stories about coronavirus—now, in the middle of it, or once we’re through it? While both sides—allowing writers and readers the necessary space to either process the pandemic or compartmentalize for their emotional well-being—are valid, Serial Box’s new short fiction collection proves that it is possible to craft engrossing fiction in this time of crisis. How We Live Now invites ten authors—Madeline Ashby, Steven Barnes, L.X. Beckett, Tananarive Due, Brian Keene, Usman T. Malik, Sunny Moraine, Malka Older, Kelly Robson, and Catherynne M. Valente—to document their feelings from the first few weeks of the coronavirus crisis through the lens of sci-fi and speculative fiction. That means quarantine and self-isolation, yes, but also zombie rats and government-mandated Blooms and sex robots.

What’s most compelling about this collection is that each story is, as Valente put it, “a snapshot of a moment.” They are individualized, highly personal responses that nonetheless manage to fulfill the aim of all great SF and spec-fic: to look ahead to possible futures (many surprisingly hopeful, all things considered) while still commenting on the present.

Best of all, the stories are all available with a free Serial Box account (sign up here or via the Serial Box app). Below, get more information on each of the ten shorts, as well as the authors sharing their various inspirations and how cathartic it was to consider the topic of “How We Live Now.”

Serial Box Releases Pandemic-Inspired Collection of SFF Stories: How We Live Now | Tor.com

Direct link to the stories on Serial Box

I think this is both true and important.

The Covid-19 pandemic has tested our society in countless ways. From the health system to the school system, the economy, government, and family life, we have confronted some enormous and unfamiliar challenges. But many of these stresses are united by the need to constantly adapt to new information and evidence and accept that any knowledge we might have is only provisional. This demands a kind of humble restraint — on the part of public health experts, political leaders, and the public at large — that our society now finds very hard to muster.

The virus is novel, so our understanding of what responding to it might require of us has had to be built on the fly. But the polarized culture war that pervades so much of our national life has made this kind of learning very difficult. Views developed in response to provisional assessments of incomplete evidence quickly rigidify as they are transformed into tribal markers and then cultural weapons. Soon there are left-wing and right-wing views on whether to wear masks, whether particular drugs are effective, or how to think about social distancing.

New evidence is taken as an assault on these tribal commitments, and policy adjustments in response are seen as forms of surrender to the enemy. Every new piece of information gets filtered through partisan sieves, implicitly examined to see whose interest it serves, and then embraced or rejected on that basis. We all do this. You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly.

Some very basic assumptions have had to be adjusted in the course of this spring, in all directions, and everyone has found it difficult. Early on, some argued that we would see nothing more than the equivalent of a bad flu season, and the virus quickly proved them wrong. In early March, Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke for many public health experts when he told an interviewer that “people should not be walking around with masks,” which would only really be of use to health workers. Within a few weeks, the same experts (including Fauci) were recommending that we all wear masks in many settings.

[…]Our polarized political culture has reflexively approached the pandemic as just another culture-war drama of this sort — demanding that we each prove our loyalty to our team and express exasperated outrage at the other. This has left us clinging to various strategies rooted in provisional hypotheses (about re-opening the economy, for instance, or enforcing lockdowns, or using hydroxychloroquine), insisting that evidence against our view does not exist, and unwilling to change our minds when new facts emerge.

Tribalism Comes for Pandemic Science

This related piece in The Atlantic is more narrowly focused, but also excellent.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

The author goes on to give several thought-provoking examples.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

What I found in researching housing is that [the post-WWII Levitt housing developments, which essentially created the suburbs were] a small part of a specific social contract, one in which a house would be the focal point for a white community, a school, a neighborhood, as well as a forced savings vehicle. Income growth, aka raises, would structure the middle class, which was rooted in producing things. The Federal Reserve, though the banking system’s connection to housing, could control swings in the economy, connecting the financial elite to the middle class directly. This contract existed because working class people had power, and were willing to seek other social organizational forms if they did not have their needs met.

Ronald Reagan shifted this social contract, by making the home a financial asset more than a bulwark of community. People no longer really got raises, but they were able to continue consumption by drawing down on savings and borrowing, a substitute of credit for income. The 1980s saw mass offshoring, as America turned increasingly into a rentier economy. The connection from the Fed to the real economy was weaker, but it still held. It was in this era that black people were finally able to buy homes, and so they never were able to build wealth as white people had. And most people were falling behind.

The housing crisis of 2007-2012 snapped the spine of the Reagan-era weaker social contract. Bankers and politician not only didn’t stop the foreclosure crisis, but began asserting that homeownership wasn’t an important social goal. The Federal Reserve’s strategy turned entirely towards buying or selling the financial assets of the wealthy as a means of engaging in macro-economic stabilizing. And so, leaving aside the moral validity of any particular movement, popular radicalism returned, on the right and the left. in the the form of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Trump, right-wing anger at lockdowns, and now protests over police brutality, as well as riots.

To take just one issue, and not the only one at issue, reducing police brutality is a question of leadership, of bureaucratic management, and it requires the ability to come together as citizens and do politics. But since the 1980s, predatory financial elites have worked aggressive to break our public institutions so that we can’t collectively do politics. In some cases, they adopted the rhetorical form of racial tolerance while fighting its economic underpinning, in other cases they adopted the rhetoric of racial backlash. Either way, they have destroyed the ability of citizens to come together and do politics to foster needed social change.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, has dedicated his whole career to blocking democratic institutions from functioning, with the goal of putting conservative judges on the bench so they can write the law, immune from popular social pressure. That’s a brilliant strategy for maintaining rigid social hierarchies, but it doesn’t allow for any release of social pressure except despair and popular explosions.

We now have two paths. Restoring a stable social contract broadly will mean restoring the ability to do politics, to rearrange our productive capacity in ways that are safer, more efficient, and more fair, which will necessarily mean a reorganization of power. Or it will require a far more authoritarian society, one in which we accept a much higher level of security spending to protect a narrow elite from a disempowered and angry populace.

Either way we go, William Levitt understood that people without a stake in society tend to rebel. And that is what we are seeing play out.

Source: Corporate Power, Protests and the Breakdown of a Social Contract

This is so cool!

The bizarre life of the sea’s middle depths has long been a challenge to see, study and fathom. The creatures of that realm live under crushing pressures at icy temperatures in pitch darkness. The fluid environment is unbound by gravity and hard surfaces, so natural selection allows for a riotous array of unfamiliar body parts and architectures. By human standards, these organisms are aliens.

Now, a new kind of laser is illuminating some of the most otherworldly life-forms. The soft bodies of the abyssal class are made of mucoid and gelatinous materials — somewhat like jellyfish, only stranger. They feature mazes of translucent parts and gooey structures, including long filaments, mucus housings and fine-mesh filters for gathering food. Recently, in the depths off Western Australia, scientists filmed a gelatinous type known as a siphonophore whose length was estimated at 150 feet — potentially the world’s longest example of oceanic life.

On June 3 in Nature magazine, a team of seven scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago described an imaging device for studying these translucent creatures. It emits a thin fan of laser light that scans through the animals, gathers backscattered rays from the inner flows and tissues, and feeds those gleanings into a computer that visually reconstructs the living organisms in subtle detail. The device, called the DeepPIV imaging system, reveals the insides much as CT scans do for human bodies.

Source: The Sea’s Weirdest Creatures, Now in ‘Staggering’ Detail

I just ran across this absolutely terrific 2009 lecture series by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford. He has a real gift for discussing these topics, in depth, in a fun and memorable way.

Here’s the playlist.

UPDATE: when I originally posted this, I had only watched one of the later ones, where he applies the approaches of several disciplines to understanding a specific topic (eg depression, religiosity, schizophrenia). The ones nearer the beginning are reviews of those disciplines (neurobiology, evolutionary biology, etc) and are pretty skippable for people who already have a decent basic understanding of those topics. I’d suggest starting as I did with one of the later ones to see how you like it, and then watching whichever of the early videos you need an introduction to and jumping back to the second half.

From UNCA’s own Rebecca Helm, whose jellyfish lab I’m dying to go and check out. These octopi are absolutely extraordinary, and Dr Helm’s post includes another five of her favorite videos of them <3

Given the internet’s obsession with both large cephalopods and bizarre animals, you’d think blanket octopuses would be all over it by now. I mean, a two-meter-long octopus dressed like a fash…

Six Reasons the Blanket Octopus is My New Favorite Stunning Sea Creature

This blog has been completely cracking me up today 🤣

This was one of my favorites, but there are lots of other good ones too:

This is an ugly and depressing story, but worth reading. It leaves me pretty cynical about who’s likely to get ahead in the current crisis.

Homewreckers, Aaron Glantz’s recent book about the investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis, is essential reading as we plunge headlong into a new financial catastrophe. Glantz observes that there are two ways a government can respond to a crisis caused by reckless speculation: by stepping in or by stepping aside. During the Great Depression Roosevelt stepped in; Ronald Reagan, dealing with the savings-and-loan crisis, stepped aside. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, alas, hewed closer to Reagan’s example.

The Housing Vultures | by Francesca Mari