The Daily Day: MLK Edition
- If liberal culture was more firmly entrenched, wouldn’t we all recognize that the failure to give one’s employees a day off “for diversity” is the same thing as allowing the Klan to solicit contributions in the cubicle farm? Racism hurts everyone, white privilege or no, and I’m being unjustly deprived of a nice day for a picnic. Waaah.
- I’m curious about the etiology of colds. Why is a snotty nose presaged by a sore throat? And why is it only snotty in one sinus at a time?
- Via Bitch, Ph.D comes an anecdote about Harvard’s President’s daughter:
In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ”daddy truck,” and one ”baby truck.”
Just because you’re “confrontational” and “straight-talking” doesn’t mean you’re not also “a sexist asshole”. The numerous flaws in Summers’s supposed “arguments” can be easily pointed out by any halfwit* and I leave them to it**.
What I’m curious about is the unspoken assumption that if girls can be demonstrated to be more nurturing than boys, then they obviously can’t be expected to be as good at math. Because the ability to do math can only be developed by skewering bunnies and kittens on your pencil, and then dancing in a shower of cute-baby-animal blood while reciting your multiplication tables.
* Provided that said halfwit is neither an economist nor an evolutionary psychologist. Both disciplines have structural barriers to admitting any pervasive imperfections in the status quo, so we really shouldn’t be surprised if their practicioners are often reduced to the blathering of patently absurd fairy tales.
** Not that Dr. Bitch or her commenters are halfwits, of course. But she does get trolls now and then.
Simon wrote:
I’d like to know that about the colds, too. Although I think I’m quite capable of having both sinuses swollen shut and full of snot at the same time.
Posted 17 Jan 2020 at 1:45 pm ¶
yami wrote:
That does happen to me sometimes too, but only for really really bad colds. With normal colds it’s always one or the other.
Posted 17 Jan 2020 at 2:04 pm ¶
Rana wrote:
I think it’s part of normal nostril function. Even when you don’t have a cold, one is always more “open” than the other, and they alternate throughout the day. /weird yoga facts
The sore throat is key, for me, in knowing that I _am_ getting sick, instead of just sneezing because it’s dusty or feeling tired because I didn’t sleep enough.
On the math — perhaps that explains why the vast majority of mathematicians I’ve known were, well, odd. They have repressed kitten-skewering impulses?
Posted 18 Jan 2020 at 3:03 pm ¶
yami wrote:
Not so much repressed kitten-skewering impulses as heightened kitten-skewering impulses – they all skewer kittens as often as they can, at least until they’re tenured. As do all of us hard-sciency types! But we swear oaths of secrecy and very few economists are allowed in on it.
Summers is evidently a soft-science mole. Goddamn lax background checks.
Posted 18 Jan 2020 at 3:15 pm ¶