Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars
The sheer decadence will draw you in and destroy you.
Growing up, we learn very quickly that there are two genders. Female and male. You either have an innie or an outie. Everything in life reinforces this; adults, institutions, bathrooms, commercials, statistics, language. Case closed. End of story. Goodnight, Irene.
Having grown up, we come to realize that things aren’t quite as clear cut as they seem. It turns out that gender isn’t bipolar. It isn’t determined by a flip of the coin at conception. Genitalia does not define gender. Gender is more like a roll of a pair of loaded dice with some outcomes much more likely than others. Something we’ve always thought of as black and white actually holds greys and yellows and oranges and purples. Many of us rebel against this idea. We try to put the yellows and oranges into the familiar and well understood black and white boxes. Many purples and greys try to conform to the black and white paradigm because society reinforces that what they truly are is wrong.
A fairly decent majority of the population does conform to the traditional female/male gender. In gender studies, these people are called cisgendered. They are the people with penises that feel like “males” and the people with vaginas that feel like “females” as defined by popular society.
Everyone else is thrown into the familiar “transgender” bucket. They are the people with penises that feel like “females” and the people with vaginas that feel like “males” and every possible permutation and gradation thereof. Our society as a whole still considers them to be abnormal. In reality, they’re just the green eyes in a world of blue and brown eyes. It is well past time that society start treating them as such.
There is a whole lot of privilege built in with being cisgendered. Like every societal privilege, a majority of the challenge is getting those with privilege to recognize that they even have it. This is a monumental task but not one that cannot be overcome. Education and exposure is the key.
But where to start? I would say the answer to that is at birth. There is already a whole lot of stigmatization that happens when we identify a newborn with a penis as male and a newborn with a vagina as female. Gender may have been decided well before birth but it certainly can not be determined by adults or by the baby at birth. Birth certificates should lose their male/female identifier and replace it with a simple equipment check: Penis/Vagina/Both.
Of course, this would also require society getting over calling the penis and vagina “naughty bits”. Which is another monumental task in and of itself. But it does lead me to the second idea. We need to get people to realize that gender identity and sexual identity are two completely different assignations. I see gender identity as how you “feel” about yourself and sexual identity as how you “feel” about other people. Society deeply intertwines the two and that makes each much more difficult to talk about. Yes, there is a lot of overlap between the two that falls exactly where you’d expect it to fall, but we’re once again getting into privilege issues.
This is incredibly complicated stuff. One can understand why a vast majority of the population doesn’t give it much thought. And that’s actually fine. That’s how it should be. That is our goal. Our problem now is that people only think about it when they are confronted with a standard deviation from their norm. It is new and completely outside their realm of experience and that makes it scary. The idea is to help them get past the fear. To make them see other gender identities just like they would someone with green eyes. It might be worth noting for it’s unusualness, but it’s certainly not worth treating a person differently over.
Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars
Take your pulpiest detective novel. Add magic. Stir.
All the trees here in Chicago are budding and it’s slightly rainy and a bit windy. That means tree splooge is everywhere. Those of us who are unlucky enough to have parked outside need a tree splooge towel to wipe off our cars. Budding trees will have distinctive bud/pollen rings around them come morning. It’s a little disgusting but it’s all part of the normal cycle.
Spring is kind of amazing. The world takes on this sickly sweet smell wherever you go. With all of the trees coming out of hibernation, the carbon dioxide in the air actually precipitously drops. The earth has a breath rhythm and that breath rhythm is increasing:
Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to increased temperatures. Increased temperatures leads to more erratic weather. More erratic weather leads to more disasters.
Increased carbon dioxide is only good for plants up to a point just like increased oxygen is only good for humans up to a point. If oxygen were increasing the way carbon dioxide is we’d be terrified. Too much oxygen in the air and someone lights a cigarette and the entire world explodes. Carbon dioxide isn’t as dramatic. It’s a creeper. There are so many places to store the excess heat that carbon dioxide creates that people don’t realize there’s something wrong. But there is something wrong and special interests have hijacked rational debate.
97% of climate scientists say there is something wrong but the 3% that say there isn’t anything wrong get equal (or even more) time in the media. This creates a dynamic where people believe there is a vigorous scientific debate going on where there really isn’t.
The ice caps are melting dramatically. Air temperatures are slowly rising. The ocean is incomprehensibly vast and has the ability to absorb a lot of the generated heat. At some point, that will end and the air temperature will rise precipitously. It may already be too late to stop this. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act.
Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars
It’s the Tony Stark Show with special guest, Ironman!
Ok, not really. Depression is a serious mental health issue that is horribly misunderstood and stigmatized in our society, but Hyperbole and a Half explains depression in a lighthearted way that both entertains and informs. I wish Allie Brosh, the creator of the web comic, would write more. Her work is truly inspiring.
Today’s cool website of the day is courtesy of Google. I present to you the YouTube Trends website! Not only does it tell you what people are currently watching but it also tells you what regions are watching what and what males and females are watching and what specific age groups are watching. Why are so many females checking out Grand Theft Auto and why don’t I know any of them?
Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars Sometimes, somebody else’s past comes back to haunt you.
Oregon, for the past two years, has massively increased access to Medicaid. (Correction: It wasn’t a massive increase, it was a drastic reduction and then more money was found to support 10,000 more participants when 90,000 were still eligible.) Participants in the expansion were chosen by lottery. This has led to a unique opportunity to study the effects of wider access to healthcare on the poor. The results of that study were recently released.
The study is seen as a presage of what things will look like for poor people under Obamacare. And, besides the ridiculous lottery aspect of it, it is.
The study shows that those added to Medicaid have no better medical outcomes than those that weren’t added to Medicaid. This has led to a large amount of gloating from people who oppose Obamacare. Oh noes! Obamacare is a failure! We told you it was a giant boondoggle!
Not quite. First and foremost, Obamacare, like Medicaid, is insurance. Plain and simple. Insurance protects you financially. Period. And the study shows much better financial outcomes for those on Medicaid. Expecting better health outcomes because you suddenly have health insurance is like expecting not to get into a car accident because you have car insurance. It’s ridiculous.
There were also many other benefits associated with being on Medicaid. These include drastically lowered rates of depression, better diagnosis and management of diabetes, and increased use of health services.
The mental health aspect of the study is enormous. This cannot be understated. Those in the Medicaid group had a 30% reduction in the rates of depression. Depression leads to all sorts of other issues that don’t show up on a health screen. Economic and social outcomes can be greatly affected by depression. Being poor is bad enough. Being poor and depressed can be disastrous. If the only thing that Obamacare succeeds at is reducing depression by 30%, it will be well worth the money spent.
All in all, the Oregon Experiment is a good study for Obamacare. Opponents, of course, will continue to pick any little nit they can find and there are certainly plenty of nits worth picking. But, like I’m fond of saying, Obamacare is a bag of doggie poo left on the doorstep of America, but what was there before was a flaming bag of doggie poo. Baby steps.
Most of you are probably familiar with driving while black; being pulled over not because you did something wrong but because of the color of your skin. Here may be the first case of doing science while black.
A 16 year old black girl, Kiera Wilmot, performed a simple science experiment (mixing toilet bowl cleaner with strips of aluminum foil) that caused a small noise and a bit of smoke and was expelled from school. School administrators issued a statement saying that Kiera needed to learn that actions have consequences. Not only that, she has been charged by the district attorney with a felony as an adult for performing this incredibly common experiment. Talk about a gross overreaction!
The same district attorney recently declined to press charges against a white boy who deliberately pointed a BB gun at his brother and pulled the trigger killing his brother. The boy thought the BB gun wasn’t loaded. This, in the mind of the DA was just a tragic accident. Which it certainly was. That boy is going to have to live with the fact that he killed his brother for the rest of his life. Not filing charges was absolutely the correct call.
But why the disparity? Why charge a 16 year old black girl with a felony when no one was injured when a 13 year old white boy actually killed someone and was not charged? Is a three years difference in age grounds for handling these two cases differently? If he did the same thing when he was 16 would he have been charged with murder?
Was Kiera’s experiment dangerous? Very mildly. Should she have performed this experiment without supervision? Definitely not. But now she’s going to be scarred for life for the simple act of having a bit of inquisitiveness.
Lesson learned? Experimenting bad! Doing exactly as you’re told at all times and draconian results if you don’t, good!
Kids do stupid things. This is a feature, not a bug. Overreacting to their stupidness dulls their curiosity. Show me a kid that isn’t allowed to do stupid things and I’ll show you a boring adult.