- Rosetta arrives at a comet – “Rosetta and Philae may be robots, machines, but the minds and hearts of a lot of real, emotional human beings are behind them. And now we get to share with them the excitement and joy of exploring a new world.”
- On the dispute between radical feminism and trans people – “I’m intrigued by the resistance that trans people’s attempts to define our own terms has met, and wonder what’s behind it: part of the problem is that the project launched in the 1990s, when liberal-left opposition to ‘political correctness’ was at its height, before people began to see it as a tool to help minorities make it harder for their oppressors to harm them.”
- You used to be a feminist before you got pregnant – On standing up to patronizing doctors. From Arturo.
- Scientists turn a brown butterfly purple in six generations – From Criticaldragon1177.
Lots more good stuff on and from Rosetta here http://rosetta.esa.int/
Skepotter,
Thanks!
One correction: Should be noted ‘political correctness’ is literally a joke. The on-the-ground lefties (a.k.a., us) originally used it to take the piss out of academic lefties. Many of these academic types were linguists, hence the focus on words over actions. One result is that the PC joke specifically invokes the self-esteem movement to demonstrate how these types aren’t really leftists at all, since, of course, Nathaniel Branden was Ayn Rand’s…um, what do you call a male mistress? Another element of political correctness was logical inconsistency, again deliberately part of the joke. Every last one of the things we came up with, though, was what faux-leftists told us we should believe.
Naturally, the media took the joke and ran with it, rewriting style guides so much that someone can advocate the inferiority of certain races, so long as he (I know, ‘he or she’, but I can’t think of any she’s in that particular industry.) uses the PC terms, and the media won’t see an issue.
And it causes problems in other ways. So exactly zero Indians complained about the National Museum of the American Indian’s name. Why would we? American Indian Movement, National Congress of American Indians, a number of tribes with “Indian” in their official name…But a lot of white ‘allies’ complain for us. This in turn legitimizes Dan Snyder because now we have stupid white people complaining about things that really don’t offend us.
words do matter and shuld be used to elivate the level of discourse…