Today In Math Class:

I didn’t think about it that way, but you’re right! That sort of indoctrination is clearly starting to have an effect on the vulnerable children at my school. My social circle has MULTIPLE so-called relationships that involve one boy and one girl, and this sort of propaganda is why they think it’s okay to label themselves like that. You would think that they would have learned after our group’s last one-boy-one girl “relationship” broke up that this lifestyle will only ever end in unhappiness, but then they look at our school curriculum and it confuses them. Honestly, controversial topics like heterosexuality ought to be left out of the school environment altogether. When we bring things like this into the school situation, it just sets up our children for unhealthy relationships.

omfg so today I saw a man and a woman holding hands in public, i mean i don’t have anything against heterosexuality but don’t flaunt it in front of me, think of the kids omfg

So this is a really funny post and I realize I’m missing the point but Latin didn’t have a “w.” 

tvmblr, 50 bce

friendly reminder that ivlivs caesar is problematic for he attempts to pass legislation in the senate that does not benefit the eqvites and the optimates, vwv

rest rest REST REST REST REST REST REST

A week or so ago, I was feeling nostalgic for my old Pokémon games, so I pulled out my old copy of Pokémon White, reset the game, and played through the main storyline.

Things I've noticed (spoilers for BW and BW2 follow):

Child!me was really bad at Pokémon. I basically just kept whichever Pokémon happened to be the highest level ones I had in my team, and if that meant randomly putting in a wild 'mon with a terrible moveset, so be it. I basically didn't consider type advantages at all. I'm pretty sure I wiped to Elesa like five times or so before I swapped in a ground type and manage to beat her, and the lesson I took from that was "wow, the Pokémon I added was only one level higher than the one I swapped it out for, amazing how much difference that makes!"

The "good guys'" arguments in the game are ... really bad. Like, I agree that they're correct about the empirical fact "is catching/training/battling Pokémon abusive," but there are a number of conversations that essentially go:

Team Plasma: have you considered that you're making Pokémon suffer, and that's bad? "Good" guy: I think it's important to consider different perspectives and let people make up their own mind on whether Pokémon suffering is bad! not everything is black and white!

Subtext I absolutely did not notice when I initially played through: Alder is really bad at his job! The Elite Four more or less tells you that he's abandoning his actual job duties to wander around Unova being sad that one of his Pokémon died several years ago. When N beats him, he randomly gets really upset about it and starts insulting him. No wonder by the sequels he's been replaced.

One thing I'd remembered as not being explicit until the second game was that outside of N, there are plenty of Team Plasma members who actually genuinely want to help Pokémon and were not abusive. I was remembering wrong -- this is pretty explicit in BW too.

Hamilton cast: Most disputes die and no one shoots

Me: okay... that sounds fake, but okay

@johnhocksbur

This isn’t how statistical methodology works.

If you want to be able to generalize the results of your survey to the general population, you have to use some form of random sampling*, you can’t just ask random people on the internet. Twitter polls (etc.) have two main flaws:

1. Response is voluntary, which means that people who don’t care are less likely to answer, and (on questions where this is applicable) people with more middle-of-the-road or less-shocking answers are less likely to answer. 

2. They operate using “convenience sampling,” which is basically what it sounds like and tends to bias the results in favor of whatever opinion is held by the people in the group likely to notice the survey. A political survey on the Fox News website will tend to have more conservative responses than the general population; a sports survey on the Boston Globe website will tend to have more pro-Red Sox responses than the general population; a survey on a Twitter page will tend to have more whatever-the-twitter-users-followers think responses than the general population.

(I did a brief Google search to see if this has been surveyed reliably and didn’t find anything, although possibly I could find something in an academic database. If anyone can find a reliable survey, I would be interested in seeing what the results.)

*This is somewhat complicated by the fact that it is nearly impossible to do a perfectly random sample. Phone surveys in which callers are randomly chosen and the response rate is high are generally close enough in surveys of Americans, although they aren’t perfect.

This is so interesting to me. 65% of people would rather experience rape than be falsely accused of rape.

For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.

No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:

“You know! Boys will be boys!” 

“He’s just going through a phase!”

“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”

“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”

“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”

I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”

She built a beautiful, glittery castle in a public space.

It was so tempting.

He just couldn’t control himself and, being a boy, had violent inclinations.

She had to keep her building safe.

Her consent didn’t matter. Besides, it’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasn’t a “legitimate” knocking over if she didn’t throw a tantrum.

His desire — for power, destruction, control, whatever- - was understandable.

Maybe she “shouldn’t have gone to preschool” at all. OR, better if she just kept her building activities to home.

I know it’s a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of don’t “get raped” and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of “don’t rape.”

Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another person’s space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning.  How much of the boy’s behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the “rules” his parents kept repeating?

There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasn’t much fun for him, but he did not do it again.

There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes… but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You can’t make this stuff up.

Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when he’s older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, “No, I don’t want to. Stop. Leave.”

The “overarching attitudinal characteristic” of abusive men is entitlement

George Takei educating the ignorant

I’m not sure if my ask box is working, but if it is, this would be fun!

How Well Do Your Followers Know You?