I watched episodes 3 and 4 of Can't Get You Out of My Head last night, which offered a less benign take on Kahneman's theory. What is your smart brain can't/won't teach your dumb brain -- that's a stretch of a paraphrase to match your formulation, but fair, I think. Or not, it was pretty fleeting.
I'm finding that every comment on every post reminds me of something in that show. I'm sure this will wear off eventually.
I like this, though I might go with "animal" brain and "angel" brain, because I'm not going to denigrate the brain that keeps me from burning myself.
Further indication reports about the victims of the massage parlor murders may have been not exactly accurate: "Authorities released the names of those killed in the first shooting at Young's Asian Massage spa in Acworth, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta: Tan, 49, of Kennesaw; Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, 33, of Acworth; and Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta. The Atlanta medical examiner's office on Friday morning released the names of four women killed at a pair of spas in the city: Soon C. Park, 74; Hyun J. Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; and Yong A. Yue, 63." Michels may have been a customer, or an investor, or a passerby. Sp the six Asian female victims were all over 40, and three were over 60. Perhaps not sex workers?
(Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez was identified as a customer, not an employee).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/these-are-the-victims-of-the-atlanta-spa-shootings.html
1: What is your smart brain can't/won't teach your dumb brain -- that's a stretch of a paraphrase to match your formulation, but fair, I think.
Are you saying "What if no one's smart brain can teach their dumb brain?" or are you saying "What happens to the type of person who is not able to use their smart brain to teach their dumb brain?"
CC: Is that the BBC doco by Adam Curtis?
4: Vox has a little more detail about the victims. Michels was a handyman employed by the spa. The guy who was injured but survived was just standing around outside, apparently with no connection to the spa whatsoever. Whatever role sex work may have played in the shooter's motivation, it seems like in the actual shootings he just opened fire randomly and hit a bunch of people who happened to be in the vicinity for various reasons.
6 Yes. Did you watch it? Don't tell me how it ends, but I'm thinking the 2000s are going to be pretty ugly.
5 I didn't get the feeling that the docu narration thought that the smart brain could teach the dumb brain. It was more like 'there's this other brain, it's operating independently, and we're all fucked.' I could be overreading . . . and I'm only in the 90s.
Can individual efforts improve society, or is individual effort is always doomed to end in loneliness and failure. Or worse.
7,8: His smart kill brain had not thoroughly taught his dumb kill brain.
I didn't get the feeling that the docu narration thought that the smart brain could teach the dumb brain. It was more like 'there's this other brain, it's operating independently, and we're all fucked.'
If this is true, then the whole plot of Memento falls apart.
Have we talked about how growing older is like living into Memento? I feel like I'm constantly arranging clues for my future self to re-derive what I'm thinking, and constantly finding clues for myself and able to infer what I meant. Usually.
No. I'm often worried about how I would notice if I have Alzheimer's. That's different, I think.
Why is my smart brain not stopping my dumb brain from reading obsessively about the Substack wars on Twitter? My emotional intelligence is dropping exponentially.
I gave up Twitter for Lent. It's been good.
It's like a dehydrating beverage. You're bored, so you consume some of it, and then you get more bored, until finally your whole body is twitching and in pain from acute boredom poisoning. But it feels so good when you stop!
Cheese sticks is a Lent-compatible app.
It's a strange war where you claim victory by performatively claiming defeat. Everyone, and no one, is winning. The people with lots of money are making lots more money, and the people without money are making a small amount of additional money, and I am nostalgic for the time last week when I hadn't quite finished China Marches West yet. I need another 600-page book.
12. My gawd you'd notice! A good friend has Alzheimers. We don't see him any more because his wife says the additional confusion of seeing people he doesn't recognise would distress him even more. But when it started he knew exactly what was happening to him. He responded incredibly bravely, and did his best to participate in whatever was going on, but at some stage his wife would have to take him out of the circle, and you could see in his face that he knew why. Sometimes he would go and sit apart of his own initiative, and watch everybody else almost hungrily. Friends would go and talk to him one at a time, and sometimes he knew who they were. This guy was the sort of scientist who regularly got invited to international conferences. He knew what was happening all right.
I'm going to get fish tacos instead of reading stuff.
21: My mom never noticed. She'd just keep in the conservation and repeat herself.
China Marches West
Review!
How to Hide an Empire isn't 600 pages but I should really finish it.
I don't have anything intelligent to say about the stories of hate crimes against Asian-Americans but it's really horrifying and upsetting.
Both my father's father and my mother's mother were untroubled by their Alzheimer's. The grandfather was always a happy-go-lucky type, but the grandmother was a big worrier who relaxed in dementia. It seems like I hear many more stories of the person finding it stressful and upsetting, but I do keep those two in the back of my mind. Hopefully it won't be stressful when I forget them.
Small in the context of the horrors of the spa shootings and other nastiness, but my wife's Do Not Travel list has gotten long enough to exclude much of the country.
What's her do not travel list? Is she excluded or doing the excluding?
Your wife is not alone. My no-go zone list is basically every Red State, and many Red areas of Blue states. Hopefully that'll change once we get this insurrection squashed and the Deplorables go back into hiding. We need some serious consequences to teach these wastes of protoplasm the sort of decent behaviour we all learned from our parents when we were knee-high to a grasshopper.
What does avoiding red states accomplish? Like not spending your tourism dollars there, as protest?
If you don't feel safe somewhere, why go? Except to see Mount Rushmore.
Is that what it is, then? Feeling unsafe? I'm just curious. And, uh, defensive.
You live in a barely habitable waste. Sorry.
30 I don't know that the Deplorables are ever going back, so long as they live somewhere that does not impose social consequences for simpler assholery. Assault is ont thing, and we can hope that barriers to charging non-police assaults on people lacking privilege will continue on a downward trajectory pretty much everywhere.
That said, if I wasn't a big old fat white guy, I'd be thinking about whether I really needed to go to X place based on personal safety. And of course X includes walking down certain streets at certain times of day in the bluest of blue places.
We are but sad urchins, forging a meager existence amongst the steaming piles of shit.
When I've visited my mom in the area where I grew up (Texas, just west of Fort Worth) I've felt uncomfortable and unsafe. Unable to breathe freely. I've witnessed [blatantly racist] events that, in California, I would have felt safe calling out, but in Texas? Nuh-uh. Shut up, duck your head, and move on. Concretely (and this goes back to the early 90s) I would never ride a bike on Texas roads -- I'd always be worried that some good-ol' boy would sideswipe me, leaving me in a ditch to die. I don't feel that fear in California, though obvs. I wouldn't do it out in Fresno, either.
Thank goodness she moved out here to be with us, and maybe she won't move back after Covid, so I'll never have to set foot in Texas again. I'll miss the food. I won't miss the good-ol' boys.
I remember visiting Orlando for a conference, and having that same feeling of "unsafety" everywhere until I got to the conference hotel, where I was "back in my world" -- surrounded by people of all colors and dress. And then again unsafe all the way back to the airport, until I finally arrived at my departure gate, where I saw the full panoply of California: lesbian couple, Asians, Black people, kids with piercings, gynormous earrings, etc. And no good-ol' boys in sight.
Something that really, really, really bothers me about the attacks on Asian-Americans. I guess I understand them happening out in the U(n)G(overned)T(ribal)R(egions). I don't have to like it, or accept it, to understand that it's just a part of the general racism and intolerance of the Deplorables. But here in the Bay Area? Where Asian-Americans have lived for well over a century in significant numbers? That's insane, and really angers me. Because here, I feel safe. But even here, they are not. This is unacceptable.
And this reminds me that for women, there is no place that's safe, unless men aren't around.
P.S. On one of my trips to see my mom, I was waiting at D/FW for a Lyft, and saw a Black man dropping off his blonde wife at the airport [it was obvious they were a couple]. My first thought was: "wow, that is one *brave* man."
P.P.S. You can argue that things have changed, and that now things are much better for people of color in Texas. It's hard to take that seriously, seeing the sort of stuff we get on the news about Texas. Not that it matters: old scars grow deep, and some never heal. Maybe after Texas has had a string of Latino governors and massive representation in the lege, I'll change my mind.
I don't think things are much better for people of color in Texas. Maybe a little better, but not hugely. I also think good ol' boys are horrible and capable of running a biker into a ditch. But you're also erasing a hell of a lot of people in these places.
This in particular: "where I saw the full panoply of California: lesbian couple, Asians, Black people, kids with piercings, gynormous earrings, etc." borders on cartoon. Houston is at times considered the most diverse city in the US!
My cousin in California is an elderly white man who owns (or used to own) cows.
I don't know if he's really retired or partially retired.
I guess what annoys me is that it doesn't help anyone for people to develop an outsized fear of the wrong things. There are right-sized fears, and they vary by place, and nowhere is free of danger.
Instead of developing an outsized fear of the good ol' boys who are already overly pandered to, propping up the agencies and giving voice to the more marginalized groups in these places is much more helpful.
The other thing about Texas - and I think everywhere in the US - is that it's extremely balkanized and inconsistent on a very granular level. Places have local culture. You can have a terrifyingly conservative baseball league that torments its gay kids, and a warm loving soccer league that supports all its kids going on simultaneously in the same town. You can have a suburb where an interracial couple gets cold side-eyes at a restaurant and feels the tension and danger, on the edge of a city that hosted massive BLM protests. Etc.
38: Heebie, I went to college in Houston, and even then (mid-80s) it was a majority-minority city. I remember having dim sum in a giant warehouse in Chinatown, and we were the only non-Asian people there. So yes, there are places in Texas that are diverse.
Let me put it this way: in 1995 a colleague Don at IBM Austin once told that Travis County voted against secession before the Civil War. I thought (but did not say): "if they'd set up customs checkpoints at the county line to keep out the riff-raff from the rest of Texas, that might have some meaning; but in this world, it means nothing."
In Orlando also, there people of color, and actually lots of Black people. But the good ol' boys were omnipresent, *they* are what caused my sense of danger.
The point about California is different than just "well, there are gay people in Houston". In San Francisco, gay couples routinely embrace on the street, like in a Doisneau portrait. Ditto interracial couples. Maybe you'll tell me that this is also true in Texas. It sure doesn't look like it, from the way that the lege repeatedly passes laws that betray their racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.
I don't have any answers for Texas, or for other Red States. But I'm not going to set foot in those places without a sizable and well-armed personal security detail. I'm not a rich man, so I can't afford that. Hence, I'll stick to Blue areas of Blue states. If it's any consolation, I wouldn't visit Eastern Oregon or Washington, either.
"Instead of developing an outsized fear of the good ol' boys who are already overly pandered to, propping up the agencies and giving voice to the more marginalized groups in these places is much more helpful."
Yes, and I literally sent nearly as much money as I spend on rent in a year, to Texas political campaigns and GOTV orgs, in 2020. Literally. I -want- Texas to change. But I'll be damned if I'm going to put my -skin- on the line to make it happen.
Look: this isn't about "politics". This is about where people feel safe. I will NEVER live in a place that isn't majority-minority. NEVER. Because I never felt safe, until I lived in SF (which is majority-minority). Sometimes I would count the number of visibly different races in a subway car, the way Catholics count on their rosary.
Another way of looking at things: perhaps you feel that your existence in Texas, and your right to be there, is part of your birthright as an American. But for me, it didn't feel like that. I was always there on sufferance, and as a kid that was made clear to me over and over again in ways small and large, by friend and enemy alike. Here in SF? I feel like my existence is by right, not by sufferance.
Something else about Houston: I have a very good friend whom I went to college with in Houston. He grew up just outside Houston, and we were roommates at Rice, and again at Cornell our first year. He came out to me literally our *first* *week* at Cornell.
Sure, things have changed. Sure. But that has always stuck with me. He spent 21 years growing up just outside Houston, and came out the first week he was finally outta there.
For sure, the power in this state is concentrated in the hands of extremely racist and sexist assholes. And yet they are located in Austin! Where the gay people roam freely like a portrait of San Francisco! The contradictions billow out like a smokestack.
I will let it go, but I'll end with this: Saying "the white supremacists set my teeth on edge and I have no interest in visiting places where I see them" is different from saying "I'm scared and fearful for my safety in those places". And even then, I'll call bullshit unless you are truly avoiding any precinct where Trump got over 5% of the vote. White supremacists look just like Republicans!
44: Wow, that really is crazy! And that's in 2021? Houston must be worse than I realized.
Sorry for the drive-by. Work happened. And yes, my wife's exclusion of large parts of the country is based on real things, ranging from funny looks in stores and restaurants, through colleagues who have been spit on or taunted, up to the violence that we're seeing around the country, but it's also frustrating because it does exclude a whole lot of perfectly pleasant places and people, including, IMO, a large majority of people whose racial attitudes wouldn't pass any kind of reasonable muster but who are, at least usually, perfectly decent to actual existing non-white people standing in front of them. My argument is that in any place we're likely to be interested in going, she's not likely to face anything worse than the very low-level crap that can be racial or can be some other sort of pointless hostility issue (and that I get from time to time here, as she can too), but the last five years or so have not been helpful.
heebie,
With respect, I think you're not understanding the difference in the freedom a cishet white person in Texas feels, as compared to what other people feel. I think you might find that gay Austin residents do *not* have the same feeling of safety as gay SFans have, the same feeling that society has their back.
It's like my telling my sister in 1994 (when I arrived back from working in France) that in Paris, it was safe all the time, and you could go anywhere, ,anytime, day or night. She (rightly) demolished me with a single phrase: "not if you're a woman."
45.2: I'm kind of on your team here, but I also think you're under-appreciating the degree to which the presence of penny-ante racist bullshit is a legitimate danger sign that the scary kind may be lurking too.
46: Sorry, that was in 1986. My point is, -that- is the Texas I grew up in. You're asking me to bet that Texas is different now. Can you understand why I (and my friend, too) don't want to take that bet? It's our necks on the line if we lose the bet.
Sorry, I should have clarified: I think the calculus for a non-white person should be entirely separate from that of a white person, and I wouldn't presume to know or roll my eyes at their experience.
50: My son had a gay, half-Filipino roommate from Kansas a couple of years ago. The kid was very, very happy when his family moved to the Seattle area while he was away at school.
51: And this is why, at some level, the anti-Asian-American violence in the Bay Area, affects me more than that same violence out in the UGTR. There, I feel that people of color have to make a different calculation than white people. Always. Always. But here, in the Bay Area, I felt for the first time that I didn't. And now, to find out, that my Asian-American fellow SFans, make a different calculation, *even* *here*.
Even. Here.
Re 51, 43.last is insightful and important. There's a big difference between being in a place where white and straight is accepted as the default human, and being in a place where there is no default sort of human and everybody has to do the same sorts of navigation exercises that minority people have to do everywhere. I've thought for a long time that the reason some white people think there's a lot of anti-white racism in Hawaii is just that their expectations for how brown people interact with white people don't really fit here.
heebie, I am somewhat shocked by your hostility towards what seem to me like commonsense choices by nonwhite people to protect their safety and peace of mind. I always regret getting involved in discussions about race here, but FWIW, I'm nonwhite and I find myself making a similar calculation as Chetan and Ms. LHI -- I've had bad experiences in certain states and regions, and as a result I'd like to avoid those places in the future.
The notion that instead of heeding my experiences and my fears, I should deal with the situation by somehow "propping up the agencies and giving voice to the more marginalized groups" is incomprehensible to me. I once went to Idaho and was harassed every single day of my trip. It was a long time ago, and I'm sure Idaho is actually a diverse place full of lovely people, and I know there are lots of racists right here in LA, and I'm definitely failing to take productive action to deal with the problem of race in America, but I don't care. I had an awful time and I don't want to go back there.
55 was written without having read 51. I assumed Chetan and Ms. LHI are not white.
I assumed Mrs. LHI was not white, but I thought Chetan is white. If I'm wrong, I apologize for my huffiness.
57: nopes, South Asian, and born in Southern India. I'm darker than a *lot* of Black Americans. Yeah, that made Weatherford, TX *real* fun, growing up.
I also don't find 43.last particularly insightful or important. Do I feel like my existence in Texas is part of my birthright as a Jew in America? Are you kidding me?
58: I really do apologize.
I should not have presumed that you were white by default. Your experience of danger is going to be fraught and full of considerations that I don't have access to. That was a really big mistake for me to make.
I guess that takes the wind out of my sails.
Spouse is Asian and Hispanic, with a dollop of Native American, which in her experience tends to get her lumped with whichever of those groups is locally disfavored by people who are so inclined. But she's also spent most of her life in Hawaii, which means that pretty much anywhere else is going to have more racism directed her way than she gets here.
59: I didn't think the insight was about you, singular. You, as a Jew in America (or anywhere), may also never have had the experience of being in the default category. As a middle-aged straight white guy, I have, I know the difference between that and what I experience living in Hawaii, and I can appreciate the large additional leap from the experience I have here to what Chetan is talking about.
60: Heebie, it's all cool. BTW, I mentioned my conversation with my sister, partially to explain that just because I might understand oppression in one context, I don't understand it in other contexts, and I make mistakes, too. I mean, for sure I do not and cannot truly understand what every woman, including white women, feel every day, every night, due to what men do.
And yes, my wife's exclusion of large parts of the country is based on real things, ranging from funny looks in stores and restaurants, through colleagues who have been spit on or taunted, up to the violence that we're seeing around the country . . . the last five years or so have not been helpful.
That is also the experience and perspective of my wife*.
She grew up in Alaska, and was desperate to leave. I grew up in the PNW, where we currently live and it's tough. She lived in NYC for a long time and felt like that was so much better in terms of not encountering casual racism, and that the PNW is in many ways worse than Alaska was. It means that she's in no mood to go anywhere that seems like it would be worse.
Like Chetan Murphy she's been disturbed by the anti-Asian violence in part because it extends to laces like NYC, and the bay area, and Vancouver which seem like they should be better.
* Apologies for not sharing the news on unfogged when it was timely! We've been together for ages, some of you met her in D.C., we got married in 2018. I intended to say something here, but then I thought I should upload a photo to the flicker group and somehow that just ended up being enough that I didn't get around to it.
64: Congratulations also, but you're not helping! It's the PNW that is most challenging for us in some ways because I grew up there too and value spending time, but her experiences have been mixed enough that she's more reluctant. Do you mind saying generally where you are? The gradient from cosmopolitan to decidedly not can be very steep, and while I think at least Seattle and Portland are pretty good, I have to admit that even they were both pretty damn white not very long ago and their attitudes still have some catching up to do.
Congratulations. Check out the other thread before you try to eat a banana slug.
FWIW, I have never heard the term "banana slug" in the PNW. They're just slugs. I gave my aunt a hard time once about having a case of Carling Black Label in her kitchen but she explained that it was the cheapest available beer for drowning slugs.
The ones we have look like bananas that are too far gone for even banana bread.
Isn't the banana slug someone's mascot? Humboldt state or something?
As I recall, the PNW ones are just gray, like the weather.
66: North of Seattle. Very White, generally lefty politically, but also a lot of people who mostly want to be comfortable-- an understandable motivation, but it means not wanting to pay attention to racial dynamics, because it is White enough for people to just be in a White bubble.
I have less of a sense of how Seattle is these days. Historically, I think Seattle has many of the same challenges, but I assume it has become more cosmopolitan over time.
It's a great part of the country in a lot of ways but . . . there are a lot of blindspots as well (and I can't exempt myself from that; I'm certainly conscious of my own blindspots).
Chetan and Murthy are common South Asian names, and he has explicitly identified himself as such on multiple occasions. Thinking he's white may have been an honest mistake, but it was a remarkably ignorant and unobservant one.
Do I feel like my existence in Texas is part of my birthright as a Jew in America?
Everything you wrote in that subthread suggests very strongly that you do.
Yes, I'm sorry, I feel like an idiot and it was very dumb to slip into the automatic-white assumption.
Also to 74.last, clearly I'm an entitled ass. Let's all go fuck ourselves.
Oregon was legally white-only for a shockingly long time. It's a very racist place.
I feel like it's not so easy to extrapolate where is or isn't going to be comfortable. I had a colleague here whose black wife said she would only move to jobs not in the south, and after two years here they moved to Atlanta. I'm from a small town in the north and have a black brother, so I was a little surprised that it took moving here for them to realize that Atlanta is obviously a more comfortable place to be Black than the rural Midwest, but if you're moving from NYC maybe it's not so obvious. Conversely, Texas has a bad reputation for a reason, but my impression is that Houston is actually one of the better cities in the US in terms of being a comfortable place for minorities. I'd think it's be better than Boston or Portland. That said I've never actually been to Houston.
76: Heebie, by your yardstick, nearly every male is an entitled ass. I wouldn't sweat it.
It probably just makes me look worse to admit that I've been misreading Chetan's last name as "Murphy" until a few moments ago.
74 dickishly said, I must also commend Heebie for a gracious climbdown.
Anyway, I feel like I nailed the key issue in 34.
73: Ah, yes. I grew up in Olympia and a bit south (first 12 years and significant time since on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, aka Trosper Road), we met at UW law school, and we spent a couple of years in Bellingham, which, yeah, you're describing it exactly whether that's what you're describing or not.
81 seems right to me. One of my grandfathers was from Texas and emphasized the "from" part, as in not going back no how, no way (and this while living in Ephrata and Soap Lake).
We've been together for ages, some of you met her in D.C., we got married in 2018.
Oh wow, lovely! I remember meeting her so well. Fabulous news, NickS. Belated congrats!
I know a lot of people of color (mostly but not entirely through work) in the PNW and honestly...my sense in almost every conversation I've had about it is that it's more wearing on a daily basis than Mid-Atlantic/Northeastern US racism, in part because you don't have the same critical mass of POC as kind of a buffer and emotional support network. But take that with a large grain of salt, since obviously I'm a very very white person and only reflecting secondhand knowledge.
On a related note, nothing like being on a protected online space with WOC-led cross-racial organizing and healing going on tonight, after all that has happened this week aaaaand....having the one white guy of 100+ attendees hijack the conversation with his political hobbyhorses.
He got bounced pretty quickly, but it was boggling to me that he could sit through the kind of emotionally raw, deeply personal conversation that was going on and think that somehow NOW was the time for him to start spouting off about his pet peeves in public policy. My fellow white people: Read the room.
83: Yeah, she gives me a hard time for pulling her away from there just when she was getting comfortable and coming back to all that happened here over the next several years, but she has no desire at all to go back.
55 I'm sorry for how you were treated in Idaho, but can't say that I think it would be any different now. There are plenty of lovely people, but even a fairly small minority of aggressive assholes, if unchecked, can completely dominate your experience. And, out in society, they'd be unchecked. Especially now.
I think you might find that gay Austin residents do *not* have the same feeling of safety as gay SFans have, the same feeling that society has their back.
I came out the day I moved to Austin and never felt unsafe there, so maybe don't speak for me. I didn't embrace in the streets, because it was 1991, but I wouldn't feel entirely sure about doing it here in my neighborhood in the bay area in 2021 and I 100% would not do it in neighborhoods further out but still on BART where I go for work and see InfoWars bumper stickers.
72: Sally is a proud Banana Slug. (For only a few more months, and then she's graduating. Time flies.)
Time flies.
I assume the antanaclasis is left as an exercise for the reader.
64: Congratulations! Same girlfriend I met with you and Tia for dim sum a few years back, I assume? She was terrific.
My parents went to Austin one winter and the had drained the river to clean it. Maybe that was San Antonio.
93. I was in San Antonio once and the river looked like it needed a good scrubbing. Never made it to Austin.
George Foreman slugs like a champ, banana slugs like a beer.
They've put a lot of work into controlling the pollution of the aquifer that feeds into the San Antonio river, so supposedly it's much less brown than it used to be. Apparently the Riverwalk portion ran clear during lockdown. The Heebieville river also thrived while our parks were closed last summer - the aerial photos are shockingly cleaner/more vibrant/full of aquatic plant life - which is kind of a bummer to contemplate.
I guess ever since the ending of "PeeWee's Big Adventure," San Antonio has been on a tourist upswing.
I can't wait till the deplorables are back under rocks. It doesn't take more than one or two of them to make a place feel unsafe. I think Chetan would be fine in Calaville if he hung out with my friends (university bubble) but feeling safe in a place is being able to do things like ride your bike without worrying that someone is going to assault you, and my favorite country route was lined with Trump flags and a few of those blue line fascist ones. Utah has a lot of blue areas but the assholes have been out in force since 2016.
Oh wow, lovely! I remember meeting her so well.
64: Congratulations! Same girlfriend I met with you and Tia for dim sum a few years back, I assume? She was terrific.
Thanks! I also have strong memories of Frederick Douglass's house and Dim Sum. She is terrific.
It's funny, it's a little weird to see you write "girlfriend" above, because by habit we tend to use non-gender specific references. For years we would use, "partner." It's been trickier since getting married; we sometimes use "spouse*" but that feels clunkier.
* I used, "wife" above, and we had a brief back-and-forth** about whether "spouse" would have been better. I said that I referred to people having "met her" so gender was already indicated, but that I use "spouse" in other contexts.
** I don't think she's read the thread, but I've passed along the comments referencing her. Thanks for the kind words.
Sally is a proud Banana Slug. (For only a few more months, and then she's graduating. Time flies.)
I feel very old.
No, everyone use "spouse" and normalize it! It's a good word really. (And congratulations NickS.)
The problem comes when you move into Spanish and try "esposx".
I get annoyed with gender-occluding pronouns. Are we pretending that gender isn't central to our identities? Tell me, so I can know how to interact with you! (If you don't want to interact in anything but the most formal way, then fine.)
If we lived in a world with fewer gendered expectations & assumptions then, sure, there would be no need to avoid them.
As it is, on topic for the thread, even if people's Smart Brains know that they should be cautious about gendered expectations, their Dumb Brain loves having default expectations. Using slightly formal language is a way to remind people to engage their Smart Brain -- it is sometimes clunky, but system 2 is sometimes clunky.
It must have been the human I met as well? Congrats!
I'm planning to be in your neck of the woods in the late summer, early fall.
I get annoyed with gender-occluding pronouns.
Do you mean nouns, in the context here?
their Dumb Brain loves having default expectations
I think I mentioned this before, but one time I was in a Starbucks and I called the barista 'he'. And then my smart brain kicked in and though that the barista had a very feminine face. So, I didn't go back for a couple of days. When I did go back, the barista had "He/Him/His" on his name tag. So my dumb brain might be better at this than my smart one.
ogged, give me a use case for "gender-occluding" pronouns. If you're talking about "spouse," I guess I don't think of being married as central to my identity, so it's more like preferring "actor" to "actress" or the like. If you specifically want to know if I'm straight so you can creep on me, basic detective skills are part of having any game at all.
Well, for example if a person says "My spouse plays for the U.S. National Soccer Team" you don't really know what to think, but if a person says, "My wife plays for the U.S. National Soccer Team", then you are properly impressed.
Yes, like "spouse." I'm far too old and tired to be creeping on anyone anymore, but I want to know if you're straight! There are whole ranges of topics and attitudes that one might adopt or avoid depending (surely this isn't controversial) so I find interactions much harder without that information. I'm not twisting anyone's arm! It's just going to be a duller conversation.
I mean, we're having this discussion on a blog which is a site of many interesting conversations and which has a (sadly inactive) front page poster of undisclosed gender.
I think that in a society where misgendering people is perceived as strongly offensive, it's kindest not to obscure one's gender unnecessarily (recognizing that for some people, obscuring their gender is a necessity for their own reasons). Even if you're not going to be upset by being misgendered, the person who's trying to guess often won't know that you don't mind.
If misgendering didn't bother people, it'd be different, but it really does.
I kind of want to be indignant about ogged's wanting to know something more specific than partner/spouse tells him, but...I feel the same way. Partner used to be an instant queer alert. Now everyone uses it. Arguably there's a difference between me wanting to know if someone is on my beleaguered team and I can feel safe saying whatever and a straight person wanting to know because, I think he's saying, he wants to avoid certain topics (yipes? but probably not yipes because I kind of doubt he's wanting to tell gay jokes?) but...I dunno. Unless the purpose of "spouse" is to respect someone's gender non-binary status, I am hesitantly on team "spit it out."
How one introduces oneself to a group of strangers in the midst of a one time interaction, and how one speaks to people one has known for a decade or more, and expect to continue interacting with seems like it might be different. I'm not saying people ought to be actively reminding everyone of everything, but this very thread includes an embarrassing faux pas because of an unstated (but, as was pointed out, not unknowable) context.
This big old fat white guy is always going to be a click or two behind. I'll try to use what someone wants me to use. My March 2021 feeling about 'spouse' is that the usage isn't so universally accepted yet that it doesn't seem like it might be erasure. That is, I don't feel like it's where 'actor' is. Yet.
This from 42 I remember having dim sum in a giant warehouse in Chinatown, and we were the only non-Asian people there gave me pause about what I thought I remembered. But it seemed clear enough that Chetan wasn't trying to tell me that I'd misunderstood.
(When I think of Chetan, I think of that park in what I guess is his home town with a large statue of a local actress famously playing a male character. And how the courthouse there looks like it has ears. We all live in our own little dream world.)
I don't have a specific policy, but my off-the-cuff thoughts are:
1) Labrys neither reads nor comments on the blog, so not using a gendered noun doesn't impact anyone's ability to converse with her.
2) Many of the cases in which I would use "partner", "significant other", or "spouse" are formal interactions in which there's no need to share more information.
3) Obviously I don't mind sharing her gender (though I was interested to go back to the DC thread and not that other people who mentioned her did so in non-gender specific ways which seems polite but not necessary).
4) The terms that prompted my comment were "girlfriend" and (tangentially) "wife." Both of which are fairly loaded terms in my opinion. I wouldn't have said anything about general pronouns. That's the point at which I'm just operating based on feel rather than a specific rule.
Charley Carp, definitely drop me/us a line if you're going to be in the area. It would be fun to see you.
Let me wade in as lurid's spouse of long standing. In our twelve years of marriage "spouse" has been the preferred term by far, for reasons that I don't think we ever formally expounded, but would go something like, we've never liked to think of our marriage as strongly marked by a gender divide, and using "husband" or "wife" would feel, to us, like we were codifying such a divide, and therefore icky and wrong.
To 112, of people are welcome to go around giving off social signals of I AM STRAIGHT or I AM QUEER ALONG THIS AXIS BUT, ODDLY, NOT ALONG THIS OTHER ONE, but I'm uneasy with the idea that such signaling really ought to be the norm in most contexts. There are lots of reasons why people might prefer a bit of occlusion. (For one thing, labels flatten complexity, and it's not automatically the case that a woman considers herself straight because she's married to a man, or vice versa.)
I was gonna mention this in a check-in thread, but as long as it's somewhat relevant, I'm the newly hatched trans commenter who's been going by Jacinda Ardern in the check-in threads since January. (Doing well, thanks everybody for all your nice messages, and isn't it lucky that I picked a feminine pseud by "accident.") So in this case it's very helpful that our marriage isn't gendered, because going from "lurid's husband" to "lurid's wife" would suggest a fundamental alternation in our relation that just hasn't happened. There's no quantum entanglement such that lurid becomes suddenly more queer as a consequence of me realizing something about myself.
To 114, I'm now having my first experiences of getting knowingly misgendered in public, and it sucks, but mostly why it sucks is that it's happening in the most superficial interactions, like the Target checkout line, where there's just no reason for gender markers to get involved at all. I keep wishing we were speaking a language like Hungarian or Persian where it would be a moot point. So I don't know that the etiquette around gender-occluded third parties is actually that difficult: if someone mentions their spouse to you, it means at that point in the conversation they don't feel a desire to disclose that person's gender, and to me the pragmatic and courteous thing would to use singular "they" for that person until you get some more explicit cue, which might come 15 seconds later in the conversation, or after a month when you know each other better, or never.
The binary is everywhere, but that doesn't mean you have to invite it to dinner.
We're getting hipster pizza for dinner, so the binary is going to miss out on about the best crust I've had in Pittsburgh.
Hey, hi there! I am the nosiest of nosy people, but have you picked a new name?
I'm not switching to 'Wry Cooter.' Stop asking.
Hi LB! Yes, for people who know the name I used as a dude, I'm now using that name with -ine on the end.
Nice! I don't know why, but when I've been told someone I know is transitioning, the new name is reliably the first thing I'm curious about.
I truly do understand wanting to have a bright line between gay and straight, wanting to know who's on which side of it, and wanting people to be decent enough to fucking admit to being in the privileged class. I admit to occasionally (I hope not that often) being unhelpfully coy because I don't always love the positions I'm put in; I don't expect sympathy for that. I have a bunch of unprocessed feelings around these issues and words are not coming so easily, so I'll just leave it there.
Our piano tuner is trans, and she said that her wife preferred the term 'spouse' after she transitioned (they'd been married 20 years.) Interestingly, I think the gay couples I know tend to use 'husband' and 'wife' more now than they did ten years ago, and most of the people I know who use 'partner' are straight hetero couples (some of this is just percentages, of course.) I wonder if there's been a shift post wide(r) spread marriage equality.
My spouse wants to bring her piano here (from her parents), but honestly it's really heavy.
wishing we were speaking a language like Hungarian or Persian
Lourdes Khanum, if you think you're getting out of a conversation in Persian without your gender coming up...
And congrats!
Also, NickS, I intended no call out to you in this thread! I was just venting a bit about kids on my lawn.
And now I see that the statue I was thinking of was torn down sometime in the 70s by high school students from a rival town. Kids on lawns!
131: Took me a while to remember, but .... really? They tore down the statue of Mary Martin, eh? I see they erected another one. I'm sure I was a high school student at the time and I don't remember it. Whatevs. Didn't read any further than that, b/c don't care.
131: BTW, as shitty as Weatherford was, Mineral Wells says "hold my beer". Truly, the ballsack of towns. We originally landed there in my 6th grade year. By the end of that school year, we'd moved to Weatherford, b/c "jesus, can't have your children in a school like that, they literally will learn *nothing*."
I had an interesting mixup caused by neutral "partner" language a while back. Our realtor has a job history that includes a writing job at an organization which makes it clear that he's queer, and he was often referring to his partner, and both me and my spouse assumed that they were a gay male couple. Like 9 months into the process, he said "wife" instead of "partner" which resulted in us being very confused (though of course not saying anything) and figured he must be bi. 5 years later when recommending him to a friend, I got confused about this all over again, and it finally occurred to me that he's trans (which was easy enough to verify online once I'd guessed). I'm pretty sure in this case they were already partners pre-transition, which as has already been stated makes the partner language make a lot of sense. There's nothing particularly important about this story, because it just didn't matter to the realtor relationship whether he's gay or straight or cis or trans, but boy was I ever confused. (It'd probably be fine to tell this story without being presidential, I'm just taking an abundance of caution in case he's not out here and somehow someone in my town lurks.)
The presumption of queerness with "partner" is strong. When I was catching people up on where Tim had gone off to, I generally explained that he had moved to NC to move in with his business partner, and people reliably boggled and then looked understanding when my next sentence made it clear that she was a woman.
130: I figured I was opening myself to that! Fair, there's grammar and there's life, but a girl can dream in any declension.
133 One of my favorite people here in mt, a woman of genuine and admirable accomplishment, is from MW. Left in the 60s though, in a really shaking the dust of this town off my boots kind of way.
132 My fourth grade teacher somehow thought it was important enough that we all see the thing to arrange a field trip, from a school on what was then the south/southwestern outskirts of Fort Worth. I don't know what we were supposed to learn from this, but IME we're all pretty much self-taught anyway -- at least with respect to what you retain even a few years past a lesson.
135: You should have probably just said "some whore."
"Partner" does sound like we're probably talking about a gay couple to me as well, but "spouse" is what I'd use in the workplace to stay professional. Especially if you're talking generically about work-life balance or something, and don't want to sound like you're only addressing men with stay at home wives, or women pulling a double shift, or whatever.
Also, NickS, I intended no call out to you in this thread!
No worries, but also, I realized that I am on the side of, "normalize non gender specific nouns. " I don't feel dogmatic about it, but I think it should be an option that doesn't require any explanation-- and I do think Standpipe Bridgeplate is a positive example, and I do think it's polite that people who met us in DC used language that didn't specify gender.
This thread is also helpful because the "Smart Brain" / "Dumb Brain" distinction captures a significant part of why I think it matters (and, "The binary is everywhere, but that doesn't mean you have to invite it to dinner." Captures my other reasons)
Partner has an extra layer of ambiguity, because there are business partners that aren't romantic partners as well as business partners that are also romantic partners, and there are also romantic partners that don't have a business.
I like that there is now the option to be a human that identifies as neither male nor female but I wish there was a different term for it than non-binary. Non-binary seems to me like it should be a description of a reality that we all are male and female to varying degrees and some of us are equal parts both, and maybe some of us are neither.
There's two kinds of cherries, and two kinds of fairies, and two kinds of pardners to hold.
Someone should probably "neighbor, please" me.
Truly, after the drubbing I took yesterday, I should not attempt playful jokes about groups of which I am not a part. Of which I am not a pardner. I'll stop now. I just think it would be great fun to co-op some cowboy lingo and pwn the 'servatives.
Belated congrats, NickS! I was actually just thinking the other day about Labrys and wondering if you were still together. I drive through her part of town more often these days than I had in a while (due to where the AirBnB is relative to where our old house is).
According to Einstein, you can picture the AirBnB as being in an elevator accelerated through space to figure where it is relative to things.
Okay, but do it quietly so you don't bother the neighbors.
I trailed this post here, on the monarchy as an influencer content-marketing operation, so here it is: https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2021/03/21/the-monarchy-as-a-content-marketing-operation/
Belated congrats, NickS! I was actually just thinking the other day about Labrys and wondering if you were still together.
Thanks. FWIW, your engagement announcement was one of the things that reminded me that I'd never shared the news here.
Topically, I'm just learning that there was a local rally about violence against Asians and Sandra Oh gave a good speech about it standing in front of the convenience store with all the bongs in the window.
142, not sure if this is tangential or obvious or displaying my horribleness:
I like "spouse" and "they" pronouns also to indicate person's gender is not your business, you'll have to get along without without indicating anything about the gender of the person in question. Not least because I'm old enough to remember all the fights about rewriting discussions of professional roles to not use "he" as if it were neutral.
But I've seen at least one person complaining that such a use of "they" takes away "they" from persons who are nonbinary in themselves. Did not have an opportunity to ask how we should write about doctors, etc.
There are several kinds of slugs in the PNW, not all native, and it really matters to letting the native banana slugs be that banana slugs are detritivores and *not* the ones that will skeletonize your crops overnight.
Banana slugs are also the ones that will hang at eye-level from a tall bush during their lengthy sex acts.
Oh! A new axis of oops! My sweetie just remarked to me that several actually-Irish coworkers have pointed out that a lot of USian St Patricks Day imagery is so offensive that they're willing to compare it to blackface (and not, they specify, that they think that's minor). Leprechauns are the woooorst, but not the only.
Sweetie might have heard this first because of visibly Irish heritage -- though we're not sure if it's visible to people actually from Ireland, or just to USians.
The worst I've seen of that is from Americans of Irish ancestry.
I'm sure there isn't an actual picture of me on the internet in green face, but I've certainly been on the wrong side on this in lots of other ways. It's progress that people like me have begun to feel embarrassed about all the stupid shit we've done, and the harm we've caused thereby.
St. Patrick's Day in the US might be kind of a special case: a formerly despised minority has succeeded in getting a holiday that validates their place in US society to near universal acceptance, and the trade-off is silly imagery, bad pretend accents, and green beer. And that stuff can be phased out.
What if a former classmate recruits (probably a paid hire) a person with dwarfism to dress like a leprechaun and go to the bars with him? Asking for a friend.
The Italians really missed the boat with Columbus Day, huh. Not their choice of Columbus as symbol, which made sense for the aspirationally-white at the time, but that the day doesn't contain much anyone looks forward to imx, besides a day off work sometimes.
And we're moving on from Columbus.
There's a guy of Finnish heritage who works in the suite next door, so of course he knows St Urho. The made up saint whose day in March 16, so the Finns can get a head start on ths Irish.
My office mate is Greek-American, her assistant Assoniboine, so, along with the Finn and his German-American boss we all wore green.
Think of all the racist stereotypes that we could now be embarrassed for celebrating!
I just started the second season of GLOW. It really is amazingly deft (maybe? hopefully?) how they navigate the ever-presence of racist stereotypes of the 80s without aligning themselves with racist humor.
(Or does it? I guess I'm not the one who should get to decide if it works.)
Something that really, really, really bothers me about the attacks on Asian-Americans. I guess I understand them happening out in the U(n)G(overned)T(ribal)R(egions). I don't have to like it, or accept it, to understand that it's just a part of the general racism and intolerance of the Deplorables. But here in the Bay Area? Where Asian-Americans have lived for well over a century in significant numbers? That's insane, and really angers me.
The tensions between east Asians and African Americans goes back decades in the cities. Definitely an uptick lately but by no means something new.
Also, race not necessarily a motivating factor in many of the attacks and robberies. There's been a big uptick in these crimes in general in the cities and often Asians are seen as easy targets. A former robber posted about this years ago.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111108082518/http:/news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=309bdba278fb51300087612ae8f931c2
But if "Asians are seen as easy targets," then... Asians are being targeted. Hearing that it's motivated by opportunism rather than pure, burning racial animus isn't going to make Asian people feel any safer -- how could it? If a group of people is being targeted for any reason, that's a problem for that group, and not one they alone are responsible for solving.
Oaklandside did a two-part article a month ago in which they talked to a whole lot of people on the ground. I am not necessarily endorsing the reporting, but it's certainly based on more conversations than I have had. One point about policing in particular:
In December, as part of a larger package of cuts, Oakland's city administrator, Ed Reiskin, who is managed by Mayor Libby Schaaf, did cut three beat patrol officers from Chinatown, including an Asian-American liaison officer who is bilingual in Cantonese and English.
Chan said that having an officer assigned to Chinatown who spoke Cantonese helped ensure that more residents felt comfortable reporting crimes and helped them report what happened accurately. In his request to the mayor at a press conference, Chan asked the mayor to bring back the Asian-American liaison officer if possible. The mayor has stated that there are no plans to bring removed officers back to Chinatown at this point.
Quote from Elke, reviewing a practice test: "My brain knew that, but my high-powered nerves and fear of failure did not know that."