Livre d'Or

This has been brewing for a while, but I'm sticking my flag in the ground:
I won't be drawn into generational conflict in the LGBTQ+ community
( rant )

In short, yes, it's uncomfortable when parts of your culture are rejected by the generation following you. But the real enemy is straight people who hold actual social power to harm Queer people, not teenagers who are sometimes clumsy and inept in their rebellion against the previous generation.

One thing that's really frustrating me about a lot of political discussion lately is this baked-in assumption that the interests of "young" people are always opposed to the interests of "old" people. As far as I can see it comes from both left and right, and it seems really wrong to me, so I'm going to try to articulate why.

( semi-coherent rant )

Happy International Women's Day to all my international women and everyone who loves them.

I'm going to use the excuse of the day to post a rant that's been brewing for a while. Namely, I'm going to reveal a dirty little secret about academia that I don't think is talked about much even within the ivory tower, let alone outside it.

( academic wives )

The sentiment: the NHS should prioritize spending on frontline services sounds innocuous, but it's a big factor in all the harm done to the NHS since Blair became PM in the late 90s. Prioritizing frontline services means underfunding, outsourcing, selling assets and quasi-privatization. People opposed to these outcomes often claim, we should prioritize frontline services, as if that were the opposite, but it's not. It's at best a euphemism for destroying publicly funded healthcare, when it isn't an active deception.

( mostly rant, tangential suicide mention )

It seems to have become a truism in certain corners of the internet that the Social Justice movement has gone bad because all they do is bully people in the name of vaguely pro-minority causes. This is a slippery sort of meme, I feel. It's hard to counter without appearing to argue in favour of bullying. I am going to attempt to push back against it, though, because what I see is that this social justice = bullying idea is being used as a rhetorical shield for some quite nasty stuff.

( thinky thoughts )

I don't want anyone to be bullied, and I most certainly don't want to contribute to bullying. But I also don't want the concept to be extended so much that it becomes meaningless, or worse, a way to let racists go completely unchallenged.

Politically speaking, I am firmly committed to a body-positive stance. If I want to sum up a fairly complex set of ideas, I would say that means I don't think people should be judged or face discrimination based on what their body is like, whether that's on aesthetic grounds, or health grounds, or (as so often happens) a convoluted mixture where the two are confused or treated as interchangeable. I also am positive about bodies, in that I don't think it's virtuous to mortify one's body for the sake of attaining some higher spiritual or similar goal, I think people are their bodies, and bodies should be treated with respect and care. But that's not the aspect of body-positivity that I want to talk about here.

As part of being body positive, I include fat bodies. There are lots of different groups trying to improve fat people's experience of the world, using labels such as fat acceptance, fat positivity, health at every size, fat pride and so on. And they all have slightly different ideas of what it means to be an activist in favour of fat people. I broadly agree with all of these movements, but I don't subscribe in detail to every aspect of their philosophy, so I don't consider myself as a member of any of the movements supportive of fat people. For me, it's part of my general belief that people are their bodies and people are worthy of respect; there isn't a certain weight or BMI or whatever above which that principle ceases to apply.

( discusses bodies and body image, dieting and weight loss etc )

Have I alienated everybody yet?

I may be turning into one of those American style liberals...

( a couple of things from the Berlin conference that seem to fit a liberal frame )

(I stole the subject line from Joanna, by the way...)

I've been annoyed for a long time about the MMR autism scare. Well, annoyed is an understatement; I'm between furious and thoroughly discouraged about humanity at the combination of scientific ignorance and sensationalism which has created a "controversy" where none should exist. The artificial controversy is not just a matter of academic interest, it has serious medical consequences. It has led to an epidemiologically significant proportion of parents refusing to let their children be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, which means these diseases are becoming prevalent again. That means children are at risk of permanent disability and death from a cause which is almost completely preventable.

I can't do anything about this, not even on the small scale where my actions would have any effect anyway. Because the story has been presented as a controversy, anything I might say about the topic is taken as taking one side in a polarized debate. There are plenty of people who feel equally passionately that MMR might cause autism, so people can pick either view based on who has the strongest arguments or the most emotive rhetoric. But the prevalence of the wrong view here is lethal.

( Actually, it's worse than I thought )

So, a combination of scientific forgery and unscrupulous media reporting led to a lot of people believing that being vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella simultaneously would cause autism. As a result, about 1 in 5 of the children who would otherwise have been vaccinated in the last ten years have not been vaccinated. This means that the population immunity is below the critical threshold; unfortunately, this means that even those who are vaccinated are at increased risk because no vaccine is perfect, so you need a big enough proportion of the population to be vaccinated so that the disease can't spread. At least one child has died of measles in that time; maybe he would have died anyway, but no child in the UK died of measles in the decade before the controversy broke.

I think the problem goes deeper than just people holding false beliefs about the vaccine, though. Part of the issue is that people think that measles, mumps and rubella are just minor ailments that lead to nothing worse than feeling miserable for a few days, whereas autism is this big horrible scary thing. I think it's important to emphasize that autism is neither infectious nor lethal, unlike measles and mumps. And that in turn is part of the stigma against mental illness and intellectual disability, which leads to horrors like this. (Thanks to rho, for making me despair of humanity even more than when I started writing this post.)

Just a guide so that you (collectively) will know in future. I don't mean it personally; I do actually know that everybody who did the things I'm listing here meant well, and I appreciate all your good thoughts.

( word to the wise )

*sigh* I'm really, really glad I have lots of kind people in my life who care about me. I'm posting this not because I'm annoyed at anyone, but because I assume that people genuinely want to make me feel better, so they will want to know how to do so effectively (and not inadvertently make things worse). The answer is: distract me. Talking to me reminds me that I do have all these wonderful connections with my friends. But talk about something that isn't my problems, politics, what's going on in your life, whatever.

Right now I am most grateful to usuakari and tooticky who organized an extremely pleasant and distracting evening on Thursday when I was reeling from bad news. It's great to meet new people, and they were really sensitive even though they'd never met me before, and generally wonderful. Also to MK and family with whom I had an absolutely wonderful, relaxing, happy weekend. Settlers of Catan is a top-notch distraction, and I find it impossible to be upset when I'm being smothered in affection by the Most Adorable Boy in the World. Not to mention lots and lots of good food and cute fuzzy animals... just try staying in a bad mood while watching platypuses playing or tickling a wombat's tummy.

---

I've extended my stay in Australia for another week. There are various reasons for this which I shan't go into in a public post, but the main thing is, expect me to continue more or less incommunicado until 30 November. I need to post properly about everything I've done since Wednesday, and a review of The Worm Ourobourous, and probably some more detail about the thing I was upset about on Thursday and what I'm doing about it.

And thank you all for being good friends to me, (even if some of you haven't quite got the sensitivity thing down). Now a few days have elapsed I'm revisiting people's comments and actions and feeling loved instead of my initial reaction of feeling annoyed and upset.

DNA sequencing is not magic.

Thankyou.

This comment prompted by a combination of:
– an otherwise good novel in which the simple fact of sequencing the human genome, described in mystical terms, is enough to propel the world into an SF future.
– a death penalty debate where it is suggested that now we have DNA evidence, we can execute people in good conscience.
– general frustration with scientific illiteracy.

I shall now return to my regularly scheduled thesis writing (in which sequencing DNA does not magically solve any problems, and in many cases does not in fact give any useful information about biology.)