photography – Page 25 – The Unwanted Blog

Two years ago, Bruce the cat fell into my possession via the simple process of walking up to me at the post office and yelling at me… and then stretching up to me when I reached down to pick him up. As y’all may recall, one of the first things I did with him was take him to the vet and get him checked for Horrible Diseases… and he tested positive for Feline Leukemia. The vet said that this was a death sentence, with a lifespan to be measured in a handful of increasingly painful and unpleasant months, and suggested that the best thing would be to put him down promptly. Because I’m a sucker for a hard luck cat, I instead opted to give him his vaccinations anyway and to give him the best life I could for a few months until things got bad, and then make the hard decision.

This is him as of a week or two ago:

There is, it seems, a narrow window when a cat can show positive for a recently acquired case of leukemia, and yet the virus can be cleared out of the cats system via vaccination. I would imagine it’s something like rabies: an essentially 100% fatal virus that you can be virtually 100% “cured” of if you get vaccinated against soon enough after infection. Bruce, it seems, got *real* lucky. Kicked out of his apartment, living on the streets next to speeding cars, infected with a fatal virus, he yelled at just the right soft-hearted schmuck at just the right moment and now he’s living in the lap of luxury.

I await the day that these sort of reports include information that these people have cured a disease, or launched a satellite, or discovered a new planet, or generated a watt of usable power.

Feminist prof says ‘traditional science’ is rooted in racism

Read the paper written by the professor. It is remarkable. In that “I don’t know if this is a joke or not” sense. I think this kinda sums it up:

Just as feminists may question the political utility of arguing that women are as smart as men, instead of challenging the idea of intelligence itself, I argue here that we as feminists may have fallen into the same trap with passion for science.

One wonders: if the idea of differences in intelligence offends to the point where “scientists” such as this are willing to challenge the idea that intelligence actually exists, does the fact tat some people weight more or less than others mean that weight and mass don’t exist?

and then there’s this:

Hammonds retells the story of how during what was supposed to be a “fun” summer math program, she and the two other black students were not having fun because they were not able to keep up due to differences in previous education compared to the white students. This is an example of how passion and exhibiting a desire to do science cannot be considered separate from the ways racism, sexism, and other systems of power differently educate and expose people to what are considered the proper objects and backgrounds in science.

In other words: science is bad because some people are better at it than others. Guess what: someone with n interest in music might find that they are not as good at it as the other people at Band Camp because the other people got an earlier start. Doesn’t mean that music is inherently bad. of course, that particular argument is promptly followed up with:

Ruth Hubbard further points out that taking pleasure in observing our “natural world” is class- and race-based, as many people grow up without “nature” around them

You’ll be shocked that the author is enamored of Marxism, dislikes capitalism, and thinks that being willfully ignorant and disdainful of science and the scientific method is a good, “revolutionary”approach to dealing with the problems of the world.

Mostly this seems to boil down to a realization the author has that science does not support her notion of what feminism is (not “women are legally the equal of men, with all the same human rights,” but “men suck, capitalism sucks, white people suck, feels before reals, magick is Teh Awesome, gimme stuff for free”). Since her form of feminism cannot be scientifically validated, and in fact is scientifically invalidated, it must be because science itself is wrong.