I’ve noticed that “identity” has become a popular topic of late. Granted, it has probably been a popular topic for several millenia, but it has recently dawned on me – after listening to the President of France today – that there is something of a schizophrenic understanding of the concept. To understand what I mean, consider two recent news events:

1) The suicide of “Leelah Alcorn.” Alcorn was born Joshua, physically male, but by 17 had decided that “she” was a female, wanted to change “her” name to “Leelah,” wanted sex change operations and hormones and all the rest, and when “her” parents refused, “she” chucked herself in front of a truck, thus using some uninvolved truck driver as her means to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Now, don’t get me wrong: people who are physically male and think they are female is a Real Thing. It’s not that they are nuts (though I imagine there is a notable fraction of that), but many of them are genetically, hormonally or structurally screwy. Something went wrong in their embryonic development, and a female brain got inserted into a male body (or the other way ’round). Unless you yourself are bugnuts, you can’t look at this situation and think that the person under discussion is necessarily morally wrong, or that their desire to adjust their physicality to match their persona is inappropriate. Sometimes, things just go wrong; if someone was born blind, or with a missing limb, you’d hardly blame them if at 17 they decided that they wanted to take advantage of medical technology to correct the flaw.

That said… Leelah/Joshua was physically a male. Look at the photos of him, and it’s clear he was a dude. A kinda1980’s sitcom stereotype of a gay dude, perhaps, but a dude. And for the bulk of human history… if you’re built like a dude, yer a dude. That’s the way the vast majority of people have been raised and naturally think. So if you’re in this situation, you might *want* everyone to think of you as a chick and refer to you as a chick, but most people are going to see a dude. And the more you demand that they see you as something that they don’t, the more screwy they’re going to think you are.

Still: society has gotten to the point where “gender identity” is such a politically correct concept that every media outlet is going to accept the gender identity chosen by the subject of the piece. And thus Bradley Manning, the Army traitor who stole a bunch of data, delivered it to Wikileaks and is now luxuriating in federal prison for the next several decades, is generally referred to as “Chelsea” Manning, despite the fact that he/she is not too likely to get hormones or a sex change anytime soon. And half of the news about Leelah Alcorn is how her evil parents buried their son under his birth name.

So: it is accepted wisdom in our culture that if you want to be considered a woman, even though you look, talk and are built like a man… you will be accepted and referred to as a woman.

OK.

But then…

2) In the last couple of decades the world had seen a spate of terrorist acts carried out by people who say they are Muslims, and say they are doing these things in the name of their faith. And yet, we get statements like this:

French President Hollande: “These Fanatics Have Nothing To Do With Islam”

Wait, what?

———————-

On the one hand, society is being told to accept the self-chosen identities of *some* people, but to reject it for others. This is not new; even GWB yammered on about how the 9/11 hijackers had nothing to do with Islam, even when it was abundantly clear that that was the primary motivating factor.

So long as such things as identity are so chaotically understood, there will be chaos in society.

If anyone has a solution to this conundrum, I’d be thrilled to hear it.

Wednesday nights “Daily Show” had a bit of a problem: how to be funny in light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. I recall the Funny Industry had the same problem immediately after 9/11, with a number of comedy shows simply going off the air for a few days to try to figure things out. Of course, the Hebdo incident is less of a problem there… a dozen dead, rather than a few thousand… and it happened Way Over There, rather than in the very heart of the TV industry. Still I think The Daily Show managed to pull off the right mix: they started with a good (if incomplete) commentary on the incident, and then promptly segued into the only thing that could be funny in the current context: Nazi cows.

Followed by:

Anti-police protester undergoes use of force scenario training

Reverend Jarrett Maupin, a civil rights activist, had a quick change of heart after undergoing three different shoot-don’t-shoot scenarios

So, there’s that.

Gotta admire the commitment to cause here… as well as the workmanship.

A Finnish movie where the President of the United States (Mace Windu) gets shots down in the forested mountains of Lappland, is being hunted by badguys, and defended by a kid with a bow: “Big Game.”

A wind tunnel model of the Saturn I, checking specifically for base heating (i.e. heating of the base of the vehicle, between the engines, due to radiant heat from the plumes and convection/conduction from hot exhaust gases recirculating between the engines). This model is odd in that it depicts the clustered booster stage as a straight cylinder; further, there appears to be at least one long fairing up the side (although that could be an artifact of reflections & shadows). I suspect this *may* be a repurposed Atlas model.

Here’s your weird for today: someone took an audio snippet of Carl Sagan saying “billion” and stretched it to an hour long. Not exactly the most melodious of tunes… but it’d be a hoot to sneak this into the regular chant rotation of you favorite newage-practicing hippie commune.

Since I’m unsure embedding will work, you can try it HERE.

The terrorist attack in Paris was brought on because the targeted company publishes “Charlie Hebdo,” a satirical French-language newspaper that has published cartoons mocking, or at least depicting, Islam’s inventor Mohammad. The goal was not only to punish Charlie Hebdo, but also to discourage future mockery of Mo. It was, in short, a direct attack on free expression.

There are two responses that should be spooled up and enacted just as soon as possible:

1) Find the perpetrators and kill them. Or capture, charge, try and imprison them, if you must.
2) Promptly show that efforts at squashing free expression will not only fail, but backfire.

Most people obviously cannot do much about #1, but #2? That’s a game anyone can play. Unfortunately, it’s a game a lot of journalistic cowards are too *afraid* to play:

Some Outlets Are Censoring Charlie Hebdo’s Satirical Cartoons After Attack

As one publisher says in the piece, “what right do I have to risk the lives of my staff to make a point?”

That’s right. You have no right to risk the lives of your staff. So stop sending them to war zones, disaster scenes, high crime areas.

The article includes a distressing number of photos included in major media outlets that show the Charlie Hebdo magazine, but censor out the “offending” cartoons. Feh.

So, these are the ones that got censored. I don’t speak a word of French beyond “merde,” so I have no idea if these are in any way NSFW. So I’ve put a little break here juuuuust in case you’re feeling squishy about opening them up at work or some such.

It should be noted that Charlie Hebdo seems to have been a generally anti-religion publication. Do a Google image search, and you’ll see a *lot* of cartoons, many quite vulgar, that depict old-school anti-Semitic cartoons… and some seriously anti-Catholic cartoons (anti-Catholic. In freakin’ France.) And yet… I don’t see a whole lot of news items about how the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed by Da Joooz or shot up by the Papists.

It’s not every man who can pull off a good Peter Griffin impression…

The eastern half of the US and eastern Europe are in arctic conditions. The rest of the world? Not so much. Yesterday I opened the windows to air this joint out a bit. Asia looks like it’s baking.