Save The Poor From Climate Change!

Willis Eschenbach asks "exactly which poor are they supposed to be saving, and from what?"

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony:

Peter Thomas, in his Marxism talk about Gramsci and the 99%, made a defence of the concept of proletarian hegemony against certain misconceptions that might put people off it. Pointing out that the working class is numerically and proportionately larger than ever, he suggested that the 99% was potentially the name for hegemony as a principle of unity, rather than as simply a form of domination: what we all have in common, despite our immense differences in identity, social category, occupational culture and habitus, etc., is that we are all exploited. This is what working class hegemony means in practice today. Not, generally speaking, the unity of a national popular bloc of classes under working class leadership: this becomes less the case as capitalist mode of production has entrenched itself, and thus simplified the class system in one sense. Rather, it means the dominance of the working class as the axis of our common exploitation and thus as the strategically privileged basis for organisation. The arrival of the Asturian miners in Puerta del Sol, site of the Indignado rebellion, could be the the sign and sanction of this hegemony in motion. The question, then, is whether Spain's heteroclite social and industrial struggles can be stitched together under the banner of the 99%.

What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our heroine thought fast and saved a life. My mother once worked in a labor and delivery ward to put herself through medschool in the days before Roe v Wade and this type of situation was common.

This is a great story because it illustrates two points. One, the war on abortion by the right wing is futile. We know abortion is more common where it is illegal and cases like these are more common. Banning abortion does not save lives. It results in more abortions, and more lives lost. Worse, in countries with strict bans even treatment of ectopic pregnancy is forbidden where there is still a beating heart detected by ultrasound. Doctors in these countries can literally go to jail for saving a woman's life, all for the sake of a non-viable embryo that will kill the mother. The hypocrisy of calling this position pro-life is demonstrated by cold hard data. More women die. More fetuses are aborted.
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What Illegal Abortion Looks Like

Income Inequality is Bad for Society

Really Bad. (via)

Or maybe it is an underlying problem that causes all other problems, and income inequality is just another measure for this problem?

The Four Horsemen Discussion - Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens

Part 1


Part 2

The evolution of the Alpha?

Anthropology argument against tribal alpha-male narrative
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There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their social group — not exactly a benefit to reproduction. It appears that human ancestors likely lived in dominance hierarchies sometime in our distant past, but probably prior to the evolution of the hominin (human) line (Boehm 1999; Debreuil 2010). These works indicate that whatever “alpha” dominance tendencies evolved in our remote ancestors has most likely been evolving in the opposite direction for a couple million years.
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Evolutionary argument against tribal alpha-male narrative
Without going into tedious detail, it’s unlikely that the alpha-male behavioral type (however imprecise that classification may be) is particularly adaptive. Traits that confer significant reproductive advantage tend to spread through a population rapidly. That basically means that traits that consistently vary widely among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being alpha was the ne plus ultraof mate wooing strategies, there would be a whooooooollle lot fewer “betas.”

What is society? The cheeseburger example

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.