Within the Event Horizon, All Cats Are Grey

"So go ahead and point your finger
Tell me who to love: is it him or her?"

In This Moment - Natural Born Sinner


Normally I try to space out my posts tagged "humanity" or "faithosis" or "FEMale chauvINISM" because
1) my hilariously sparse, single-digit readership doesn't want to hear me yammer about that crap constantly. They prefer video games and SciFi.
2) and more importantly, I don't want to yammer about that crap constantly. I'd rather be talking about cool stuff... like video games and SciFi.

But some undeniably cool beans were spilled last week in the real world of non-fictional science, and one of them had a video component, so I started surfing yesterday to cobble together some fanciful riff combining the new hominid (sub?)species and the first successful imaging of a black hole. It was going to include the predictable Muse song lyric quote and everything. Which is when I ran into this crap: 
"Male Scientist Claps Back at Trolls Who Tried to Discredit Female Colleague's Role in Black Hole Photo"
So after losing half of you by denouncing male bashing in my last post I'm going to lose the other half now by denouncing female bashing. I decided to sleep on it until today to calm down so that this entire post would not resolve to a page full of yelling YOU FUCKING RETARDS.

And hey, the good guy in that article's an Ursula K. Le Guin fan. Implicit high-five! It seems appropriate enough to the topic at hand, since Le Guin's most interesting work The Dispossessed deals largely with the betrayal of idealism by base human nature. As the black hole image was being announced, one of the (many, many) researchers involved in processing the data posted a facebook picture of herself excited at the unveiling. And the internet apparently went ape over it. Given that I only engage in anti-social media, I could not have given two shits about her booked face picture even if you doped me with laxatives. I do, however, care about intellectual integrity, which is why this latest chapter in the decline of civilization ticks me off.

I despise feminism as a chauvinistic, dogmatic, dishonest, reactionary scourge upon society. I will also gladly denounce feminism's much more pervasive instinctive basis, gynocentrism, the presumption of females' greater right to health, safety and happiness, the presumption of women's entitlement to extract labor from men, the presumption that society must be built around feminine nesting instincts, as one of the basic intellectual hurdles our primitive species must overcome if it wants to consider itself sentient, along with religion or tribalism. Certainly, there is some truth to observing the incongruity in a 4/5ths male research project being represented in our public consciousness by a female. I don't doubt the various internet personalities and media outlets who popularized her picture could have found plenty of images of the project's males geeking out in turn over their success. But they weren't as cute. We instinctively respond more favorably to a female presence, whether we're male or female. Yes, this creates an unconscious pervasive bias, as can be demonstrated rather flamboyantly by every male band with a female vocalist and media figurehead.

So it would've been perfectly reasonable for people to complain to everyone linking and reposting the latest meme "yeah, ok, now how about popularizing some other images of the various research teams involved instead of just that one adorable girlish squee" ... but that's not what the Twit mobs did, is it YOU FUCKING RETARDS! You decided to attack the woman in question. And of the thousands involved in the whole overblown burst of interwebz hot air, if there was one singular person who was not at fault, that was Bouman herself. She saw the result of years of work, proof of her participation in the advancement of scientific knowledge, materializing before her. She was excited about it. Damn straight. She had every right to be excited and still does. I may not be as fluent in the vernacular as I should be, but I do believe the phrase "you go girl" applies.

Social advancement is not about male vs. female or left wing vs. right wing but about intellect vs. stupidity, reason and creativity vs. the lowest common denominator. Always has been. Inasmuch as feminism appeals to base instinct and sentimentality over free thinking and prevents individual growth, I despise it... and when meninists do the same, they evoke the same scorn. Only four and a half years ago we were arguing over the debasement of Matt Taylor by morons trying to erase his professional achievement, astroturfing a battle of the sexes over (it never sounds any less ridiculous) the shirt off his back. Now his self-appointed public defenders want to debase another scientist... over what? Some pissing contest over lines-of-code counts? Even if you were right (and you're apparently off by more than an order of magnitude) you would still be wrong. Quantity is not quality and you're objectively not in a position to judge that from across a Twit feed. If your answer to everything that happens around you is limited to a knee-jerk "another victim of the fem-o-centric fem-ocracy!" you're not an edgy social critic. You're feminism's poorer cousin.

If you have a complaint about CNN's choices of material, go bitch about it to CNN. Better yet, apply for a job with them and try to be more balanced, sedate and objective. If, however, you are demeaning an intellectual achievement by reducing it to the physical attributes of its collaborators, you are part of the anti-intellectual problem. You are as bad as the feminists claiming the spotlight by right of ovaries YOU FUCKING RETARDS!!!