Peterkin

There is a handy lookup function on my browser that allows me to bridge small rivulets of ignorance in particular subjects. I avail myself of this function from time to time, hoping that eventually my vast ignorance will diminish. The insolence, however, is intransigent.

Of course we cannot agree - especially about your low opinion of all human beings. Comapare that chart with the list of all the English words you don't know (e.g: thoroughly) and have managed to lived without, so far. Infacilty in a few more pronouns will make no appreciable difference to your communication skills. Only the tense is wrong. Every biology textbook did refer to male and female, wherever the authors deemed it applicable to sexual reproduction. (There are, of course, other kinds of reproduction, which involve no genders at all) What biology textbooks will refer to is yet to emerge. Whether biology textbook will delve into the details gender fluidity and variation depends on the level of instruction.

Remember that the caste mentality goes very deep in India. If you're one of an unvalued or unwanted group, you take what you can get.

The final arbiter of all things natural has pronounced. I guess we all feelin' preddy small right now.

Looks like the most succinct diatribe against social welfare that I've seen in a while.

in an article from ACLU Ohio references this interesting map from PBS. A lot more than just interesting, actually: it's a well-compressed education on the subject of diverse social attitudes.

Understanding is easy. Believing is impossible - since it's (still, in spite of much repetition) not true. How can you tell? Do you really believe you know better what's under their clothes and skin than they do? And why is it so important to you to classify people by their reproductive capability?

If I can remember that far back, I think there was something about lobsters, tough guys and women red in tooth and claw on Page 1, and then lost of bogus attacks on an amendment to the Bill of Rights. Other than that, I have seen very little on the title topic. Dr. Peterson seems to have plenty of reactions and attitudes to matters political, but I never saw one single "idea". In that sense, the whole thread can be considered a failure. OTOH, I'd never heard of or from this Peterson, or Dave Chapelle until now, so my database on 'influencer' culture is greatly enriched. I meant lots, but will leave it.

Yes. And it doesn't matter. What's being tested is unimportant; what's not being tested is important. (But the tests are fun to take.)

My umbrella tree and hibiscus live on a wheeled cart all winter. The palm and the orange are still - just - small enough to carry and put on a stand.

The reason for that: Roots reach down to the bottom and thy all need water; the idea is for it to trickle down through the pot, carrying nutrients to every root. You can - indeed, you're expected to, if you own plants - water them as required. Holes in planters can be on the side around the base - just above the thickness of the bottom of the pot. If holes are half-way up, the water washes nutrient out of the soil, away from the plant roots and not reaching the lower ones, and the soil dries out faster. The simplest solution is to raise the planters. Put them on some kind of pedestal, a stand, a rack, or just a couple of bricks with a space between them. If the problem is that the holes in the bottom clog up with earth, you haven't put in draining material: stones or shards from broken pots keep the holes open; you could get specially made inserts (raised disc with slots cut in). Even chunks of styrofoam will do, if you want to keep the weight down.

Yes! (Except for the fuming part.) I would certainly appreciate some of these issues separately. Each topic started with a single, unambiguous question would work best, IMO.

Works for inanimate objects to establish averages for calculation. Does not work for sentient beings to establish behavioural norms. Who was doing that? What is it you're responding to? For that matter, how do you demonstrate 'what these traits are' through unsubstantiated generalizations about who reacts in what way to being the object of which kind of attention for what reason? Science? You claimed that some people - more precisely, that some men - are more sensitive to heat than others and might require more ventilation than 'the average guy', which might therefore be mistakenly taken for display. Such a condition may equally well exist in women - in fact, if you take menopause into consideration, much more so - biologically. How, then, can science determine the degree of sincerity when either sex claims it as a reason to remove items of clothing? Standards of dress have nothing to do with science. Objectively, anyone who feels too hot should be free to remove excess clothing and go naked anywhere they liked, any time they liked (except laboratories, recycling depots, construction sites and similarly hazardous environments). Culturally, some societies are offended by female faces, others are offended by male genitalia, and there is no scientific basis for either prejudice.

How is that about the justification of transgressing dress codes? Are you just rabbiting on about girls being mean to guys, or what? That's an easy fictional character to hang anything on, as is "the average gal". They can't object to your generalizations, because they don't exist.

Agreed. It was a superficial gesture in response to a superficial concern: appearances. Doesn't change anything; may be futile, even silly. And I wouldn't care, but for the backlash. I don't think an administrator trying to be seen to do the right thing - whatever the motivation, however ineffectual the gesture - deserves a public flogging. That's what Peterson does; that's what all the right-wing commentators do: they inflate trivial missteps by social liberals to stand against the egregious crimes of social conservatives. MacDonald instituted the residential school system, yeah, okay, that was back then. (But Trudeau went to a costume party dressed as the Sheik of Araby - so there!) (Of course millions of poor South Americans are thrown off their ancestral land to make room for our steak; that's hard-wired Nature. Anyway, you're just a virtue-signalling hypocrite: I saw you in Starbucks one time.)

I'm glad you asked! Urban farming of several kinds is part of the answer. Cultured meat is another. Industrial farming doesn't require much building: it's carried out by massive machines on vast acreages, with tons of chemicals. The immense barns and chicken-factories already exist, as do the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, grist mills and transport depots. However, should new structures be needed, I recommend recycled plastic instead of new trees? It always is. We always do some, maybe lots. Nowhere near as many as get burned, an it will take 30-100 years for the new ones we plants to replace those. That's 25-100 years more than we have to spare. Still, planting anything green, especially on top of buildings or on the side of big ugly cement walls can only be good.

It is also, let us put things in perspective, merely a decision in interior decorating: what is displayed, where. If you want to create a welcoming atmosphere, you take the bars off the windows, remove the spikes from the sofa cushions, and replace the black candles with pink-shaded lamps - regardless of the motivations of preceding decorators who installed those things. No alumnus (in the unlikely event that any are still alive to care) was deprived of anything, except the resentful gaze of the great-grand-son or -daughter of someone who had been denied admission. (And whose family, due to that denial as well as all the other denials of access to economic and social betterment, had to struggle for two, three extra generations to catch up with their Anglo counterparts.) Not so so what. Nova Scotia has history, too. It had a large and [intermittently] thriving Black settlement, First Nations communities, French Canadian second-class citizens, small but vibrant Jewish settlements - none of whose children were represented in those photographs. If all of that were in my past, I probably wouldn't brag about it, either. But that doesn't mean I'd be automatically shutting down discussion about it. I don't know exactly what's going on in the Dalhousie administrative offices and board meetings - but I'm inclined to give them the benefit of several doubts before condemning their actions.

And what is that difference? What are the signs to look for and metrics whereby to judge whether to respect someone's self-declared identity? I think it more like having two quite different perceptions of the same situation. What Peterson's position seems to be that he considers himself persecuted by a law under which he might, in certain hypothetical circumstances, be prosecuted for refusing to comply with a request that might sometime be made to use a syllable that could validate the possibly disingenuous non-standard gender identity of someone he might encounter in a minority-protected environment. My position is that Peterson's whole right-wing roadshow is disingenuous.

Nope. And that's why there isn't one. We, on the other hand, are talking about discrimination against a minority by selectively invalidating their reality.

There are too many of us, we want too much and we are, as a species, purblind and barking mad. The big flood worked once....

I'm not so sure. What those farming families eat, plus enough extra to take to market once a week, would comfortably grow on a small fraction of the lands needed for export. It's their governments, landowners and bankers that woo the foreign investment and trade - especially if part of the payment is in weapons to point at the peons, in case they get any ideas about the ownership of land and water The question is, who that's willing to can offer sufficient money reward to offset the enormous head start and ongoing advantage of capital? It might work -- but I'm skeptical.

It's a lot of hard work, but people are doing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApSP5apZEfk Then, there is the other kind - small green walls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dvFb2vC7_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU-z_JAzNg4 Plenty of good ideas - but we still need to plant more, and consume less. The big challenge for most of these projects is water supply.

The rain forest is - and has been for a long time - in a perilous position: https://eartheclipse.com/environment/serious-threats-rainforest.html Educating the 'developed' countries that exploitation of resources in 'developing' countries doesn't remove the effects of damage from themselves, just because they can't immediately see the consequences. How do you persuade American, Russian and Middle Eastern investors to stop the growth of the mining industry in Latin America? Will the US consumer stop buying the coffee ? China may be 'greening up its supply chain', but won't stop importing beef. (That last link is also from the Guardian. Good little paper, that one.) Rich countries don't have to pay poor countries to stop cutting down trees: they just need to stop paying poor countries for cutting down trees. Then, there is the construction and bio-fuel problem.... This ought to be sustainable, if the industry were satisfied with waste from sawmills.... except that the lumber industry is always hungry for more mature hardwood, and still doesn't produce the quantity of sawdust required. Are we going to stop making paper for all those hygiene and convenience products and advertising garbage nobody wants? The "forest industry" with government support and subsidies is really terrifying! And of course, they're burning. All the forests, all over the globe. Nobody can stop the fires now. So, i guess, efforts could best be concentrated on consuming less - a lot less! - and planting more.

This is exactly the crux of Jordan Petersons argument. No, that isn't Peterson's argument. He may have a problem with renaming manhole covers - can't imagine why; I mean, he's not likely to be anywhere near one in that suit! Nor do I see any need for self-help gurus to step into that controversy: it's more the purview of stand-up comedians. Each one of those debates can wind down to some mutually acceptable end without causing any deep social rifts. The arguments of his that I've heard are directed at a law that [he falsely claims] forces him to call people by words of their choice, rather than his own. He seems unaware, or unwilling to admit, that self-identification is the right of all persons; that they are not objects to be defined by by someone [himself] who knows better what they are and what they need than they know themselves. That, to me, is an old and very bad political idea.

I do not. The majority - indeed, the entirety - of the population is concerned in and with mental health, the availability, accessibility and quality of health care, the societal and legal response to mental illness and the people who suffer mental illness. Every citizen of every country might, at some time in their life, become ill, might need help, might have family members who are ill and need help. It's not merely a majority issue - it's a universal one. That's true, though not applicable to the present topic, which was gender-denoting pronouns. (I know; it's a very tiny ball and hard to keep in focus.) Which values - other than pi, the speed of light and the boiling point of water - are objective? Where is the perch on which a deity must sit in order to get an objective view of human politics? Monarchist and republican values are in opposition. So are Christian and Ojibwa values. So are commercial and family values. When drafting the constitution, law-makers have to balance all the sets of values that make up the convictions of their people in such a way that no group is dispossessed. That's no easy task! From time to time, some aspect of the people's character comes to light that had previously been neglected and an amendment is drafted, proposed, debated and voted-on. So then, the laws of the land change a little bit, to make things better for some people - while everyone else keeps on truckin' like nothing happened. Predictably, a few object to the change and become oppositional. I tried, but can't guess what that means.