Sophianotloren

Transsexualism is the latest example of a difficult truth: Everything you thought was a category is actually a continuum.

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The interview. When I started watching Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bruce Jenner (as he was still calling himself in late April), I can’t say I was fully comfortable either with transsexualism in general or with the idea that the hero of the 1976 Olympics [see endnote 1] thought of himself as a woman.

I sort of understood transsexuals in the abstract, or at least I could repeat the right words: For some reason nobody can adequately explain, the gender that society assigns you (based on your genitalia) just feels wrong; you think of yourself as a woman with a penis or a man with breasts and a vagina. Jenner described the feeling in Christian terms: feeling like he had “the soul of a female”.

But as someone who has a hard time pointing to his own soul or tracing its outlines, I can’t really claim I know what that means. At times I have felt like a dissenter from various aspects of male culture — the violence, say, or the joy so many men take in humiliating others — but I have always experienced myself as reaching for a different kind of masculinity (just as so many women in my generation reached for a different kind of femininity) rather than rejecting the whole concept. I’m not sure what it would mean to not feel like a man “inside”. I’m like the fish who hears another fish say that swimming in water just feels wrong, that he was meant to fly through the air. And I respond, “Water? What is water?”

In my personal life, no one has forced me to come to terms with transsexualism. More than one of my casual friends has a child who has adopted a new name and a new pronoun. But learning that name has been about all the adjustment required of me. Occasionally I have found myself in a social setting with someone whose gender was ambiguous — combining breasts with a beard, say. And I have been uncomfortable, but what I mainly felt was fear of making a social error. My discomfort manifested as a desire to be somewhere else, not to harm that other person or make him/her be different.

So I was perhaps the perfect target audience for the Sawyer/Jenner interview. The distance — identifying through a screen with Sawyer sitting across from Jenner — was about right for me to put aside my discomfort and listen with empathy as he (at that time, Jenner was still using the masculine pronoun and talking about “her” as a person he had not yet revealed to the public) discussed his decision to create a new public identity as a woman.

First reactions. After watching that interview, a few things seemed obvious to me:

• At 65, Jenner is old enough to know what s/he wants.
• Jenner gave masculinity a fair shot. If it hasn’t worked, it hasn’t worked. In some ways, his external success — being an Olympic hero, trying marriage with three gorgeous women, fathering six and step-fathering four “wonderful, wonderful children” — makes the case clearer. A less successful person with Jenner’s inner life might have blamed himself and said: “Masculinity would be fulfilling if only I were better at it.”
• Sixty-five is a do-or-die point for a lot of things in life. If there’s something you’re going to regret not trying, you better get on with it.
• If Jenner’s kids and step-kids are OK with the transition [2], why should the rest of us object?

So this week, Jenner’s new female identity — Caitlyn — made her public debute with an Annie Leibovitz portrait on the cover of Vanity Fair. (Looking at that photo, I assume Kim Kardashian is happy with the way Caitlyn “rocks it”. [2])

Not pink and blue, red and blue. The public reaction has generally split on political lines. Liberals like me have mostly praised the courage it took to go public with something this controversial, while the conservative reaction has been described by the Washington Post as “apocalyptic“. The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer said on his radio show:

If you want one snapshot of just how corrupt, how morally corrupt, how morally bent, how morally twisted, how morally confused, how morally bankrupt we have become, all you’ve got to do is take a look at the cover of Vanity Fair magazine.

Matt Walsh wrote for The Blaze:

It’s all so evil and so bizarre and so unthinkably ridiculous that no dystopian sci-fi writer could have predicted that the collapse of western society would look like this.

President Obama has praised Jenner, while Republican candidates to replace him have either said nothing or lined up against her. (Lindsey Graham is the exception. And while the WaPo article lists Hillary Clinton as “generally supportive”, I can’t find a quote.) Mike Huckabee has been particularly interesting to watch, as he defended the Duggar family’s handling of their son’s abuse of his sisters (but then removed their endorsement from his web page), while trying to make a joke out of transsexualism.

The social-conservative base that the Republicans need to appeal to has been anything but silent. All you have to do is pick any of the links above and read the comments. They’re not just opposed, they’re actively hostile about it.

Why? Now, part of me (and probably part of you) is saying, “What else is new? Conservatives are rejecting somebody for being different from them, sometimes in very aggressive, insulting ways. Par for the course.” But it’s worth considering all the reasons that it didn’t have to be this way.

• Jenner is one of their own. In the Sawyer interview, Jenner self-describes as a conservative Republican who “believes in the Constitution”. Jenner talks about God creating his male body and female soul, and thinks seriously about what mission God had in mind for that combination. And Jenner is not just a nominal Christian, but has a real relationship with a congregation. In the WaPo, a minister describes how the Jenner/Kardashian family was “an integral part of this nondenominational evangelical church” and put considerable effort into founding a new church in their neighborhood.
• There’s really no scripture about this. You’ll search in vain for a verse that says, “A man shall not become a woman.” (If God foresees all, why wouldn’t He have included that verse in His scripture?) The Bible assigns different roles to men and women (not always consistently), and Deuteronomy 22:5 bans cross-dressing (though this rabbi interprets that ban in a limited way). But as for spelling out how you tell whether God meant for you to be male or female, the Bible is silent. Biblical verses supposedly condemning transsexualism all require a lot of interpretation. What motivates people to do the work necessary to arrive at that conclusion?
• It’s not our business. We all have the option to say, “I wouldn’t do that, but I guess it takes all kinds.” In Thomas Jefferson’s words, Jenner is neither picking my pocket nor breaking my leg.
• It’s a freedom thing. Who knows, maybe Caitlyn has made a mistake she will eventually regret. But she’s risking her own future life and happiness, not yours or mine. People following their own vision and risking it all for a goal that seems important — that’s something conservatives usually admire.
• Jenner is a great family-values story. When unexpected challenges arise in the life of one of its members, does a family pull that person closer or push him or her away? The Sawyer interview shows Jenner embedded in a matrix of close family relationships, and the family supports Caitlyn. I’ve got to admire that, and you’d think people who define their politics around “family values” would too.

So there’s plenty of room for conservatives to support Jenner, or just to shrug and move on. But clearly they don’t want to do that. Why not?

What I think is going on. When I look at my own initial discomfort, I think it traces back to a source so basic that it’s pre-verbal. Before I can talk about it, I need to tease it out. So bear with me while I seem to go off on a tangent.

The human mind is kind of a kludge. It has to be. After all, how is a three-pound piece of meat supposed to make sense of such a vast and complicated universe? One of the kludgy short-cuts our minds take is to break the world into categories, i.e., to clump different things together and treat them the same. Many of those categories are binary: male/female, child/adult, right/wrong, friend/enemy, and so on. Others have more options. (In grade school I was taught that there are three races of humans: caucasian, negroid, and mongoloid.) Some of the categories seem in-born, while others are taught to us so early they might as well be. For example, a certain amount of species recognition is practically hard-wired. Kids at an early age will tell you that two dogs are similar while a dog and a cat are different.

We really, really want to believe that the categories in our heads are objective descriptions of the world out there, but science keeps telling us that they aren’t. For example, there are no races, but rather a continuum of genetic difference. If you pluck two people from distant parts of the continuum, they may look like members of distinct races, but in the world as a whole, you won’t be able to trace any boundary line between those races.

Similarly, species are not platonic ideals, but clusters in the genetic continuum. So (contrary to Plato) there is no ideal horse or dog, just lots of individual horses and dogs, any two of whom resemble each other. There are no gay people and straight people, but rather a continuum of bisexuality. There are no nationalities — a point made very strikingly in a fascinating book called The Discovery of France. And like nationalities, modern languages are largely political constructions. In medieval Europe, for example, each village would have a dialect slightly different from the next. If you plucked people out of distant places on that continuum — say one from Paris, another from Madrid, and a third from Lisbon — they would sound like they were speaking different languages you could call French, Spanish, and Portuguese. But, like races, there were no boundaries where one butted up against the other — until politics created those boundaries and imposed them.

And now we are discovering that gender is a binary categorization imposed on an underlying continuum with multiple dimensions. It’s more complicated than just John Waynes with penises and Marilyn Monroes with vaginas.

If you think seriously about how flawed the fundamental building blocks of our thinking are, it’s scary. At any moment, some part of the Universe you’ve been assuming away could come back to bite you. That’s the human condition.

That’s why we get such an oogy feeling whenever we see an example of something we were raised to think didn’t exist: an effeminate man, two women kissing, a child with dark brown skin and frizzy red hair. It’s a reminder that we don’t really grasp the Universe; we just apply kludgy notions that more-or-less work most of the time.

What social conservatism is. At its root, social conservatism is a way to deny that fear and transmute it into anger. Conservatism reassures us that the categories in our heads are real. We didn’t make them up; God created them. They’re natural.

You can see that principle operating across the board. For example, that’s why social conservatives have such a hard time accepting evolution: If species are real things and if humans evolved from some other kind of primate, then each being in that mother-to-child chain belonged to a species. Somewhere along that line, the impermeable boundary between species had to be crossed: an ape mother gave birth to the first human child. Impossible!

Likewise abortion. The moral worth of a member of the human species is a unitary thing. It can’t develop gradually along a continuum, but has to exist either in its entirety or not at all. And a fetus is either a member of the human species or not. We aren’t allowed to recognize that in its early stages, a human fetus is virtually indistinguishable from the fetus of a pig or cow, or that it begins to differentiate from a chimp fetus even later.

This reification of the categories is why conservative rhetoric is obsessed with the word real: real men, real Americans, real conservatives. Liberals are more likely to describe themselves as authentic. Authentic is a relative word; it points to a harmony between what I am and the image I project. Real is absolute; I am a real X because I match an ideal definition of X that exists eternally in the mind of God.

Now, not even social conservatism can deny the existence of things that don’t fit neatly into the proper categories. But it can reject them as abominations. The list of abominations depends on the categories you were raised with: Men attracted to other men are abominations. Women who operate heavy machinery are abominations. Families who cross from black to white are abominations. Americans who can’t speak English are abominations. Mixed-race people are abominations. Genetic engineering produces abominations.

Functionally, an abomination is anything that causes confusion by making us doubt our categories. And by labeling it as an abomination, we transform our doubt and confusion into anger at whatever confused us.

So: Caitlyn Jenner is an abomination. Just by existing, she creates confusion about the kludgy notion of binary gender. She points out that there is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies … or our religions. That’s a scary idea, and by raising it, she becomes an object of anger.

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[1] I remember eating Wheaties out of a box with Bruce Jenner’s picture on it. In the 1970s, (moreso than today, for some reason) the Decathlon was a legend-making Olympic event. Americans who won it — Jim Thorpe and Bob Mathias, for example — were famous for more than just a four-year cycle. They became the defining image of the perfect all-around athlete. Physically, they were what every American boy was supposed to want to become.

Bruce Jenner was a record-setting Olympic Decathlon champion, and he arrived at a moment in history when white males were starting to feel insecure about their athleticism. Black sports heroes (Jesse Ownes, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson) had once been tokens, freakish exceptions who were “credits to their race”. The next generation of black athletes (Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Willie Mays) claimed their place in the mainstream. But by the mid-70s, it was white players (Rick Barry, Dave Cowens) who looked like tokens in the NBA, and the NFL and MLB seemed headed in the same direction. Blacks would never be great quarterbacks, we told each other. But secretly we wondered if there would ever be a white running back on the level of O. J. Simpson, Tony Dorsett, or Walter Payton. (According to this CheatSheet.com top-ten list, the answer was no.) Even the last American Decathlon champion (Rafer Johnson) had been black.

And then came Bruce Jenner, the hero we needed at the time we needed him. A white man’s white man. Or so we thought.

[2] The most amusing reaction Jenner reports came from step-daughter Kim Kardashian. Following a “breakthrough” conversation with Kanye West (of all people), Kim became “by far, the most accepting” of the children. Jenner quotes her volunteering to help shape Caitlyn’s style:

Girl, you gotta rock it, baby. You gotta look good. If you’re doing this thing, I’m helping you. You’re representing the family. You gotta look really good.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This week’s featured article is “What’s So Scary About Caitlyn Jenner?”

This week everybody was talking about Caitlyn Jenner

My article on Jenner focuses on where I think my own discomfort and the social-conservative vitriol come from. But there’s a whole other argument going on among liberals about whether transsexualism conflicts with feminism. Elinor Burkett argues in the NYT that it often does:

By defining womanhood the way he did to Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Jenner and the many advocates for transgender rights who take a similar tack … undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us.

But Slate‘s Amanda Marcotte isn’t having it.

Unfortunately, writer Elinor Burkett (last seen crashing the stage at the Oscars) brought along for the ride one of the worst tendencies of academia: highly intellectualized arguments made in bad faith. … Here’s an idea: Why don’t we call a truce and let ordinary people express themselves without lighting their asses on fire for not sounding like they’re reading out of a doctoral thesis?

As I understand it, the gist of the dispute is whether the transsexual experience undermines the notion that femininity is socially constructed rather than inborn. (Jenner, after all, has been treated like a male for a lifetime. Why didn’t that take?) And I guess I agree with Marcotte: that’s a topic for a research paper, not an op-ed. The apparent disjunction strikes me as an anomaly that some wise person should carefully explain, not a contradiction to fight over.

and the USA Freedom Act

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it wanted more restrictions on the NSA, but

Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA.

The article outlines the steps that still need to be taken: More legislative provisions sunset in 2017 and shouldn’t be re-authorized, there’s an executive order they’d like rescinded, and there’s the problem of “overbroad classification” that keeps the public from knowing what its government does.

Another rising cause is the movement to drop the charges and let Edward Snowden come home. Courts have ruled that he was right: the program he exposed was illegal. The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy thinks we should be “thanking Snowden for his public service” rather than trying to lock him up.

and (still) the Duggars

The parents were interviewed by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who gave them a pretty soft ride. At least, that’s what people tell me; I haven’t watched more than a few seconds of it.

Amanda Marcotte focuses on the Duggars’ use of the Christian-persecution myth:

Nursing the grievances of [Fox News’] right-wing audience is big business. Its audience wants to hear all about how the meanie liberals are picking on this cute little Christian family for an itty-bitty multimonth rampage of child molesting.

Caryn Riswald explains how the opposite is true: The Duggars’ career in general and this issue in particular make good examples not Christian persecution, but of Christian privilege.

Like white and male privileges, Christian privilege affords members of a status-group the ability to do and get away with things that those who are not members of that group could not. It is unearned and unseen, affording advantages that holders of it can actively deny existing, yet count on every day. Examples of things a Christian can assume because of this privilege: Adherence to my religion will be seen as an asset; I can wear symbols of my religion without being accused of terrorism; I know that my workplace calendar respects my religious holidays and Sabbath. We can add to that list: My religious identity will help me escape punishment for criminal activity.

and getting ready for the Supreme Court to rule on marriage

Tom Delay says “all Hell is going to break loose” if the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality. He pledges “to stand for marriage even if it takes civil disobedience.”

I’m having trouble picturing which laws he’s planning to disobey. If you google “civil disobedience against gay marriage” you can get all kinds of pledges and petitions and whatnot. But they’re all a little vague about how the campaign would work. Your neighbor’s marriage doesn’t really need your cooperation, so refusing to cooperate with it doesn’t accomplish much.

Here’s Glenn Beck interviewing the organizer of “The Future Conference: what you thought was coming … is here now“. Beck says he believes 10,000 pastors “are willing to lay it all down on the table and willing to go to jail or go to death because they serve God and not man.”

I’m not sure who these 10,000 pastors expect to kill them. What I fear is that having gotten all revved up and then discovering there actually are no jack-booted troops coming, the Right is going to create violent incidents of its own.

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Another possible response to the Court: Secede from the Union. Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of World Net Daily, explains what a bonanza secession could be for any state that could pull it off:

I know there are millions of Christians, Jews and others who would pull up stakes and move to another country that honored the institution of marriage as it was designed by God – a union between one man and one woman. … Is there one state in 50 that would not only defy the coming abomination, but secede in response? The rewards could be great. I would certainly consider relocating. How about you? … We need a Promised Land. We need an Exodus strategy.

He’s ignoring, of course, all the people who would immediately leave his theocratic utopia. (I would expect the net population flow to be out rather than in.) But I think the interesting question is: Should the rest of care?

I mean, suppose one of the redder states — maybe Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Mississippi, or some combination thereof — decides to become the New Israel for people who can’t stand the idea of continuing to be Americans after marriage equality becomes the law of the land. Suppose the seceding state(s) even agree to reasonable conditions: (1) a period of time for people to move in and out freely before either side closes the border; (2) assuming a fair share of the national debt; (3) letting the U.S. military remove any WMDs before turning over its bases; and maybe some others I haven’t thought of yet — nothing punitive, just making sure they’re not taking advantage of the rest of us.

In that scenario, I’m not seeing a reason to go all Abe Lincoln on them and force them back into the Union. What do the rest of you think?

and you also might be interested in …

Last week I neglected to cover all the new presidential candidates, and it will be a while before my 2016 Stump Speech Series can catch up. The new announcements include Democrats Martin O’Malley, and Lincoln Chafee; and Republicans Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. The total number of candidates is up to ten Republicans and four Democrats. The NYT projects the ultimate numbers will be five Democrats and 15 Republicans — and they don’t count Donald Trump, who will announce something June 16.

Part of the difference is that Jeb Bush is not as popular among Republicans as Hillary Clinton is among Democrats, so his candidacy hasn’t intimidated anybody out of running. But another reason is that liberals don’t have the lucrative celebrity culture conservatives do. Running for president is a good career move on the Right, even if you don’t win. There’s a lecture circuit waiting for the Michele Bachmanns and Herman Cains. You can make a lot of money even if hardly anybody voted for you. Sarah Palin had such opportunities for wealth that remaining governor of Alaska just seemed stupid.

Once you get past the Clintons, though, it’s hard to find anybody making big money as a Democratic celebrity. The lecture circuit will probably open up for President Obama after he leaves office, if that’s what he wants to do. But it will continue to be a small circle. Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 campaign should have established his brand as an authentic liberal, but nobody bought his book and I haven’t been invited to hear him give a sponsored lecture anywhere. Elizabeth Warren got a decent book deal, but nothing on the Palin scale. Howard Dean shows up fairly often as a guest on MSNBC, but he didn’t get his own show like Mike Huckabee did on Fox.

In short, I can easily imagine a failed presidential campaign turning into a financial bonanza for Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina. Not so for Martin O’Malley or Jim Webb.

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One of the more embarrassing campaign moments so far — at least it’s embarrassing to me as an American — came when Rick Santorum urged the Pope not to make an issue out of climate change.

The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science. We probably are better off leaving science to the scientists, and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is theology and morality.

It’s parody worthy of The Onion, but it’s what Santorum really said. I mean, who is ignoring the scientists here? It’s Santorum and his fellow climate-change deniers, not the Pope.

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84% of Americans agree that money has too much influence in politics. Why doesn’t that lead to change? Because money has too much influence on politics.

This would be an interesting experiment: Redo that poll, but weight the responses according to the respondents’ net worth. The lower half of the country, i.e., households with net worth zero or negative, wouldn’t count at all. A billion-dollar household would count as much as a thousand million-dollar households, and so on.

That poll would be a more accurate reflection of the public as Congress sees it. And it might well turn out that a net-worth-weighted majority thinks money’s influence is perfectly fine. Sure people think that money has too much influence; but money probably thinks that people have too much influence.

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College Humor presents: Diet Racism.

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Gun Owners of America President Larry Pratt makes it clear why people like him shouldn’t be armed.

The Second Amendment was designed for people just like the president and his administration. … Yes, our guns are in our hands for people like those in our government right now that think they wanna go tyrannical on us. We’ve got something for ‘em. That’s what it’s all about.

Remember the Conservative-to-English Lexicon‘s definition of tyranny:

When a Marxist gets elected and then tries to carry out the platform the people voted for.

Marxist, in turn, is defined as “one who regrets the increasing concentration of wealth”.

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538 does a good, even-handed discussion of the job market, the unemployment rate, and all those related statistics people often grind an ax about.

and let’s close with a duel

Chipotle’s “Scarecrow” video can be read as a full-force assault on the food industry.

But Funny or Die reads it as an attempt to subvert the revolution, and does an “honest version”

.

So which is it: Are the capitalists selling us the rope to hang the capitalists? Or is seeing-through-the-illusion the new illusion?

redhester:

npr:

Women outnumber men in the nursing profession by more than 10 to 1. But men still earn more, a new study finds.

Even after controlling for age, race, marital status and children in the home, males in nursing outearned females by nearly $7,700 per year in outpatient settings and nearly $3,900 in hospitals.

Even In Nursing, Men Earn More Than Women

Photo Credit: iStockphoto

the wage gap is not because some professions are not as highly-paid as others. the wage gap exists because women are valued less than men. no matter what job, in any sector, if you are a woman you will be paid less. it’s about being female, not the job you do as a female. 

We make thousands of charts a year at Quartz, and when we receive complaints about them, it’s usually that the y-axis doesn’t start at zero.

Their point is that truncating the y-axis, as we often do in line charts, exaggerates what the data really say. Some people consider it a maxim that the y-axis should always be zeroed. They think to do otherwise amounts to lying.

But these complaints are wrong.

Charts should convey information and make a point. We make charts to illustrate ideas that have context beyond their x- and y-axes. Forcing the y-axis to start at zero can do just as much to obscure and confuse the point as the opposite.

Of course, there’s plenty of nuance to when it is and isn’t OK. Below are some guiding principles when it comes the y-axis.

Truncate the y-axis to emphasize what you’re trying to show.

Charts serve to illustrate ideas. If the price of a stock spiked upon news of an acquisition or plummeted on the rumor of a catastrophe, the chart should show a line that spikes or plummets.

A common complaint of this is that it gives the appearance of severity when none exists.

First, this is why charts have scales. Blaming a chart’s creator for a reader who doesn’t look at clearly labeled axes is like blaming a supermarket for selling someone food he’s allergic to.

Second, the degree to which the chart emphasizes certain aspects of the data is a judgement of storytelling not chart-making. Sure, this mindset can yield misleading displays, but how is that different than words? Charts should be fair, not impartial.

Truncate the y-axis when doing so is the norm.

Stock charts, especially intraday charts, use truncated axes. It’s a convention. The purpose of these charts is to show the tiniest fluctuations relative to where the price was moments ago, not relative to zero.

Truncate the y-axis when small movements are important.

Which chart below is better at showing how the most recent financial crisis affected the US economy?

Can you look at the chart above and determine the low point of the recession? Can you determine how much US economic output shrunk? Of course you can’t, because plotting this on a zeroed axis at this aspect ratio obscures those ideas.

Now take a look at this chart. It’s the exact same data.

This chart clearly shows that the low point was in the second quarter of 2009, the result of a $0.5 trillion drop in economic output.

Edward Tufte, an expert in data presentation, agrees. “In general, in a time-series, use a baseline that shows the data not the zero point,” he wrote on his website, “don’t spend a lot of empty vertical space trying to reach down to the zero point at the cost of hiding what is going on in the data line itself.”

Truncate the y-axis when zero values are ridiculous.

Charting is about being true to the data. Some data never falls to zero—the body temperature of a living person, for instance. Who has a fever, Sara or Bob?

Let me help by truncating the y-axis.

Feel better, Bob.

In other data sets, where zero values are technically possible, they are still worth omitting when the implication that it might reach zero is preposterous. Consider the labor force participation rate in the US, which is defined as:

All persons 16 years or older in the US classified as employed or unemployed as a percent of all persons 16 years or older persons who are not inmates of institutions, and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

For this figure to fall to zero, every person in the US would have to either be younger than 16, out of work, not looking for work, furloughed, in the military on active duty, in prison, in a nursing home, or in a mental facility. (At which point, all of those facilities would have to be run by volunteers or members of the military.) The labor force participation rate has never been measured below 58%.

Real world example:

Real world criticism:

Putting a zeroed y-axis on this chart would suggest that it’s plausible that either every 15-64 year old in Europe could die or every person over 64 never had kids in their life. How’s that for upping the scariness?

Use a zeroed y-axis when it doesn’t matter.

None of this means you shouldn’t zero your y-axis. If doing so doesn’t obscure the point your chart is trying to make, or muddle the information, it’s often a good idea. The chart above works exactly as well with a zero axis as it does without it.

Always use a zeroed y-axis with column and bar charts.

Of course column and bar charts should always have zeroed axes, since that is the only way for the visualization to accurately represent the data. There is no debating this one (except for a few exceptions).

Never use a zeroed axis on a log scale.

That is impossible.

We all have those annoying social media friends whose incessant selfies seem little more than digital bragging. But Mark Marino, an associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California, sees much more in the images.

“Selfies are part of first-person communication in the 21st century,” he told Hyperallergic. “Just like first-person writing, this is a communication mode that has its own rhetoric and aesthetics.”

Needing some good essay prompts for first-year students this year, he developed #SelfieClass. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the course (officially titled “Writing 150: Writing and Critical Reasoning: Identity and Diversity“) helps college freshmen sharpen their prose while considering how every Snapchat post and Instagram “like” shapes their identities.

“Although selfies may appear narcissistic and vain, by the very nature of being images we circulate of ourselves and then share with others for response, they are part of the process of communication that touches our core identity characteristics,” Marino explained. “When students are wrestling with their selfies, they are wrestling with their sense of self in community.”

His scholarly approach to the oft-dismissed photographic genre reflects a larger trend in the academic world: more and more, researchers are seeing all those prune-mouthed snapshots as a valuable anthropological trove. UCLA also offers a class called “Selfies, Snapchat, and Cyberbullies,” and the Selfie Researchers Network — a group of more than 1,500 teachers, researchers, and artists who study the phenomenon’s cultural implications — has developed its own course as well.

While critic Alicia Eler has written extensively about selfies for Hyperallergic, there’s also been a sudden proliferation of academic literature published about them. The latest issue of the International Journal of Communication, for instance, devotes itself to selfies, with 19 articles wielding titles like “Virtual Lactivism: Breastfeeding Selfies and the Performance of Motherhood.“ It follows Jill Walker Rettberg’s authoritative tome, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves, published in October 2014.

Marino’s class includes writing prompts such as  “Know Thy Selfie” (“How do your selfies produce or obscure a sense of your identity?”) and assignments like “Why Do My Facebook Friends Look Like Me?” (“How homogenous or heterogeneous is your Facebook network?”).

The students are also asked to think about the photographs in light of philosophical concepts like Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, W.E.B. Du Bois’ double-consciousness, and Ernst Goffman’s and Stuart Hall’s theories of representation. “When the point isn’t selfies as an end but selfies as an opportunity to discuss issues of identity and diversity, suddenly the topic becomes much more powerful and much more meaningful,” he said.

If it seems like Marino and others like him are sucking all the fun out of taking mindless pictures of yourself, that’s not his intention at all. He himself really enjoys taking selfies — so much that his wife recently bought him a selfie stick. He just thinks we shouldn’t underestimate their power.

“I hope [the class] helps [students] ask, as they scroll down their newsfeed, ‘What are my friends and I creating with all these pictures, for whom, and who or what is left out of the picture?'” he said. “More than anything, I hope they develop their writing skills.”

PARIS — Feminism has happily challenged the given of the privileged male in relationship to the female model and forced a re-evaluation of a visual culture that viewed the world from a white heterosexual male perspective. Still, depending on one’s sexual orientation and taste in decency, the huge representation of a woman’s vagina in public, even if abstract-arty, can be a quite daunting proposition.

That is exactly what Indian-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor’s “Dirty Corner” (2011–15) does — and it opens to the public tomorrow. It is a 60-metre (200-foot) long, 10-metre (33-foot) high steel-and-rock funnel set amid busted stones gracing the pomp and monarchic folly of the long formal lawn at Château de Versailles. With some obvious verve, Kapoor has described “Dirty Corner” as the vagina of the queen taking power. Château de Versailles is the enormous palace built by the Sun King Louis XIV that came to symbolize the end of the monarchy and the bloody history of the French Revolution and the downfall of the king.

So, following Paul McCarthy’s “butt-plug” sculpture (vandalized amid protests by conservative groups) Kapoor’s “Versailles Vagina” is the current succès de scandale in advance. I guess some consider it quite shocking as we have not seen many men working on the perplexing vagina, even though historically many artists — including Leonardo da Vinci, “The Female Sexual Organs” (circa 1510), Gustave Courbet, “L’Origine du monde” (1866), and Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)” (1946–1966) — have all depicted that aspect of human anatomy. Also there has been the lesser-known Henri Maccheroni’s photographic series called “2000 Photos du Sexe d’une Femme” (2000 Photos of the Sex of a Woman) (1969–1974).

Contemporary female artists like Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith (among others) have been industriously working on the subject of female sex, perhaps starting back with Carolee Schneemann’s Parisian performance of “Meat Joy” (1964). Art focused explicitly on the vulva with Valie Export’s “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1969) and the broad-spectrum vulva work of Hannah Wilke, for example with her piece “Corcoran Art Gallery” (1976). Subsequently Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1979) brought the theme front-and-center, followed by Kembra Pfahler’s “Wall of Vagina” (2011), and Betty Tompkins’s “Cunt Painting” (2011), and probably many others. Judith Bernstein’s Birth of the Universe paintings (2013) depicted gigantic manic female sexual reproductive organs just last year. They all make no bones about taking the vagina and vulva head-on.

Kapoor is popular in France from his 2011 gigantic Leviathan installation at the Grand Palais that attracted more than 250,000 visitors, but “Dirty Corner” has already sparked controversy, debate and condemnation by Royalist activists and far-right blogs — where they are even discussing if the work truly resembles a queen’s vagina or a pipe. This is not a pipe. This after the more-is-less “king of kitsch” Jeff Koons became the first artist invited to shock by plopping big ugly stuff at Château de Versailles.

A number of newspapers, such as Les Inrocks, Le Journal du Dimanche, and Le Parisien, have defended the work, describing Kapoor’s move here as that of a genius provocateur and that the work was a welcome comment on Versailles’s symbolism of macho French power and identity. Controversy will just bring more visitors, applauded Le Figaro.

Given Kapoor’s stature, and the level of abstraction at play here, it might be interesting see how this plays out, even as some might find the displaying of female genitalia effrayable (frightful).

He calls for me and not for you

483 Threads

Installation by Kimchi & Chips uses projection and a screen made up of 483 horizontal threads which produces illusions of depth:

From World War II up until the recent end of analogue broadcasts, decades of living imagery had been constructed using the NTSC standard. This standard represents a moving image frame as 483 lines of modulated light stacked from the top to the bottom of a television screen, within each line there is an analogue continuum, like the groove on a record player. From Nam Jun Paik to the moon landings, pictures were being represented, archived and seen within this format, until the line made way for the pixel and the digital video revolution.

The artwork 483 lines magnifies this analogue video picture until it is 16 meters wide, and then folds this image several times so that it fits vertically into the gallery space, therein adding oscillations of depth into the image which can be activated by ‘tuning’ the projected video to match these waves. At this scale, each line of video can be individually inspected as its own agent beyond its contribution to the total image. This follows a common motif within the artists work, to create 2 scales of experience, this time the beating panoramic imagery contrasts the delicate physicality of the fine thread elements.

You can find out more at Kimchi & Chips website here or (for more technical background information) at Creative Applications here

Oscilloscope Music

Kickstarter campaign from jerobeamfenderson to create an album whose music can be visualized on an oscilloscope, as well as develop software for anyone to create their own:

In the past year I’ve been playing live shows across Europe and working on lots of new material. Also I’ve been collaborating with Hansi3D, who is currently working on an incredible piece of oscilloscope software … With the material that already exists in some form, plus all the ideas that are about to take shape, plus your support, I’m gonna make a full length audio visual album. It will also include a collaboration track with Adoxo, who produced two oscilloscope videoclips and live visuals for Clark (Warp records) last year.

More about the project and how it works can be found here

Elisa Gabbert asks the hard questions for Electric Literature:

When the VIDA counts come out and multiple publications are shown to publish far more men than women (with the numbers for POC writers looking even worse), editors make excuses about their submission pools – they get far more submissions and pitches from men than women. Then people inevitably respond by telling women to write more, submit more, and pitch more. I think this is exactly the wrong response: Instead we should tell men to submit less. Pitch less. Especially white men.

Related Posts:

• A Book Review Column That Isn’t All About White Men
• Over 300 Characters
• Art is What We Buy
• NYRB Joins LRB in Hole, Helps Keep Digging
• LRB Finds Itself in Hole, Keeps Digging

In the last few days, from more than a couple of friends, I’ve seen statements of frustration and helplessness.

I get it. And then I’ve seen something I really don’t get — others who know these friends, whose suggestions (unsolicited, of course) have been along the lines of “Well, you should just get yourself to this specific religious group, because organized religion will solve not only all of YOUR problem, but it will fix all of the problems in the WHOLE WORLD, too!” And these “suggestions” have been given to friends who are not subtle or closeted about their specific rejection of the very real harm that religion has wrought on the world, people who have made it quite clear that as solutions go, that’s NOT one.

And yet somehow there’s surprise when “go to church!” is not received particularly well… hmm.

Look, if I said that I was dealing with an upset stomach, and one of you said “Go to that guy on the corner of 5th and Main, he sells this great brand of Snake Oil!” I would pretty much expect a chorus of replies pointing out how stupid that was, how pointless and unhelpful that suggestion was. I would likely write a scathing rant in reply to the offending commenter, and might make a point of how I’ve laughed off plenty of others in the past for similar ridiculous suggestions, complete with links to evidence demonstrating that fact.

And if I — or any of my friends — talk about how fed up we are with current events and feeling compassion fatigue, if we talk about how we’re slowly slipping away because we’ve been trying so hard to be self-reliant and it isn’t working, and one of you says “go to church! It’ll make everything fantastic for you!” you’re going to get at least one reply from me pointing out how stupid that was, how pointless and unhelpful that suggestion was. And that goes double when the folks you’re telling to seek out religion have made a very specific point of talking about the harm it’s done, about all the reasons why that’s a dangerous and unsafe place to be.

Or, put another way… next time someone who has shared their history of self-harm with you says they’re struggling, think about how “helpful” it would be to tell them that they could fix things by going shopping for a brand-new set of knives… and then shut your fucking mouth.

Filed under: General

Originally posted 2015-06-07 20:20:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

aidra fox enter her exit source: droolingfemme.

A reader was kind enough to send me a link to just the sort of Fetlife thread that I like to rant about, so here goes. That thread is here, but I’ll summarize it quickly for people who don’t do Fetlife: some schlub is convinced that the answer to all of our female dom/male sub prayers is to make ourselves identifiable by, uh, putting paperclips on our shirt collars. Because getting shitty one-line messages from random asshats isn’t annoying enough, apparently I need to conveniently tag myself for further harassment in real life, waste my time making up excuses for why I’m wearing a paperclip, and run the risk of some total asshole outing me while I’m having lunch with my coworkers.

Shockingly enough, he didn’t react particularly well when people told him they didn’t like his idea, and started whining about how he has freedom of speech and everyone who exercised their own freedom of speech to tell him why his idea didn’t appeal to them is apparently a great big meaniepants mcpoopyhead. I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but it always hurts my brain a little to see how fast men who supposedly worship women change their tune when women disagree with them. And for extra irony points, as far as I know everyone who said they didn’t like his idea was relatively polite about it and he still started whining and crying about what horrible people the supposed “haters” are.

I do want to acknowledge the one thing this guy didn’t get totally wrong, though. Usually when men complain about not being able to find dominant women to pester they don’t have any sort of suggestion to fix it. Mr Paperclips had a shitty suggestion, but at least he had one and I’m sad to say I’ve heard far worse. I may be in no hurry to explain why I’ve got a paperclip on my shirt over and over, but at least it’s less obvious than wearing handcuff jewelry or a t-shirt with a kinky slogan.

The part that makes me want to flip tables and set them on fire is the whining about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is immensely important, I’m not denying that. However, Mr Paperclips’ freedom of speech was never under debate and never attacked in any way. Literally zero people said he didn’t have the right to talk about his idea, just that it was a crappy idea and they weren’t going to participate. What I truly wish the freedom of speech!!!11!!! whiners understood is that freedom of speech is for everyone. You get to have your opinion and so do I. I might even, horror of horrors, have opinions about your opinion, which I have just as much right to talk about as you do.

That kind of behaviour makes me seriously doubt that the freedom of speech whiners actually care about freedom of speech at all. If you even vaguely understand the concept, then it’s obvious it has to apply to everyone equally. Trying to shut down other people’s freedom of speech tells me that what you actually want is total freedom of speech for yourself and people who agree with you, and no freedom at all for people who disagree with you. We can all agree that’s shitty and hypocritical, right?

It would also make me really happy if people understood that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. That is, while I don’t think people should be jailed or face criminal charges if they’re not making threats or spewing hate speech, they should understand that acting like an asshole means that people might somehow get the idea that they’re an asshole and ban them from their group/forum/blog/website or otherwise choose not to interact with them.

And finally, I’m going to quote an xkcd comic that I think perfectly sums up the “freedom of speech!!111!!!” argument:

I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Frances Willard

This is from last year, but I just saw it so I am going to post about it anyway. Mallory Ortberg really presented the unfortunate issue of suffrage activists using white supremacy to press their case in the most effective way possible. Although given that it’s The Toast, Freddie DeBoer probably thinks it’s another example of feminists doing it wrong. Anyway:

Suffragette: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902 (Social activist, abolitionist, author)
Hooray: “The best protection any woman can have is courage.”
Wait, What: “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”

Suffragette: Laura Clay, 1849-1940 (Founder of Kentucky’s first suffrage group)
Hooray: “Religious intolerance just now is abroad in the land. It is an evil passion of the heart which dies hard…This campaign is a call to every true American of whatever party to stand firmly for the principle of religious freedom.”
Wait, What: “The white men, reinforced by the educated white women, could ‘snow under’ the Negro vote in every State, and the white race would maintain its supremacy without corrupting or intimidating the Negroes.”

Suffragette: Frances Willard, 1839-1898 (Feminist lecturer, founder of the National Council of Women, anti-child abuse activist)
Hooray: “Politics is the place for woman.”
Wait, What: “Alien illiterates rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their scepter. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt.”

Suffragette: Carrie Chapman Catt, 1859-1947 (Founder of the League of Women Voters)
Hooray: “”There is one thing mightier than kings and armies”–aye, than Congresses and political parties–“the power of an idea when its time has come to move.” The time for woman suffrage has come. The woman’s hour has struck. If parties prefer to postpone action longer and thus do battle with this idea, they challenge the inevitable. The idea will not perish; the party which opposes it may. Every delay, every trick, every political dishonesty from now on will antagonize the women of the land more and more, and when the party or parties which have so delayed woman suffrage finally let it come, their sincerity will be doubted and their appeal to the new voters will be met with suspicion.”
Wait, What: “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.”

All of this is pretty well known to historians, but really isn’t stressed that much in public conceptions of the suffrage movement. It’s not unknown, but it needs to be more known. Expressing it in this way, cheering for feminists of the past and then being horrified by the same feminists, is well done.

The American Library Association’s 2015 Annual Conference will be held in San Francisco June 25th-30th, yes the same weekend as PRIDE! It is going to be a fun weekend. The Library, Archive and Gallery have many things planned for the long weekend, but we need your help.  

On Thursday June 25th the ALA Think Tank Pre-Party will be a fundraiser for the Center for Sex and Culture Archival Library and sponsored by Makingithappen.us and EveryLibrary. All proceeds will go to support this rare archive and important social educational center.

We need help on the following days to prep for the ALA Pre-party, and so that we may host library, archive, gallery open hours during ALA/PRIDE weekend:

Sun., 6/14 – Gallery Archive Show Prep: you will be assisting gallery and space prep for a CSC archival display, this is an early shift- 9am -1pm.

Tue., 6/16 – Library work Day: you will be assisting in library, archive, gallery pre-party prep and ALA/Pride Open Hours.

Tue., 6/23 – Library work Day: you will be assisting in library, archive, gallery pre-party prep and ALA/Pride Open Hours.

Thur., 6/25 – ALA Think Tank Pre-Party: we need people to help get the space party ready, we will also need a few sexy glittery volunteers to assist during party time- library and archive talk, art talk, CSC talk, and manning the donation drink table.

Friday, June 26th – Tuesday, June 30th – ALA Conference and PRIDE

Fri., 6/26-Sun., 6/28. 11:00 am – 5:00 p.m. – we need people to man open hours at the CSC. We want PRIDE visitors and ALA participants to visit the CSC.

Please contact us for more information or to volunteer.library@sexandculture.org

And here’s the thing: it’s not just kids. Nearly every time I post something on Facebook about treating people like human beings, a dogpile of people with no empathy whatsoever come along and make me weep for humanity.

Example: I x-posted a thing from Tumblr about a teacher who was in trouble for giving food to kids at her school who didn’t have money to pay for lunch. The school’s policy (which I find abhorrent) is to warn kids — because, you know, it’s their fault when they’re in elementary school — and then give them one slice of cheese between two white hamburger buns, with some milk. As their lunch.

So set aside the humiliation these kids are going to feel, through no fault of their own, and think about the lack of nutrition they’re getting. Think about how that lack of nutrition prevents them from learning to their full potential. Consider that these ARE CHILDREN WHO ARE HUNGRY and the option was to just throw food away, instead of giving it to them, or give them this fucking cheese sandwich thing.

Now consider that our politicians want us to take it as an article of unimpeachable faith that America is THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH FULL STOP DO NOT EVER QUESTION THAT.

Okay. If that’s true, why do we, as a nation and a culture, decide that it is acceptable for children to be hungry and underfed in a public school that we, as a community fund, but it’s entirely acceptable to make sure billionaires keep as much of their money as possible? Where is the fucking empathy for the poorest children and their families?

Every time this comes up, someone gets onto comments and goes on a rampage about Personal Responsibility. Some guy today went into full-on internet argument mode because this policy was supposed to SEND A MESSAGE TO THE PARENTS TO JUST STOP BEING POOR ALREADY AND BE MORE RESPONSIBLE.

I wonder what that guy would do if he actually had to face one of these hungry children. Would he get down on one knee, look that child in the eye and say, “hey, this is about teaching your parents a lesson about personal responsibility. Deal with it.” Or would he actually, you know, have some fucking single shred of human compassion and decency, and give the child a regular lunch?

That I don’t know the answer to this question — really, genuinely don’t know — makes me seriously ashamed of my country. There are tons of people in America who would let a child go hungry to make a point, and they’d feel really good about that.

And those people are all over the Internet, setting examples for the future about what’s acceptable behavior and what it means to be American.

…maybe this doesn’t make sense, and maybe I’ve constructed a fallacy I can’t see at the moment because I’m really goddamn emotional about all this stuff.

But I feel like this enormous swath of our population has no sense of humanity and empathy, and that’s profoundly upsetting to me.

theinturnetexplorer:

ratherbookish:

sushinfood:

reeferkitten:

king-faded:

angelclark:

Historic Black and White Pictures Restored in Color

1. Women Delivering Ice, 1918
2. Times Square, 1947
3. Portrait Used to Design the Penny. President Lincoln Meets General McClellan – Antietam, Maryland ca September 1862
4. Marilyn Monroe, 1957
5. Newspaper boy Ned Parfett sells copies of the evening paper bearing news of Titanic’s sinking the night before. (April 16, 1912)
6. Easter Eggs for Hitler, c 1944-1945 
7. Sergeant George Camblair practicing with a gas mask in a smokescreen – Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 1942
8. Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin in 1919
9. Painting WWII Propaganda Posters, Port Washington, New York – 8 July 1942
10. Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge ca 1935

This is awesome.

Not something I’d typically reblog but I like.

This is bloody fantastic.

Honestly seeing old photos in color makes the past so much more tangible.

dumb-boshie-stuff:

kittens are painful;;

Daycare | Kent, England, UK

(I’m a secretary/receptionist for a nursery. I’m dealing with a VERY upset parent whose husband has just left her. Another parent approaches my desk to pay, hears what’s going on and backs up to give the first parent some privacy.)

Parent #1: “I don’t know what to do. He just packed his stuff, said he ‘didn’t want to do it anymore,’ and left. I don’t know how I’m going to pay you.”

(The more she spoke, the more she cried. I buzzed for the owner and she took the parent into her office. The second parent then approached the desk again:)

Parent #2: “Oh my goodness, that poor woman. Anyway, I need to pay [Son]’s bill for the month, please.”

(I told her how much and she writes a cheque. She then hesitates a little.)

Parent #2: “Could I pay her bill as well?”

Me: “Pardon? You want to pay another person’s bill?”

Parent #2: “Yes. She needs all the help she can get right now.”

(I tell her it’s almost double her bill but she insists. Just as she’s finished writing the cheque the owner and the first parent come out. The woman has calmed down a bit and rushes to pick her son up.)

Parent #2: “Excuse me, [Owner], could you do something for me? Would you give this to her, please?”

(She’s holding a gift card for a supermarket.)

Parent #2: “I’ve been putting £50 a month on it since January; there’s £500 on it now. They’re going to need it a lot more than we will.”

(I and the owner stared at her for a moment, completely taken aback by her generosity. The owner took the card and the parent went to get her son. That’s when I started crying. I was so overwhelmed by what had just happened. Two days later, when the first parent brought her son in, the owner greeted her and asked her to come to the office where she gave her the card and told her the bill had been paid. I could hear her crying through the door. That was the best day at work and probably the kindest thing I’ve ever seen.)

deanprincesster:

I just lost 6 followers for pointing out that there aren’t a lot of women in lord of the rings. I lost more followers than there are speaking female characters in the nine hours of lord of the rings

earendils:

i already loved catherynne valente, but then she went on a twitter rant about the social construction behind poison being seen as a coward’s weapon and now i love her EVEN MORE

Lonely Hearts Club 💊🍃

“Apart from learning the “tricks of the trade” from other criminals, Kropotkin thought that the primary reason for this failure was that the prisons “killed all the qualities in a man which make him best adapted to community life”. The effects of cutting off social contacts and the petty nature of the prison regime made the prisoner progressively more unsuitable for his re-integration into community life. Of all the drawbacks of a system based on isolation, deprivation and systematic cruelty, his major criticism was that it was specifically designed to destroy the willpower and self-discipline of the individual. The idea that prisons could be reformed was, Kropotkin thought, a ridiculous proposition. Their institutional, authoritarian and hierarchical nature meant that even if the best of people were chosen as guards they would nonetheless become corrupted and degraded. In placing people in near absolute control of other people it was only a matter of time before the relationship between prisoners and guards degenerated into pettiness and tyranny.”

- Graham Purchase, Peter Kropotkin: Ecologist, Philosopher and Revolutionary  (via anarchistcommunism)

The super smart folks at MIT’s Senseable City Lab have produced this great video of how an urban intersection might operate in a world of driverless cars. The smart, signal-free crossing offers everything we want from autonomous vehicles: fewer emissions, better traffic flow, less delay—all at a collision cost of zero. The MIT team visualized this “digital traffic controller” as part of a project called DriveWAVE:

Imagine a city without traffic lights, where lanes of cars merge harmoniously from one to the next, allowing traffic to flow smoothly across intersections. This futuristic vision is becoming reality. The development of autonomous driving promises to revolutionise the landscape of urban mobility.

DriveWAVE obviously isn’t meant for direct implementation onto city roads tomorrow. But the video raises a couple points worth acknowledging as we steadily move toward the driverless car era.

The first thing to notice is how truly terrifying it would be—at least initially—to ride in a driverless car going that fast through an intersection. Seriously: pause the video at 44 seconds and see how narrowly the car turning left avoids being slammed by another going straight. When you ride in a self-driving car, you quickly learn to trust it; in fact, Google has said its early test riders trusted the car too much on highways. But having faith in a computerized intersection overlord to orchestrate so much city traffic at such great speeds will require a steep period of public adjustment.

The second thing to note is far more important: Where are all the pedestrians and bike riders? (Hat tip to Columbia University planning professor David King for bringing this to our attention.) Keep in mind this wasn’t some remote crossing being modeled; it was the intersection of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues in Boston. Here’s the Google Street View, complete with cyclists and walkers:

There’s an obvious reason why an “intelligent intersection” would want to eliminate people crossing on foot or by bike: they’d slow things down. But it would be a huge mistake for cities to undo all the progress being made on human-scale street design just to accommodate a perfect algorithm of car movement. If the result is that driverless cars need to move through cities at sub-optimal speeds, then so be it. We won’t be losing as much productivity to traffic as we do today, anyway.

This isn’t to pick on DriveWAVE. It’s natural to model intersections as if cars were the only mode that mattered—especially when computer drivers make every move predictable. The driverless intersection we presented a few years ago, based on work from computer scientists Peter Stone and Kurt Dresner of the University of Texas at Austin, made the same assumptions: lots of cars, no people or bikes.

Again, these models and videos were meant to start a discussion about how to design urban intersections for a driverless future. They aren’t supposed to be a finished product. But the interactions between self-driving cars and every other city street user need to be considered at the very earliest phases of that planning process. The self-braking Volvo that recently failed to stop for a person is a great example of what might happen in the absence of strong regulation over the safety of our streets.

More broadly, cities need to be thinking about how to integrate driverless cars into their existing transit networks—either as a supplement to train and bus lines, or as stand-alone shared taxi fleets. The alternative is subverting the needs of city people to those of city cars, and we’ve seen that movie before.