Creatures That Don’t Conform
emergencemagazine.org
emergencemagazine.org
https://www.barrywebbimages.co.uk/Images/Macro/Slime-Moulds-...
Edit: As noted below, the correct surname of the photographer is Webb, not White!
> Iridescent rainbow orbs bursting into tangerine spun sugar. Pearly spheres of goo. Sorbet corn dogs leaning into one another with matching bouffants. Bright yellow blackberries. A bunch of Mr. Blobby’s babies. Golden goblets overflowing with effervescent honeycomb. Opalescent spherules in crinkled sweet wrappers. Amaretti flecked with flakes of soap. Honestly, go and check it out if you don’t believe me.
And then later it refers to some lesbain poet who talked about slime molds in a poem. And meaningless speculation about how slime molds are "unstudied" due to a revulsion of slime, which is pointed out to be feminine. Not an argument I'm going to buy, for if there extremely well studied from early times, then this article would perhaps be talking about how slime molds are seminal in nature. So, meaningless in the sense it's unfalsifiable. Maybe search for actual reasons why they're unstudied and improperly categorised, like they're difficult to study? Or that good scientists try to be as parsimonious with category as possible, so that those categories retain explantory power? But that has to be ignored, so the Queer theoretic "violence of categorization" can be undermined with nature.
It's tiresome. If you've found an interesting creature in nature, then write what makes that creature interesting. It doesn't (ever) need to include what a lesbian writer thought it taught humans how to live. Because it doesn't, really.
Your comment, on the other hand, feels mean-spirited and is far more dominated by the topic of gender and sexuality, in a wholly negative way, than the article was.
this is literally what they did.
I think you just have a bias against queer people. you say in another comment “actual cool people laugh at those blue-haired weirdos” and in this one that an article “doesn't (ever) need to include what a lesbian writer thought.”
these aren’t legitimate criticisms, and your claim that an unfalsifiable argument is meaningless is not a valid criticism either. you can’t falsify the theory of evolution, but the the theory still has meaning. in many cases, you can’t ethically set up control groups for medical interventions which save lives, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reason about those interventions. an unfalsifiable argument can certainly still have meaning and utility, and claiming otherwise is ridiculous.
saying “actual cool people laugh at those blue-haired weirdos” is also ridiculous. first because it’s obviously biased. second because cool is subjective, and you were just complaining about OP being subjective.
The theory of evolution is falsifiable.
As you say, medical interventions often cannot ethically be falsified. However, medical trials are typically set up in a way designed to test if they work with an eye towards also detecting if they do not. Which is to say trials enable falsifying them. This happens quite often when pharmaceuticals fail trials.
Why the hell is this kind of comment again at the top of the thread?
No, actually, I'll say that queerness cannot be cool on its own terms. Queerness is that which rejects normality[0]. Coolness - to analyze it so deeply I reveal myself as deeply uncool - is to be at the peak of social aspiration. It's normativity so easily achieved it makes people feel envious and desirous. It is, in that sense, the antithesis of queer.
[0] queer-as-identity allows individuals to transcend or outright reject normative labels https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-queer/
"Actual cool people." Give me a break.
It is frankly bizarre to say gay, nonbinary or trans people are "worshiped." It seems like around 40% of people actively oppose the normalization of queerness. Anti-queer laws are being passed all over the place in the country. This doesn't seem like a culture that worships queerness to me.
It remains to be seen whether those opposed can mount a successful defense.
[0] Before someone comments with something like "LGBT isn't an ideology; they're PEOPLE!", I will restate that, yes, LGBT is an ideology (or family of ideologies). It is an anthropological position taken on what it means to be human, what human sexuality is about and therefore on sexual morality, the social relations that can licitly follow, etc. People can accept or reject the position. People can experience same-sex attractions or whatever. What LGBT offers is a particular interpretation of those experiences, and a political program that appeals to and makes use them, that, to put it mildly, are controversial. They are contested and challenged and quite rigorously by, e.g., natural law ethicists (who draw on a long intellectual and ethical tradition that has already dealt with such questions throughout history). LGBT ideology cannot be understood outside of the liberal tradition; with liberalism comes the notion that freedom is the unfettered indulgence of any desire ("do what thou wilt"), save for those that contradict the ideology, of course. But the classical tradition has responded to such and similar views throughout history; to act against reason and to be a slave to one's passions and to any disordered desires is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to do what one ought, to do what is objectively good, to act according to human nature, and it is the nature of human beings to be rational. By that rationality, they can discern what is objectively good. (There are also interesting connections between LGBT and transhumanism and gnosticism, ones which reveal how unwittingly appropriate the choice of the "pride" slogan is, but those I leave to the side for now.)
But also: having the opinion that certain kinds of sexual relations and gender expressions' morality should be re-evaluated is not the same as believing "do what thou wilt." This seems obvious. Eg, those who wished to abolish slavery before the civil war did not wish to abolish society. It is possible to want to reform without wanting to utterly dispense with every moral fact. I don't know a single queer person who expresses or believes in this kind of moral anarchy. Indeed, the very ideal of queer liberation is to assert _moral status_ for a class of people that have previously not had it, not to eliminate the idea of moral status all together.
In fact, the only place I've ever seen moral chaos conflated with queer stuff is among conservatives, who do so because it makes queerness seem more scary than it actually is.
I would like to pose a question to you. If, as you state, 60% of the population is ambivalent to or supports queerness, how do you distinguish this state of affairs from a genuine social evolution compared to what you are implying, some kind of sinister plot imposed by "them." If "them" is 60% of the country or even just 40% of the country, and, as you suggest, opposition is actually smaller than 40%, then isn't the acceptance of queerness just a social change like any other?
You must know very different queer people than I do, because queer communities in my experience tend extremely anti-capitalist. I see various flavors of anarchism, but anarcho-capitalism is not typically one of them.
It's also weird of you to assume that anyone who is popular on the internet and also queer is popular because they are queer.
The uncool are all uncool in more or less the same way, but the cool are all cool differently. This is why you can have cool queer people, cool conservatives, cool liberals, cool socialists, cool communists. Coolness has an inevitable character of transgression against norms. It is an expression of the basic human need to rethink and revise normal behavior, presumably in search of other ways of living that might be more productive, pleasurable, just, aesthetically pleasing, whatever. This is a necessary part of a functioning society. Queer people, among others, are a part of it.
Analyzing coolness doesn't make you uncool. Getting bent out of shape because someone wrote a fun little essay about being queer and slime molds might.
1) There are some people who claim that male and female is one of those universal binaries, woven into the fabric of the universe, like light and dark. Actually pretty common for religious people to make the strong form of this claim for example.
2) Slime molds prove that isn’t necessarily true and doesn’t have to be true for living organisms. It’s the way evolution went but it wasn’t inevitable. (Article then delves into this but more scientifically)
Sex is a case of biotic complementarity. I don't know much about slime molds, but I'm willing to bet there is all kind of complementarity in their organization.
Binary complementarity is no more woven into the fabric of the universe than any other symmetry that you see in nature. Gravity is unipolar, electromagnetism is dipolar and the strong force is multipolar. In fact, if you look at electroweak theory (which breaks into E&M and the Weak Force) the bipolar character of the E&M field is less fundamental that it might appear.
Also complementarity isn't limited to 2-tuples. Or perhaps another way to see it is that the dyad suffices to model any more complex structure.
well, no. i would say it can performs some simple algorithms.
> It knows itself
this is useful, performing those algorithms, and so will be selected for.
> It is able to learn and anticipate.
anticipate? don't know about that.
> It can learn, for example, to avoid something potentially harmful.
bacteria do this, via very rapid natural selection.
> It makes decisions
not in the sense we do.
[...] After three cold snaps the scientists stopped changing the temperature and humidity and watched to see whether the amoebas had learned the pattern. Sure enough, many of the cells throttled back right on the hour in anticipation of another bout of cold weather
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/71-slime-molds...
a term from the OP, not one introduced by me. complain to them.
> not in the sense we do.
Isn't that the point? That in some ways it seems familiar, yet gets there in ways utterly foreign?
As in: is it a camera and a macro lens? Or is there some focus stacking and image composition involved? Or perhaps some other approach?
In any case, with such a high magnification, the plane of focus becomes very narrow, so they're very likely also doing focus stacking.
And you need a lot of light, so they're probably also using a flash.
Definitely using a flash, you wouldn't get that even side/shadow lighting without either (diffused) flash or other added light source
Which links to https://amateurphotographer.com/technique/macro_photography/...
And that further elaborates (in the Barry Webb section): "a Micro Four Thirds system with a 60mm macro lens [...] also often use between one and three extension tubes and, on occasions, a Raynox close-up lens" (plus a whole lot more info.)