This Wednesday is the last day for Amazon employees to cast their vote: Union or No?
In the coming days, the vote tally from the unionization effort at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama will be known. Amazon has gone to great lengths to undermine the effort (and that’s just the start). They have acted in a number of ways both currently illegal (such as pushing former employees to vote) and potentially so, should the Senate vote to pass the PRO Act.
Here’s hoping that Amazon’s lies fell on deaf ears and that workers there have maintained earlier numbers to become the first, but not last, Amazon workers in the US to unionize.
Going the Wrong Way
I’m a big fan of Robert Evans’ Behind the Bastards podcast. It moves between irreverence and providing necessary context to the stories of the worst people/groups in history—sans apologia—without ever sacrificing narrative or humor.
As I was working on last month’s newsletter (specifically the bits on masculinity), the show was addressing the birth of the manosphere. The “manosphere” refers to a corner of the internet made up of websites, blogs, etc which emphasize the kind of toxic masculinity we need to leave in the dirt. It’s hostile to feminism, outwardly embraces misogyny, and associated with the alt-right, the men’s rights movement, incels, pick-up artists, etc.
Something I really appreciated about the show’s treatment of the manosphere is the host’s willingness to acknowledge how easily he might have followed the breadcrumbs towards men’s right’s activism. I’ve thought the same of myself many times. I can recall being a 19 year old professed feminist who spoke over women and listened little. I had my own connections, years ago, to fundamentalist atheism and saw people graduate from that to Ron Paul Libertarianism and other common avenues into the subculture.
It’s worth noting that there has always been a small contingent which views men’s liberation in the context of a broader liberation from codified and oppressive gender roles, a far cry from the way men’s rights activists think. Terms for these wildly different kinds of thought are often conflated and confused, such that they become indefensible very quickly. The rotten seed at the heart of men’s rights activists is that rather than seek freedom for all, they are reactionary, see the struggle as zero-sum and thus something to be won, place women and non-affiliated men in opposition, and are ultimately violent in rhetoric and often in deed.
I highly recommend the first episode in particular (it’s a 2-parter) for the historical context. While the views are indefensible, there are certainly people swept up in it that are pitiable, taken advantage of by grifters packaging a hateful ideology posturing as community. And then there are those who simply need “a good bricking.”
Punctuation
Talking with one’s hands can seem to convey passion and excitement. It’s often a sign one is confident in the point they are making, and comfortable with making it.
According to a piece published in January in the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal, it further seems that hand talking has a strong impact on what people hear from the speaker.
Beat gestures—that is moving your hands with your speech, or what the paper calls “spontaneously produced biphasic movements of the hand”—not only occur in lock step with speech, but also influence how the listener perceives vowel stress.
In languages where vowels stress changes a word’s meaning or clarifies between homonyms (the paper refers to the difference between object and object) this is particularly affective. Beat gestures significantly improve the likelihood of discerning the appropriate vowel stress. The effect is even stronger in the reverse; when beat gestures are mismatched to meaning—that is, if my hand gesticulations fall on the wrong part of the word object—the listener is far more likely to misinterpret meaning, even if the speech is clear and distinct.
It might be worth being a bit more choosy about how I wave my hands about when speaking emphatically.
Back to the Well of ‘Intelligence’
Another piece recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal finds that cuttlefish exhibit behaviors indicating an ability to plan for the future.
Scientists performed a modified version of the Stanford marshmallow experiment on a population of cuttlefish to determine whether they could delay gratification. If you aren’t familiar with the classic marshmallow experiment, it sought to establish a connection between cognitive performance overall and the specific ability to delay gratification. Children were given a choice between a a small but immediate reward and a greater reward (a marshmallow) if they could wait. The published results of the experiment found that those children who could wait to get the greater reward performed better on subsequent cognitive tests than did those who took the immediate gratification.
As with a lot of the best known psychological experiments of the mid-20th century, there are significant issues with the original experimental design as well as the conclusions drawn from the findings. See here and here for a couple of examples of criticism of the experiment and it’s legacy. Without going into too much detail, current psychologists are more sensitive to the effects of environment on test subjects, especially with regard to how affluence can boost an individual’s ability to plan for the future. Not to be overly simplistic, deprivation can make is rather challenging to hold off for rewards later.
I mention all of this because despite a growing awareness of the limits of the marshmallow test (and the Stanford prison experiment, and Harlow’s experiments on the cognitive development of rhesus monkeys, and so on), we continue to make many of the same hard to resolve mistakes. Researchers adjust for prior biases but surely impart new ones, journalists continue to sensationalize the findings of scientific study, and the public continues to simplify and codify often incorrect learnings to be taken from the same.
I bring this up not as a specific criticism of any of these groups, but as an opportunity to return to something I wrote about back in issue #2 under the subhead “Measuring Distance in Liters,” namely:
Humans have a bad track record with describing and defining intelligence, especially because we often center our own intelligence as prime, and
Oversimplification of new learnings is every bit as problematic as confusing correlation with causation.
Cuttlefish can learn to wait for better treats. More and more we find that other animals can plan for the future in ways we didn’t think possible. Intelligence is broad, divergent, and incredible. We need to use our own far more judiciously.
Allemansrätten and Good Neighbors
I’ve long been fascinated with the “freedom to roam”, sometimes called the “everyman’s right” ( or in Swedish the “allemansrätten,” which I love), the right of public access to the wilderness, or the "right to roam". The second to last is a pretty clear definition of a right which has existed in some places since antiquity, in other places exists not at all, and in a good many places exists only under very specific legal conditions.
In Northern Europe, where it is a broad and common right, it has existed for so long that it has only been codified into law in the past half century. In general, even in the places where the right is largely uninfringed upon, one cannot make money from (hunt, fish, extract) or disrupt (burn large fires, drive an ATV) the land, nor can one tread next to a private dwelling, but otherwise the right to walk, run, bike, ski, etc on private and public land alike is assured.
In England, the right existed prior to “enclosure,” a 13th century legal process whereby lands were consolidated into large scale farms and made accessible only by permission of the owner (or in the case of public lands, the monarch). It has only recently been partially reestablished, and then only on uncultivated land.
Side note for further historical context: Enclosure made subsistence farming for the feudal class more challenging, as in this time otherwise unused land was fair game for hunting and farming. Karl Marx argues in Capital that enclosure and the associated increase in labor supply stemming from these people’s loss of land to cultivate led, in part, to the Industrial Revolution and thus the transition from feudalism into capitalism.
As is often the case, in the US there is a patchwork of laws and regulations which differ on federal vs state owned lands, and again by state when pertaining to personally owned lands. Even national and state parks are not necessarily free to roam, as one must often pay park maintenance fees to enter. There are a handful of states with freedom to roam laws, including Maine where all outdoor property is open access unless prohibited by clear signage.
Some critics note that populations numbers and a general lack of knowledge about preserving biodiversity makes such rights a point of concern. In many places, monocultures of local and/or imported plants have supplanted rich natural flora, making this concern for protecting wild and natural land more pressing still. I tend to think of the concern in the reverse; in an effort to preserve and expand both the “everyman’s right” and natural flora, I’m in the camp that we should rewild a TON of land while making it more accessible for non-extractive/destructive purposes.
All of this makes the decision to enclose our yard a complicated one. Our house is 80 years old, and as far as I can tell based on records of the house and building norms in the area, the yard has never been enclosed. Having dogs (and potentially children) makes enclosing the yard a matter of safety as well as privacy, but then dogs and kids aren’t exactly new and they can always be watched for safety.
A not insignificant part of me wants a yard open to neighbors. While I was born in a place where houses were far enough apart that we often let trees play the part of demarcating property lines, I mostly grew up in higher-density areas where fences were absolutely everywhere. This internal dissonance brings to mind the contradictions in the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall.” In it, the narrator repeatedly mentions among otherwise playful banter “Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” to which his neighbor replies in proverb: “Good fences make good neighbours.” I, like the narrator, understand but am not so much convinced.
In a time such as these, when communities are so fractured and individuals so atomized, I wonder if another fence isn’t the last thing we need.
A Brief Plug
McKinley Valentine published a fantastic little (~1500 words) piece of fiction in Fantasy Magazine, and I just have to share it. Over the past year, McKinley has expressed the relief she’s found in her relatively recent ADHD diagnosis, citing it as a revelation that puts so many life long challenges into perspective. I so love how she’s worked that feeling into the fabric of “The Code for Everything.”
In no particular order, “I love Noonday's nonchalance with human norms, the stark juxtaposition of needing to know nothing about service work against the incredible social expectations of fae folk, and [the protagonist] Izzy's immediate comfort with codified rules” (quoted because one can plagiarize themselves ).
e·phem·er·a mis·cel·la·ny
(Wherein I try to cover a lot of ground in far less detail than you’ve come to expect)
Note: I wanted to embed the linked images below, but they made the issue to large. Durn.
If you asked my lovely wife for a handful of adjectives describing me, among them would be “restless.” I’m pretty much always doing something, even when I ought to be resting.
Looking back on this month, I think I may have stretched the bounds on that one.
With free time soon to be at a premium, I spent the first few days of the month knocking out a building project.
As per usual, I was a little too zoned in to remember to take regular pictures, but I did find staining and sealing the new shelves striking enough to pause. Unfortunately, I couldn’t readily find a good ‘before’ pic, so you’ll have to imagine sliding pressed board doors concealing white metal wire racks. Trust me, this open hall tree is a big improvement.
Tangent: Big thank you to Jaime Loftus for the excellent Lolita Podcast, which I binged through the project. If you’ve ever been curious about the cultural legacy of Nabokov’s most famous literary work, I highly recommend this 10part series. (Related: she also did an awesome limited podcast about joining MENSA, which is hilarious and kept me entertained through snow shoveling).
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As a couple and individually, Lena and I have been cooking up some new dishes. The empanadas and pain à l’ancienne were both quite good, as were the homemade fettuccine and and fish stew we failed the capture 😛.
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The gardening plans are all coming together. We’re only about a month and a half out from the average last Spring frost, so I’ve got all kinds of things sprouting (peppers, lettuces, onions), planted indoors for transplanting soon (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, different onions), and even a few things already out in the beds (shallots & garlic).
I still need to fill the last bed with soil, sprout more seeds, plant more seeds indoors, demarcate the beds, build trellises, and slowly get everything outside, all over the coming months. Even if little comes out of the ground ready to eat, I’m super excited to dive into gardening.
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On top of everything on this list, there were numerous professional goings on this month as well. I think I might need to dial it back a touch in April.
I really enjoyed reading these you continue to grow as a writer!
Thanks for sharing my story!
i really enjoyed this issue and last issue especially - i shared last issue with a group of male and AMAB non-binary friends who've been discussing masculinity, i had it saved to reply to you with a proper thoughtful discussion but it looks like I'm going to be as unreliable a commenter as i am a timely-email-replier
what struck me, i think, is that much of the start of what you wrote could have been said by a lot of my male/AMAB friends (including the nail painting), but the conclusion they mostly came to was that they don't particularly connect to masculinity or think of themselves as "a man" but it didn't really affect them negatively either, so shrug, basically. whereas your conclusion was much more invested in / attached to masculinity (for yourself) - it was interesting to see people have very similar experiences / thoughts but quite a different outcome
They came up with a metaphor for gender that i think works well - that masculinity was like a work uniform, but a comfortable and functional one, so while it's not "them" they don't mind putting it on every morning to go out into the world - it's not worth kicking up a fuss about. I liked that - in that metaphor, femininity is like a work uniform that's like, a playboy bunny outfit - i don't mind being a woman but i just want to get on with my day and do my work and stuff, but I'm forced to wear an outfit that means people see me as inherently sexual even when I'm not flirting or in a remotely sexual context