#hashtag activism; or, how our intellectual degradation is accelerated by social media.

With nothing to do but write, I guess I should finally put some thoughts down on a few subjects that have been on my mind lately.

One of the many thing that irks me is hashtag activism. The idea that simply writing a catchy phrase on twitter of facebook is going to lead to massive reform is at best ridiculous, and possibly intellectually stunting. Take for example the #bringbackourgirls campaign. On paper, it seems worthy and righteous: these poor girls were kidnapped and will be sold as "wives" (read: sex slaves) on the black market. Thank God twitter came to the rescue. Except it didn't. These girls haven't been returned. Those responsible haven't been caught. Nothing came of mass hashtagging, but yet everyone bandwagoned it. Feminazis, neonazis and facists alike all "joined together" to "rescue" the girls, yet nothing actually happened. All we got was annoying click bait headlines and pointless petitions and ranting tumblr feminists. Some argue that the twitter hashtag was to raise awareness about the kidnapping, as if no one had any idea what was going on. This is similar to the campaign a few years back to change your facebook picture to a cartoon to "raise awareness" about child abuse. I wasn't aware child abuse existed before this, and when I saw all my friends were suddenly cartoons, I just had to learn more. The idea that no one beforehand knew that children were abused is bullshit. It didn't raise awareness, and it didn't stop anything. As written by the satirist Maddox: "Want to stop something? Do something, like: Make a pledge to abuse one less child everyday, or try bowling instead of beating kids. There are lots of things you can do to end child abuse. Changing your facebook profile picture isn't one of them." (link) The reality is hashtagging isn't doing anything for anyone. There have been tons of examples: #yesallwomen, #kony2012, #cancelcolbert. None of these have done anything but provide more rhetoric points for the echo chambers that perpetuate the groupthink behind these types of things. Abuse never stopped. Kidnapped children were never returned. Warlords still exists.

Along the lines of #cancelcolbert, there is something else that has happened with hashtag activism: people using twitter and facebook to make stupid points or get an easy 15 minutes of fame. If you don't know about the cancel colbert fandango, google it. The story behind the hashtag is ridiculous, but the reaction and perpetuation of it is even worst. Granted, most people with a brain didn't buy into it, including even a few feminists, but it took off quickly in the intellectual sandbox of twitter, where everyone is Mensa material. But what made really bad even worst, was the attitude of the woman who started the hashtag. She wanted everyone to hear her opinion, which changed often, and absolutely refused anyone else to disagree with her, telling them to "check [their] privilege." Now we have idiots calling for the Daily Show to be canceled because they used satire to prove a point, which was lost on most of america's youth. It must be true what I've heard: You have to have a least a double-digit IQ to understand satire.

Maybe this is all just evolution embracing artificial selection: We now can tell who's to stupid to breed.

Maybe we should embrace this afterall.

Life as a biology major

"In our experiment, we hypothesized that obesity, type I diabetes and similar health issues were correlated with depleted levels of Akkermansia Muciniphila in the gut microbiome. In our experiments, we found that mice who were genetically predisposed to obesity had A. Muciniphila levels between 6 and 8, (log base 10) whereas lean mice had levels around 11, (figure A) which confirmed our hypothesis that A. Muciniphila levels are correlated with obesity. We tested then to see how prebiotic oligosaccharides would affect the levels of A. Muciniphila in mice. We found that in obese mice, prebiotic oligosaccharides supplemented to a control diet increased A. Muciniphila levels slightly from about 9 in control diet alone to about 10. When prebiotic oligosaccharides were supplemented with a high-fat diet, A. Muciniphila levels increased dramatically from around 7 in high-fat diet alone to about 10.5. (Figure B) Furthermore, we found that levels of lipopolysaccharides in the blood, which is indicative of endotoxicity, decreased with the introduction of prebiotic oligosaccharides into a control diet. With the lean mice, LPS dropped from around 1 to about .8; in the obese mice, LPS levels decreased from around 3, to the control baseline of 1. (Figure D) This suggests that as A. Muciniphila levels in the gut microbiome increase, the permeability of the guy decreases, thus inhibiting endotoxicity and obesity, type I diabetes and other similar conditions."

That fact that all of that makes sense to me, is kinda troubling.

New blog

Since I've kind of turned a corner in life, heading back to school, I figured I would go ahead start a new blog.

Main news here is am am getting married in three weeks. Sarah and I were gunna wait until July, but some circumstances have come up and we are moving the date to the 28th of this month. It's been quite hectic, but things are happening regardless. We've got a great deal on a place. We're renting a basement for 375 a month.

This semester seems to be going better than last. I ended last semester pretty well, though. I got 91st percentile on the ACS and I got an 88 on my pre-calc final. I only ended up with a 79 in pre-calc, though, so I'm taking Algebra and trig this semester. I bombed my biology test last week, so I can still get an A-, but realistically I'll end up with a B. I have an A+ in Algebra and an B in Psych. Trig doesn't start until Monday, and it's four classes a week. I have an hour and a half between each class, which has been helpful for studying and homework, except I don't do a good job using it. I only have one class on tuesday and thursday. I'm tutoring on tuesdays and I am playing flag football as well. The football is going alright... I scored a touchdown our first game and had two sacks, then I didn't do much of anything aside from a couple of tackles until thursday. I had two sacks and two tackles for loss, and I had a lot of rushed passes. The other team didn't seem to like losing to us, and didn't seem to like that I could get in their backfield every play. The refs were pretty fed up with then complaining. I did however get away with a foul at the end. I was tired of the qb running his mouth, so I "accidentally" shoved him to the ground while reaching for his flag on a fourth-and-goal.

Overall things are alright. Wedding stress and all, but it's a going.