In Your Heart

i haven't seen anything about this on my dashboard, so i wanted to share. ICE gestapo killed another human being on tuesday. he leaves behind three sons and his wife, who he has spent the last 35 years building a life with

there is a gofundme supported by the league of united latin american citizens set up to help with funeral costs, legal fees, and supporting his family moving forward.

Things will never again be so beautiful.

Check out the bonus panel on the site.

Upcoming book signings this summer.

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SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

"there is nothing morally cleansing about hardship" -- Okay, sure, true, but the more salient point is that nations, cultures, and populations cannot be morally cleansed! Groups are not moral agents; that is the exclusive province of individuals! Groups do not suffer, feel, or choose, only the human beings situated within them do.

They might be more skilled at something, in a way you should respect to accomplish things. They may have power over you, such that you need to listen to them to avoid pain. They may be someone you look up to, because they're accomplished in some way.

But fundamentally everyone you could ever meet, from presidents to scientists to writers to elders, should be treated no better than, say, your buddy Kev. They don't need deference Just Because, they aren't inherently smarter on axes you haven't seen evidence for, and they do not deserve or require Respect in some amorphous fashion.

Twenty years ago, a sociologist of science called Harry Collins tried out an experiment. He had been researching the community of physicists who worked on gravity waves for the preceding two decades, trying to get insight into standards of proof and how experimental results were reconciled and interpreted. In furtherance of this project, he had been attending gravity waves conferences, where he was a familiar figure and had lots of friends in the community (because he talked to lots of people, physicists often sought him out to get gossip and news on what other labs were doing and seeing). The experiment was a sort of Turing test – one group of physicists came up with a list of half a dozen questions about gravity waves, and then sent them by email to both Collins and a physicist, with instructions just to answer them from general knowledge rather than looking anything up. A jury of other physicists were then given the job of deciding which set of answers had come from Collins, and which from the physicist. And all but one of the judges identified the sociologist as the physicist. Although extremely funny, this wasn’t actually meant as a practical joke; it was meant to test a serious hypothesis about expertise. Harry Collins theorised that there was a thing called “interactional expertise” (basically the ability to hold a sensible and useful conversation about a subject) which was distinct from “contributory expertise” (he didn’t actually even know enough maths to do gravity wave physics). Deep interaction with a knowledge base and literature could provide one, but it wasn’t the same thing as actually working within the field.