fuck it。

I’ve been seeing headass headlines this for the past few days, and I simply ignored it bc the media does shit like this for money and clickbait. But I realized this is more than the media tryna get their coins, this is a blatant attack on black women and other woc. So @ white women? I think it’s time we have a little chat. 

1. Beyonce has gone through a miscarriage, and thousands of other women have been through it as well. It is a terrible experience that no one deserves to go through. But Beyonce is a FAMOUS PERSON, and she has one of the largest fanbases in the world. So when she delivers news such as being pregnant with TWINS, of course the beyhive is gonna to go above and beyond when it comes to the reaction.  Ya’ll dragged her through the mud w/ her first pregnancy trying to say it was faked. Now that she’s pregnant for a second time, she’s doing all these photo shoots to further prove the accuracy of it. And now ya’ll are criticizing her for it????? Tryna cover your asses for how you treated her 5 years ago??????? Get the fuck over it, because ya’ll didn’t say shit when these women did THIS w/ their pregnancy announcements: 

2. Serena Williams has been demonized and ridiculed for her body type since FOREVER. People say that her body is “too masculine” and how she’s “built like a man”. It’s fucking gross because Serena is one of the most hard working athletes in the WORLD, and her body type shouldn’t be affiliated with the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into her career. White women, you can’t say that you’re an advocate for equality when you criticize a black woman’s photo shoot, deeming it “soft porn”, and yet you praise THESE photoshoots: 

When a white woman, or hell even a non-black woman does shit like this, ya’ll are so quick to write article about how “empowering” they’re being. But when a black woman does it ya’ll all of the sudden wanna further sexualize and make it about “soft porn”??? Get over yourselves and let a black women love herself after receiving massive amounts of slander for her body type. 

3. The role in Ghost in the Shell is definitely about race. If her character’s mom is Asian, then why tf couldn’t they just get an Asian person to play the character in the damn first place???? 

She should’ve just said “a woc deserves the role more than me, but unfortunately I can’t control who they cast” and then moved on. But nope, she had to make it about herself and disregard the fact woc are hardly ever represented in movies, especially Asian women.   

4.  You can’t criticize a movie you don’t even relate to on a cultural level. Moonlight takes the components of black struggles, black culture, black life, and puts it into a true cinematic experience. You don’t have to like the movie, but the movie itself is more about whether you “like it” or not. It’s whether you relate to it, whether you feel with it, and whether your experiences correlate with the character’s experiences. A “better plot” wouldn’t do shit Becky, you either get it or not. Not to mention Camilla Long was kissing La La Land’s ass: 

For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb.  Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.

Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.

But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)

Off the top of my head?

-advances in robotics

-advances in miniature robotics

-advances in flight technology

-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences

-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)

-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people

-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants

-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc

-fucking robot bees, my friend

-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be

Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.

Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.

Trust me.  The paperwork haunts my nightmares.

So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”

But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions. 

A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.

Nice work, college boy. :p

Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student.  She developed this in her product design class.  And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars. 

‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.

Pro

-None

Con