“Careful, that compound is rich in phlogiston..."

May 6, 2017 11:52 PM

If People Talked About Other Things the Way They Talked About Gender Identity.
posted by loquacious (39 comments total)

I laughed. Since color labels are essentially arbitrary it seems fine to call Indigo and Violet purple and other purple. So maybe the editor should have dropped that one.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:05 AM on May 7, 2017

I think I've seen all these things said on Metafilter.
posted by bleep at 12:30 AM on May 7, 2017 [13 favorites]

Ugh, I can totally believe people have sincerely said each of these things. This doesn't read as satire to me or even unlikely, or even a useful allegory for demonstration purposes.
posted by amtho at 1:19 AM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Avocado ice cream sounds delicious, though.
posted by mochapickle at 1:49 AM on May 7, 2017 [7 favorites]

Subatomic particles: “Now they’re saying they discovered ‘tetraquarks’ and ‘pentaquarks’. How many combinations of quarks are there? I can’t even keep up these days. What ever happened to just talking about good old atoms?”

I confess that I periodically long for the atomism of the Epicurians, but then I remember the Swerve, and I get over it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:01 AM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

Technically, rainbows don't have purple at all...
posted by Happy Monkey at 3:40 AM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Take out "or a Democrat" and I've said the Politics one about seventy times since the election.
posted by Etrigan at 4:31 AM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

Feh -- nuances are just a matter of semantics. Everybody knows there's no such thing as grey.
posted by Construction Concern at 4:46 AM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

“The cultural imposition of boundaries on a color gradient has nothing to do with it. A rainbow has seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and another kind of purple.”

🎼they stole my rainbow, my lovely rainbow/they stole my rainbow & made it gay/A leftist faction has made refraction an emblem of moral decay
(Posted to Twitter after some rightwinger claimed that the LGBT flag was “cultural appropriation” from God.)
posted by acb at 5:56 AM on May 7, 2017 [9 favorites]

Also, isn't the presence of both “indigo” and “violet” in the colour spectrum due to Isaac Newton's numerological superstitions and insistence on there being seven elements?
posted by acb at 5:59 AM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

Well Daniel Craig is just an actor, however talented, while Sean Connery is James Bond.

And if that one's right, it just stands to reason that the others would be right too. So gender is fixed, inherent, and binary. Because Sean Connery. QED.
posted by Naberius at 6:39 AM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

Could have done with one about preaching to the choir.
posted by hawthorne at 7:07 AM on May 7, 2017

Politics: “‘Libertarian’? Stop trying to be a special snowflake. You’re a Republican or a Democrat, end of story.”

The others are funny, but this one is weaponizable.
posted by bonehead at 7:13 AM on May 7, 2017 [21 favorites]

Considering how many "libertarians" seem to be firmly in the alt-right camp using the special snowflake label against them is definitely a case of turn-about being fair play. Hell I've even started noticing alt-right types claiming anarchist affiliations.
posted by vuron at 7:38 AM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

Avocado ice cream is indeed delicious. Very soft and runny, though — better suited to a bowl than a cone.
posted by Banknote of the year at 7:44 AM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Because Sean Connery. QED.


O RLY?
posted by sexyrobot at 7:51 AM on May 7, 2017 [7 favorites]

A spectrum has two opposite extremes, and is therefore binary. Also, I can remember when McSweeney's was funny. I have a collection that came with a CD -- an accompanying They Might Be Giants song for each story. It's hard to imagine the silly, upbeat fun of TMBG singing along with the politically preachy and sneering tone McSweeney's seems to have adopted. But I imagine they either don't want to risk standing out from the rest of the Left, or are hungry for those Vox clicks.
posted by Paddle to Sea at 8:23 AM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

A spectrum has two opposite extremes, and is therefore binary.

What makes something binary is that there are only two possible values that it can take.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:42 AM on May 7, 2017 [41 favorites]

Avocado ice cream sounds delicious, though.
posted by mochapickle

I'll bet.
posted by jonmc at 8:46 AM on May 7, 2017 [11 favorites]

A spectrum has two opposite extremes,

lol
posted by FirstMateKate at 8:48 AM on May 7, 2017 [24 favorites]

Avocado ice cream is super easy as well as being delicious, and doesn't even need special equipment.
posted by bonehead at 8:58 AM on May 7, 2017

The ice analogy didn't really hold water.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:52 AM on May 7, 2017 [12 favorites]

A spectrum has two opposite extremes,

You want extremes? Try that darned Ultraviolet! There's no talking sense into it....
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:00 AM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

A spectrum has two opposite extremes,

yeah the gender spectrum idea is an imperfect analogy too. i haven't found any good geometrical approximation that actually makes gender make sense

pssst gender is a social construct
posted by magentaisafuncolortobe at 10:13 AM on May 7, 2017 [8 favorites]

Yeah, honestly, for me this made the opposite point to the one it was trying to make. I'd considered people to be especially idiotic about gender identity but the fact is people are idiots about everything.
posted by potrzebie at 10:13 AM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm sympathetic to the avocado ice argument, it sounds terrible and you're wrong if you disagree with me.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:36 AM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I didn't really like this, but it had good intentions, I guess. It just didn't really land as either genuinely funny or particularly thoughtful/insightful for me. It just felt a bit trivializing and ill-informed and only half-committed to its own premise. Cracked has done better with this kind of thing, but I know that's a really impossibly high standard for most internet humor writers.
posted by byanyothername at 11:06 AM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

A spectrum has two opposite extremes, and is therefore binary.

The set of natural numbers has two opposite extremes, minus infinite and plus infinite, and is therefore binary.
posted by sukeban at 11:15 AM on May 7, 2017 [13 favorites]

McSweeney's always seems rather glib and insubstantial, especially contrasting with its “erudite”/“literary” presentation. It seems like the online publishing equivalent of those gorgeous, easily-digestible pseudo-arthouse films whose function is to reassure their viewers that they're cultured and sophisticated whilst not taxing them any more than a Judd Apatow gross-out bromance would.

Having said that, this piece was probably one of the better ones I've seen from them.
posted by acb at 11:17 AM on May 7, 2017

Was using a zero (0) instead of a capital O in "H₂0," twice, deliberate?
posted by BrashTech at 11:45 AM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

I actually had an avocado milkshake at a Filipino restaurant once. It wasn't bad.
posted by jonmc at 12:09 PM on May 7, 2017

that avocado argument is just fruity. it's awesome everybody - strongly recommend making some if you were disappointed with the content in the link.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 12:49 PM on May 7, 2017

>>Because Sean Connery. QED.


>O RLY?

I am confused. All I see on that page is mostly Zed...
posted by twidget at 12:51 PM on May 7, 2017

They left out "The Bible is either perfect in every way or is propaganda written so religious leaders could maintain power over fools. There is no other option."
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:28 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]

Fallacies...logical fallacies as far as the eye can see...
posted by mikoroshi at 11:23 AM on May 8, 2017

this article kind of hurt to read. Felt kind of like when left bros try to insinuate they are hip to a particular cause by being gross as hell about it. I have seen some buds share it on bad social media site Facebook and I'm like... this.... this might maybe be funny in secret trans inside baseball universe? But... enh
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 11:29 AM on May 8, 2017

Several of those gave me a chuckle. I'll try to remember the phlogiston one next time someone gripes about "politically correct" terminology.
posted by biogeo at 11:33 AM on May 8, 2017

this might maybe be funny in secret trans inside baseball universe?

can confirm :)
posted by magentaisafuncolortobe at 10:48 AM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

As I was reading through the list, I was thinking that I would make a comment jokingly agreeing with the avocado ice cream one, until I got to the ice/water one which I will sincerely defend.

Ice is water: solid water. That "water" is often used and understood in context to mean liquid water is fine, but doesn't change that fact.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:31 AM on May 10, 2017