This Week In Cool Stuff: 06/16/12

Sorry this is late. I need a better way to manage my time.

Anyway, here are this week's cool links:

-Drew Tatusko ask what a white, privileged male should do in the face of injustice:

I no longer see myself having a unique role with those in the LGBT community, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, women, and others. I used to think that I had a unique role because I had something to say. Much of what I had to say was out of pure self-centeredness. I wanted attention. I had the arrogance to believe that I was entitled to be heard among those who our society has done its best to silence mainly from direct actions taken by men who share much of my own social standing. Some of my friends call this “terminal uniqueness.”

 -Bo Sanders at Homebrewed Christianity explains why we need to believe in a different story if we want to save the world:

Because christian humans live by the wrong narrative, we behave as a cancer on the planet. In increasing size and exponential growth we consume at greater and greater levels, consuming the very body that gives host to our existence. At some point, the cancer ends up compromising the functions (organs) that give life to the organism in which it lives. Death ensues. We are not worried about because we think Jesus is coming back soon – it is the end times after all (a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever I saw one).

 -And finally, over at the Huffington Post, new research suggests that homosexuality in men occurs more in bigger families than smaller ones:

For several years, studies led by Andrea Camperio Ciani at the University of Padova in Italy and others have found that mothers and maternal aunts of gay men tend to have significantly more offspring than the maternal relatives of straight men. The results show strong support for the "balancing selection hypothesis," which is fast becoming the accepted theory of the genetic basis of male homosexuality.

The theory holds that the same genetic factors that induce gayness in males also promote fecundity (high reproductive success) in those males' female maternal relatives. Through this trade-off, the maternal relatives' "gay man genes," though they aren't expressed as such, tend to get passed to future generations in spite of their tendency to make their male inheritors gay.