And they are scary, not least because they are about 18% of Americans. They are ill-informed, think in slogans and are inconsistent. The false and inconsistent beliefs are not uniform, but some are common. E.g., they love medicade and social secuity, but not any ‘socialist’ programs that involve big government.
They each express a sense of estrangement and alienation from the US government, which they see as very menacing and out of control They also think that it favors other people. It is hard not to see racist coding all through the talks.
As I read the article, I kept thinking, “Forget about the tea party and have some madeira, m’dear.” The second part of the sentence comes from a Flanders and Swann song which – amazingly enough – they can be seen performing in 1967 on youtube. Delightful though the melody is, it is a tale of a failed seduction, and so hardly going to cheer one up, I think. Well, see what you think. If it seems offensive (I really can’t decide), try the next one, which is just fun.
The point of the second one is that it has absolutely nothing to do with current politics. Go look at the Tea Partiers and you may get a sense of why that’s a good thing.
If you have a child who has heard Flanders and Swann on the Gnu, today might be a good day to fill them in!
The worst news is from China; it looks as though the death toll could go to a thousand, with 60,000 injured. Less awful, perhaps, is the volcano eruption in Iceland and now the closure of airspace in Norther Europe.
If you or friends or loved ones are involved in any of this, please let us know.
Rowling writes, in The Times, that the Conservative party’s manifesto:
reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.
I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it. Even Mr Cameron seems to admit that he is offering nothing more than a token gesture when he tells us “it’s not the money, it’s the message”.
Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.
David Cameron last week argued for a reduction in the time limit for abortion, as reported here, and criticised here. Details here of how to find out your local MP’s stand on abortion rights, and link to some election lobbying materials.
News here of another online group having some measure of success in their campaigns in the UK: Mumsnet’s ‘Let Girls be Girls ‘ campaign against the marketing of products that sexualise children. They write:
It’s hardly news that the worlds of entertainment and celebrity encourage girls to believe their sexual attractiveness is paramount. But, increasingly, this same trend is visible in products marketed at young children.
Primark have responded to the campaign by withdrawing a padded children’s bikini. The mumsnet campaign page lists how some other prominent companies have responded.
The Philosophy of Science Association Women’s Caucus plans to offer a prize biennially for the best book, article, or book chapter published in English in the area of feminist philosophy of science within the five years prior to each PSA meeting. The first Prize will be awarded in November 2010 at the Association’s meeting in Montreal. The deadline for nominations is May 1, 2010.Nominations, including self-nominations, are strongly encouraged (though not required). The winner will receive a cash award of $500. Nominations should be submitted to both Co-Chairs of the PSA Women’s Caucus:
Frontline tonight is doing what looks to be a highly critical analysis of how the bill took shape and passed. It promises an inside look at American politics, so be warned. People outside North American ought to be able to watch a video of the program, but it isn’t clear when it will be up; you can check the site here.
The National Catholic Reporter, which supported the HCR bill, has an interesting and detailed report of what it means for access to abortion. My skimming through suggested a more positive picture than I had expected – that is, positive from the position of a feminist philosopher, as opposed to the NCR. If you read it more carefully, please let us know what you think.
According to Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, see story here, a young Muslim woman whose face was hidden by a religious covering was pulled out of her government French class near Montreal and told to unveil or leave the course. This is the second such case to come to light in Quebec. The first case led to landmark provincial legislation against religious face veils. Whatever egalitarian sentiments there might be behind the Quebec legislation, it’s clear that those who are hurt by the legislation are women. The law would deny veiled women government services including consulting a doctor in a hospital and having access to education. Quebec Premier Jean Charest and his cabinet introduced the sweeping legislation that effectively bars Muslim women from receiving or delivering public services while wearing a niqab.
You may remember our post from a few days ago about a single mother who was accepted to an NEH summer seminar then given 12 hours to arrange childcare on another continent to the satisfaction of the seminar director– or be withdrawn. There was a giant outpouring of outrageround the blogosphere, and an article on Inside Higher Ed, in which an NEH spokesperson made clear that this was against their policies. You’ll be pleased to know that the philosopher/mother in question has been in touch with an NEH lawyer. E writes that “he asked for her patience while the matter is being investigated but made clear that the NEH does not support the kind of demands that were being made of her.”
This is looking likely to be a big, and remarkably rapid win for the Femisphere– hurrah! And many thanks to all of you for helping to spread the word and also to offer support and advice when it was much needed.
And it’s also a lovely teachable moment. The woman who had all this happen to her writes: “Ironically, I’m teaching the chapter on Woman’s Situation in _The Second Sex_ … tonight and we were scheduled to discuss the extent to which things have (and haven’t) changed since then. Now I’ve got the perfect example! It illustrates both the sameness (co-director response) and the change (huge mobilization against that response).”
I do love happy endings. Hope this really does turn out to be one.
I take it that there are impersonal and imperfect procedures all around us, including all sorts of stuff going on now: hiring, admissions and so on. But to take it away from any immediate concerns for most of us, let’s suppose you have responsibility for distributing the ballots in a very important faculty election and adding up the results as they come in. And let’s focus on cases where the alleged mistakes are really fairly egregious.
So suppose you put the ballots in the university mail and, lo and behold, the day after the results are finally added up, a small group of faculty come to you and say that they didn’t receive the ballots and they think it was due to the incompetence of a staff person, who has failed to distribute mail correctly in their department before. And let’s suppose that indeed not all the ballots that were put in the mail have come back.
What should you say and do? Take them at their word and add in the ballots? Initiate an investigation? Or tell them that the institution followed proper procedure and that’s what you are responsible for.
You can probably easily see how very different situations can have the same structure. TA grading, journal refereeing, committee decisions about hiring and on and on are all fallible. And some can have instances of engregious mistakes – ballots not distributed, a TA who just screwed up on some of the grading. Or it might be the lab processing results from yearly physical exams or looking at potentially important evidence in a crime.
Let’s suppose the alleged errors are not really massive enough to invalidate the whole procedure. The labs mess up in only a few instances, the TAs are generally quite reliable, etc. The question, then, is: in such cases, do the people in charge have any obligation to pay attention to alleged cases of egregious errors?
Why ask this question? Well, one reason is that answers to such questions might separate those of us attracted to a “care ethics” from others. And another reason is that there may be political dimensions to such situations that are worth noting.
One is that very often those pointing out egregious errors may be the supposed victims. Does their first person perspective lessen the value of their claims? Are they to be thought suspiciously self-serving?
Futher, are there groups more apt to be victims of egregious errors? Is a student’s ethnic background revealed in a choice of unfamiliar examples more likely to trigger a “kiss this off” reaction? Might the fact that a sample is supposed to come from an alleged rape case mean the evidence is more or less likely to be treated in the best professional fashion?
So I’m not a moral philosopher, and perhaps I should start off by re-reading Rawls, whom I haven’t thought of for decades. But maybe enough has been said to ask this question: Are those implementing an impersonal but imperfect procedure under any obligation to consider reasonable allegations of egregious errors?
If you can, please do give us some indication of why you have selected the answer you have.
And, to be perfectly up front: I’m concerned that pleas on behalf of women in academia may be floundering in part because of the stress put at times on impersonal procedures. Some procedures, of course, may be revealed as discriminatory at their foundation. But others might be so only in their execution. If we think impersonal procedures are fair and that claims about alleged abuses are inclined to be self-serving, then we may be perpectuating inequalities despite what we intend.
An implication might be that those implementing such procedures should check to make sure that the disadvantaged are in fact not subject to egregious errors. I suspect this will look like suspicious “special pleading.”
The disorder in question is Williams Syndrome (WS), which is a neurodevelopmental disorder due to the deletion of 26 genes from chromosome 7. Apart from a typical elfin appearance, one of the more remarkable symptoms is cheerfulness and an open demeanor to strangers.
[...] children with WS lack racial stereotyping, though they retain gender stereotyping, compared to matched typically developing children. Our data indicate that mechanisms for the emergence of gender versus racial bias are neurogenetically dissociable. Specifically, because WS is associated with reduced social fear, our data support a role of social fear processing in the emergence of racial, but not gender, stereotyping.
One caveat, as expressed in the account at NatureNews is that WS is associated with mental retardation, which may have an effect.
The study does not answer whether stereotyping is genetically determined or based on experience, Meyer-Lindenberg says. So he’d also like to examine the role of experience, for instance, by finding children who have been raised by two members of the same sex.
“Until this study, I think people never imagined that these two stereotypes would be biologically separable,” Gabrieli says. “Whether it turns out to be due to genes, the environment or a complicated interaction, it shifts the discussion.”
I’m pleased to announce the official opening of the 2010 ESWIP Virtual Conference!
Our first paper–Jennifer Benson’s “Daly, Lugones, and the Ontology of Freedom”–is up and available for commenting – you can find a link to the paper’s main page in the top right corner of the website, next to the “Registration” and “About” pages.
For an explanation of how this all works, copy and paste this link into an address bar:
This post might be taken as a follow-on to Jender’s post on the gendered conference campaign, though the success in this case should be attributed to the good sense of an organizer, Dan Wieskopf.
102nd Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology
April 15-17, 2010
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Atlanta, GA
Philosophy Invited Program
Invited Speakers:
Alfonso Caramazza (Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology,
Department of Psychology, Harvard University)
Concepts, Actions and Objects: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience
Peter Carruthers (Philosophy, Maryland)
Primate Metacognition: Its Nature and Extent
Robert McCauley (William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor and
Director, Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Emory University)
Taking a Cognitive Point of View: Religions as Rube Goldberg Devices
Invited Symposium on Language and Thought:
José Luis Bermudez (Philosophy, Washington University) Elisabeth Camp (Philosophy, Penn)
Michael Rescorla (Philosophy, UC Santa Barbara)
Invited Symposium on The Self:
Barry Dainton (Philosophy, Liverpool) Jenann Ismael (Philosophy, Arizona and Sydney)
Robert Howell (Philosophy, SMU)
Invited Symposium on Mental Representation: Kathleen Akins (Philosophy, Simon Fraser)
Larry Barsalou (Psychology, Emory)
William Ramsey (Philosophy, UNLV)
More information, including the psychology part, at:
One of the most influential American Indian leaders in recent history, most knew former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller for strengthening her tribe and drawing the accolades of U.S. presidents. But it was her humble, tender nature — a refusal to squash a bug, an affinity for opera — that defined her life, friends said Saturday.
Mankiller, among the few women to ever lead a major tribe, was remembered during a memorial that drew more than 1,200 mourners, including dignitaries from other tribes and governments, as a respected leader who earned the nation’s highest civilian honor.
More here. And an even better more here. (Thanks, Jender-Mum!)
We get a lot of grief for our Gendered Conference Campaign, both online and off– enough that sometimes I honestly just can’t face doing a post and waiting for the shit to hit the fan again. We do spend time wondering if it’s worth it, and if it’s a good way to accomplish our goals or if it’s just making people angry and being counterproductive. So it was lovely to get this email over the weekend, which I thought I’d share with you:
Our chapter of Phi Sigma Tau held our conference yesterday which turned out to be a great example of gender representation in philosophy. When the president of PST began planning the conference, I talked to him about the importance of gender representation and directed him to this website. He was hesitant at first, but after about half an hour he began to see the bigger picture. I explained how important it is for philosophy students to see female names on conference schedules and hear women’s voices if for no other reason than it breaks the stereotype that philosophers must be male. This hadn’t ever occurred to the president of PST before, but he said he would think about it. Over the next month he sought me out a few more times to ask my opinions about when gender should be relevant and when it shouldn’t, so he was clearly making an effort.
The conference yesterday was a great success. Although the genders were nowhere near equally represented, women were represented in a way that may not have happened unless I spoke up. There are so few female grad students in our department that it is clear the president called every single woman asking her to take part.
Out of ten speakers, only one was a woman.
Out of ten commenters, two were women.
Out of ten moderators, four were women. (this was a new position that I suspect was created solely to include more women in the conference.)
That might not seem like very many women, but I heard multiple people from other programs comment on how many women there are in our department. Again, there are actually very few women in our department, but the president made sure they were all seen on stage. It changed the face of the conference in a way that gives me hope for the future of philosophy. Although the men who planned the conference were hesitant about my views at first, after reflection they realized I was right and acted on those new beliefs. I could tell they were proud of the non-gendered conference they put together, and I’m sure they will make the same effort in ever conference they put together throughout their careers. They stopped seeing my request as affirmative action, and started seeing it as a way to improve the field they love so much.
There’s some discussion on youtube about whether this cat is happy in its role. Cats will adopt an amazing range of creatures, so I suppose we should consider whether they really want to. I mean, there’s this particularly self-sacrificing species, the domestic cat, that gets taken advantage … wait! The domestic cat is not known for selless altruism. Hmmmmm.
Cojones? Chest-beating self-confidence? Or sustained awareness of one’s limits. The creation of a surrounding structure to compensate for one’s weaknesses? Perhaps there isn’t precisely a dichotomy,** but one style seems clearly to be the dominant paradigm, at least in the US.
Books instead points out the dangers of a hyper-masculine leadership style, and argues for the importance of style often attributed to women. It’s the same style that can be invoked to explain why women aren’t among the leaders; that is, women’s supposed possession of the style is given as a reason for why they are few among the CEO’s, university presidents, and so on. We are, then, talking about a conflict between what works and what is thought to work, with the familiar result that women are seen as not good enough, and so are kept in positions below what their talents could take them.
The details are worth looking at if you envisage getting trapped by someone who wants to explain why women are meant to be in the second ranks. Or, if David Brooks is right, if you want to explain a very great problem the US has. But here’s a sample of what he has to say:
What having the cojones gets one:
Some leaders are boardroom lions. They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic. They call for relentless transformational change. … We can all point to successful leaders who display this kind of self-confidence. It’s the sort of self-assurance that nearly every politician tries to present. …
Yet much research suggests that extremely self-confident leaders can also be risky… charismatic C.E.O.’s often produce volatile company performances. These leaders swing for the home run and sometimes end up striking out. They make more daring acquisitions, shift into new fields and abruptly change strategies.
One the other hand:
[Research has found) found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.**
Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model. The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. ….
In short, she spends a lot of time on metacognition — thinking about her thinking — and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses.
She knows the world is too complex and irregular to be known, so life is about navigating uncertainty. … It is complex beyond reckoning.
She spends more time seeing than analyzing. Analytic skills differ modestly from person to person, but perceptual skills vary enormously. Anybody can analyze, but the valuable people can pick out the impermanent but crucial elements of a moment or effectively grasp a context. This sort of perception takes modesty; strong personalities distort the information field around them. …
Brooks concludes, “If this leadership style were more widely admired, the country could have spared itself a ton of grief.”
————————————————
**attributed to Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall
**in fact the highlighted reader’s comments tend to say that someone can have both: e.g., Obama has both charisma and humility. But I think Brooks’ essay aims to crticize our models for leadership, for which we – in the US and perhaps elsewhere – have simplistic ideas on the basis of which bad choices are made.
We talk a lot here about subtle ways that women get excluded from or marginalised within philosophy– the workings of networks, implicit bias, and so on. Sometimes, it’s not so subtle. Reader E sends us this tale:
a good friend of mine (a tenured philosophy professor in the states) was just accepted to an NEH summer seminar in [European city]. She’s a single mom and, obviously, wants to bring her son along. But she says she: “has just been given 12 hours to “demonstrate” that she has full-time childcare arrangements for her son for the month of July that “are to the [completely unspecified] satisfaction” of the Institute directors; if she fails to meet this requirement, she has been told her accceptance in the program will be withdrawn. She was notified of said acceptance on Monday.”
12 hours to find childcare in a foreign city on another continent, and the requirement to prove this to the satisfaction of some committee. As E says, “Sometimes the ways women get excluded in philosophy are subtle and complicated. Sometimes they are so fucking obvious they make you want to scream. . .”
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