‘Galileo was wrong’ September 16, 2010

The Pope is about to grace the UK with his presence, and so there’s been a lot of anti-Catholic news (propaganda?) hitting the headlines recently. Unfortunately, lots of it has focused on less important issues such as paedophile priests and some bloke’s* injudicious remarks about his being likely to forget where he was when he landed at Heathrow because there are so many brown people in Britain, he might accidentally think he’s landed in a Third World country. (Oh yes, he also claimed there was an aggressive streak of neo-atheism raging rampant in our green and pleasant land, but that seems correct – check out Richard Dawkins.) The bloke in question has unleashed no end of good old British outrage, which we’re all clearly enjoying (a bit like a hand ball in the World Cup), and paedophile priests are clearly a bad thing. But I can’t help thinking that since the percentage of paedophile priests is, one presumes, pretty small, and the remarks about brown people at Heathrow are not so different from what passes for critical analysis in certain sectors of the tabloid industry (Daily Mail hacks, I’m looking at you), you’d think there were more important topics on which to take issue with the Catholic Church. I mean, for example, its stance on the use of contraception, its opinions about abortion, and its views on the ordination of women. In case you missed the memo at previous meetings, there is a massive AIDS crisis going on right now. People are dying horrible deaths, leaving behind families, many of whom have little or no sources of financial support. Moreover, whilst there are cases of AIDS in the developed world (for ‘developed’ read ‘rich and taking steps to retain their riches at the expense of the poor’), the vast majority of cases are in the ‘developing’ world (for ‘developing’, read ‘poor and getting f&%$ed over by the rich nations’). Those folks can’t afford the drugs that would make living with AIDS possible. An excellent tool to help stem the spread of AIDS is the simple condom. But guess who thinks that’s the work of the devil? You guessed it, our mates in the Vatican. Abortion? Don’t get me flipping started. In fact, take the following words ‘reproductive rights’, ‘importance of allowing women control over their own fertility’, ‘treating women as people, capable of making their own decisions, and with control over their own bodily boundaries’ and just insert your own rant HERE. As for the ordination of women, well, I believe the Pope has pronounced that it’s a sin in the same category as paedophilia. Because, you know, there’s something intrinsically evil about those people with vaginas, and they shouldn’t be allowed entry to the old boys’ club. You gals want a role model? Here’s one: a lady who was both a virgin AND a mother. Having trouble living up to our expectations? Try harder.

Anyway, I wouldn’t want you folks to think to we’re out of touch with wider news themes, so here’s a lovely Catholic apologist conference you might be interested in attending. (Alternative title: some old white men spout crap about something again.)**

*Hilariously, said bloke is one of the Pope’s advisors responsible for building bridges and easing communication with other faiths – or so I’m informed by the BBC.

**No, I don’t know whether this is a wind-up. If it is, it’s one of the best pieces of trolling I’ve ever seen.

More women getting Ph.D.s in US September 15, 2010

A report is out indicating that for the first time since tracking began, more women than men earned Ph.D.s in the U.S.A. last year.  (Right-click on the word ‘report’ in the WaPo story, but note that the pdf you’ll download is 3.5 megs.)

Of course, when I read the actual report, the Humanities are not where the hot trends are, and across the board, the inequities are not yet gone:

Overall, women and girls make up 51 percent of the U.S. population. But women have not conquered every corridor of the ivory tower. Men still hold the majority of faculty and administration positions. Women earn less than men at every level of academic rank, according to the American Association of University Professors. Male faculty members earned $87,206 on average and their female counterparts made $70,600 in the 2009-10 academic year. Starting salaries for newly minted faculty members are nearly equal.

Men retained the lead in doctoral degrees until 2008, largely through their dominance in engineering, mathematics and the physical sciences. They still earn nearly 80 percent of engineering doctorates.

Shame on Forbes! And Gingrich! September 15, 2010

Neither Forbes nor the National Review is on my list on constant reads.  The following descriptions come from Maureen Dowd in the NYT. 

I’m not sure where the last discussion we had about bigotry left us, and I’d be interested in hearing reactions to people who publish this thinly disguised racism.

It’s probably also the case that it’s good to be aware that these influential people are saying this stuff.  It is the sort of thing that can make one fear for the future of America. 

So the smear artists are claiming not only that the president is a socialist but that he suffers from a socialism gene.

“Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine,” D’Souza writes in Forbes, offering a genetic theory of ideology. “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

And Newt Gingrich

Gingrich praised D’Souza’s article in Forbes, previewing an upcoming book called “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

Newt told The National Review Online that it was the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama” and said D’Souza shows that the president “is so outside our comprehension” that you can only understand him “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”

Newt added: “This a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”

As Dowd says, “It’s Newt and D’Souza and their ilk who put America at risk.”

France bans Niqab September 15, 2010

Because forbidding women from wearing particular things increases their freedom. And making them feel that they can’t leave the house makes them more equal. And there’s nothing Islamophobic about this. After all, a Christian who wanted to cover their face would also be prevented.

Please don’t misunderstand me: there is plenty to criticise about the views underlying a demand for women, but not men, to cover their faces. But there’s also plenty to criticise about e.g. traditional marriage vows (“obey”), and I don’t think they should be banned either. (Though I do think one could make a better case for banning those vows than for banning niqabs, now that I reflect on it.)

(Thanks, Synaesthetik!)

Review of police handling of rape cases shelved September 15, 2010

From the Guardian:

A major review of how the police handle rape cases has been shelved amid efforts by the government to save money, it was disclosed today.

The £441,000 study by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) had been prompted by a series of high-profile blunders by detectives…

Last year it emerged that John Worboys, a London taxi driver, had been left free to attack hundreds of women because officers did not believe victims’ reports of being assaulted.

Weeks after Worboys was jailed, Kirk Reid was convicted of more than 20 attacks, including two rapes. He had apparently come to the police’s attention 12 times before he was arrested and charged.

The Home Office defends itself thusly:

The Home Office insisted funding for the probe was withdrawn in June because it would merely have “duplicated” other reviews by Lady Stern and Sara Payne.

I don’t know enough to know whether this claim by the Home Office is true. But my level of trust in this government is low, and so I’m sceptical.

Thanks, Mr Jender!

Rape Jokes September 15, 2010

Apparently they’re socially acceptable, and indeed trendy.

(Thanks, E!)

Mental illness stigma in USA September 15, 2010

A study carried out by researchers at Indiana University and Columbia University, and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, has discovered that although the public are more willing to accept neurobiological explanations of mental illness and substance abuse problems, these conditions are still stigmatized. This results in discrimination when people with such problems attempt to find work, housing, access treatment, conduct social relationships, and so on. As well as having a negative impact on their own lives and well-being, it also negatively affects the lives and well-being of their friends and relatives. You can read more here.

Toys for boys who like ponies, and girls who like comics!! September 15, 2010

These are seriously cool…

Created by Jodi K. Moisan. You can see more at her webpage.

Because we all know that mom=caregiver September 14, 2010

“Amazon Mom is a free membership program aimed at helping parents and caregivers, from the prenatal days through the toddler years, use Amazon to find all the products their family needs. To join, simply sign into your Amazon account and tell us whether you are a Mom, Dad, or other caregiver of a child. By providing some optional information about your family, you can help us personalize offers, e-mails, and product recommendations to help you find exactly what you need at just the right time.”

In case you were wondering, dads (grandparents, aunts, uncles, are eligible)!

“Despite the name, Amazon Mom is open to anyone who is responsible for caring for a baby or young child–“Amazon Primary Caregiver” just didn’t have the same ring to it. Kidding aside, we chose this name because we noticed moms in social communities (like our Amazon discussion boards) looking to connect and share information about products and problems with other moms. We wanted a name that would let these groups know that this program was created with their unique needs in mind.”

Gender Bias Resources September 14, 2010

The Gender Bias Learning Project has a really impressive website. It’s run by Joan Williams, author of the excellent Unbending Gender.

Gender bias in academia is alive and well. Identifying and understanding the distinct patterns of gender bias is the first step towards ensuring that bias does not derail your career.

The Center for WorkLife Law, with support from a NSF ADVANCE leadership grant, has developed this on-line gender bias training that teaches you to identify the four basic patterns of gender bias:

* Prove it Again!
* The Double Bind
* The Maternal Wall
* Gender Wars

This training also provides survival strategies for handling each type of bias.

There’s even a fab online game, Gender Bias Bingo, for which you can win prizes! (We mentioned it some time ago, here. But I’d forgotten, so maybe you had too! Thanks for the reminder, JJ.)

(Thanks, P!)

Infantile Gender-Deviance: Your Heartwarming Tale for the Day September 14, 2010

Elp-son—who is four years old—loves to be pretty. His favourite colour is pink, he loves fairy wings and glitter and nail varnish and dresses and pretty hair clips and so on and so on. For as long as he’s been expressing preferences about dressing, this has been the case. Lately, he has started to complain that children at preschool are being nasty, taunting him and telling him off for wearing ‘girl clothes’. We were, of course, very nervous about the situation, and couldn’t really figure what to do. (Parents seem to care a lot about gender indoctrination; how could we fight the teaching the other children were getting at home?)

We’re friendly with another family at the preschool, whose three year old son J also likes being pretty, and has also had trouble, though his trouble, alarmingly, came from a teacher, not from other children! So, knowing that they were in a similar circumstance, we told them about elp-son’s troubles. J’s mother immediately sprung into action: she decided to organise a boys-being-pretty day, and got in contact with another mother whose son was keen to be a fairy. (This boy’s mother is a social psychologist, as it happens, and was very enthusiastic about flaunting gender norms!) This mother told her about yet another child in the class whose pretty impulses were being stifled. That boy’s parents were contacted. And his parents brought in yet another child, whose parents went shopping especially for the occasion.

To date, the boys-being-pretty day has somewhat crumbled, because the boys involved couldn’t wait for a specific day to wear their pretty clothes: they wanted to wear them right away!  So in effect, we’ve ended up with (at least) a boys-being-pretty week.

I can’t decide what aspect of these events is the most wonderful: the exuberant efforts of J’s mum on behalf of elp-son; or the fact that every parent who’s been approached so far has greeted the initiative with enthusiasm; or the fact that as it goes on, more and more little boys are jumping at the chance to finally be pretty. (No, to be honest, I know full well what aspect I like best: with any luck, my beautiful, wonderful, magical little child won’t be bullied in preschool any more!)

But don’t worry: gender is still innate. ;-)

The Common Ground Campaign September 13, 2010

The Common Ground Campaign is a coalition of young people that stands against hate speech and the violence directed at American Muslims. The aim is to reach common ground through dialogue. Surely a good thing!

Woman and two children – deportation alert September 13, 2010

The Guardian reports that an Iranian woman and her two children who have been in the UK since 2007, are due to be deported tomorrow. She is at risk of being flogged and stoned for allegedly circulating copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Farah Ghaemi has the support of her local MP, Gerald Kaufman, who has stated that the decision to deport her and her sons is “intolerable”. There is an ongoing campaign to stop the deportation. You can read more here.

The Negro Motorist Green Book September 13, 2010

The Negro Motorist Green Book, otherwise known as the Green Book for short, was a travel guide for black people in the US, informing them where they could find food, lodgings, barber shops, beauty shops and other services, during a time when many establishments refused to serve black people, and many towns made it illegal for blacks to be within them after sundown. The Green Guide was invented by a Harlem postal worker, named Victor H. Green, to help people of his race avoid violence and humiliation when doing run-of-the-mill things that whites took for granted – such as booking a hotel, or buying petrol. The Green Book ceased publication in 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed. You can read the New York Times article here.

The Chorus September 13, 2010

Many of you will know about The Stone, a series written by various philosophers for the NY Times.  One remarkable features of these is the chorus of comments that follow.  As one person puts it in comments on the latest of the series:

Many reader comments on The Stone would be much better if the commentators came to the table as open-minded and careful readers who are interested in constructive dialogue. All too often, we see people who offer vague, ungrounded, and often fallacious responses instead. It’s no coincidence that the worst accusations against philosophy here come packaged in “arguments” that wouldn’t pass muster in freshman logic class.

I’ll put in a sampling of some short bits, but I’m not sure we should dismiss the comments.   So is there anything we can learn from the comments?  What do you think?

A sampling:

-  Ayn Rand complained that ‘modern philosophy’ had lost its compass. And this was in the mid-50s.
Fortunately, The Stone has proved that she was largely correct.

-  Mr. Sorell, you are really stretching it way out there by developing generalizations that are arrived at from comparing apples and oranges. Your last sentence makes absolutely no sense in the context of the rest of your article.

-  Talk about over-analyzing.

-  “Ayn Rand complained that ‘modern philosophy’ had lost its compass.”
Believe me, modern philosophers take that as a compliment.

-  The first part of this article is highly sensible–much too sensible for The Stone. However, the author more than makes up for this lapse in the second half of his post … where he suddenly departs the reality based community and phones it in from the monastery:

-  Like everything else of which philosophers make a muck, so it is with causality.
You’d propose to run the tapes of Katrina flooding New Orleans backward, and find out precisely which butterfly flapped its wings and started the Atlantic (atmospheric) wave that became Katrina.

This last comment may seem especially off the wall.  It reads like something the author has stored for some time and has let out at the first vaguely relevant moment.

Unfortunately, though, it does seem as though Sorell is promoting some conjectures about what would not have made a difference with the 9/11 terrorists, and he may indeed be in trouble there.

American Living Abroad? September 13, 2010

Don’t forget to make sure you’re registered to vote in November, and to request your ballot. It’s easy: Go here.

Query from a reader September 12, 2010

C writes:

I am teaching an ethics class and while they have a reading against prostitution in their books, there is nothing taking the other side. I was hoping for a short video that would take the other side so as to give them something else to think about and some other way to get the information than to do more reading. (I already ask a lot of them in that regard.)

Any suggestions?

Leave your ideas in comments!

Thoughts on Sewing and Inatenness September 12, 2010

We have nosy neighbours whose kitchen window is directly across from ours. Also, we are skint. So, I spent my weekend sewing kitchen curtains. First, I had to work out, given how much fabric I had–how long and how wide–how many panels to cut; then how wide to make the hems; how deep to make the channel for the curtain rod; and so on. And it suddenly struck me: curtains are, basically, just flat rectangles with finished edges. It must be mind-numbing to design a pattern for, say, a dress. start with a flat rectangle, make it into this shape: 
Now, this particular dress was probably made by an experienced and gifted professional, but not so for most of its lowly contemporaries, and those that came before it. Most dresses–and trousers, and shirts, and so on–would’ve been made in the home. And, prior to the second half of the 19th century, would’ve been made without the benefit of a commercially-produced sewing pattern.

William Jennings Demorest and Ellen Louise Demorest began the home sewing pattern industry in 1860 by holding fashion shows in their homes and selling the patterns. This was the beginning of the Mme. Demorests’ Emporium of Fashion. They published a magazine, The Mirror of Fashion, which listed hundreds of different patterns, most available in only one size. Patterns were of unprinted paper, cut to shape, and could be purchased “flat” (folded), or, for an additional charge, “made up” (with the separate pieces tacked into position). The latter version was intended to compensate for the absence of detailed instructions.

So, until the second half of the 19th century, the clothes of the common people were made at home, and, most likely designed by the maker. Who would have undoubtedly been…well…a woman (or girl). And this got me to thinking about women and spatial reasoning. Again, start with a flat square, and make this:

Or start with string, and get this:

I don’t even know what else to say. Suddenly, these women-can’t-reason-spatially claims don’t just seem sexist and wrong; they seem knowingly dishonest.

My curtains, by the way, look great. Well, much better than the nosy neighbours’ faces, anyway…

The Sunday Cat insists that “pussy” means September 11, 2010

just what “kitty” means, no more and no less, despite ugly attempts by some people to pervert its meaning.  Or, as she has been known to remark, “Screw common usage in the States.”

Remembering 9/11 September 11, 2010

Nicholas Kristof recommends that we work to take the focus off destructive hatred and try instead to follow the lead of two 9/11 widows who turned to help women in Afghanistan. 

This weekend, a Jewish woman [Susan Retik] who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks is planning to speak at a mosque in Boston. She will be trying to recruit members of the mosque to join her battle against poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan.

In the shattering aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Retik bonded with another woman, Patti Quigley … Devastated themselves, they realized that there were more than half a million widows in Afghanistan — and then, with war, there would be even more. Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley also saw that Afghan widows could be a stabilizing force in that country.

So at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives.

His column has links to organizations worth having a look at, even if one can only give a bit of money.    There is a list of suggestions in a toolkit at “Beyond 9/11,” which Retik and Quidgley founded.  Also at “Beyond 9/11″ you can contribute to income generating programs for femal-headed households in Afghanistan. And here is an organization helping women in constructive ways, which also sells great looking tribal rugs.  And there’s more.