The sunday cat thinks, “Who Knew?” July 16, 2011

Foxes and trampolines do mix!

Gay marriages are death of Canadian society… July 15, 2011

Wait a minute, no they aren’t!  It turns out that the legalization of gay marriage for the past six years in Canada has not brought about the end of the world, polygamy, bestiality, or anarchy. 

I did see a kid ride his bike on the sidewalk the other day, however.  A slippery slope?!?!?

Say Other! Gender a must on Google+ July 14, 2011

I was invited to join Google+ and thought I’d enjoy building an alternative to FaceBook.  However, it was a wee bit unsettling to have my gender information demanded (“Required“), though at least I was provided the option of checking male, female or “other.”  As one of our commenters mentioned in an email to us,

Anyone signing up for Google+ is forced to choose a gender. This gender MUST be visible to the whole world, and various aspects of the user interface present things as if gender were THE defining feature of a person (besides their e-mail address).

He was right at the time he left the comment, and Google has since made a few changes.  [Updated to reflect DavidC's comment.] The gender must be visible when you register, as a default, but now that I have a Google+ profile, I’m provided the option of altering the availability of gender information: Anyone on the web, extended circles, your circles, or only you. 

In any case, the gender line is always available on the “about” tab of my Google+ profile.  I didn’t realize it would be when I filled out the information.  What the aitch?  Is this necessary?  Surely members of tight-knit (whoops, don’t say ‘groups’) networks don’t need to have my gender-identification constantly available, nor do I.

My proposal for the day:  Everyone who accepts a Google+ invite should say OTHER!  Let’s stick it to the info-demanders.

iPad Children’s Book designed to teach open-mindedness July 14, 2011

Lovely!

When artist Raghava KK had two children, he decided it was time for a new approach to children’s books. That approach manifests itself in Pop It, a new children’s book for iPad that looks to teach open mindedness to toddlers.

The book, which is about things that little children do with their parents like take a bath, play or change clothes, is notable for its use of a homosexual couple as parents. However, its message comes in that those characters can be changed to a lesbian couple or a heterosexual couple upon shaking the iPad.

“It’s a metaphor for shaking from one perspective to another,” said Raghava in an interview with Mashable. “The relationship between parent and child does not change if they have two moms, two dads. I’m challenging the concept of family.”

Looking at the video, it seems like something kids would *really* love playing with, too.

(Thanks, S!)

All winners of new science competition are female July 14, 2011

If Google’s first science fair is any indication, the top scientists of the future will be women. Google has announced the fair’s winners, and they are all young women.

Hmm….wonder how long it will take people to move from “but the top scientists will always be male” to “BOY CRISIS IN SCIENCE!!”

(Thanks, Wade.)

Linda Alcoff on The Pluralist’s Guide July 13, 2011

The following is excerpted from an email by Linda Martin Alcoff, with her permission.  Please note that, as Alcoff says in her email to me, she is of course in much discussion with co-developers of the Pluralist’s Guide, so the following is not speaking for everyone affiliated with the Guide, and not intended to be the last word or exhaustive of all that they must continue to consider.  (Last, here at FP we are already disposed to moderate discussion of this post very closely, since overstated criticisms of our colleagues are unwelcome and inappropriate; therefore, please forebear from comments not conducive to constructive discussion.)

A few facts for people to know about The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy that I have been working on for over four years with Paul Taylor and Bill Wilkerson  :

1) Our guide is entirely independent of every philosophy organization, including SPEP. Paul Taylor is not a member of SPEP nor a continental philosopher. He and I hatched the plan entirely ourselves, then recruited Bill Wilkerson. Many leaders of SPEP, the APA, and other organizations have voiced their encouragement because they are concerned that we need more information about philosophy departments out there, and more than one source of information. But we, and they, want total independence.

2) Our methods were painstaking, but obviously limited as anything of this sort is when it is basically an “expert survey.” We tried to make our expert survey better than the PGR by allowing respondents to do research, making our questions more specific so it was less of a beauty contest, and casting a more pluralist net of advisors. Information on our advisors, our methods, and our questions is all on the site.

3) A commenter [on Leiter Reports] says “some” of our advisors are dead.  John Haugeland is mistakenly up on the continental list of advisors. One person. And he did advise us before he died.

4) Much of the criticism is going to the climate for women report, which reports problems at a few top depts. I knew this would generate heat, but what are we to do when we get very negative reports on these depts? Ignore them? I felt a responsibility to report the information we received when it was numerous enough to warrant concern. We will update at least every other year, so depts have a chance to change their rating. That’s the best we can do. The responses are confidential—I don’t even know who reported what, though I know who I asked and who sent in a response.

5) As viewers of the site may note, there are many departments not listed. We listed departments with positives in two categories: Strongly recommended and recommended. Some departments did not make the cut, and some departments did not have enough of a response to generate any information. It is true that our advisory lists are less than 100% comprehensive in their collective knowledge of the profession. That is inevitable.

The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy July 13, 2011

There is now a new guide to graduate programmes, The Pluralist’s Guide, and Leiter has been very critical.  I’m not going to weigh in on the debate over whether Leiter’s or the The Pluralist’s views on continental philosophy are right, because I just don’t know enough.  But it does give a very different picture from Leiter’s report on where one should go to study feminist philosophy.  My own view, in this case, is that it’s very much a matter of one’s taste in feminist philosophy: there are great scholars at the programmes listed by both reports. One thing that’s incredibly important about the report is that it, unlike the Gourmet Report, has a category for Philosophy of Race.  This is, to my knowledge, the only place that prospective grad students in this area can get guidance.

Leiter is also very harsh about the discussion of women friendliness. Personally, I’d like to know more about the methodology of the report, especially for this section.  Having run the SWIP women-friendliness awards for several years, I’ve learned how tricky this is to judge.  Every year we have some departments nominated for women-friendliness that fail to get the awards because when we contact all staff and students we get a picture which casts considerable doubt on the original claim of women-friendliness.  And in some instances it’s been a feminist woman making the nomination.  Sadly, such people can be unaware of what goes on in their own departments. So before I’d want to make a judgment on these lists, I’d like to know more about how they were compiled.

Still, I think it’s fantastic to have a report that is trying to offer a different vantage point from Leiter: rankings of departments look very different depending on one’s methodological starting points, and this report helps to make that clear.  There isn’t just *one* canonical ranking, and now we have an alternative to look to and compare: this has to help the bewildered student trying to make choices.  It’s also great to have a report which tries to give some guidance on women-friendliness.   The report is under development, and my hope is that a future development will be similar attention to friendliness to other under-represented groups.

 

(Revised slightly in light of Elijah’s comments)

Which of these things is not like the others? July 12, 2011

1. Being forbidden to wear a cross at work
2. Being required to perform a public service without discriminating against gay people

Okay, it’s only a list of two.  But apparently the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thinks they’re alike in at least one important way: the people who fought against them should be supported in taking a legal case to the European Court of Human Rights.

I’m uneasy about this. I understand that part of the EHRC’s role is to support strategic legal cases in order to clarify the law, and I think the European Court of Human Rights is quite bad at protecting the religious freedoms of individuals (particularly the religious freedoms of women). Mrs Eweida was forbidden by British Airways from wearing a cross with her uniform, and she lost her case even though BA subsequently changed their policy to permit at least some religious symbols. That policy change alone suggests the reasons for banning cross-wearing weren’t really weighty enough to justify interference with religious freedom. (I don’t know what to say about the Chaplin case – I’ve no idea if there’s a genuine health and safety risk involved in a nurse wearing a necklace.)

But in McFarlane and Ladele, there’s another really important right at stake in a way it just isn’t in Eweida: McFarlane and Ladele both chose to do jobs which were about serving people in contexts to do with important and very personal areas of private life, respectively relationship counselling and acting as a Registrar of births, marriages and deaths. It seems to me absolutely correct that they should be required to deliver those services in line with the non-discrimination policies of the organisations for which they worked.  I  just don’t think the EHRC should be supporting them – especially when there are Christian legal organisations only too happy to step in (or, indeed, who may have prompted the cases in the first place).

An african american women’s experience in an engineering class July 12, 2011

I was going through one of those routine insurance checks when, on hearing I am in both philosophy and engineering, the woman taking my data told me about her daughter’s experience at another Texas university.

Her daughter has wanted to be an engineer since she was a little girl. A college education for her has meant a combination of scholarships and loans. In order to save money, she decided to go to a community college near home for two years and then transfer. So in her first class at a university, her professor asked about her background. When told he said, ‘Houston Community College can’t teach you anything. You don’t belong here, and I’m going to get you out of this class in ten days.’

Of course, the science community has supposedly woken up to the fact that the country can’t afford to trash the talents of women and African Americans, but it seems the word is slow to spread.

The young woman survived the class, despite his ignoring her and the other woman in the class, solely addressing the male students, etc.

So I asked her to find out his name, said I’d write to the prof’s chair and the dean, but, as my partner pointed out, that’s not going to change much. Still, maybe we have to settle for just very tiny moves forward.

What do you think?

Also, the university is not mine; it’s the one up in the Texas panhandle.

Uncertain Iranian lives: Sakineh, lawyers, and human rights activists July 12, 2011

The life of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani remains in the balance

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“A year after public attention was cast upon Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s plight, her life appears to remain in the balance.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old woman from Iran’s Azerbaijani minority, was sentenced in 2006 to be stoned to death for “adultery while married”.  She was also sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for her role in her husband’s murder which,  according to her lawyer, was reduced to five years’ imprisonment for complicity in the murder. She remains in prison in Tabriz.  In a letter sent by the Iranian Embassy in Spain to Amnesty International Spain on 8 July 2011, the Iranian authorities reiterated that she was sentenced to death by stoning and to 10 years’ imprisonment for murder…”

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for more, click here

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also, Fears grow for lawyer of woman in Iran stoning case

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Lawyer still in prison after speaking to foreign media about case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

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for more, click here

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Interested readers might also wish to check out:

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What do Iran and the U.S. have in common?

and

Urgent petition to save Sakineh

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New Credit Regulations Disadvantage Stay at Home Partners July 11, 2011

From Jezebel:

Earlier this year, the Fed ruled that credit card applications should ask about a consumer’s individual income or salary rather than his or her “household income.” This isn’t just for students under 21, but for everyone. That means that a stay-at-home parent is considered as unworthy of credit as an unemployed college kid–-and seven out of eight stay-at-home parents are mothers. No one without a pay stub, no matter the value of her contribution to her household, can get a line of credit unless her spouse cosigns the account.

And, as the author notes:

I can’t overstate the psychological effect of relying completely on a spouse for such an essential part of adult finances. Refusing credit completely devalues a stay-at-home parent’s contribution, essentially saying that the household’s income belongs solely to the wage-earner.

In addition to contributing to the psychological shame of being an unequal partner in a relationship, this also renders stay-at-home parents financially vulnerable in the case of divorce. If a stay-at-home mom’s spouse is irresponsible, her credit score will fall-and she can’t repair it without her own line of credit.

The most dire implications are for women trapped in abusive relationships. If a woman can’t get a line of credit without her husband’s approval, she is less able to leave a failing relationship. According to Rene Renick of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, a joint line of credit opens an abused woman to even greater exploitation. Financial abuse is one of the least recognized but most significant ways that a batterer controls his victim: Not only can an abusive partner use the money irresponsibly and ruin the victim’s ability to get credit later, but he can use the account to track her if she tries to leave.

“Financial abuse occurs in 98% of abusive relationships. I can’t tell you the number of women who’ve said, ‘I stayed in the relationship longer than I wanted, or came back, [because] I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to feed my kids,’” says Renick. “[The Fed's regulations] will limit a woman’s ability to have access to assets on her own. Batterers will more than likely use this to … keep her entrapped in the relationship.”

Thanks, J-Bro!

Fired for grey hair July 11, 2011

despite winning outstanding employee awards.

Sandra Rawline’s hair turned grey when she was in her early 20s. She stuck with it, proudly displaying her shoulder-length locks with their natural silver streaks. “This is who I am,” she said.

But it seems that who she was, when it comes to grey hair in the workplace, was not satisfactory to her Texan employer. In August 2009 her boss approached her and told her to confect a more “upscale image” to go with her real estate firm’s move to a new headquarters in Galleria, Texas.

Rawline, 52, said she was told to come to work wearing “younger, fancy suits” and lots of jewellery. And she had to dye that hair – her boss even offered to do the colouring.

When she refused, the Houston Chronicle reports, she was fired within a week and replaced by a woman 10 years her junior. She has sued for discrimination in the Houston courts.

Rawline told the paper her hair colour had never been an issue until that point since she joined the firm, Capital Title, in 2003. “I was really working hard for them,” she said, pointing out that she won the outstanding employee award in 2004 and 2005.

She’s suing.

Girls will be boys July 10, 2011

Here’s an article in the Hindustan Times about a new trend in Indore, a big city in the middle of India, to perform genitoplasty on girls, to turn them physically into boys. It concerns hundreds of girls (aged 1-5) per year. Officially, the procedure only takes place when the girl has undescended testes and external female genitals including a vulva. However, there are strong indications that there is a widespread abuse of this procedure because the parents want a boy instead of a girl.

According to the article, there are very few cases known where boys get genitoplasty.

Here’s an article explaining about ambiguous genitalia, which is allegedly what those girls get the genitoplasty for. The prevalence of ambiguous genitalia is about 1% of live births, and only 1-2% of those are ambiguous enough to warrant medical attention. I get the impression from the articles that it’s more often that girls resemble boys physically than vice versa (and apologies for the sloppy use of the terminology for boys and girls, but it’s for simplicity’s sake), so it is very odd that the genitoplasty only happens with children who appear to be girls.

Well, not so odd when it is taken into account how desperately people want to have a boy instead of a girl in that region, but that doesn’t make this practice any less horrifying.

(Thank you @exhibitontiz)

The Sunday Cat goes didactic again July 9, 2011

From the Animal Planet’s cat from hell program:

 

Betty Ford: RIP July 9, 2011

Feminists and others may have  laughed at her husband, but she spoke often to our causes.

From the NY Times:

Few first ladies have been as popular as Betty Ford, and it was her frankness and lack of pretense that made her so. She spoke often in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed legalized abortion, discussed premarital sex and revealed that she intended to share a bed with her husband in the White House (NB).

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The country’s affection for Betty Ford transcended party lines. It began in earnest slightly more than two months after Gerald Ford became president in August 1974, following President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. … On Sept. 28, 1974, Mrs. Ford had a radical mastectomy after doctors discovered cancer in her right breast.

…  In the months that followed, tens of thousands of American women, inspired by Mrs. Ford’s forthrightness and courage in facing her illness, crowded into doctors’ offices and clinics for breast-cancer examinations.

After leaving the hospital, Mrs. Ford underwent chemotherapy treatment for two years. In November 1976, her physician announced that she had made a complete recovery.

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The Betty Ford Center, dedicated on Oct. 3, 1982, was a direct result of Mrs. Ford’s victory over her alcoholism and addiction. Set on 14 acres on the campus of the Eisenhower Medical Center 11 miles southeast of Palm Springs, the center was a nonprofit venture spearheaded by Mrs. Ford and Leonard K. Firestone, an industrialist and former ambassador to Belgium who raised a major part of the money.

She was not a perfect advocate of feminist causes.  She did not object to the 1976 Republican platform that called for banning abortion, and she was a hawk on Viet Nam.  But she did many things, including pushing for her husband to appoint women to high government offices.

How feminism ruined marriage July 8, 2011

Oh Dan Savage, how I ambivalent you. [Dear language gods -- please make "ambivalent" a verb. Thanks.]

Savage does amazing, important things like the “It Gets Better” project. He does hilarious things like the “Choicer Challenge”. But he also tells young college women whose boyfriends’ predilection for facials (no, not the spa kind) makes them feel degraded that they aren’t “game” enough lovers.

He’s been in the news again for his recent interview with the NY Times magazine in which he discusses his views on and criticisms of monogamy. Somewhat orthogonally to his specific views on monogamy, he seems to feel that marriage and family cohesiveness are in decline. And he knows just what to blame: feminism! (Gee, where have we heard this one before?) Here’s a choice passage from the interview:

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

To be fair, Savage isn’t saying that marriages shouldn’t be fair or equal. He is, rather, saying that to create equality we should have extended non-monogamous expectations to women, rather than enforcing monogamy on men. Still, there’s a lot not to like about Savage’s comments.

For starters, you might think that if men freely, voluntarily, and without coercion make promises of monogamy and then fail to live up to those promises (causing pain as a result) the thing to do is not to say to women “Hey, it’s all your fault, you never should’ve believed him when he made that promise! Boys will be boys, etc.” Secondly, Savage seems to subscribe to an increasingly common Mad Men-esque myth that all men used to be Don Draper, living large and unconstrained until feminism came along and ruined the party. That’s pretty simplistic, to put it mildly. And finally, one might have thought that higher divorce rates (when compared to, say, the 1950s) have rather less to do with women’s sudden expectation that men be monogamous, and rather more to do with women having more options – socially, economically, personally – should they want to leave a marriage. Just maybe.

Here endeth the rant.

Guidance for UK prosecutors: false or retracted allegations of rape July 8, 2011

Haven’t had a chance to read it properly yet, but here’s the new guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service on ‘Perverting the Course of Justice – Charging in cases involving rape and/or domestic violence allegations‘.  To be clear, this is about when it is or isn’t appropriate to prosecute people for making false allegations, for retracting allegations, or for withdrawing a retraction…

What Analysis is doing about what it’s like July 8, 2011

They’re moving to a triple-anonymous review process. This decision was made because the committee became concerned about the potential for implicit bias in the review process.

Change *is* possible, and sometimes even change in the right direction! Nice to have something to counter-balance the bad news from economics. And especially nice to have the good news coming from philosophy.

Derailing for Dummies July 7, 2011

Hilarious!

 

No, it really isn’t blue July 7, 2011

Jezebel reports a truly historic moment in advertising: an ad for Always pads has depicted a pad stained with red, rather than the ubiquitous blue.

And okay, the depiction still looks nothing like blood (it’s just a red dot) and the ad doesn’t actually acknowledge that it’s supposed to be blood (nor does it, of course, mention blood in any way). But hey, the dot’s not blue. That’s progress.

Maybe someday we’ll get ads that explicitly acknowledge that women buy menstrual products for (cover your delicate ears, boys!) menstrual blood. I’m sure some would find that disturbing, but it can’t be any weirder than the blue liquid that’s the current advertising standard. If I ever started leaking blue fluid, my first thought would not be “hey, at least I’m wearing a fantastic brand of tampon!”