And they have such a nice logo:
But here’s what they put in email to sell pills like viagra:
Order now and drill her tonight!
Once your body gets such power stimulus as our products provide? You get stallion power and eagerness. All girls need it, all girls want it from you. Give it to her and be her King!
Why, they are mixing metaphors! What is going on in Canada!
(That is, this is so over the top it doesn’t need philosophical analysis.)
Rebecca Saxe is at Harvard, and her work is fascinating. It is about cognitive neuroscience and our knowledge of other minds.
It’s also has links to some controversial claims, which we should be aware of. She discusses “the false belief task,” which has often been used to describe children with autism. That is, it is said that the neural-typical child passes the test between 4 adn 5 years old, and the neuro-atypical child with ASD does not. Other theorists have doubts about the test itself.
I think Saxe’s work is very interesting even if it is not a display of the full range of the dialectic. In putting it here, I do not mean to endorse an account of the symptoms of ASD.
The BBC reports:
Fathers will be able to take six months’ paternity leave, the government has announced. The move will allow mothers to decide to return to work after six months and fathers to stay at home for the rest of the 12 months off allowed by law.
This is of course great news. But it still enshrines the thought that mothers are more essential to parenting than fathers. It looks to me like the first six months *must* be taken by the mother. There’s no room to shift the order, and there’s no room for a father to do all of it– though there’s plenty of room for the mother to do all of it. And it just seems silly to keep these restrictions– if we want equity, why not really go for equity?
(The answer will perhaps be that mothers need to be there for all that breastfeeding. But breastfeeding is, and should be, a choice. And in fact it’s a minority choice. Families should not be forced into particular structures simply on the basis that they’re well-suited to this choice.)
H/T Broadsheet.
Really. Eight states currently allow insurers to refuse coverage to victims of domestic violence. Another reason to demand health care reform.
When I recently had to fill in (yet another) form on line in order to register for something, I was struck by a curious thing that wasn’t present with its paper predecessors.
In the predigital age, you had paper forms with all those empty boxes to fill in, first name, last name, address, date of birth, gender, etc.
But with digitalised forms, there are other options of presenting, and gender is often presented with radio buttons for male or female or with a drop down box for Mr, Mrs or Ms (different discussion on that).
The awkward thing is that with on line forms, there generally is a default selection, and as far as I have seen, the default selection is male.
With the drop down box it is a matter of alphabetical sorting, I suppose, but in the case of the radio buttons having male be the default is just odd.
It seems that technology has imposed yet another bias.
I like to think that I just ran into a bad set of samples. Has anyone encountered electronic forms with no default gender?
Now seems the right time to tell you the origins of our “be nice” rule, which I’m not even sure any of the other FP bloggers knew. The truth is what whenever I use the phrase “be nice”, this scene is what I’m secretly thinking of*:
In case you haven’t yet had the pleasure, Roadhouse is a movie in which Patrick Swayze (RIP) is a world-famous bouncer with a degree in philosophy from NYU.
*And yes, I do always silently include “until it’s time to be not nice”.
Feminist Philosophers 