A Blog of Her Own Video

Some of my favourite feminist academic bloggers are now the subjects of of video called “Blog of Her Own: Scholarly Women on the Web.”

Hear from the women behind the popular blogs Bitch Ph.D., Tenured Radical, Easternblot.net, and Expression Patterns. The speakers discuss the interplay between their blogging and scholarship, attitudes towards blogging among their colleagues, how blogging should be valued in the academy, and blogging as a feminist act. The panelists: Bitch Ph.D. author Tedra Osell is a writer, former English professor, mother, and sometime public intellectual; Claire Potter blogs as Tenured Radical and is a professor of history and American Studies at Wesleyan University; Eva Amsen blogs at Easternblot.net and Expression Patterns and recently completed her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Columbia University English and Comparative Literature professor Jenny Davidson moderates.

The video is here.

“Gay troops contributed to massacre”

According to some retired US marine general by the name of John Sheehan, the fact that the Dutch troops that were assigned in Srebrenica included gays, contributed to the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in 1995.

Sheehan pointed to the Netherlands, which he said embarked on a process of social engineering in the Dutch military once the Cold War ended. “They declared a peace dividend and made a conscious effort to socialize their military.  It included open homosexuality.  That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war,” he said.

There seems to be some underlying assumption that homosexuality makes one incapable of dealing with war situations. No need to point out how preposterous that is.

It must be noted that Dutchbat wasn’t there to wage war, but to keep the peace, which might be a novel concept to this retired marine.

The Fall of Srebrenica and the role of Dutchbat in it is quite a sensitive issue to the Dutch and that has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuals in the military. That this person would even dare to suggest it is a travesty in many ways.

Update: Statemens of Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Renée Jones-Bos, the Dutch ambassador to the US on the matter, here.

Another update: the New York Times News blog sums it up neatly.

Genderanalyzer says…

“We think https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ is written by a woman (71%).”

From their website: “About GenderAnalyzer BETA: We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on 11000 blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web! We hope you like it!”

See the analyzer here I’d appreciate comments from someone who knows more about how these things work about the assumptions they use to guess the sex of a blog’s author.