“No one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.” - Peter Medawar
Down with Hegel!
***
In Socrates' Wake: More advice to students: How to write a #$%* essay - "Always begin your essay along these lines: “Since the very dawn of time the problem of free will has been considered by many of the greatest and deepest thinkers in history.”"
Rise of male student support groups sparks row at British universities - "Male students are "manning-up", setting up men's groups to celebrate and explore the concept of masculinity amid accusations of sexism and gender stereotyping. Manchester University has created the first official MENS Society – Masculinity Exploring Networking and Support – despite outrage from critics who claim the existence of such a group undermines women's ability to speak out for equality... Men, who could feel pressured to "man-up" in a mixed gender environment, might feel less vulnerable discussing such issues in a male-only setting."
It's telling that feminists are such noisy critics of these
Twitter Bios and What They Really Say - NYTimes.com - "The Twitter bio is a postmodern art form, an opportunity in 160 characters or fewer to cleverly synopsize one’s professional and personal accomplishments, along with a carefully edited non sequitur or two. It lets the famous and the anonymous, athletes and accountants, surreal Dadaists and suburban dads alike demonstrate that they are special snowflakes with Wes Anderson-worthy quirks."
20 of the world's most clever Twitter bios - "As I scoured the Twitterverse for the most clever bios, I also found some pretty bad ones, too! But they are also funny in their own strange way. I don’t want to embarass anyone so I’ve removed the handles, but I couldn’t resist some of these clunkers:
- Fascinated by transactional nature of counterknowledge & public discourse in socially mediated spaces which simulate (but don’t engender) counter-public spheres"
Chinese give teachers most respect: survey - "Chinese respect teachers the most, while Singapore gives them the best salary, according to a latest survey... China is the only country where the majority rank teachers as holding the same social status as doctors. Over 70 percent of Chinese respondents believe students respect their teachers... About 50 percent of the respondents in China said they would encourage their child to become a teacher."
Scheduling Sex: The Secret to a Passionate Marriage? - "To practice Personal Integrity in your relationship, you are probably going to have to schedule sex, or at least commit to it X times per week. My husband and I have two young children and we both work more than full time, and yet we still promise each other that we will have sex twice per week. Sex is after all what distinguishes our relationship from a really good friendship. We honor that commitment, to differentiate our relationship, no matter what. Just to make sure we do, we have designed a "consequence" that we pay if we break our commitment: the next time we have sex, we have to have it outside of our warm, comfy bed. For some of you, this may be exciting, but I happen to love my cozy bed. What consequence would work well for you?"
Alleged pimp forced 15-year-old to have sex with 10 men a day in ‘high-end’ Richmond, B.C., apartment, court hears - "Mr. Moazami, now 29, would also bring around to various apartments a long-haired Chihuahua named Gucci. The dog was meant for the girls’ enjoyment, and as a manipulative device, according to witness testimonies. When the girls didn’t fall into line, he would hit the dog, step on its neck, threaten to kill it, court has heard."
22 Words | How to make people think you have a girlfriend with your right hand and Instagram [10 pics]
Read Sinead O'Connor's searing open letter to Miley Cyrus - "
You also said in Rolling Stone that your look is based on mine. The look I chose, I chose on purpose at a time when my record company were encouraging me to do what you have done. I felt I would rather be judged on my talent and not my looks. I am happy that I made that choice, not least because I do not find myself on the proverbial rag heap now that I am almost 47 yrs of age.. which unfortunately many female artists who have based their image around their sexuality, end up on when they reach middle age. Real empowerment of yourself as a woman would be to in future refuse to exploit your body or your sexuality in order for men to make money from you... it’s sending dangerous signals to other young women. Please in future say no when you are asked to prostitute yourself. Your body is for you and your boyfriend. It isn’t for every spunk-spewing dirtbag on the net, or every greedy record company executive to buy his mistresses diamonds with."
Comment: "Slut shaming, really? Do you even understand that term? Why don't you read some feminist literature besides Jezebel before you "pretend" to be PC and know what your talking about."
Who Takes the Lead Hand? Correlates of Handholding Position in Lesbian Couples - Journal of Homosexuality - "When couples hold hands, one partner must take the lead hand and the other the following hand position. As potential correlates or predictors of handholding positions within lesbian couples, we explored differences in height, age, income, who initiated the relationship, who usually initiates sexual intimacy, previous history of partnership with a male, and who has the most “say” in decision-making. Our data revealed only two significant variables: the taller partner was more likely to have the lead hand, and a woman who had previously been partnered with a male was more likely to take the trailing hand position."
There's a journal of homosexuality?
Real vampire website: Get turned into a vampire - "To get turned into a vampire you need to do a simple exchange of blood with a vampire. Even just a 1/4 teaspoon of blood is more than enough blood to turn you into a vampire... being a vampire, and the ability for you to get turned into a vampire is caused by an endogenous retrovirus... Vampires are everywhere. You don't have to go to any specific place to find a vampire, even a grocery store can be used to find a vampire. If you know how to recognize a vampire when you see one, then it will be almost as easy as finding a girlfriend or a boyfriend... Most people that claim to be a vampire, are not actually vampires. We refer to these people as posers, avoid these people if you want to get turned into a vampire. It is usually pretty easy to tell that they are fakes, common traits among posers are one or more of the following traits: 1. use white makeup to pretend to look pale, 2. fake fangs, 3. dress like hollywood vampires, 4. claim they don't need blood just energy, 5. claim to be over 100 years old. There is a group that calls itself the vampire community that is estimated to be 98% posers and the very few real vampires in that group aren't the ones that are running it."
Potential government shutdown: How would the U.S. media report on it if it were happening to another country? - "The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city. Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. Money-changers are not yet buying stacks of useless greenbacks on the street."
L'origine de Bert
Sunday, October 06, 2013
Multiple Identities and Tolerance
"All generalizations are dangerous, even this one." - Alexandre Dumas
***
Social Identity Complexity and Outgroup Tolerance
"As one step toward understanding the structure of multiple social identities, Roccas and Brewer (2002) introduced the concept of social identity complexity. The idea behind the complexity construct is that it is not only how many social groups an individual identifies with that matters but, more important, how those different identities are subjectively combined to determine the overall inclusiveness of the individual’s ingroup memberships. More specifically, Roccas and Brewer proposed that multiple social identities can be represented along a continuum of complexity and inclusiveness, reflecting the degree to which different identities are both differentiated and integrated in the individual’s cognitive representation of his or her group memberships. At the low end of the complexity dimension, the individual defines the ingroup as the intersection of all of his or her group identities, creating a single, highly exclusive identity category (e.g., female Republican college professors) whereby others who do not share all of the same memberships are effectively outgroup members. At the high end of the social identity complexity dimension, the individual recognizes that each of his or her group memberships incorporates a different set of people as ingroup members and the combined representation is the sum of all of these group identities—more inclusive than any one ingroup identity considered alone...
Roccas and Brewer (2002) also speculated that social identity complexity (as represented by perceived overlap among ingroup memberships) would be associated with tolerance for outgroups in general. Social identity complexity is based on chronic awareness of crosscategorization in one’s own social group memberships and those of others. A simple social identity is likely to be accompanied by the perception that any individual who is an outgroup member on one dimension is also an outgroup member on all others. In contrast, if an individual is aware that one of his ingroups only partly overlaps with any other of his ingroups, then we assume that he is also aware that some of his ingroup members have crossed group memberships: They are ingroup members on one dimension but are simultaneously outgroup members on others. Making salient that an outgroup member on one category dimension is an ingroup member on another decreases bias by comparison with instances where the latter information is not available (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman,&Rust, 1993).
There are a number of theoretical reasons why a complex representation of ingroup categorization should influence intergroup attitudes and behavior in ways that reduce bias and discrimination. First, cross-cutting distinctions make social categorization more complex and reduce the magnitude of ingroup-outgroup distinctions. According to social categorization theory (Deschamps& Doise, 1978; Vanbeselaere, 1991), processes of intracategory assimilation and intercategory contrast counteract each other when categories are cross-cutting. Thus, the effects of intercategory accentuation are reduced or eliminated and differences between groups are minimized (or no greater than perceived differences within groups). This undermines the cognitive basis of ingroup bias. Second, partially overlapping group memberships reduce the evaluative significance for the self of intergroup comparisons, thereby undermining the motivational base for intergroup discrimination (Vanbeselaere, 1991). Third, multiple group memberships reduce the importance of any one social identity for satisfying an individual’s need for belonging and selfdefinition (Brewer, 1991), again reducing the motivational base for ingroup bias.
Finally, principles of cognitive balance (Heider, 1958; Newcomb, 1963) are also brought into play when ingroups and outgroups have overlapping membership. When another person is an ingroup member on one category dimension but belongs to an outgroup in another categorization, cognitive inconsistency is introduced if that individual is evaluated positively as an ingroup member but is also associated with others who are evaluated negatively as outgroup members...
Overall, the findings from the present study provide considerable support for our thesis that a cross-cutting category structure and multiple social identities with awareness of ingroup diversity provide an effective formula for reducing intergroup prejudice...
Exclusive definitions of the ingroup would be promoted when individuals have a high need for certainty or cognitive simplification. If multiple, overlapping ingroupoutgroup distinctions increase uncertainty about whether to classify others as ingroup members, a simplifying strategy that limits ingroup membership to those who clearly meet all criteria for shared identity reduces that uncertainty... when individuals, or social systems, are threatened by psychological, economic, or political loss, social identities will be defined more exclusively (less complexly) than under low threat conditions"
In other words, identity politics and the obsession of third-wave feminism with segmenting people into ever-smaller (and mutually exclusive) interest groups (under the guise of "kyriarchy") leads to intolerance.
Strong (and exclusive) identities also lead to intolerance.
***
Social Identity Complexity and Outgroup Tolerance
"As one step toward understanding the structure of multiple social identities, Roccas and Brewer (2002) introduced the concept of social identity complexity. The idea behind the complexity construct is that it is not only how many social groups an individual identifies with that matters but, more important, how those different identities are subjectively combined to determine the overall inclusiveness of the individual’s ingroup memberships. More specifically, Roccas and Brewer proposed that multiple social identities can be represented along a continuum of complexity and inclusiveness, reflecting the degree to which different identities are both differentiated and integrated in the individual’s cognitive representation of his or her group memberships. At the low end of the complexity dimension, the individual defines the ingroup as the intersection of all of his or her group identities, creating a single, highly exclusive identity category (e.g., female Republican college professors) whereby others who do not share all of the same memberships are effectively outgroup members. At the high end of the social identity complexity dimension, the individual recognizes that each of his or her group memberships incorporates a different set of people as ingroup members and the combined representation is the sum of all of these group identities—more inclusive than any one ingroup identity considered alone...
Roccas and Brewer (2002) also speculated that social identity complexity (as represented by perceived overlap among ingroup memberships) would be associated with tolerance for outgroups in general. Social identity complexity is based on chronic awareness of crosscategorization in one’s own social group memberships and those of others. A simple social identity is likely to be accompanied by the perception that any individual who is an outgroup member on one dimension is also an outgroup member on all others. In contrast, if an individual is aware that one of his ingroups only partly overlaps with any other of his ingroups, then we assume that he is also aware that some of his ingroup members have crossed group memberships: They are ingroup members on one dimension but are simultaneously outgroup members on others. Making salient that an outgroup member on one category dimension is an ingroup member on another decreases bias by comparison with instances where the latter information is not available (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman,&Rust, 1993).
There are a number of theoretical reasons why a complex representation of ingroup categorization should influence intergroup attitudes and behavior in ways that reduce bias and discrimination. First, cross-cutting distinctions make social categorization more complex and reduce the magnitude of ingroup-outgroup distinctions. According to social categorization theory (Deschamps& Doise, 1978; Vanbeselaere, 1991), processes of intracategory assimilation and intercategory contrast counteract each other when categories are cross-cutting. Thus, the effects of intercategory accentuation are reduced or eliminated and differences between groups are minimized (or no greater than perceived differences within groups). This undermines the cognitive basis of ingroup bias. Second, partially overlapping group memberships reduce the evaluative significance for the self of intergroup comparisons, thereby undermining the motivational base for intergroup discrimination (Vanbeselaere, 1991). Third, multiple group memberships reduce the importance of any one social identity for satisfying an individual’s need for belonging and selfdefinition (Brewer, 1991), again reducing the motivational base for ingroup bias.
Finally, principles of cognitive balance (Heider, 1958; Newcomb, 1963) are also brought into play when ingroups and outgroups have overlapping membership. When another person is an ingroup member on one category dimension but belongs to an outgroup in another categorization, cognitive inconsistency is introduced if that individual is evaluated positively as an ingroup member but is also associated with others who are evaluated negatively as outgroup members...
Overall, the findings from the present study provide considerable support for our thesis that a cross-cutting category structure and multiple social identities with awareness of ingroup diversity provide an effective formula for reducing intergroup prejudice...
Exclusive definitions of the ingroup would be promoted when individuals have a high need for certainty or cognitive simplification. If multiple, overlapping ingroupoutgroup distinctions increase uncertainty about whether to classify others as ingroup members, a simplifying strategy that limits ingroup membership to those who clearly meet all criteria for shared identity reduces that uncertainty... when individuals, or social systems, are threatened by psychological, economic, or political loss, social identities will be defined more exclusively (less complexly) than under low threat conditions"
In other words, identity politics and the obsession of third-wave feminism with segmenting people into ever-smaller (and mutually exclusive) interest groups (under the guise of "kyriarchy") leads to intolerance.
Strong (and exclusive) identities also lead to intolerance.
Post ID: 1085674371807720092
Friday, October 04, 2013
On sensitivity to criticism
Bala Senthil Kumar's answer to Indians On Quora: Has India bashing become a fashion on Quora? - Quora
"You should see the bashing the USA gets.
But it is India and Indians that are sensitive about all the wrong things.
India deserves the bashing it gets no less than any other subject, but it also gets a ridiculous number of kudos for things that are not accomplishments of any kind.
If a culture gets bashed, it is also the reason why it needs to be examined and corrected, not unduly protected. If people have confidence in their culture and way of life why would they be sensitive to criticism?
India lacks confidence because its hypocrisy is easily exposed, and the bottom line - rank 119 on the Human Development Index cannot be missed.
Proud of "thousands of years of civilization", but not ready to accept a royal screw up in merely sixty odd years of being a nation?
No, it doesn't mean we only bash - Bala Senthil Kumar's answer to India: What makes Indian people so awesome?
But the difference is that i wouldn't have to post it here to assuage anybody's feelings if the subject weren't "India"."
"You should see the bashing the USA gets.
But it is India and Indians that are sensitive about all the wrong things.
India deserves the bashing it gets no less than any other subject, but it also gets a ridiculous number of kudos for things that are not accomplishments of any kind.
If a culture gets bashed, it is also the reason why it needs to be examined and corrected, not unduly protected. If people have confidence in their culture and way of life why would they be sensitive to criticism?
India lacks confidence because its hypocrisy is easily exposed, and the bottom line - rank 119 on the Human Development Index cannot be missed.
Proud of "thousands of years of civilization", but not ready to accept a royal screw up in merely sixty odd years of being a nation?
No, it doesn't mean we only bash - Bala Senthil Kumar's answer to India: What makes Indian people so awesome?
But the difference is that i wouldn't have to post it here to assuage anybody's feelings if the subject weren't "India"."
Post ID: 5525371207142646516
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Feminist Privilege and Capitalism
Feminisnt » Freedom of association: Unpacking the most invisible privilege knapsack
"One of the things I've been dealing with as I've been moving out of the sex industry is a longing for the shocking degree of freedom one has as a sex worker. Even if you're not fully running your own business the way I have been, sex workers generally have the ability to reject clients, to move to another strip club, find a new escort service, work for a different studio, and overall, set a much greater number of boundaries than your average worker. While that statement seems bizarre - how can you have "boundaries" if a stranger can see your naked body or is even having sex with you? - boundaries come in more forms than ones based on chastity.
With the vast, vast majority of jobs, a worker has very little control over their working environment, boss, coworkers, and upward mobility potential. A typical waitress doesn't show up to shifts only on days she feels like working, bouncing between various restaurants depending on which she prefers at the moment, the way a stripper might. A nurse knows he'll never be able to start his own hospital and declare himself its chief of surgery, unlike a porn star who works hard and invests his money in starting his own production company. For all the endless criticism lobbed at the sex industry for being a measure of last resort and misery, there's a huge and unrecognized amount of freedom in it, both freedom of association and the ability for your hard work to propel you upwards. The sex industry is the true "American dream," in that tenacity, hard work, and creativity can take a person (usually with no formal training and little startup capital) from poverty to the middle class more easily than any other industry.
One of the things I've been thinking about more lately is the issue of "association privilege," both how I've been lucky to have it as a sex worker, and how it remains perhaps the most invisible privilege. When framed in that way, it makes obvious a particularly strong correlation between the shrill lefty feminists who rail endlessly about how everyone is too "privileged," yet themselves possessing the privilege to choose their work environment, bosses/editors, and business/activist contacts. (I've long maintained that nothing is more indicative of privilege than spending all day on the internet picking fights with strangers about how privileged they are.) If someone wants to refuse to associate with anyone who isn't also a socialist feminist wannabe-academic that adorns their virtual spaces with Audre Lorde quotes and Foucault references, they can easily live in such a bubble. There are plenty of such bores in neighboring regions of the blogosphere. (Where all of these people make money remains a mystery. While I know that two big names in the sexy feminist scene have secret rich male partners/husbands who bankroll their lifestyles of being internet pesonas, I don't know how the others do it. NGO jobs? Sporadic paid writing gigs? Trust funds? Secret sex work?)
It all reminds me of a favorite section from a piece in The Atlantic a while back, which perfectly sums up the completely un-checked privilege that runs rampant among those who have declared themselves the enforcers of privilege-checking."
***
I Choose My Choice! - Sandra Tsing Loh - The Atlantic
"As you may have heard, some 50 years after Betty Friedan sprang us from domestic jail, we women … seem to have made a mess of it. What do we want? Not to be men (wrong again, Freud!), at least not businessmen—although slacker men, sans futon and bong, might appeal. In these post-Lisa-Belkin-New-York-Times-Magazine-“Opt-Out” years, we’ve now learned the worst: even female Harvard graduates are fleeing high-powered careers for a kinder, gentler Martha Stewart Living. Not only does the Problem Have a Name, it has its own line of Fiestaware!...
Is the mass media to blame (again!) for pushing women out of the workplace? Not so much. On our zeitgeist-setting TV shows, it’s only the housewives who are desperate. Work is fun! The Manhattan working gals of Sex and the City, whose days revolve chiefly around dishing over cocktails, are essentially ’50s suburban housewives, trophy wives of (in this case) glamorous if emotionally distant New York jobs—skyscraper-housed entities with good addresses and doormen that handsomely fund their lifestyles while requiring that they show up to service them only infrequently, in bustiers and heels. I want a vague job like the one Charlotte has, in the art gallery she never goes to; or the lawyer job Miranda has (charcoal suits and plenty o’ time for lunch with the gals); or Samantha’s PR gig, throwing SoHo loft parties and giving blow jobs to freakishly endowed men (actually, that’s the one job I don’t want); I want to spend my days like “writer” Carrie, lolling in bed in her underwear, smoking and occasionally updating her quasi-bohemian equivalent of a MySpace page...
Hirshman fires with both barrels (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) at today’s mommies, who are so busy sniffing the Martha Stewart paint chips that they have forgotten Friedan’s exhortation to get out and change the world...
Hirshman considers all stay-at-home mothers fish in her barrel (think fish pedaling tiny aquatic bicycles). No target is too small: Hirshman even tears mercilessly into the sleep-deprived new mothers who’ve made the unfortunate decision to share their rambling thoughts on something called Bloggingbaby.com... But in fact, Hirshman insists, the problem starts well before motherhood. It begins when young women enter college and violate Hirshman’s No. 1 rule of female emancipation: “Don’t study art.”
Why aren’t the women who are outnumbering men in undergraduate institutions leading the information economy? “Because they’re dabbling,” she snaps. Here’s yet another Problem That Has a Name: Frida Kahlo.
... She leaves aside the matter of whether women driven to make piles of money are the same ones likely to incite meaningful social change. If the Harvard stay-at-home mom walked away from an attack-dog corporate-lawyer job with Exxon, I, for one, would rather see her playing tag and climbing trees. And although Hirshman did work as a lawyer (lawyer, along with doctor and judge, is the kind of high-degree, socially relevant job she approves of), she then became a professor of philosophy and women’s studies. (Call the White House! We have a professor of philosophy on the line!)
Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment,
Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world...
To be sure, attacking feminist criticism as being the extended whine of a privileged, educated upper class is as old as … well, as bell hooks’s 1984 critique of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique: “[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.” It’s a point that keeps having to be made, though...
Further, in a development that would shock only today’s most radical feminists (where are those last two hiding? Buffalo?):
... Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks—such as makin’ kahpies!—to continually oppress their wives...
Financial need is not the force behind women’s shift in the past 50 years from work in the home to work in the marketplace; rather, it is the desires of those who have made out like bandits in this new order, the tiny minority (3.5 percent in 2003) of women who earn $75,000 or more. Members of this occupational elite have created a host of cultural norms by which their far less privileged sisters—who, again, make up the vast majority of working women—feel they must abide. For Hirshman’s doctors, lawyers, judges, and professors, work has been terrific, so it’s no wonder they’ve advocated social change, imposing on society between the 1960s and the mid-1990s “new expectations about modern life, self-fulfillment, and the joys of work outside the home”...
Since the late 1990s, so-called family-friendly policies in Europe have been, as the Oxford sociologist Jane Lewis observes, “explicitly linked to the promotion of women’s employment in order to further the economic growth and competition agenda.” Women have achieved the freedom to join men on a more or less equal footing in the marketplace, which strengthens the notion that the only thing ultimately of value is one’s ability to turn a buck. The triumph of feminism, Gilbert reminds us (echoing those socially conservative men of the left, George Orwell and Christopher Lasch), has served the culture of capitalism...
From 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector … providing social welfare services … almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband’s job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family’s finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people’s toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, “the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.”)"
Funny, I thought housewives' lives were terrible and their work should be valued equally as that of working adults.
"One of the things I've been dealing with as I've been moving out of the sex industry is a longing for the shocking degree of freedom one has as a sex worker. Even if you're not fully running your own business the way I have been, sex workers generally have the ability to reject clients, to move to another strip club, find a new escort service, work for a different studio, and overall, set a much greater number of boundaries than your average worker. While that statement seems bizarre - how can you have "boundaries" if a stranger can see your naked body or is even having sex with you? - boundaries come in more forms than ones based on chastity.
With the vast, vast majority of jobs, a worker has very little control over their working environment, boss, coworkers, and upward mobility potential. A typical waitress doesn't show up to shifts only on days she feels like working, bouncing between various restaurants depending on which she prefers at the moment, the way a stripper might. A nurse knows he'll never be able to start his own hospital and declare himself its chief of surgery, unlike a porn star who works hard and invests his money in starting his own production company. For all the endless criticism lobbed at the sex industry for being a measure of last resort and misery, there's a huge and unrecognized amount of freedom in it, both freedom of association and the ability for your hard work to propel you upwards. The sex industry is the true "American dream," in that tenacity, hard work, and creativity can take a person (usually with no formal training and little startup capital) from poverty to the middle class more easily than any other industry.
One of the things I've been thinking about more lately is the issue of "association privilege," both how I've been lucky to have it as a sex worker, and how it remains perhaps the most invisible privilege. When framed in that way, it makes obvious a particularly strong correlation between the shrill lefty feminists who rail endlessly about how everyone is too "privileged," yet themselves possessing the privilege to choose their work environment, bosses/editors, and business/activist contacts. (I've long maintained that nothing is more indicative of privilege than spending all day on the internet picking fights with strangers about how privileged they are.) If someone wants to refuse to associate with anyone who isn't also a socialist feminist wannabe-academic that adorns their virtual spaces with Audre Lorde quotes and Foucault references, they can easily live in such a bubble. There are plenty of such bores in neighboring regions of the blogosphere. (Where all of these people make money remains a mystery. While I know that two big names in the sexy feminist scene have secret rich male partners/husbands who bankroll their lifestyles of being internet pesonas, I don't know how the others do it. NGO jobs? Sporadic paid writing gigs? Trust funds? Secret sex work?)
It all reminds me of a favorite section from a piece in The Atlantic a while back, which perfectly sums up the completely un-checked privilege that runs rampant among those who have declared themselves the enforcers of privilege-checking."
***
I Choose My Choice! - Sandra Tsing Loh - The Atlantic
"As you may have heard, some 50 years after Betty Friedan sprang us from domestic jail, we women … seem to have made a mess of it. What do we want? Not to be men (wrong again, Freud!), at least not businessmen—although slacker men, sans futon and bong, might appeal. In these post-Lisa-Belkin-New-York-Times-Magazine-“Opt-Out” years, we’ve now learned the worst: even female Harvard graduates are fleeing high-powered careers for a kinder, gentler Martha Stewart Living. Not only does the Problem Have a Name, it has its own line of Fiestaware!...
Is the mass media to blame (again!) for pushing women out of the workplace? Not so much. On our zeitgeist-setting TV shows, it’s only the housewives who are desperate. Work is fun! The Manhattan working gals of Sex and the City, whose days revolve chiefly around dishing over cocktails, are essentially ’50s suburban housewives, trophy wives of (in this case) glamorous if emotionally distant New York jobs—skyscraper-housed entities with good addresses and doormen that handsomely fund their lifestyles while requiring that they show up to service them only infrequently, in bustiers and heels. I want a vague job like the one Charlotte has, in the art gallery she never goes to; or the lawyer job Miranda has (charcoal suits and plenty o’ time for lunch with the gals); or Samantha’s PR gig, throwing SoHo loft parties and giving blow jobs to freakishly endowed men (actually, that’s the one job I don’t want); I want to spend my days like “writer” Carrie, lolling in bed in her underwear, smoking and occasionally updating her quasi-bohemian equivalent of a MySpace page...
Hirshman fires with both barrels (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) at today’s mommies, who are so busy sniffing the Martha Stewart paint chips that they have forgotten Friedan’s exhortation to get out and change the world...
Hirshman considers all stay-at-home mothers fish in her barrel (think fish pedaling tiny aquatic bicycles). No target is too small: Hirshman even tears mercilessly into the sleep-deprived new mothers who’ve made the unfortunate decision to share their rambling thoughts on something called Bloggingbaby.com... But in fact, Hirshman insists, the problem starts well before motherhood. It begins when young women enter college and violate Hirshman’s No. 1 rule of female emancipation: “Don’t study art.”
Why aren’t the women who are outnumbering men in undergraduate institutions leading the information economy? “Because they’re dabbling,” she snaps. Here’s yet another Problem That Has a Name: Frida Kahlo.
Everybody loves Frida Kahlo. Half Jewish, half Mexican, tragically injured when young, sexually linked to men and women, abused by a famous genius husband. Oh, and a brilliantly talented painter. If I was a feminazi, the first thing I’d ban would be books about Frida Kahlo. Because Frida Kahlo’s life is not a model for women’s lives. And if you’re not Frida Kahlo and you major in art, you’re going to wind up answering the phones at some gallery in Chelsea, hoping a rich male collector comes to rescue you.
... She leaves aside the matter of whether women driven to make piles of money are the same ones likely to incite meaningful social change. If the Harvard stay-at-home mom walked away from an attack-dog corporate-lawyer job with Exxon, I, for one, would rather see her playing tag and climbing trees. And although Hirshman did work as a lawyer (lawyer, along with doctor and judge, is the kind of high-degree, socially relevant job she approves of), she then became a professor of philosophy and women’s studies. (Call the White House! We have a professor of philosophy on the line!)
Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment,
mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have “real” jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities.
Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world...
To be sure, attacking feminist criticism as being the extended whine of a privileged, educated upper class is as old as … well, as bell hooks’s 1984 critique of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique: “[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.” It’s a point that keeps having to be made, though...
Employed women expressed a higher degree of enjoyment for shopping, preparing food, taking care of their children, and doing housework than for working at their jobs—an activity that was ranked at the next-to-lowest level of enjoyment, just above commuting to work.
Further, in a development that would shock only today’s most radical feminists (where are those last two hiding? Buffalo?):
When it came to interactions with different partners, the women ranked interactions with their children as more enjoyable than those with clients/customers, coworkers, and bosses.
... Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks—such as makin’ kahpies!—to continually oppress their wives...
Financial need is not the force behind women’s shift in the past 50 years from work in the home to work in the marketplace; rather, it is the desires of those who have made out like bandits in this new order, the tiny minority (3.5 percent in 2003) of women who earn $75,000 or more. Members of this occupational elite have created a host of cultural norms by which their far less privileged sisters—who, again, make up the vast majority of working women—feel they must abide. For Hirshman’s doctors, lawyers, judges, and professors, work has been terrific, so it’s no wonder they’ve advocated social change, imposing on society between the 1960s and the mid-1990s “new expectations about modern life, self-fulfillment, and the joys of work outside the home”...
Since the late 1990s, so-called family-friendly policies in Europe have been, as the Oxford sociologist Jane Lewis observes, “explicitly linked to the promotion of women’s employment in order to further the economic growth and competition agenda.” Women have achieved the freedom to join men on a more or less equal footing in the marketplace, which strengthens the notion that the only thing ultimately of value is one’s ability to turn a buck. The triumph of feminism, Gilbert reminds us (echoing those socially conservative men of the left, George Orwell and Christopher Lasch), has served the culture of capitalism...
From 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector … providing social welfare services … almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband’s job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family’s finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people’s toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, “the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.”)"
Funny, I thought housewives' lives were terrible and their work should be valued equally as that of working adults.
Post ID: 5494877350545443545
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Why They Call It Work
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." - G. K. Chesterton
***
Why They Call It Work
The halls are alive with the sound of carping. Last year, only 50% of U.S. workers were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest point yet in a steady decline that began in 1995, reports the Conference Board. And with the exception of a few anomalous years, job satisfaction in the United Kingdom has been dropping since 1991, according to research done at the University of Kent. Participants in these studies complained, among other things, about lack of personal fulfillment; “robotic,” meaningless work; work/life imbalance; insufficient acknowledgment of efforts; and lack of influence with supervisors.
Conventional wisdom blames such pervasive disgruntlement on poor leadership and lousy work environments. But have working conditions in the past decade really degenerated so much for so many? The decline in satisfaction has persisted in periods when employees have had tremendous leverage and when they’ve been lucky to have jobs at all. Moreover, the average worker spends more than two hours of each eight-hour workday surfing the Internet, conducting personal business, or just “spacing out.” That suggests many employees have autonomy and a manageable workload.
Maybe employees are dissatisfied because they have been taught to expect too much from their jobs. In the mid-1900s, organizational behaviorists concluded that great work environments would produce happy, productive workers. At the same time, humanists began arguing that work should be a vehicle for growth and self-expression. Those ideas became part of the conversation for companies and observers of companies, including management consultants and the business press. Employees, as a result, came to expect that their jobs would be satisfying and meaningful and that their employers would help them grow professionally and develop their “true potential.”
Such expectations represent a corporate ideal akin to the romantic ideal that guides some people in their quest for a mate. Those animated by the romantic ideal believe that they will someday find “the one” and embark upon a life of bliss untroubled by personal faults, limitations, and weaknesses. Fortunately, most mature adults eventually abandon that myth. Those who don’t not only are doomed to disappointment but make life miserable for their mates.
Similarly, employees animated by the corporate ideal believe in the existence of a “right” job that meets all the needs on their own, personalized versions of Maslow’s hierarchy. But even a good job in a good company is bound to produce disappointment. In time, these deluded souls will realize that the business is more interested in what they do than in who they are. They will be required to perform tasks they consider tedious or misconceived. They will find that their input is not always welcome. As a result, they will feel frustrated, disappointed, and demeaned.
Much misery could be avoided if employees held less-exalted ideals about work. Why does a job have to be meaningful and fulfilling? Isn’t it enough that work is simply worthwhile–which is to say worth the employee’s time, considering his or her circumstances? A former student of mine sells a remedy for irritable bowel syndrome, a job she doesn’t find particularly meaningful. But she does believe that for someone with her skills, experience, priorities, and goals, selling this product for this company is certainly worthwhile. Consequently, she believes that she has a good job. And she does. The pharmaceutical company she works for pays her a decent wage, provides good working conditions, and does not waste her time. That should be enough.
Employees should not demand that companies imbue their lives with meaning. Employers and employees have something the other needs. One of the keys to a mutually beneficial relationship is a realistic understanding of what that something is.
(The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2006 - 20. Why They Call It Work, E.L. Kersten)
***
Why They Call It Work
The halls are alive with the sound of carping. Last year, only 50% of U.S. workers were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest point yet in a steady decline that began in 1995, reports the Conference Board. And with the exception of a few anomalous years, job satisfaction in the United Kingdom has been dropping since 1991, according to research done at the University of Kent. Participants in these studies complained, among other things, about lack of personal fulfillment; “robotic,” meaningless work; work/life imbalance; insufficient acknowledgment of efforts; and lack of influence with supervisors.
Conventional wisdom blames such pervasive disgruntlement on poor leadership and lousy work environments. But have working conditions in the past decade really degenerated so much for so many? The decline in satisfaction has persisted in periods when employees have had tremendous leverage and when they’ve been lucky to have jobs at all. Moreover, the average worker spends more than two hours of each eight-hour workday surfing the Internet, conducting personal business, or just “spacing out.” That suggests many employees have autonomy and a manageable workload.
Maybe employees are dissatisfied because they have been taught to expect too much from their jobs. In the mid-1900s, organizational behaviorists concluded that great work environments would produce happy, productive workers. At the same time, humanists began arguing that work should be a vehicle for growth and self-expression. Those ideas became part of the conversation for companies and observers of companies, including management consultants and the business press. Employees, as a result, came to expect that their jobs would be satisfying and meaningful and that their employers would help them grow professionally and develop their “true potential.”
Such expectations represent a corporate ideal akin to the romantic ideal that guides some people in their quest for a mate. Those animated by the romantic ideal believe that they will someday find “the one” and embark upon a life of bliss untroubled by personal faults, limitations, and weaknesses. Fortunately, most mature adults eventually abandon that myth. Those who don’t not only are doomed to disappointment but make life miserable for their mates.
Similarly, employees animated by the corporate ideal believe in the existence of a “right” job that meets all the needs on their own, personalized versions of Maslow’s hierarchy. But even a good job in a good company is bound to produce disappointment. In time, these deluded souls will realize that the business is more interested in what they do than in who they are. They will be required to perform tasks they consider tedious or misconceived. They will find that their input is not always welcome. As a result, they will feel frustrated, disappointed, and demeaned.
Much misery could be avoided if employees held less-exalted ideals about work. Why does a job have to be meaningful and fulfilling? Isn’t it enough that work is simply worthwhile–which is to say worth the employee’s time, considering his or her circumstances? A former student of mine sells a remedy for irritable bowel syndrome, a job she doesn’t find particularly meaningful. But she does believe that for someone with her skills, experience, priorities, and goals, selling this product for this company is certainly worthwhile. Consequently, she believes that she has a good job. And she does. The pharmaceutical company she works for pays her a decent wage, provides good working conditions, and does not waste her time. That should be enough.
Employees should not demand that companies imbue their lives with meaning. Employers and employees have something the other needs. One of the keys to a mutually beneficial relationship is a realistic understanding of what that something is.
(The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2006 - 20. Why They Call It Work, E.L. Kersten)
Post ID: 2576157125390648928
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Why are some feminists rude and defensive?
"To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." - Woody Allen
***
Gabriel Seah's answer to Feminism: Why are some feminists rude and defensive? - Quora
Question Details: "Why do many feminists post curt and rude responses when their statements or arguments are questioned? One would normally assume a civilized and thought out responses for an argument, well, it doesn't seem to be so. In past 1.5 years, I have been blocked by 3 people, all feminists, who didn't have an answer to my statements (my statements were against stereotyping my ethnicity or pointing out their ignorance, not against their ideology).
Why are opposing arguments ignored or attacked?"
Me: "I too find that feminists in general are rude and defensive, but perhaps it is not feminists per se but people who openly (and loudly) identify as feminists, especially online, who are the problem. Since you mention 3 feminists blocked you, I'm assuming you encountered them online.
It is significant that even the centre-left British magazine New Statesman had an article on this (There’s no point in online feminism if it’s an exclusive, Mean Girls club) where the writer, who even praises Andrea Dworkin (despite her being deeply problematic; The Dworkin Whitewash) got burnt by online feminists, and there are good examples there of the harsh words that were directed her way.
Part of the reason is due to a phenomenon that rears its ugly head in other areas: the online disinhibition effect (basically people are nastier online; Online disinhibition effect)
However, it goes beyond that, since I've found feminists I know (or knew) in real life to be this way as well.
The three major reasons, I think, are strong identification with feminism, the assumption of infallibility and a Manichean worldview.
We all have multiple identities. Research on tolerance shows that "A simple social identity is likely to be accompanied by the perception that any individual who is an outgroup member on one dimension is also an outgroup member on all others" (Page on The5f). In this context, if one strongly identifies as feminist (and this identification is very important to one's identity), one will be less tolerant of non-feminists. People who openly (and loudly) identify as feminists are thus less tolerant of non-feminists (we see this elsewhere too, among militant atheists, religious fundamentalists and ideologues in general).
Next, feminists seem to be incapable of imagining that they are wrong. Thus, people who disagree with them are wrong, and it just remains to be determined whether they are wrong because they are ignorant (in which case "education" is the answer), trolling (in which case the correct response is to ignore the "trolls"; related: Gabriel Seah's answer to Trolling: Why are some people obsessed with trolls of both the real and imagined variety?) or evil (where the 'misogynist' gets verbal abuse hurled at him).
As for the last, a Manichean worldview is a strongly polarised one: you are either good or evil and there is no middle ground. If you disagree with feminists, you are not just wrong but evil (because the opposite of feminist is, obviously, misogynist) and thus worthy of being insulted. This is especially so if you are male (and thus part of the Patriarchy, and guilty by association). Women are generally let off more easily but not spared (e.g. Camille Pagilla, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sarah Palin).
I also suspect that the reflexive (automatic) attitude of going against stereotypes (feminists love to champion the breaking of stereotypes) is responsible: since stereotypically women are supposed to be nice and polite, female feminists (since most feminists are female) are nasty.
Postscript: Feminists being rude is part of a larger phenomenon: Liberals tend to be ruder than their counterparts on the other side of the spectrum (Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values) and more likely to block those they disagree with (Study: Liberals more likely to block social-media friends over political differences). For a prime example of this, you can look at PZ Myers's blog (Pharyngula - Just another site) which is full of he and his fans insulting people they disagree with (for example every time libertarianism comes up, the comments section is full of people slamming them as "assholes")"
***
Gabriel Seah's answer to Feminism: Why are some feminists rude and defensive? - Quora
Question Details: "Why do many feminists post curt and rude responses when their statements or arguments are questioned? One would normally assume a civilized and thought out responses for an argument, well, it doesn't seem to be so. In past 1.5 years, I have been blocked by 3 people, all feminists, who didn't have an answer to my statements (my statements were against stereotyping my ethnicity or pointing out their ignorance, not against their ideology).
Why are opposing arguments ignored or attacked?"
Me: "I too find that feminists in general are rude and defensive, but perhaps it is not feminists per se but people who openly (and loudly) identify as feminists, especially online, who are the problem. Since you mention 3 feminists blocked you, I'm assuming you encountered them online.
It is significant that even the centre-left British magazine New Statesman had an article on this (There’s no point in online feminism if it’s an exclusive, Mean Girls club) where the writer, who even praises Andrea Dworkin (despite her being deeply problematic; The Dworkin Whitewash) got burnt by online feminists, and there are good examples there of the harsh words that were directed her way.
Part of the reason is due to a phenomenon that rears its ugly head in other areas: the online disinhibition effect (basically people are nastier online; Online disinhibition effect)
However, it goes beyond that, since I've found feminists I know (or knew) in real life to be this way as well.
The three major reasons, I think, are strong identification with feminism, the assumption of infallibility and a Manichean worldview.
We all have multiple identities. Research on tolerance shows that "A simple social identity is likely to be accompanied by the perception that any individual who is an outgroup member on one dimension is also an outgroup member on all others" (Page on The5f). In this context, if one strongly identifies as feminist (and this identification is very important to one's identity), one will be less tolerant of non-feminists. People who openly (and loudly) identify as feminists are thus less tolerant of non-feminists (we see this elsewhere too, among militant atheists, religious fundamentalists and ideologues in general).
Next, feminists seem to be incapable of imagining that they are wrong. Thus, people who disagree with them are wrong, and it just remains to be determined whether they are wrong because they are ignorant (in which case "education" is the answer), trolling (in which case the correct response is to ignore the "trolls"; related: Gabriel Seah's answer to Trolling: Why are some people obsessed with trolls of both the real and imagined variety?) or evil (where the 'misogynist' gets verbal abuse hurled at him).
As for the last, a Manichean worldview is a strongly polarised one: you are either good or evil and there is no middle ground. If you disagree with feminists, you are not just wrong but evil (because the opposite of feminist is, obviously, misogynist) and thus worthy of being insulted. This is especially so if you are male (and thus part of the Patriarchy, and guilty by association). Women are generally let off more easily but not spared (e.g. Camille Pagilla, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sarah Palin).
I also suspect that the reflexive (automatic) attitude of going against stereotypes (feminists love to champion the breaking of stereotypes) is responsible: since stereotypically women are supposed to be nice and polite, female feminists (since most feminists are female) are nasty.
Postscript: Feminists being rude is part of a larger phenomenon: Liberals tend to be ruder than their counterparts on the other side of the spectrum (Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values) and more likely to block those they disagree with (Study: Liberals more likely to block social-media friends over political differences). For a prime example of this, you can look at PZ Myers's blog (Pharyngula - Just another site) which is full of he and his fans insulting people they disagree with (for example every time libertarianism comes up, the comments section is full of people slamming them as "assholes")"
Post ID: 7007755096091942508
Monday, September 30, 2013
Links - 30th September 2013
"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying." - Bertrand Russell
***
'Feminists are man-hating and unhygienic': How negative activists stereotypes remain barriers - "people were more motivated to adopt pro-environmental behaviors after reading the articles written by the ‘atypical’ or 'undefined' environmentalist, than the 'typical' activist. Psychologist Nadia Bashir and her team conclude: 'Unfortunately, the very nature of activism leads to negative stereotyping. 'By aggressively promoting change and advocating unconventional practices, activists become associated with hostile militancy and unconventionality or eccentricity. '[People] may be more receptive to advocates who defy stereotypes by coming across as pleasant and approachable.’"
Funny, I thought shouting at people was the best way to persuade them to your point of view
How Google Play DRM promotes piracy - "Jim O’Donnell was away in Singapore attending a library conference when he saw that his iPad’s Google Play app needed to be updated. In Google Play’s case, the app erases the books and re-downloads them once the app is updated. With almost 40 books in his library, he was suddenly unable to download them since Singapore isn’t an approved Google Play Books region."
How Selfies Are Ruining Your Relationships - "people who constantly share photos of themselves generally tend to have more shallow personal relationships. Admittedly, this won’t come as a huge surprise to regular Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users, but now there’s data to support our nagging suspicions."
iOS 7 users destroy iPhones after fake waterproof advert - "In an emergency, a smart-switch will shut off the phone’s power supply and corresponding components to prevent any damage to your iPhone’s delicate circuitry"
What your email sign-off really means - "You can sign off with “regards”, which means, quite literally, “I have no regard for you at all”. Or you can use the more extreme “warmest regards”, which means, “never contact me again you insufferable bastard”. Then there’s “yours”, which means, “I don’t even know who you are or what you wrote to me about”, and its cousin, “yours sincerely”, which means, “you owe me money and I will make your life a living hell until I get it”."
Camille Paglia - 'I don't get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them' - ""But the feminist culture-wars were at their height at that time," she says. "A lot of that's completely gone now. Some of the principal antagonists are dead, like Andrea Dworkin. Basically, what happened is that my side won that war. The younger women of the Nineties rose up and embraced this. I," she says, with a sudden spurt of generosity, "credit Madonna. For decades, feminism had rejected Hollywood, sex symbols and fashion magazines and so on. Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman"... "The plastic surgery issue is really looming," says Paglia when I raise it, "because girls in the US are getting it in their teens". She won't say they shouldn't, but then I didn't think she would. Paglia has been described as a "radical libertarian". She thinks people should be free, in the private realm, to do what they like. They should be free to take drugs if they want to, and enjoy porn if they want to. And they should certainly be free to change the way they look. "I believe," she says, "that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models. I'm going to really try to avoid it unless I get to the point where I'm actually scaring the horses"... "I had no sex life," she says, "but I was writing a dissertation on sex"... The thing that shocked me most was how many of her views seemed to me like common sense. I agree with Camille Paglia that many feminists have underestimated the power of hormones in human behaviour and the creative power of sexual desire. I agree with her that many feminists have a Rousseau-ian view of human nature where they expect to be able to dress as they like, and go where they like, and drink as they like, and never come to harm. I agree that women who stay in abusive relationships are complicit in the violence. I even agree with her about the link between male obsession and achievement. I think it's quite possible that there is "no woman Mozart because there is no woman Jack the Ripper". And I absolutely agree about the damage postmodernism and its boring theories have done to culture and art... "The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me. Woah!" she says. "I'm Italian, OK. So I went on the warpath.""
Honk if you like minorities: Vuvuzela attitudes predict outgroup liking - "the less participants liked vuvuzelas, the less positively they also tended to feel toward minority groups. Furthermore, respondents who liked vuvuzelas the least were also less generally open to change. These findings suggest that the vuvuzela controversy was about more than just a plastic trumpet – it was also an episode of differential ingroup/outgroup perceptions and a lack of openness to new things"
Every Sci-Fi Starship Ever*, In One Mindblowing Comparison Chart
A rare insight into Kowloon Walled City
Height and Male Attractiveness - "men without children are on average three cm. (1.2 inches) shorter than those with at least one child... The only age group with men that were not "significantly" taller than the childless group was men in their fifties. The authors credit that to the fact that these men entered the marriage market after World War II, when men were in short supply... These studies point to a "strong universal tendency" and need to be done in many different places. "A lot of people with good hearts really don't want to believe that something you're simply born with ... somehow has that much impact on your course in life. It's unfair, and yeah it is unfair, but it also tends to be true, and the more people that actually document this carefully, the better""
There’s no point in online feminism if it’s an exclusive, Mean Girls club - "Ever tried to engage with feminism on the internet? I’ve had to start differentiating between feminism – good honest feminism in all its manifestations from Luce Irigaray, to Greenham Common, to Andrea Dworkin and even (although the Lord knows, she’s not to my taste) Camille Paglia – and what I’ve started calling the Online Wimmin Mob. The latter is meant to sound insulting. Borderline misogynist if you like, and there’s a reason for that: the Online Wimmin Mob don’t seem to like feminism. There’s not much evidence that they like women very much. Perhaps this is the reason that they don’t want you to be a feminist either. If you try to join the club that they seem to believe they have seized control of, you too will be told that there are no vacancies. No room for you, with your “privilege”... The Online Wimmin Mob takes offence everywhere, but particularly at other women who are not in their little Mean Girls club, which has their own over-stylised and impenetrable language, rules and disciplinary proceedings. “Check your privilege!” This has become the rallying cry of the Mob when faced with a woman with whom they disagree... about 35 per cent of the world’s population has access to the internet. Everyone on Twitter is privileged. Everyone. Claiming “unprivileged” underdog status when you are in the top 35 per cent of the entire world makes you sound like the sort of annoying princess who screams that it’s just not fair and she hates you because she only got an iPhone and a pony for Christmas... “Checking your privilege” is about playing an inverted game of Top Trumps where the real message is that it’s not who you are but how you were born that determines whether what you have to say is worth listening to. It’s not a dissimilar message to that of your average bar room sexist – or transphobe for that matter - but so much more depressing coming from our own side... If you are a member of the Mob, you spend your evenings in noble pursuits. Namely, picking up on ill-considered comments on the internet (which are often, although admittedly not always, well-meant but made in ignorance) and encouraging all your mates to weigh in to beat up on the woman. Is this beginning to sound like an evening out with the patriarchy to anyone else?... anyone who thinks that anything can be achieved on Twitter at 2am has no business feeling superior to anybody."
But then, they do that to men too...
Why people who boast about their IQ are (generally) losers - "If Stephen Hawking wanted to brag about how clever he is, his IQ (however high it may be) would come a long way down the list of braggables like “I held the Lucasian chair in mathematics at Cambridge” or “I discovered Hawking radiation”... In contrast, it might still be worth bragging about your IQ if you haven’t achieved much"
Are Singaporean workers... expensive & entitled? - "Mr V. S. Kumar, managing director of local courier company Network Express Courier Services, says Singaporean workers only seem motivated just to do enough and have no qualms about dropping everything and leaving on the dot at 5.30pm every day. However, his staff from India, the Philippines and Vietnam are keen to stay back after office hours to learn new skills... "If you're talking about the ability to present their ideas, to communicate, then, in general, local PMETs are behind their Western counterparts. The differences might be down to culture and the respective education systems." When they do speak up, however, it is to demand things such as more work-life balance and faster promotions... he says a bit of perspective is needed: "Comparing the entire Singaporean workforce with this small select group of employees who left their home country to make it into another country to work here, naturally they would be more driven"... A recent survey of 6,000 university students here by consultancy Universum found that the main thing they want from their careers is work-life balance, beating job security, intellectual challenge and an international career."
I thought Singaporeans love to do OT for the sake of doing OT
***
'Feminists are man-hating and unhygienic': How negative activists stereotypes remain barriers - "people were more motivated to adopt pro-environmental behaviors after reading the articles written by the ‘atypical’ or 'undefined' environmentalist, than the 'typical' activist. Psychologist Nadia Bashir and her team conclude: 'Unfortunately, the very nature of activism leads to negative stereotyping. 'By aggressively promoting change and advocating unconventional practices, activists become associated with hostile militancy and unconventionality or eccentricity. '[People] may be more receptive to advocates who defy stereotypes by coming across as pleasant and approachable.’"
Funny, I thought shouting at people was the best way to persuade them to your point of view
How Google Play DRM promotes piracy - "Jim O’Donnell was away in Singapore attending a library conference when he saw that his iPad’s Google Play app needed to be updated. In Google Play’s case, the app erases the books and re-downloads them once the app is updated. With almost 40 books in his library, he was suddenly unable to download them since Singapore isn’t an approved Google Play Books region."
How Selfies Are Ruining Your Relationships - "people who constantly share photos of themselves generally tend to have more shallow personal relationships. Admittedly, this won’t come as a huge surprise to regular Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users, but now there’s data to support our nagging suspicions."
iOS 7 users destroy iPhones after fake waterproof advert - "In an emergency, a smart-switch will shut off the phone’s power supply and corresponding components to prevent any damage to your iPhone’s delicate circuitry"
What your email sign-off really means - "You can sign off with “regards”, which means, quite literally, “I have no regard for you at all”. Or you can use the more extreme “warmest regards”, which means, “never contact me again you insufferable bastard”. Then there’s “yours”, which means, “I don’t even know who you are or what you wrote to me about”, and its cousin, “yours sincerely”, which means, “you owe me money and I will make your life a living hell until I get it”."
Camille Paglia - 'I don't get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them' - ""But the feminist culture-wars were at their height at that time," she says. "A lot of that's completely gone now. Some of the principal antagonists are dead, like Andrea Dworkin. Basically, what happened is that my side won that war. The younger women of the Nineties rose up and embraced this. I," she says, with a sudden spurt of generosity, "credit Madonna. For decades, feminism had rejected Hollywood, sex symbols and fashion magazines and so on. Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman"... "The plastic surgery issue is really looming," says Paglia when I raise it, "because girls in the US are getting it in their teens". She won't say they shouldn't, but then I didn't think she would. Paglia has been described as a "radical libertarian". She thinks people should be free, in the private realm, to do what they like. They should be free to take drugs if they want to, and enjoy porn if they want to. And they should certainly be free to change the way they look. "I believe," she says, "that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models. I'm going to really try to avoid it unless I get to the point where I'm actually scaring the horses"... "I had no sex life," she says, "but I was writing a dissertation on sex"... The thing that shocked me most was how many of her views seemed to me like common sense. I agree with Camille Paglia that many feminists have underestimated the power of hormones in human behaviour and the creative power of sexual desire. I agree with her that many feminists have a Rousseau-ian view of human nature where they expect to be able to dress as they like, and go where they like, and drink as they like, and never come to harm. I agree that women who stay in abusive relationships are complicit in the violence. I even agree with her about the link between male obsession and achievement. I think it's quite possible that there is "no woman Mozart because there is no woman Jack the Ripper". And I absolutely agree about the damage postmodernism and its boring theories have done to culture and art... "The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me. Woah!" she says. "I'm Italian, OK. So I went on the warpath.""
Honk if you like minorities: Vuvuzela attitudes predict outgroup liking - "the less participants liked vuvuzelas, the less positively they also tended to feel toward minority groups. Furthermore, respondents who liked vuvuzelas the least were also less generally open to change. These findings suggest that the vuvuzela controversy was about more than just a plastic trumpet – it was also an episode of differential ingroup/outgroup perceptions and a lack of openness to new things"
Every Sci-Fi Starship Ever*, In One Mindblowing Comparison Chart
A rare insight into Kowloon Walled City
Height and Male Attractiveness - "men without children are on average three cm. (1.2 inches) shorter than those with at least one child... The only age group with men that were not "significantly" taller than the childless group was men in their fifties. The authors credit that to the fact that these men entered the marriage market after World War II, when men were in short supply... These studies point to a "strong universal tendency" and need to be done in many different places. "A lot of people with good hearts really don't want to believe that something you're simply born with ... somehow has that much impact on your course in life. It's unfair, and yeah it is unfair, but it also tends to be true, and the more people that actually document this carefully, the better""
There’s no point in online feminism if it’s an exclusive, Mean Girls club - "Ever tried to engage with feminism on the internet? I’ve had to start differentiating between feminism – good honest feminism in all its manifestations from Luce Irigaray, to Greenham Common, to Andrea Dworkin and even (although the Lord knows, she’s not to my taste) Camille Paglia – and what I’ve started calling the Online Wimmin Mob. The latter is meant to sound insulting. Borderline misogynist if you like, and there’s a reason for that: the Online Wimmin Mob don’t seem to like feminism. There’s not much evidence that they like women very much. Perhaps this is the reason that they don’t want you to be a feminist either. If you try to join the club that they seem to believe they have seized control of, you too will be told that there are no vacancies. No room for you, with your “privilege”... The Online Wimmin Mob takes offence everywhere, but particularly at other women who are not in their little Mean Girls club, which has their own over-stylised and impenetrable language, rules and disciplinary proceedings. “Check your privilege!” This has become the rallying cry of the Mob when faced with a woman with whom they disagree... about 35 per cent of the world’s population has access to the internet. Everyone on Twitter is privileged. Everyone. Claiming “unprivileged” underdog status when you are in the top 35 per cent of the entire world makes you sound like the sort of annoying princess who screams that it’s just not fair and she hates you because she only got an iPhone and a pony for Christmas... “Checking your privilege” is about playing an inverted game of Top Trumps where the real message is that it’s not who you are but how you were born that determines whether what you have to say is worth listening to. It’s not a dissimilar message to that of your average bar room sexist – or transphobe for that matter - but so much more depressing coming from our own side... If you are a member of the Mob, you spend your evenings in noble pursuits. Namely, picking up on ill-considered comments on the internet (which are often, although admittedly not always, well-meant but made in ignorance) and encouraging all your mates to weigh in to beat up on the woman. Is this beginning to sound like an evening out with the patriarchy to anyone else?... anyone who thinks that anything can be achieved on Twitter at 2am has no business feeling superior to anybody."
But then, they do that to men too...
Why people who boast about their IQ are (generally) losers - "If Stephen Hawking wanted to brag about how clever he is, his IQ (however high it may be) would come a long way down the list of braggables like “I held the Lucasian chair in mathematics at Cambridge” or “I discovered Hawking radiation”... In contrast, it might still be worth bragging about your IQ if you haven’t achieved much"
Are Singaporean workers... expensive & entitled? - "Mr V. S. Kumar, managing director of local courier company Network Express Courier Services, says Singaporean workers only seem motivated just to do enough and have no qualms about dropping everything and leaving on the dot at 5.30pm every day. However, his staff from India, the Philippines and Vietnam are keen to stay back after office hours to learn new skills... "If you're talking about the ability to present their ideas, to communicate, then, in general, local PMETs are behind their Western counterparts. The differences might be down to culture and the respective education systems." When they do speak up, however, it is to demand things such as more work-life balance and faster promotions... he says a bit of perspective is needed: "Comparing the entire Singaporean workforce with this small select group of employees who left their home country to make it into another country to work here, naturally they would be more driven"... A recent survey of 6,000 university students here by consultancy Universum found that the main thing they want from their careers is work-life balance, beating job security, intellectual challenge and an international career."
I thought Singaporeans love to do OT for the sake of doing OT
Post ID: 4660771199750227467
Saturday, September 28, 2013
On wanting to be grown up
“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
--- On Three Ways of Writing for Children / CS Lewis
--- On Three Ways of Writing for Children / CS Lewis
Post ID: 2701172983337615741
Friday, September 27, 2013
Links - 27th September 2013
"Anthropology Without Science - "In the past, archaeologists and practicing and professional anthropologists have argued that the discipline as a whole has become dominated by cultural anthropologists, and has grown indifferent to their interests. More fundamentally, the dispute has brought to light how little common ground is shared by anthropologists who span a wide array of sub-specialties... "It’s become so dominated by, not so much humanistic scholars, but by scholars who are actively hostile" to science, said Raymond Hames, chair of anthropology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and a cultural anthropologist who favors a scientific approach... Culturally centered interpretations must be subjected to empirical evaluation, even if doing so exposes anthropologists to charges of disrespecting local customs in favor of the "hegemonic" scientific method, he said. He described a hypothetical field study in which children being studied in a community were found to be dying of dysentery or cholera. "Are we to accept the local explanation that children are dying ... because someone is breaking a taboo and the gods are angry," he said, "or do we look to see how fecal matter is being introduced to the water supply?""
The colonizing, privileging, superior positionality of anthropology that continues to plague the discipline: saving children's lives from Cholera since 1885
And people get upset when Pinker asks the humanities to embrace science
No Science, Please. We're Anthropologists. - "Presumably, in the AAA's tradition, the promotion of the "public understanding of humankind" will include anything that is politically unoffensive to the AAA leadership, and nothing offensive. It's safe to assume the AAA will not be promoting the public understanding of how human behaviors evolved, especially if those human behaviors are anything that might make some or all humans look violent, greedy, harmful to the environment, or (worst of all) sexually dimorphic... I was reminded why anthropologists refer to the annual conference as "the meetings," plural: it's because they go and meet with their own actual disciplinary types, in separate groups, so that the real scientists don't have to deal too much with the fluff-head cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way of knowing. Not all cultural anthropologists are fluff-heads, of course. You can usually tell the ones who are fluff-heads by their constant need to look like superheroes for oppressed peoples, and you can tell the non-fluff-heads by their attention to data. But the non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that actively denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing... "If we purge science from our mission statement we lose our credibility, the ability to advocate for effective change, and hence our power to do good. We become just another special interest group." Hames brought up a useful example, namely the recent ruling in Florida allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children. In that case, the judge considered the scientific evidence showing that same-sex couples can be just as good parents as opposite-sex couples. Wrote Hames to me, "Evidence-based advocacy trumps special interest group advocacy." So, even if most of what the AAA wants to do is advocacy rather than data-driven scholarship, why ditch science in that pursuit?... "The willingness of some anthropologists to relinquish any claim to doing science is symptomatic of the low self-esteem among many colleagues. They are happy not to be held to a high standard of rigor in their research and writing and pleased to be judged by the more open-ended and subjective standards of humanistic research""
Science's Humanities Gap - NYTimes.com - "In his recent sermon to humanists, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” the psychologist Steven Pinker makes an impressive plea for humanists to pay more attention to science and urges them to an interdisciplinary approach that he thinks has been sadly lacking. His general point is surely right: specialists in any area are likely to benefit from acquaintance with relevant work beyond their disciplinary boundaries. But it seems to me that Pinker mistakes his audience. On this issue, it’s humanists who are the choir and scientists who need a call to grace... philosophers of mind — David Chalmers is a striking example — who work in cognitive science are typically highly trained in that discipline. Few cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have comparably strong backgrounds in philosophy of mind"
Comments: "I have been studying and performing research in physics since high school. During this time I have never stopped studying the humanities. Most scientists I know live the same way... I took several upper level humanities courses as an undergrad, but never saw linguistics students nor historians in my probability and statistics courses, which I consider to be a huge mistake."
"At my little liberal arts college, most of us non-Humanists encourage our students to take courses in English, History, Philosophy, etc. And the faculty in those areas do not reciprocate. When we're in meetings and social events, and a lit professor starts talking about books and writing, we all understand the discussion; but when the topic is Economics, or Physics, or Mathematics, the Humanists are clueless."
"When someone doesn't know who William Shakespeare is, it is perfectly natural, almost instinctual for a lot of people to then judge that person as stupid, uncultured, uneducated... idiotic. But it is perfectly acceptable in our society for people to have no idea why the sky is blue, a most basic of scientific questions."
"I do not know a single working neuroscientist who takes Chalmers seriously"
"As a history major many years ago I was constantly bombarded by attitudes of resentment and blame towards the science depts. Resentment for their bloated budgets, blame for their birthing of "Social Darwinism" (class/racism), high explosives, nuclear weapons, and all other manner of evil"
Ex-editor of NEJM tells how Big Pharma has corrupted academic institutions
Arts sector can boost Singapore's competitive edge: Yaacob - "The government recognises the importance of the arts sector in providing an edge to our competitiveness. As such we are committed to growing the opportunities in this sector, by providing both funding and infrastructure support”
Chinese turtle 'addicted to smoking' - "The turtle allegedly picked up the unhealthy habit last month when Tang tried to remove a chicken bone stuck in its belly. The painful process agitated the creature and it tried to bite Tang. He put a cigarette in its mouth instead. The pet immediately started puffing away at the cigarette and has been hooked on nicotine ever since. Tang claims that the turtle keeps following
him whenever he smokes, Global Times reported. He now hopes to find a way to help his pet kick the habit since he can’t afford buying cigarettes for both himself and the turtle"
Shanghai restaurants made 'addictive soup' by using poppy
Chinese gaming addict poisons family to be 'free' - "A week before the poisoning, the boy’s mother scared him by threatening that if he visited these cafés again, she would cut his hamstring. "I think he really bought it and carried a grudge""
Where To Find The Smartest Commenters On The Internet - "Internet comments get a lot of flak, but some may be more intellectually challenging than others. BuzzFeed gathered comments from 15 news websites and ran them through Online-Utility.org’s readability
calculator...
15. Huffington Post
14. TMZ
13. Gawker
12. The Daily Caller
11. Politico
10. Chicago Tribune
9. CNN
8. Los Angeles Times
7. Mother Jones
6. Breitbart
5. Slate
4. Washington Post
3. Fox News
2. New York Times
1. The Atlantic"
Contrary to stereotypes, Fox News has some of the best educated commenters
Inspirational Instagram Cards - "Finally, inspirational Instagrams that won't make you throw up in your mouth...
"love, means never having to clear your browser history."
"pain is just weakness leaving your body in much worse shape than it was before."
"a simile is the prettiest thing you can wear on your ugly FACE.""
Cops: Professor Filmed Student "Upskirt" Videos - "A college professor who used a camera pen to secretly film under the clothing of two students explained to police that he was attempting to gather evidence that one of the women “was not wearing undergarments,” which he thought was “inappropriate”... When asked about the occasions during which he “directed the camera pen at students’ breasts,” Samuelson “acknowledged that this activity was ‘inappropriate’”"
Danish scholar analyzes religious texts, Islam most ‘violence and aggression towards other faiths’ - "A Danish linguist has spent over three years analyzing ten religions basic texts and concludes that the texts of Islam stands out by encouraging terror and violence to a greater extent than in other religion. Danish linguist Tina Magaard, an analysit that questions Islam’s relation to terrorism, violence and holy war worked on the three-year research project... Imams Ahmed Abu Laban and Abdul Wahid Petersen, both of Copenhagen, is strongly resentful of language researcher’s analysis. Abu Laban, “I will not be captured in a single stupid, biased and dishonest research. Why waste time on someone who will create a delusional about Islam?” Petersen calls the analysis “something researcher hogwash ‘"
Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Muslim Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France - "Contrary to the usual stereotype of Muslim women who wear the face veil, the majority of women whose voices are heard are like any other French woman with active social lives: working, attending classes, seeing friends, eating out, playing sports, and actively engaging in local activities... The report reveals that since the debate on the face veil began, a large number of the women have experienced verbal and sometimes physical abuse, and as a direct result have preferred to limit their time spent outside the home."
Shoebox » CHUCK & BEANS (comic) - ""Here's to geeky girls!"
The colonizing, privileging, superior positionality of anthropology that continues to plague the discipline: saving children's lives from Cholera since 1885
And people get upset when Pinker asks the humanities to embrace science
No Science, Please. We're Anthropologists. - "Presumably, in the AAA's tradition, the promotion of the "public understanding of humankind" will include anything that is politically unoffensive to the AAA leadership, and nothing offensive. It's safe to assume the AAA will not be promoting the public understanding of how human behaviors evolved, especially if those human behaviors are anything that might make some or all humans look violent, greedy, harmful to the environment, or (worst of all) sexually dimorphic... I was reminded why anthropologists refer to the annual conference as "the meetings," plural: it's because they go and meet with their own actual disciplinary types, in separate groups, so that the real scientists don't have to deal too much with the fluff-head cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way of knowing. Not all cultural anthropologists are fluff-heads, of course. You can usually tell the ones who are fluff-heads by their constant need to look like superheroes for oppressed peoples, and you can tell the non-fluff-heads by their attention to data. But the non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that actively denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing... "If we purge science from our mission statement we lose our credibility, the ability to advocate for effective change, and hence our power to do good. We become just another special interest group." Hames brought up a useful example, namely the recent ruling in Florida allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children. In that case, the judge considered the scientific evidence showing that same-sex couples can be just as good parents as opposite-sex couples. Wrote Hames to me, "Evidence-based advocacy trumps special interest group advocacy." So, even if most of what the AAA wants to do is advocacy rather than data-driven scholarship, why ditch science in that pursuit?... "The willingness of some anthropologists to relinquish any claim to doing science is symptomatic of the low self-esteem among many colleagues. They are happy not to be held to a high standard of rigor in their research and writing and pleased to be judged by the more open-ended and subjective standards of humanistic research""
Science's Humanities Gap - NYTimes.com - "In his recent sermon to humanists, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” the psychologist Steven Pinker makes an impressive plea for humanists to pay more attention to science and urges them to an interdisciplinary approach that he thinks has been sadly lacking. His general point is surely right: specialists in any area are likely to benefit from acquaintance with relevant work beyond their disciplinary boundaries. But it seems to me that Pinker mistakes his audience. On this issue, it’s humanists who are the choir and scientists who need a call to grace... philosophers of mind — David Chalmers is a striking example — who work in cognitive science are typically highly trained in that discipline. Few cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have comparably strong backgrounds in philosophy of mind"
Comments: "I have been studying and performing research in physics since high school. During this time I have never stopped studying the humanities. Most scientists I know live the same way... I took several upper level humanities courses as an undergrad, but never saw linguistics students nor historians in my probability and statistics courses, which I consider to be a huge mistake."
"At my little liberal arts college, most of us non-Humanists encourage our students to take courses in English, History, Philosophy, etc. And the faculty in those areas do not reciprocate. When we're in meetings and social events, and a lit professor starts talking about books and writing, we all understand the discussion; but when the topic is Economics, or Physics, or Mathematics, the Humanists are clueless."
"When someone doesn't know who William Shakespeare is, it is perfectly natural, almost instinctual for a lot of people to then judge that person as stupid, uncultured, uneducated... idiotic. But it is perfectly acceptable in our society for people to have no idea why the sky is blue, a most basic of scientific questions."
"I do not know a single working neuroscientist who takes Chalmers seriously"
"As a history major many years ago I was constantly bombarded by attitudes of resentment and blame towards the science depts. Resentment for their bloated budgets, blame for their birthing of "Social Darwinism" (class/racism), high explosives, nuclear weapons, and all other manner of evil"
Ex-editor of NEJM tells how Big Pharma has corrupted academic institutions
Arts sector can boost Singapore's competitive edge: Yaacob - "The government recognises the importance of the arts sector in providing an edge to our competitiveness. As such we are committed to growing the opportunities in this sector, by providing both funding and infrastructure support”
Chinese turtle 'addicted to smoking' - "The turtle allegedly picked up the unhealthy habit last month when Tang tried to remove a chicken bone stuck in its belly. The painful process agitated the creature and it tried to bite Tang. He put a cigarette in its mouth instead. The pet immediately started puffing away at the cigarette and has been hooked on nicotine ever since. Tang claims that the turtle keeps following
him whenever he smokes, Global Times reported. He now hopes to find a way to help his pet kick the habit since he can’t afford buying cigarettes for both himself and the turtle"
Shanghai restaurants made 'addictive soup' by using poppy
Chinese gaming addict poisons family to be 'free' - "A week before the poisoning, the boy’s mother scared him by threatening that if he visited these cafés again, she would cut his hamstring. "I think he really bought it and carried a grudge""
Where To Find The Smartest Commenters On The Internet - "Internet comments get a lot of flak, but some may be more intellectually challenging than others. BuzzFeed gathered comments from 15 news websites and ran them through Online-Utility.org’s readability
calculator...
15. Huffington Post
14. TMZ
13. Gawker
12. The Daily Caller
11. Politico
10. Chicago Tribune
9. CNN
8. Los Angeles Times
7. Mother Jones
6. Breitbart
5. Slate
4. Washington Post
3. Fox News
2. New York Times
1. The Atlantic"
Contrary to stereotypes, Fox News has some of the best educated commenters
Inspirational Instagram Cards - "Finally, inspirational Instagrams that won't make you throw up in your mouth...
"love, means never having to clear your browser history."
"pain is just weakness leaving your body in much worse shape than it was before."
"a simile is the prettiest thing you can wear on your ugly FACE.""
Cops: Professor Filmed Student "Upskirt" Videos - "A college professor who used a camera pen to secretly film under the clothing of two students explained to police that he was attempting to gather evidence that one of the women “was not wearing undergarments,” which he thought was “inappropriate”... When asked about the occasions during which he “directed the camera pen at students’ breasts,” Samuelson “acknowledged that this activity was ‘inappropriate’”"
Danish scholar analyzes religious texts, Islam most ‘violence and aggression towards other faiths’ - "A Danish linguist has spent over three years analyzing ten religions basic texts and concludes that the texts of Islam stands out by encouraging terror and violence to a greater extent than in other religion. Danish linguist Tina Magaard, an analysit that questions Islam’s relation to terrorism, violence and holy war worked on the three-year research project... Imams Ahmed Abu Laban and Abdul Wahid Petersen, both of Copenhagen, is strongly resentful of language researcher’s analysis. Abu Laban, “I will not be captured in a single stupid, biased and dishonest research. Why waste time on someone who will create a delusional about Islam?” Petersen calls the analysis “something researcher hogwash ‘"
Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Muslim Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France - "Contrary to the usual stereotype of Muslim women who wear the face veil, the majority of women whose voices are heard are like any other French woman with active social lives: working, attending classes, seeing friends, eating out, playing sports, and actively engaging in local activities... The report reveals that since the debate on the face veil began, a large number of the women have experienced verbal and sometimes physical abuse, and as a direct result have preferred to limit their time spent outside the home."
Shoebox » CHUCK & BEANS (comic) - ""Here's to geeky girls!"
Post ID: 8095591891136118219
Women and Love
"She must either suffer or lie to herself. Most often she clutches at the straw of falsehood. She fancies that the man’s love is the exact counterpart of the love she brings to him; in bad faith she takes desire for love, erection for desire, love for a religion. She compels the man to lie to her: 'Do you love me? As much as yesterday? Will you always love me?' and so on. She cleverly poses her questions at a moment when there is not time enough to give properly qualified and sincere answers, or more especially when circumstances prevent any response; she asks her insistent questions in the course of a sexual embrace, at the verge of a convalescence, in the midst of sobs, or on a railroad platform. She makes trophies of the extorted replies; and if there are no replies, she takes silence to mean what she wishes; every woman in love is more or less a paranoiac"
"Il faut donc qu’elle souffre, ou qu’elle se mente. Le plus souvent, elle s’agrippe d’abord au mensonge. Elle imagine l’amour de l’homme comme l’exacte contrepartie de celui qu’elle lui porte ; elle prend avec mauvaise foi le désir pour de l’amour, l’érection pour le désir, l’amour pour une religion. Elle force l’homme à lui mentir : Tu m’aimes ? Autant qu’hier ? Tu m’aimeras toujours ? Adroitement, elle pose les questions au moment où le temps manque pour donner des réponses nuancées et sincères, ou bien où les circonstances les interdisent ; c’est au cours de l’étreinte amoureuse, à l’orée d’une convalescence, dans les sanglots ou sur le quai d’une gare qu’elle interroge impérieusement ; des réponses arrachées, elle fait des trophées ; et, faute de réponses, elle fait parler les silences ; toute véritable amoureuse est plus ou moins paranoïaque"
--- Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) / Simone de Beauvoir
Post ID: 8183374981723121563
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Amusing My Paper article on dating
Going dutch on first date a no-no
Acing that first date can be a tricky affair, especially when one is nervous and unsure of what to expect.
My Paper gets tips from image consultant Suzenne Zheng, founder and master trainer at First Impressions Image International, ahead of Saturday's Singles Forum, which is organised by the Social Development Network.
Why are first impressions important? Isn't it unfair to judge a person based on his appearance?
It should be (based on) more than the person's appearance. We all think that it is unfair to judge, but the problem is that we all do.
Research in psychology has found that you tend to make an impression on somebody in less than 30 seconds. It makes sense that, in these 30 seconds, when you are presenting yourself to the world, you present the best (side of yourself).
Tests show that it takes a further 20 encounters for someone to change their opinion of you.
Conventional dating wisdom says guys should be the one who is more proactive. Is this true?
The girl can make the first move too. A lot of guys need to be pushed. If a girl calls a guy up for coffee a week after the first date, it's a form of encouragement for him.
In this modern age, why not split the bill for a meal on the first date?
A girl must never allow a guy to go dutch on the first date. It doesn't matter which century we live in, chivalry must (not die).
For a marriage to work, a man must still be a man, and a woman must still be a woman. For example, you don't expect a couple to split the cost of a washing machine for their family home.
Talking to a date can be pretty daunting. What topics should one talk about on the first date?
You must be able to strike up a conversation (with your date).
You don't have to know everything, but you should be up to date with what's current. For example, the news headlines of the day, popular movies that people are talking about and songs that people are currently listening to.
Will women carrying branded bags on dates scare guys away?
In other countries, say, China, the guy may think that the girl is hard to maintain (should she carry a branded bag to a date).
In Singapore, guys don't think of it the same way. Most of us work and earn our own keep. If you want a branded bag, the guy expects you to be able to pay for it yourself.
He may give you branded gifts if he can afford it. But don't expect such things from the start.
GWENDOLYN NG
Catch Ms Zheng and other relationship gurus at The Singles Forum 2013, to be held at the Joyden Hall in Bugis+ at 9am on Saturday.
Registration fee costs $25 (inclusive of tea break and buffet lunch). Sign up for the forum at www.singlesforum 2013.com. Registration ends today.
Make a good first impression
AS THE saying goes, first impressions count.
And when it comes to dating, first impressions can either score you a second date or turn the other party off totally.
To make a good first impression, here's a list of things you need to take note of:
Women are put off by guys with oily hair, nasal hair that is showing, a long nail on the last finger and dirty shoes.
Men are turned off by women with messy hair. According to image consultant Suzenne Zheng, 90 per cent of guys like girls with long, straight black hair.
If getting a perm is your thing, you should go for romantic bouncy curls. Curls that look like Maggi noodles are a no-no.
Men like women in kitten heels or court shoes with 2cm heels.
Killer stilettos give off aggressive vibes that tend to scare men off. And although ballerina flats are comfy, guys feel that these shoes aren't feminine enough.
On the first date, women should consider wearing light make-up, meaning just powder, lipstick and a little eyeliner.
Dramatic false eyelashes may brighten those peepers, but guys don't like them.
***
A: "... a man must still be a man, and a woman must still be a woman."
Oh ok. She better start washing those clothes so she can start making dinner on time.
B: I do expect my husband and I to split the cost of the washing machine.
Me: I still don't understand who's supposed to pay for the washing machine
C: Or whatever society deems to be the "correct" qualities of a man or woman... we are, each of us, individuals, and should not taint ourselves with the pressure of conforming into our so-called "proper" gender archtypes...
Such an archaic way of thinking... what of the man who wants to stay at home and nurse his own child, or the female who prides her independence and wishes to earn her own living?
Petty things like money should not be the cause of concern for whether a marriage would work. What's important is commitment, the want to sacrifice, companionship... not if the man pays for the fucking washing machine... >.>
D: This thread is awesome. The deliberations over the payment of a washing machine!
Me: the thing about social interaction is that other people have expectations of your behavior. You can behave however you want but this may be misunderstood.
If everyone follows different social scripts this will probably lead to a worse outcome for most people (e.g. the 90% of guys who like long straight black hair, who we can roughly assume are happy to conform to "proper" gender stereotypes) even if a minority benefit. It's like purposely driving on the left side of the road when everyone else is driving on the right.
That said if people were more forthright/honest then different scripts would work, since you would know what the other person was thinking. Unfortunately the realm of inter-gender relations is fraught with games and intrigue, so having common scripts is a necessary evil.
Post ID: 2080149141511044180
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Pense à moi
Pense à moi
pense à nous deux
après nos au revoirs.
Ne m'oublie pas
où que tu ailles
promets-le-moi ce soir.
Quand l'instant
te semblera venu
de regagner ta liberté,
Glisse-moi de temps à autre
là, dans tes pensées.
Oh non, jamais nous n'avons cru l'amour
irréprochable et infini.
Mais un jour si tu t'éloignes,
pense à moi aussi.
Pense au temps où tout semblait facile.
Dis-toi qu'après la pluie demain jubile!
Pense à moi
qui me réveille,
si seule et sans espoir,
qui rêve et prie
qu'enfin le temps
t'arrache à ma memoire.
Revis ces jours,
repense à ces instants.
Les petits riens semblaient si doux.
Il ne sera pas un jour
Sans que je pense à nous...
Fleurs et fruits, tout n'a qu'un temps ici.
Les grands élans ne durent pas.
Mais veux-tu me le promettre?
Pense aussi...
À moi!
pense à nous deux
après nos au revoirs.
Ne m'oublie pas
où que tu ailles
promets-le-moi ce soir.
Quand l'instant
te semblera venu
de regagner ta liberté,
Glisse-moi de temps à autre
là, dans tes pensées.
Oh non, jamais nous n'avons cru l'amour
irréprochable et infini.
Mais un jour si tu t'éloignes,
pense à moi aussi.
Pense au temps où tout semblait facile.
Dis-toi qu'après la pluie demain jubile!
Pense à moi
qui me réveille,
si seule et sans espoir,
qui rêve et prie
qu'enfin le temps
t'arrache à ma memoire.
Revis ces jours,
repense à ces instants.
Les petits riens semblaient si doux.
Il ne sera pas un jour
Sans que je pense à nous...
Fleurs et fruits, tout n'a qu'un temps ici.
Les grands élans ne durent pas.
Mais veux-tu me le promettre?
Pense aussi...
À moi!
Post ID: 3110517335271195080
Monday, September 23, 2013
Another interesting part of the Penal Code
Section 504: Intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of the peace
Whoever intentionally insults, and thereby gives provocation to any person, intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation will cause him to break the public peace, or to commit any other offence, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 2 years, or with fine, or with both.
Does this mean that if I stare at a fierce-looking man with tattoos, he asks me "kuah simi?" ("what are you looking at?") in a challenging tone, and I continue to stare (or give a droll reply)
I tried to find examples of this law in action, but have not been very successful, finding only one example:
In Malaysia people were investigated under this law for stepping on "photographs of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his wife Rosmah Mansor"
Other posts in this series:
Section 354, Assault or use of criminal force to a person with intent to outrage modesty
Section 508, Act caused by inducing a person to believe that he will be rendered an object of divine displeasure.
Section 509: Word or gesture intended to insult the modesty of a woman
Slander of women (Defamation Act)
Whoever intentionally insults, and thereby gives provocation to any person, intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation will cause him to break the public peace, or to commit any other offence, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 2 years, or with fine, or with both.
Does this mean that if I stare at a fierce-looking man with tattoos, he asks me "kuah simi?" ("what are you looking at?") in a challenging tone, and I continue to stare (or give a droll reply)
I tried to find examples of this law in action, but have not been very successful, finding only one example:
In Malaysia people were investigated under this law for stepping on "photographs of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his wife Rosmah Mansor"
Other posts in this series:
Section 354, Assault or use of criminal force to a person with intent to outrage modesty
Section 508, Act caused by inducing a person to believe that he will be rendered an object of divine displeasure.
Section 509: Word or gesture intended to insult the modesty of a woman
Slander of women (Defamation Act)
Post ID: 1696038047856018908
Friday, September 20, 2013
Israeli vs Palestinian soldiers
"A soldier of Palestine vs A soldier of Israel"
Gaza: Palestinian Rockets Unlawfully Targeted Israeli Civilians | Human Rights Watch
"“Palestinian armed groups made clear in their statements that harming civilians was their aim,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “There is simply no legal justification for launching rockets at populated areas.”"
Israel "Peace Activist" and Hamas Celebrate Death of Israeli Pilots
"Not everyone was saddened by Tuesday’s helicopter crash that killed two Israeli reserve pilots. “Peace activist” Noa Shaindlinger took to Facebook yesterday morning to celebrate as news of the incident surfaced. “We may have some good news later this morning (hint: IOF drill accident with casualties,” she posted to her Facebook page. Shaindlinger later deleted the post from her page.
Shaindlinger no doubt would have appreciated the tweet sent out by Hamas’s military wing, Alqassam Brigades. Anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon caught this exchange between the IDF and the terror tweeters"
Israel Expresses Regret in Civilian Deaths
"Israel expressed regret Thursday for the deaths of four Palestinian civilians in an army shelling"
Post ID: 1229577452644511465
Is it midnight already?
Police arrested Malcolm Davidson, a 27 year old white male, resident of Wimbledon, in a pumpkin patch at 11:38 pm Friday. Davidson will be charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, public indecency, and public intoxication at the County courthouse on Monday.
The suspect allegedly stated that as he was passing a pumpkin patch, he decided to stop. "You know, a pumpkin is soft and squishy inside, and there was no one around here for miles. At least I thought there wasn't." He stated in a phone interview from the County courthouse jail.
Davidson went on to state that he pulled over to the side of the road, picked out a pumpkin that he felt was appropriate to his purposes, cut a hole in it, and proceeded to satisfy his alleged "need."
"I guess I was just really into it, you know?" he commented with evident embarrassment. In the process, Davidson apparently failed to notice the Wimbledon Municipal police car approaching and was unaware of his audience until officer Brenda Taylor approached him.
"It was an unusual situation, that's for sure." Said officer Taylor. "I walked up to [Davidson] and he's ... just working away at this pumpkin." Taylor went on to describe what happened when she approached Davidson.
"I just went up and said, 'Excuse me sir, but do you realize that you are screwing a pumpkin?' He got real surprised as you'd expect and then looked me straight in the face and said, 'A pumpkin? Damn ... is it midnight already?'"
Snopes: Pumpkins may be "soft and squishy" inside, but they're also mostly hollow — if you're looking for a sexual partner, several other kinds of produce (primarily fruits) would probably serve you much better. And the fictional Mr. Davidson should brush up on his fairy tales: it isn't Cinderella who turns into a pumpkin at midnight, but her coach.
With a sense of direction like that, if Malcolm had a wife, no wonder he couldn't keep her.
Although 1998's Malcolm Davidson and his "Is it midnight already" line were wholly fictional, the key element of this tale did play out in real life at least once. In September 2002, Bill Patton of Macomb, Michigan, was sentenced to ninety days in the hoosegow for indecent exposure stemming from a 2000 incident during which neighbors saw him masturbate in his back yard, then observed him through his basement window pleasuring himself with a pumpkin. His crime lay in being seen — one is allowed to love vegetables as much as one wants, provided one doesn't do it in public.
Sightings: In the 1991 film Night on Earth, Italian comedian Roberto Benigni plays a cabdriver who confesses his pumpkin-loving vice (and others) to a priest he's picked up.
The suspect allegedly stated that as he was passing a pumpkin patch, he decided to stop. "You know, a pumpkin is soft and squishy inside, and there was no one around here for miles. At least I thought there wasn't." He stated in a phone interview from the County courthouse jail.
Davidson went on to state that he pulled over to the side of the road, picked out a pumpkin that he felt was appropriate to his purposes, cut a hole in it, and proceeded to satisfy his alleged "need."
"I guess I was just really into it, you know?" he commented with evident embarrassment. In the process, Davidson apparently failed to notice the Wimbledon Municipal police car approaching and was unaware of his audience until officer Brenda Taylor approached him.
"It was an unusual situation, that's for sure." Said officer Taylor. "I walked up to [Davidson] and he's ... just working away at this pumpkin." Taylor went on to describe what happened when she approached Davidson.
"I just went up and said, 'Excuse me sir, but do you realize that you are screwing a pumpkin?' He got real surprised as you'd expect and then looked me straight in the face and said, 'A pumpkin? Damn ... is it midnight already?'"
Snopes: Pumpkins may be "soft and squishy" inside, but they're also mostly hollow — if you're looking for a sexual partner, several other kinds of produce (primarily fruits) would probably serve you much better. And the fictional Mr. Davidson should brush up on his fairy tales: it isn't Cinderella who turns into a pumpkin at midnight, but her coach.
With a sense of direction like that, if Malcolm had a wife, no wonder he couldn't keep her.
Although 1998's Malcolm Davidson and his "Is it midnight already" line were wholly fictional, the key element of this tale did play out in real life at least once. In September 2002, Bill Patton of Macomb, Michigan, was sentenced to ninety days in the hoosegow for indecent exposure stemming from a 2000 incident during which neighbors saw him masturbate in his back yard, then observed him through his basement window pleasuring himself with a pumpkin. His crime lay in being seen — one is allowed to love vegetables as much as one wants, provided one doesn't do it in public.
Sightings: In the 1991 film Night on Earth, Italian comedian Roberto Benigni plays a cabdriver who confesses his pumpkin-loving vice (and others) to a priest he's picked up.
Post ID: 8823942651429613465
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Consulting
Dogbert: I like to con people. And I like to insult people.
If you combine con & insult, you get 'consult'.
I'm here to consult you.
Pointy-Haired Boss: It sounds expensive and demeaning... Okay.
Post ID: 8463555891944909737
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Starfish Story
A little girl was walking along a beach, where thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. She picked up every starfish she saw, and threw it back into the ocean.
People watched her in amusement.
An old man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can't save all these starfish! Furthermore, don't you know that starfish are pests?"
The girl was crushed. A while later, she bent down, picked up another starfish and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean.
Then the little girl replied:
"Well, I made a difference to that one, even if it is not sentient and cannot appreciate my actions! And who cares what the ultimate consequences of my actions are? As long as I feel good about myself, that's alright"
Inspired, the old man joined the little girl throwing starfish back into the sea.
The next day, another terrible storm hit the sea, and most of the starfish who had been thrown back into the ocean washed up again. Having never read about Sisyphus, since she spent so much time throwing starfish into the sea, the little girl kept at it.
The old man, picking up a poisonous starfish by mistake, was pricked by its thorns and died of an allergic reaction.
Thereafter, all the coral died, and the oceanic ecosystem was wiped out. Meanwhile, since she spent so much time throwing starfish into the sea, the little girl kept failing her exams and couldn't get a job in the local factory, and became a maid in other people's countries.
People watched her in amusement.
An old man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can't save all these starfish! Furthermore, don't you know that starfish are pests?"
The girl was crushed. A while later, she bent down, picked up another starfish and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean.
Then the little girl replied:
"Well, I made a difference to that one, even if it is not sentient and cannot appreciate my actions! And who cares what the ultimate consequences of my actions are? As long as I feel good about myself, that's alright"
Inspired, the old man joined the little girl throwing starfish back into the sea.
The next day, another terrible storm hit the sea, and most of the starfish who had been thrown back into the ocean washed up again. Having never read about Sisyphus, since she spent so much time throwing starfish into the sea, the little girl kept at it.
The old man, picking up a poisonous starfish by mistake, was pricked by its thorns and died of an allergic reaction.
Thereafter, all the coral died, and the oceanic ecosystem was wiped out. Meanwhile, since she spent so much time throwing starfish into the sea, the little girl kept failing her exams and couldn't get a job in the local factory, and became a maid in other people's countries.
Post ID: 2085081201647246264
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
On Equality
""Equality is a lie" Bane told her. "A myth to appease the masses. Simply look around and you will see the lie for what it is! There are those with power, those with the strength and will to lead. And there are those meant to follow-those incapable of anything but servitude and a meager, worthless existence.
"Equality is a perversion of the natural order!" he continued, his voice rising as he shared the fundamental truth that lay at the core of his beliefs. "It binds the strong to the weak. They become anchors that drag the exceptional down to mediocrity. Individuals destined and deserving of greatness have it denied them. They suffer for the sake of keeping them even with their inferiors.
"Equality is a chain, like obedience. Like fear or uncertainty or self-doubt."
- Darth Bane
"Equality is a perversion of the natural order!" he continued, his voice rising as he shared the fundamental truth that lay at the core of his beliefs. "It binds the strong to the weak. They become anchors that drag the exceptional down to mediocrity. Individuals destined and deserving of greatness have it denied them. They suffer for the sake of keeping them even with their inferiors.
"Equality is a chain, like obedience. Like fear or uncertainty or self-doubt."
- Darth Bane
Post ID: 810692012958942636
Amused when people contradict themselves and then say they are tired of arguing with me
A: Although it has long since ceased to be the case, the myth is that soldiers and armies attack combatants-- other soldiers-- primarily, and that civilian deaths are proportionately few, and unintended. Chemical weapons, like nuclear weapons, always kill large numbers of civilians, so it runs counter to this myth. The fact, however, is that civilian deaths as a proportion of the total number of deaths have been increasing steadily in contemporary wars, even when only "traditional" weapons are used.
I started a petition at a US government website demanding that the government reconsider its use of drones. It got only one signature in addition to my own. Another petition that I signed at that website, to pardon Edward Snowden, did get enough signatures to require a response from the government-- over 100,000 in the first month-- but as far as I know, the government has never responded. So much for the trappings of accountability in which the current administration has portrayed itself.
B: Ces pétitions sont-elles réservées aux Américains ? Est ce que je peux les consulter et éventuellement les signer ?
A: Je crois qu'elles sont réservées aux Américains. La site est par ici:
We the People: Your Voice in Our Government | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government
Me: Well, civilian deaths have increased because wars have involved terrorism and insurgencies. The point about WMDs being indiscriminate in who they kill is at least somewhat defensible as a reason to ban their use.
BBC News - Why chemical weapons provoke outrage
Les pétitions ne sont pas réservées aux Américains : AFP: Hong Kongers turn to Obama over milk shortage fears
A: > civilian deaths have increased because wars have involved terrorism and insurgencies
I disagree with this strongly. The proportion of civilian deaths in modern warfare started increasing long before the emergence of what some news media now call "terrorism" and "insurgencies". Most of the civilian deaths were inflicted by governments.
It has become fashionable to call anyone who opposes an established regime a terrorist; this is not what the word really means.
The petitions at the website *** and I were talking about are reserved for Americans. The petition talked about in the article you gave a link to has nothing to do with that website.
Me: News article: "The appeal, labelled "Baby Hunger Outbreak in Hong Kong, International Aid Requested", was posted on Tuesday on the "We the People" section of the White House website, which does not require petitioners to be US citizens."
Website you talked about: We the People: Your Voice in Our Government | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government
If you Google "Baby Hunger Outbreak in Hong Kong" you get a link: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/baby-hunger-outbreak-hong-kong-international-aid-requested/xVSGJNN1 which mentions that "The petition you are trying to access has expired, because it failed to meet the signature threshold."
The "We the People" FAQ says: "Anyone 13 or older can create or sign a petition on WhiteHouse.gov. In order to participate in the We the People platform on WhiteHouse.gov, users must create a WhiteHouse.gov account and verify their email address."
There is no mention of citizenship requirements.
I talked about "terrorism and insurgencies". Do not conflate the two.
I haven't seen any evidence that the high amount of civilian deaths is due to governments murdering civilians. That is generally recognised as a war crime. The civilian deaths in Iraq, for example, are because "most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis" (Iraq War Logs Show Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths – Iraq War Logs - Wikileaks Documents - NYTimes.com)
A: Here is the description of the purpose of the website, from the same page:
We the People is a new, easy way for Americans to make their voice heard in our government. It is a platform on the White House website where individuals can create and sign petitions that call for action by the federal government on a range of issues facing our nation. If a petition gathers enough signatures, it will be reviewed by White House staff and receive an official response. We the People helps the White House understand the views of the American people and have a focused and civil conversation with them.
Note "... an easy way for Americans..."
When you sign up for an account, the website asks you for your zip code.
Me: I saw the signup page. Zip code is not a mandatory field
At the very least they do not even try to limit it to citizens
A: Agagooga,
Please do some basic reading on the following wars:
World War II-- In addition to the use of nuclear weapons near the end of the war, cities were bombed with traditional bombs and fire bombs by both sides, causing many civilian deaths. All of this bombing was done by governments.
The Korean war-- look up aerial bombing as well as massacres committed by the forces of both North Korea and South Korea.
The war in Vietnam-- Ever heard of napalm and Agent Orange? They caused vast numbers of civilian deaths.
I could go on and on, but that should be enough to start with. You seem to be unaware of some very basic historical facts.
Me: I thought you were talking about recent wars (post-Cold War). I wasn't aware you extended it back all the way to World War II. People who make arguments about civilian deaths refer to post-Cold War conflicts.
World War II bombing raids of Germany were meant to destroy infrastructure that supported war, like factories. Japan is a slightly more complicated story; one could make a case that the firebombing of Tokyo was indefensible on the grounds of targeting war assets since civilian deaths were so high.
I hadn't heard about the massacres during the Korean War.
Agent Orange was meant to deforest areas - it wasn't a deliberate targeting of civilians. Napalm was also used to deforest areas and to flush out Viet Cong bunkers, but its relative consequences in civilian casualties are less defensible than with Agent Orange.
A: The question is not whether the intent was to cause civilian deaths or not; the question is whether civilian deaths were caused, and what proportion they form of all deaths in a given war. What I said to begin with was that the proportion of civilian deaths in wars is increasing. This is a historical fact. I'm tired of talking about this with you.
Not posted in thread:
The ‘New Wars’ Debate Revisited: An Empirical
Evaluation of the Atrociousness of ‘New Wars’
"Based on in-depth analysis of the inner workings of these wars and more superficial comparisons with wars in the Cold War era and earlier, new war theorists identified several empirical trends: (1) the number of civil wars is increasing; (2) the intensity of battle is increasing; (3) the number of civilians displaced in civil wars is increasing, (4) the number of civilians killed in civil wars is increasing; and (5) the ratio of civilians to military personnel killed in civil wars is increasing.
A debate soon followed where critics pointed out that much of what ‘new war’ theorists identified as new in the nature of contemporary conflicts were in fact not new, calling into question the whole idea that the nature of war had changed (Cf Henderson & Singer, 2002; Kalyvas, 2001; Newman, 2004). Other scholars pointed out that some of the empirical trends identified by ‘new war’ theorists did not stand up to empirical scrutiny and that many alleged trends had at best sketchy underpinnings (Cf Kalyvas, 2001; Lacina, 2006; Lacina; Gledistch & Russett, 2006; Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005; Mack, 2005; Newman, 2004). However, ‘new wars’ theorists and their critics alike have relied mainly on case studies and anecdotal evidence. With the partial exception of Lacina (2006) we still lack systematic tests of the propositions forwarded by the ‘new wars’ theorists.
The claim that the number of civil wars is increasing since the end of the Cold War has been soundly refuted. In this study we therefore focus on the ‘new wars’ theorists’ claims about the atrociousness of ‘new wars’ and put these through systematic empirical tests. Specifically, we directly test three of the four claims concerning the atrociousness of ‘new wars’. First we test the claim that the claim that the intensity of battle is increasing; and second that the number of civilians displaced is increasing, and third that the number of civilians killed in wars is increasing. The fourth and final claim concerning atrociousness, that the ratio of civilians to military personnel killed in wars is increasing, is not possible to evaluate directly in a systematic fashion since there is no systematic data on this aspect of wars. However, we do offer an indirect test of this proposition. If the ratio of civilian to military victims is increasing we should expect too see higher numbers of civilian deaths in conflicts with similar levels of battle intensity. Moreover, if the ratio of civilian to military deaths is higher in the ‘new wars’ period then ipso facto conflicts have become more threatening and dangerous to civilians which research on forced migration has consistently shown should generate higher levels of civilian displacement (Davenport; Moore & Poe, 2003; Melander, 2006; Melander & Öberg, 2006; Moore & Shellman, 2004; Schmeidl, 1997). Thus, by holding battle intensity constant and looking at the variation in civilian displacement and civilians killed we can get an indication of whether or not the ratio has changed significantly over time...
What we find is that battle intensity, measured as battle deaths, is significantly lower in the ‘new war’ period. We also find that the magnitude of violence against civilians in civil conflict is significantly lower in the ‘new war’ period. Forced displacement of civilians follows a slightly more complicated pattern, similar to the trend in the number of civil conflicts. The number of civilians displaced in civil conflicts is significantly higher in the period 1990-1994 than in either the Cold war period or in the period 1995-1999. Thus, although civil conflicts in the period 1990-1994 generate larger flows of displaced people than civil conflicts of the Cold War, there is no consistently increasing trend in the data. On the contrary, the decrease in forced migration flow in the most recent time period is statistically significant. Finally, patterns in civilians displaced and civilians killed do not change when we control for battle intensity, which indirectly suggests that the ratio of civilian to military victims has not changed significantly since the end of the Cold War.
Thus, if anything, civil conflicts in the ‘new war’ period have been less atrocious than civil conflicts in the Cold war period"
I started a petition at a US government website demanding that the government reconsider its use of drones. It got only one signature in addition to my own. Another petition that I signed at that website, to pardon Edward Snowden, did get enough signatures to require a response from the government-- over 100,000 in the first month-- but as far as I know, the government has never responded. So much for the trappings of accountability in which the current administration has portrayed itself.
B: Ces pétitions sont-elles réservées aux Américains ? Est ce que je peux les consulter et éventuellement les signer ?
A: Je crois qu'elles sont réservées aux Américains. La site est par ici:
We the People: Your Voice in Our Government | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government
Me: Well, civilian deaths have increased because wars have involved terrorism and insurgencies. The point about WMDs being indiscriminate in who they kill is at least somewhat defensible as a reason to ban their use.
BBC News - Why chemical weapons provoke outrage
Les pétitions ne sont pas réservées aux Américains : AFP: Hong Kongers turn to Obama over milk shortage fears
A: > civilian deaths have increased because wars have involved terrorism and insurgencies
I disagree with this strongly. The proportion of civilian deaths in modern warfare started increasing long before the emergence of what some news media now call "terrorism" and "insurgencies". Most of the civilian deaths were inflicted by governments.
It has become fashionable to call anyone who opposes an established regime a terrorist; this is not what the word really means.
The petitions at the website *** and I were talking about are reserved for Americans. The petition talked about in the article you gave a link to has nothing to do with that website.
Me: News article: "The appeal, labelled "Baby Hunger Outbreak in Hong Kong, International Aid Requested", was posted on Tuesday on the "We the People" section of the White House website, which does not require petitioners to be US citizens."
Website you talked about: We the People: Your Voice in Our Government | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government
If you Google "Baby Hunger Outbreak in Hong Kong" you get a link: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/baby-hunger-outbreak-hong-kong-international-aid-requested/xVSGJNN1 which mentions that "The petition you are trying to access has expired, because it failed to meet the signature threshold."
The "We the People" FAQ says: "Anyone 13 or older can create or sign a petition on WhiteHouse.gov. In order to participate in the We the People platform on WhiteHouse.gov, users must create a WhiteHouse.gov account and verify their email address."
There is no mention of citizenship requirements.
I talked about "terrorism and insurgencies". Do not conflate the two.
I haven't seen any evidence that the high amount of civilian deaths is due to governments murdering civilians. That is generally recognised as a war crime. The civilian deaths in Iraq, for example, are because "most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis" (Iraq War Logs Show Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths – Iraq War Logs - Wikileaks Documents - NYTimes.com)
A: Here is the description of the purpose of the website, from the same page:
We the People is a new, easy way for Americans to make their voice heard in our government. It is a platform on the White House website where individuals can create and sign petitions that call for action by the federal government on a range of issues facing our nation. If a petition gathers enough signatures, it will be reviewed by White House staff and receive an official response. We the People helps the White House understand the views of the American people and have a focused and civil conversation with them.
Note "... an easy way for Americans..."
When you sign up for an account, the website asks you for your zip code.
Me: I saw the signup page. Zip code is not a mandatory field
At the very least they do not even try to limit it to citizens
A: Agagooga,
Please do some basic reading on the following wars:
World War II-- In addition to the use of nuclear weapons near the end of the war, cities were bombed with traditional bombs and fire bombs by both sides, causing many civilian deaths. All of this bombing was done by governments.
The Korean war-- look up aerial bombing as well as massacres committed by the forces of both North Korea and South Korea.
The war in Vietnam-- Ever heard of napalm and Agent Orange? They caused vast numbers of civilian deaths.
I could go on and on, but that should be enough to start with. You seem to be unaware of some very basic historical facts.
Me: I thought you were talking about recent wars (post-Cold War). I wasn't aware you extended it back all the way to World War II. People who make arguments about civilian deaths refer to post-Cold War conflicts.
World War II bombing raids of Germany were meant to destroy infrastructure that supported war, like factories. Japan is a slightly more complicated story; one could make a case that the firebombing of Tokyo was indefensible on the grounds of targeting war assets since civilian deaths were so high.
I hadn't heard about the massacres during the Korean War.
Agent Orange was meant to deforest areas - it wasn't a deliberate targeting of civilians. Napalm was also used to deforest areas and to flush out Viet Cong bunkers, but its relative consequences in civilian casualties are less defensible than with Agent Orange.
A: The question is not whether the intent was to cause civilian deaths or not; the question is whether civilian deaths were caused, and what proportion they form of all deaths in a given war. What I said to begin with was that the proportion of civilian deaths in wars is increasing. This is a historical fact. I'm tired of talking about this with you.
Not posted in thread:
The ‘New Wars’ Debate Revisited: An Empirical
Evaluation of the Atrociousness of ‘New Wars’
"Based on in-depth analysis of the inner workings of these wars and more superficial comparisons with wars in the Cold War era and earlier, new war theorists identified several empirical trends: (1) the number of civil wars is increasing; (2) the intensity of battle is increasing; (3) the number of civilians displaced in civil wars is increasing, (4) the number of civilians killed in civil wars is increasing; and (5) the ratio of civilians to military personnel killed in civil wars is increasing.
A debate soon followed where critics pointed out that much of what ‘new war’ theorists identified as new in the nature of contemporary conflicts were in fact not new, calling into question the whole idea that the nature of war had changed (Cf Henderson & Singer, 2002; Kalyvas, 2001; Newman, 2004). Other scholars pointed out that some of the empirical trends identified by ‘new war’ theorists did not stand up to empirical scrutiny and that many alleged trends had at best sketchy underpinnings (Cf Kalyvas, 2001; Lacina, 2006; Lacina; Gledistch & Russett, 2006; Lacina & Gleditsch, 2005; Mack, 2005; Newman, 2004). However, ‘new wars’ theorists and their critics alike have relied mainly on case studies and anecdotal evidence. With the partial exception of Lacina (2006) we still lack systematic tests of the propositions forwarded by the ‘new wars’ theorists.
The claim that the number of civil wars is increasing since the end of the Cold War has been soundly refuted. In this study we therefore focus on the ‘new wars’ theorists’ claims about the atrociousness of ‘new wars’ and put these through systematic empirical tests. Specifically, we directly test three of the four claims concerning the atrociousness of ‘new wars’. First we test the claim that the claim that the intensity of battle is increasing; and second that the number of civilians displaced is increasing, and third that the number of civilians killed in wars is increasing. The fourth and final claim concerning atrociousness, that the ratio of civilians to military personnel killed in wars is increasing, is not possible to evaluate directly in a systematic fashion since there is no systematic data on this aspect of wars. However, we do offer an indirect test of this proposition. If the ratio of civilian to military victims is increasing we should expect too see higher numbers of civilian deaths in conflicts with similar levels of battle intensity. Moreover, if the ratio of civilian to military deaths is higher in the ‘new wars’ period then ipso facto conflicts have become more threatening and dangerous to civilians which research on forced migration has consistently shown should generate higher levels of civilian displacement (Davenport; Moore & Poe, 2003; Melander, 2006; Melander & Öberg, 2006; Moore & Shellman, 2004; Schmeidl, 1997). Thus, by holding battle intensity constant and looking at the variation in civilian displacement and civilians killed we can get an indication of whether or not the ratio has changed significantly over time...
What we find is that battle intensity, measured as battle deaths, is significantly lower in the ‘new war’ period. We also find that the magnitude of violence against civilians in civil conflict is significantly lower in the ‘new war’ period. Forced displacement of civilians follows a slightly more complicated pattern, similar to the trend in the number of civil conflicts. The number of civilians displaced in civil conflicts is significantly higher in the period 1990-1994 than in either the Cold war period or in the period 1995-1999. Thus, although civil conflicts in the period 1990-1994 generate larger flows of displaced people than civil conflicts of the Cold War, there is no consistently increasing trend in the data. On the contrary, the decrease in forced migration flow in the most recent time period is statistically significant. Finally, patterns in civilians displaced and civilians killed do not change when we control for battle intensity, which indirectly suggests that the ratio of civilian to military victims has not changed significantly since the end of the Cold War.
Thus, if anything, civil conflicts in the ‘new war’ period have been less atrocious than civil conflicts in the Cold war period"
Post ID: 4018467644801662676
Monday, September 16, 2013
Fire in a Crowded Theatre
"Everyone knows the fatuous verdict of the greatly overpraised Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, asked for an actual example of when it would be proper to limit speech or define it as an action, gave that of shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.
It’s very often forgotten what he was doing in that case was sending to prison a group of Yiddish speaking socialists, whose literature was printed in a language most Americans couldn’t read, opposing President Wilson’s participation in the First World War and the dragging of the United States into this sanguinary conflict, which the Yiddish speaking socialists had fled from Russia to escape...
What they say is it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view...
Rosa Luxembourg... said that freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.
My great friend John O’ Sullivan, former editor of the National Review, and I think probably my most conservative and reactionary Catholic friend, once said –it’s a tiny thought experiment– he says, if you hear the Pope saying he believes in God, you think, “well, the Pope is doing his job again today”. If you hear the Pope saying he’s really begun to doubt the existence of God, you begin to think he might be on to something...
[A Holocaust denier] doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, might contain a grain of historical truth, might in any case get people to think about “why do they know what they already think they know”. How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else?...
One of the proudest moments of my life, that’s to say, in the recent past, has been defending the British historian David Irving who is now in prison in Austria for nothing more than the potential of uttering an unwelcome thought on Austrian soil. He didn’t actually say anything in Austria. He wasn’t even accused of saying anything. He was accused of perhaps planning to say something that violated an Austrian law that says only one version of the history of the Second World War may be taught in our brave little Tyrolean republic.
The republic that gave us Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General of the United Nations, a man wanted in several countries for war crimes. You know the country that has Jorge Haider, the leader of its own fascist party, in the cabinet that sent David Irving to jail.
You know the two things that have made Austria famous and given it its reputation by any chance? Just while I’ve got you. I hope there are some Austrians here to be upset by it. Well, a pity if not, but the two great achievements of Austria are to have convinced the world that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Viennese.
Now to this proud record they can add, they have the courage finally to face their past and lock up a British historian who has committed no crime except that of thought in writing...
I don’t know how many of you don’t feel you’re grown up enough to decide for yourselves and think you need to be protected from David Irving’s edition of the Goebbels Diaries for example, out of which I learned more about the Third Reich than I had from studying Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. B. Taylor combined when I was at Oxford...
Bear in mind, ladies and gentleman, that every time you violate, or propose the violate, the right to free speech of someone else, you in potentia [are] making a rod for your own back...
Isn’t a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what’s fit to be passed and what is [not], is the man most likely to become debauched?...
Dr Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, complier of the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete Dr Johnson was waited upon by various delegations of people to congratulate him. Of the nobility, [...] of the Common, of the Lords and also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London who attended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him.
– “Dr Johnson”, they said, “We are delighted to find that you’ve not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.”
– “Ladies”, said Dr Johnson, “I congratulate you on being able to look them up.”
... I have been the target of many death threats, I know, within a short distance of where I am currently living in Washington, I can name two or three people, whose names you probably know, who can’t go anywhere now without a security detail because of the criticisms they’ve made on one monotheism in particular. And this is in the capital city of the United States...
[These people making the death threats are] the people who are going to seek the protection of the hate speech law, if I say what I think about their religion, which I am now going to do...
Do [people who issue death threats to those who insult Islam] get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I’ve just said about the prophet Mohammad? Yes, I might."
- Christopher Hitchens, speaking at Hart House, University of Toronto, November 15th, 2006
It’s very often forgotten what he was doing in that case was sending to prison a group of Yiddish speaking socialists, whose literature was printed in a language most Americans couldn’t read, opposing President Wilson’s participation in the First World War and the dragging of the United States into this sanguinary conflict, which the Yiddish speaking socialists had fled from Russia to escape...
What they say is it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view...
Rosa Luxembourg... said that freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.
My great friend John O’ Sullivan, former editor of the National Review, and I think probably my most conservative and reactionary Catholic friend, once said –it’s a tiny thought experiment– he says, if you hear the Pope saying he believes in God, you think, “well, the Pope is doing his job again today”. If you hear the Pope saying he’s really begun to doubt the existence of God, you begin to think he might be on to something...
[A Holocaust denier] doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, might contain a grain of historical truth, might in any case get people to think about “why do they know what they already think they know”. How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else?...
One of the proudest moments of my life, that’s to say, in the recent past, has been defending the British historian David Irving who is now in prison in Austria for nothing more than the potential of uttering an unwelcome thought on Austrian soil. He didn’t actually say anything in Austria. He wasn’t even accused of saying anything. He was accused of perhaps planning to say something that violated an Austrian law that says only one version of the history of the Second World War may be taught in our brave little Tyrolean republic.
The republic that gave us Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General of the United Nations, a man wanted in several countries for war crimes. You know the country that has Jorge Haider, the leader of its own fascist party, in the cabinet that sent David Irving to jail.
You know the two things that have made Austria famous and given it its reputation by any chance? Just while I’ve got you. I hope there are some Austrians here to be upset by it. Well, a pity if not, but the two great achievements of Austria are to have convinced the world that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Viennese.
Now to this proud record they can add, they have the courage finally to face their past and lock up a British historian who has committed no crime except that of thought in writing...
I don’t know how many of you don’t feel you’re grown up enough to decide for yourselves and think you need to be protected from David Irving’s edition of the Goebbels Diaries for example, out of which I learned more about the Third Reich than I had from studying Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. B. Taylor combined when I was at Oxford...
Bear in mind, ladies and gentleman, that every time you violate, or propose the violate, the right to free speech of someone else, you in potentia [are] making a rod for your own back...
Isn’t a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what’s fit to be passed and what is [not], is the man most likely to become debauched?...
Dr Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, complier of the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete Dr Johnson was waited upon by various delegations of people to congratulate him. Of the nobility, [...] of the Common, of the Lords and also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London who attended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him.
– “Dr Johnson”, they said, “We are delighted to find that you’ve not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.”
– “Ladies”, said Dr Johnson, “I congratulate you on being able to look them up.”
... I have been the target of many death threats, I know, within a short distance of where I am currently living in Washington, I can name two or three people, whose names you probably know, who can’t go anywhere now without a security detail because of the criticisms they’ve made on one monotheism in particular. And this is in the capital city of the United States...
[These people making the death threats are] the people who are going to seek the protection of the hate speech law, if I say what I think about their religion, which I am now going to do...
Do [people who issue death threats to those who insult Islam] get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I’ve just said about the prophet Mohammad? Yes, I might."
- Christopher Hitchens, speaking at Hart House, University of Toronto, November 15th, 2006
Post ID: 5409963650944068658
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