He Was Just Helping The Sheep Over The Fence

Billy "Wicked" Wilson, creater of Voodoo Extreme and Gaming Groove game news web sites, has passed at 33.

Voodoo Extreme was the web site that made the internet useful to me. It was the first site that made me log on every day because there was actually new stuff happening every day. Magazines suddenly seemed horribly late with everything they reported and VE was able to open up the video game world in a way that no place I had ever seen before.

Man, it's weird how someone that you don't even really know dying can still unsettle you.

R.I.P. Billy, hope wherever you are you don't have to ice up the tp.

Freedom Force: The Review!

So I just finished Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich (FF2), the sequel to Freedom Force (FF), released in 2002 (possibly 2001, but I picked it up the Summer of 2002). I enjoyed Freedom Force immensely, and I've gone back and played through the single-player game several times. Both games have a similar format: In each mission, you control a squad of up to four superheroes from a third-person overhead view. As the story progresses, characters earn experience and 'character points', which allow them to purchase more spectacular powers. The game includes a 'hero builder', which allows you to create your own heroes, who can then be 'recruited' into the single-player game; with some 3D modelling experience and practice with the hero builder, a user can create just about any hero they might come up with.

The differences between the two games is largely cosmetic: FF2 uses a new graphics engine which allows for more spectacular special effects than in FF, though these aren't anything that will blow your mind. Controls are almost identical, so if you've played FF recently you'll just notice a few small streamlining touches here and there. FF2 includes several new characters, my favourite being Tombstone (whose Possession power makes the game ridiculously easy sometimes), and all of the characters from the old game show up at one point or another.

The weaknesses of FF2 are largely the same as the weaknesses of FF, and the primary one is the fact that I got this game on Friday night and finished it Sunday night -- with Saturday and Sunday largely taken up by homework. All together, I'd say less than 20 hours to play the entire single-player game, even shorter than I remember FF being. The writing can also get more than a little cheesy at times, and there are some out-and-out plot holes.

If you, like me, are addicted to superhero games, then I recommend FF2, though not everyone will want to spend $40 on a game they can finish this quickly.

Propagantastic!

By now, I assume you've heard about the pundits paid to shill Bush administration policies. You might also remember hearing about a pro-Medicare Drug Bill 'video release' which ran on local news stations across the country but was produced by the administration. As it turns out, like it so often has lately, things are much, much more appalling: the administration has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the past four years (twice as much so far as was spent under the Clinton administration) to produce hundreds of similar segments, most of which have been shown on local news stations throughout the country, and often modified so that the token indications that these are government productions are removed or replaced.

Eastern and Western Washington

Some state senators in that state we all know and love have floated a proposal to split Washington in two along the Cascades. We get these sorts of proposals every ten or fifteen years in California, too: people from rural parts of Northern California (everything north of Bakersfield/San Luis Obispo, including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Lake Tahoe) object to all the water that gets sent down to LA and propose cutting them off. Nothing ever happens, of course, because something like 40% of the state lives in the Santa Barbara-LA-San Diego corridor, and another 40% in the Bay Area (who, on the whole, don't care what happens to the lakes up in the mountains other than Tahoe).

Gender politics in the US of A

Have I mentioned how much I'm enjoying the guest bloggers over at the panda which has left?

The problem with comments like this [that the greatest gift a husband can give his wife is the freedom to choose whether or not to work] is that men in this country are already oppressed by the American Dream, the male version, at least. As far as I know, there's no female-centered version of the American Dream. In the American Dream, our hero Ward Cleaver is a Real Man because he has a job that pays for him to have a big house, a family and a most importantly, a wife who is financially dependent on him and under his direct control. This is how masculinity is defined for so many, many men in our country. The problem is that fulfilling that dream of having a woman sequestered away at home tending to you and your children is that it's out of the financial reach of the majority of men.

Of course, what this means is that we have a population of men in this country that both believe that in order to be Real Men they have to have a wife that is both at home and subservient, but out of financial necessity, they have wives who work. And it's hard to get subservience out of someone when you can't tell them, 'Well, who makes the money around here?' There's a lot of resentment there.

In step the Republicans, who can't give these guys what they really want--jobs that pay enough to have a family with one income--but they can give them an endless list of people to scapegoat: welfare moms, illegal immigrants, disobedient women getting abortions, gays who want marriage when you can't even have the Leave It to Beaver one you wanted for yourself, and so on and so forth. Plus, the President is all too willing to be a walking phallic symbol for all sorts of masculine fantasies of power to be projected on. Maybe you can't be Ward Cleaver, conservative men of America, but at least you can pretend you're Dirty Harry.

I wonder if Jesse consciously turned his blog over to a handful of women during women's history month?

Some good advice

from some wingnut writing for Focus on the Family's magazine for teenage girls. The topic, as the topic of most such magazines, is boys, and the three 'essential' differences between boys and girls.
1. Guys are visual -- because girls just don't ogle.
2. Guys are physical -- which is a euphemism for fucking-oriented; and again, unlike girls, who are much less fucking-oriented.
3. Guys are the sexual aggressor in the male/female relationship.

That’s not really a news flash for you, is it? The fact is, guys are not only visually stimulated and physical, but they really are the sexual aggressor in any relationship. And you know why? God made them that way. That’s right. God wired guys to be sexually aggressive, just as He made you to be the caring, nurturing one in the relationship.

You know what pisses me off about abstinence-only sex ed? It's not really the fact that it doesn't work; that just makes it bad policy. What bugs me so much is how much patriarchal crap like this the wingnut abstinence cheerleaders just throw into the stuff they write. Come on, people: couldn't you just admit that most everyone (not just men) wants to fool around with the person they're dating and ogle attractive people, and most everyone (not just women) wants a deep emotional connection and worries about getting 'too involved too fast' (whatever that might mean in each particular case)? Then your textbooks wouldn't be offensive and wrong, just ineffective.

Bonus: Even more patriarchal crap from the same magazine. This piece reveals the 'eight secrets' about guys:

2. Keep a Little Mystery ...
Guys by nature are "conquerors" (just look at their interest in football, video games, rock climbing, etc.). What can guys conquer or pursue if girls reveal everything about themselves? I'm referring to how you relate to guys, but it can also apply to how you dress....
It is possible to be too open and too buddy-buddy with guys. There seems to be a fine line between treating them as brothers in the Lord and crossing over into too familiar territory. When a guy knows everything about you, it leaves nothing for him to conquer....
In our discussion, the girls drilled me about how to actually maintain some mystery. I responded by giving them questions to ask themselves.
• Who initiates most of the conversations I have with a guy?
• Who (other than adults) initiates our activities, the girls or the guys?
• Who's making the phone calls?
• Does he ask questions, or do I volunteer information?
Remember, if you're too available, you've removed the challenge.

Remember, if you're not letting the boys decide what you're going to do, they'll dump your feminist butts.

3. Don't Mock
Guys of any age don't like being playfully mocked by a group of girls, even if the mocking comes in the form of a compliment: "nice eyes/hair/muscles/etc."...
5. Free or Flee
Guys don't like feeling manipulated, controlled or emotionally cornered by girls. Being conquerors, they naturally withdraw from those situations. My sons know they're not yet ready for relationship commitments, and the more they feel pressured by girls to make them, the more they pull away....
6. Guys vs. Girls
Guys don't like competitive "guy vs. girl" contests. It puts them in a lose-lose situation. On one hand, when guys win a contest, they're put in a male chauvinist category. If they lose, it's humiliating and creates an invisible barrier between them and the girls.
Competition locks girls into a no-win situation as well. If the girls win the contest, it forfeits the openness the guys may have felt with them. If they lose, girls usually feel some degree of humiliation, resentment or bitterness.

Got to stroke those oh-so-fragile male egos. Remember: you're here to make the boys feel good about themselves, and if you show them up they'll dump your feminist butt. Boys only like girls who stroke!

7. Guys Are "Allergic" To Silliness
Guys enjoy seeing girls have fun, but they don't like being around girls' silliness.... Rest assured, guys definitely have their own form of silliness. Do they ever! But it needs to stay among the males. Keep your silliness among yourselves as well. Guys admire girls who conduct themselves with poise in public.
8. Guys Do Notice Homemaking Skills
Believe it or not, in these days of liberation, guys still notice a girl's homemaking skills. In fact, the older my sons and their friends become, the more alert they are to the presence or lack of those skills in their female friends. Can she cook? Administrate? Is she kind to children? How does she handle her money? Does she care about learning?

So, to put it all together: if you and your boyfriend are hanging out with your friends (who, naturally, are all girls) and their boyfriends (who, naturally, are his friends), let them decide what movie to watch or game to play. Then, while they're having their fun, you girls can go in the kitchen and bake them some pies!

Christ.

funny stuff

Pandagon: This makes me feel like a clown--laughing on the outside, but crying on the inside

my finger's hurting, so that's all you get for now

More PP

Panda which has left:

The woman who makes plans is pretty much always a negative stereotype in our culture. Sylvia Ann Hewlett got on all the talk shows by writing a book scolding women not to plan to have their children later in life when it was easier for them for fear that they may not be able to have them, and a great time was had by all on the shows pitying women who got their comeuppance for thinking they could exert control over their own destinies only to be left childless. Even in situations where women are doing their best to fulfill social expectations, taking control is viewed negatively. For example, we adore ourselves a blushing bride, but a woman who manages her own wedding planning is going to be labeled a Bridezilla before all is said and done.

Plans indicate control and plans also indicate desire. You make a plan because you have things you want and you need to figure out the best way to get them. Every time a woman swallows her birth control pill, there's a world of desires behind that decision and the pill is one of the tools she's using to achieve those desires--a job, an education, marriage to the man she really wants not just to the first that got her pregnant, no marriage at all, a smaller family, more income to spend on hobbies, more time to herself, you name it. There's a lot of feminist ink spilled on the discussion of how female sexual desire is demonized in our culture, but even more than that, almost all female desires are suspect, except of course the desire to serve. (One reason that fields like math and science are still underpopulated with women is that intelligent women often turn their talents to fields where service is still emphasized, like medicine.)

And from the excellent post by a blogger I'm not familiar with that the guest-blogger links to:

How fucked up is it, that a woman's ability to choose whether or not to bear a life is so incredibly fucking scary that there's an entire formal and informal institution of fear and shame set up around her body to keep her from understanding it? How fucked up is it, that when I say that out loud, or here in a public forum, that people just dismiss it, pretend talking about women's uteruses is boring and unimportant and not worth thinking or talking about? How can they say that and then spend their time passing laws that directly affect me and my pesky uterus, and heckle me when I try and take control over my body's processes? How can they say that and then tell me that not only is my body not worth discussing (so long as I'm the one discussing it), but that having this body makes me bad at math, too emotional, weak and inferior and flippant and flighty?

Pandagon: Affirmative action for theologians?

Pandagon: Affirmative action for theologians?

my finger hurts, so you just get the link

The PP

Dr. B on the importance of PP:

This, of course, is the real point: abortion is only a small (but necessary) part of what women's health clinics provide. The attack on women's health clinics is, effectively, an attack on women's health; when and if anti-abortion crusaders shut down clinics, all they do is promote more, not fewer, unwanted pregnancies--by removing access to birth control, by removing respectful, affordable health care, by removing the education and support women need to learn how to take care of themselves, including planning pregnancies when and if they want them.

Bitch. Ph.D.: Spoiled students, part 3; or, what kind of student was I?

Dr. B writes about her childhood education, and then reflects:

This is one reason I want to get pseudonymous kid the hell away from whitebread smalltownia: his mom is a college professor, he's not going to have to worry about academics. What is going to be hard for him if we don't get out of here is to expand his brain beyond middle-class suburbanism. But the point isn't, 'god I hate the suburbs' (though I do): the point, educationally speaking, is that in some ways one of the things I took away from my elementary ed. was that, in the name of protecting their kids, middle-class parents seriously limit their childrens' education. The education I got was far superior to the education the honors kids--or the white flight kids whose parents moved to a different school district--received. What those kids learned, I got from books and at home. What I learned, they couldn't learn from books, or at home in their safe suburban families. Maybe some of them learned a bit of it later; I hope so. The problem, of course, is that when those kids don't learn those things, they grow up to weild power and miseducate their own children and continue to shit on the children of the underclasses. I don't want my kid to grow up to think like that, nor do I want him to grow up with the equally horrible (maybe in some ways even worse) sense of safe middle-class liberalism that the honors kids whose parents kept them in public school had, a liberalism that operates without a real understanding of the issues at hand and is still, underneath, scared and scornful of the people it tries to 'help' without in any way actually thinking about the power structure.

I have one small, impersonal comment on this, and then I'll go into a larger, more personal one.

The small comment is that the last sentence reminds me of Nietzsche's critique of a sort of patronizing liberalism and Christian charity. Nietzsche argued that these attitudes towards the 'lower' classes stemmed from a feeling he called ressentiment: anger, jealousy, and resentment.

The larger comment is that, particularly in Bush's America, the ideology of the suburbs is just as much condescending conservatism as condescending liberalism. This is actually the ideology I was surrounded by growing up in rural Northern California: throughout the community, almost nothing but contempt is shown for the small non-white population of the county, for gay people, for liberals and 'socialists', and for 'flatlanders', a term which describes the tourists who come up to the mountains from San Francisco and the Central Valley (and whose wallets bring in the cash which keeps the economy afloat there, I might add). The local paper, 'The oldest continuously published paper west of the Mississippi', publishes syndicated neo-con Charles Krauthammer's calls to invade Iran and Syria and letters to the editor which forecast the doom which will befall our bastion of decent living if, say, the 'communist-socialist plot' to put carpool lanes on a busy stretch of the major highway is implemented, or Wal*Mart isn't given the tax breaks and exemptions from road development requirements it 'needs'.

I think the only reason I didn't turn out a raging movement conservative Christian like so many of the people I went to high school with was my parents. While I'm far to the left of both of them today, they -- and especially my mom -- offered a moderate-liberal counterbalance to all the bigotry and lower-middle-class sneering that surrounded me. The church we attended until I was in junior high is by far the most liberal in the county.

If I had to choose between the condescending liberal East Bay suburb where my dad lives and the condescending conservative community where my mom lives and I grew up, I really don't know which way I would go. I don't think I could stand the people in either place.

No words

Just go. Now.

Why are you still here?

Ugh, part eleventy-thousand

Per guest-blogged Amanda over at the panda which has left, a Texas state rep. has proposed a bill which would allow pharmacists to refuse to provide birth control, including emergency contraception. I've heard about this before, but I've never encountered an argument so disigenuous, ignorant, or downright abhorrent as the one she quotes.

Arguing that a raped woman has been extremely traumatized, he concluded: "A woman has gone through a trauma; for these reasons her body may not be fertile."

I've known probably eight young women who were raped as teenagers, and most of them still have a week of nightmares every year, around the date they were attacked. Several of these young women didn't take emergency contraception because they were too scared to go to a doctor; the unsurprising end result is often a bright young women branded a slut by the community, kicked out of her parents' house, and being forced to drop out of high school instead of go to college so she can care for her child with some minor financial support from the asshole who thought he was entitled to put his penis wherever the fuck he felt like.

This is where my personal desire to castrate rapists with a golf club comes to the surface again.

But They're So Stupid!

The Supremes have made it illegal to kill kids. Drew sums it up pretty well.

Don't Panic

Here is another trailer for The Hichhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it is good.

Savings of DOOM!

Shorter David Brooks: oh noooooes! seperate cheking accounts will destroy teh marrieges!

What a fucking inane tool.

Spider-man's greatest bible stories!

Just go. Trust me.

The Christmas Season Starts Early This Year

If any of you are looking for an excellent gift for me, this tie will do.

Now On Ebay, The Stick From Sean Penn's Ass

Welcome to the Style section of Headpiece for the Staff of Ra, I'll be your Cruise Director, Ben.

So I got roped into watching the Academy Awards last night, and other than the fact that the thing's a god damn four hours, I thought it went pretty well. Chris Rock got a couple gasps from me for some particularly catty moments, which I suppose it good as opposed to being bored off my ass, which is sort of the standard. Sean Penn needs some serious hugs to call the fuck down. I thought they did a good job of spreading the awards around a bit rather than piling them all on one film as they usually do, but Hotel Rwanda seems to have been snubbed a bit.

And what the fuck was Laura Linny thinking with that hair?! Hellooooooo!

Breaking: Iraq has been completely pacified

Or not. Not at fucking all.

Overdue

Five years after it was clearly necessary, and five-and-a-half after it could've made a huge difference, Sens. Clinton and Boxer, along with a Rep. from Ohio, have proposed election reform. Based on the press release quoted at that link, the reform includes making election day a national holiday, voter-verified paper ballots for electronic voting machines (which will be considered their official ballot), and same-day voter registration.

And, of course, since accurate vote counts are a partisan issue, we should not be surprised when this goes down in flames.

Wal*Mart

Perhaps you wonder why I refuse to shop at Wal*Mart. Well, besides the fact that they're involved in a huge class-action lawsuit against all their female employees for systematic discrimination, here's some
info about labour conditions at Wal*Mart:
- Average pay of a sales clerk is $8.50 an hour. This works out to be $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three if this is the only form of income.
- Wal*Mart employs so many people at these wages that other retailers are forced to cut paycheques to be competitive.
- Wal*Mart considers 'full-time' to be 34, not 40, hours a week. True, this means someone who works 36 hours a week is eligible to buy health insurance -- but it also means they're even less likely to be able to afford it.
- By one reckoning, the CEO of Wal*Mart receives 897 times the pay of the average sales clerk.

Rings of Rexnor!

Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich has gone gold. Due in stores 8 March. This makes me jump up and down in one place.

Though it makes me wonder how I'm going to keep up with my other superhero game ...

You Know What Would Make Hockey More Exciting? Games Played.

On the heels of a cancelled season the NHL is thinking of ways make the game more exciting for spectators when the players and owners can finally resolve their petty bickering. In a country whose "national pasttime" is as boring as freaking baseball I've never been able to understand why people can't get behind a game as fast paced as hockey. Sure, there's not a ton of scoring, but why is that the ultimate arbiter of excitment? Do basketball fans thrill over every lay in? Hell no! According to this article the average goals per game is down from 7 to 5, which really doesn't strike me as a huge change. My real problem is that it seems like this is being viewed as an either/or situation. I just wish someone could come up with a way to alter the rules that wouldn't favor either offensive or defensive play. My team, the Devils, are a great defensive team, or at least they have been in years past, and I'd hate to see that style of play disappear completely, even if it would be nice if other teams could go for a more open style of play.

T.G.I.PH.

Another end of the week, another Photoshop Phriday and all the wry wit you wait all week for.

Spoiler Alert!

Calling all nerds! Here are some pics from the next/last Star Wars movie. Yeah yeah yeah, I got excited for both of the previous two film and they turned out to be less than great, but *this* one looks BITCHIN'!

The Erotic Applications Are Endless

Hey, long time no see! Over at Evil Avatar I ran across a link to a video and an article about supposedly "total immersion" technology which allows 3D objects to interact with real life objects. One thing to keep in mind while you're watching the video is that these are *not* holograms and you can't see them just floating in the air, you have to see them on a moniter or something. In application however, you could perhaps have some sort of headgear or other peripheral that would make it seem as if the objects were in front of you. We'll see, at this point it seems like it's still very much in the lab.

A shoe post

Echidne:

The politically incorrect parts probably have to do with the fact that a woman in high heels is showing her availability for sex in two ways: first, her pelvis is tilted to receive rear-entry and second, she is clearly unable to run away. Or so I imagine. Though high heels are also excellent weapons of self-defense, especially if used against the eyes of the attacker. Just kidding, just kidding! Don't quote me on any of this and don't try any of this at home.

Whoops! Sorry, E, too late now.

Heels are also terrible for your feet, knees, legs, and back. One of my grandmothers worked as a cocktail waitress for many years, wearing high heels for 40 hours a week. She's had foot surgery at least half a dozen times, probably closer to a dozen times, and, while she can still walk and go up and down stairs, she's considered legally handicapped, with wheelchairs at the airport and a parking placard.

Oh, and another story, this one about one of my step-sisters. A couple years back, Rachel begged and begged for a particular pair of high heels for months. Finally her mom relented. Rach will wear them for 5-10 minutes at a time, then have to take them off or sit down because they're so uncomfortable.

"But they're fun!" "But they're cute!" "But they're sexy!" Uhhh, yeah, fine whatever.

Do I have an inner whore?

It's illegal to sell sex toys in Alabama. Today the SC said they won't consider the constitutionality of this law.

Bitch. Ph.D explains the narrative underlying why "siding with the sex toy merchants could open the door to the legalization of behavior such as prostitution":

Ah yes, we all know this story. A young girl, fresh and innocent, purchases her first vibrator. She becomes addicted to sexual pleasure, masturbating constantly, and neglecting her studies and her family duties. Her hair becomes greasy and unkempt, and her eyes unfocused, and she begins to steal money to purchase more vibes. Anything, anything! to feed her habit. Next thing you know, she's lost touch with all that is Good and Holy and is prostituting herself on the street, mere pennies for a blow job, anything to earn money towards a rabbit vibe. By the end of the novel, there she is, poor, ruined thing, standing on a street corner in the freezing rain, fingering herself right out there in public in front of god and everyone without even realizing what she's doing, all sense of shame lost in her addiction, muttering "suck your cock?" to every passing car.

Happens all the time. Only by outlawing sex toys can we protect women from their inner whores. Don't give me that "if you outlaw sex toys, only outlaws will own sex toys" crap, or the "they'll just masturbate with cucumbers or electric toothbrushes" argument. It's a slippery slope, and we must stop masturbation here and now or we'll descend into a nightmare world of humping and groaning and civilization, as we know it, will be doomed.

DOOOOOOOOOM!

Give me reasons

I agree with Jesse, although permit me to express my reaction to 'framing' in the terminology of a philosopher:

Framing is sophistry. Sophistry is the sort of thing ad executives, the worst sort of lawyers, and patronizing political hacks do: wrap up whatever they're hocking (usually crap) in a bright shiny bow so they can force it down your throat before you even think to ask whether it's what you really want. Okay, got my metaphor's a little mixed, but I think you get the idea.

The term 'sophistry' comes from the ancient Athenian school of rhetoric, the sophists. If you were a politician or other prominent Athenian, you would go to their school and they would teach you how to impress people with your fancy vocabulary and compelling and vacuous arguments. Think of a modern day forensics club. Or trashy law school. Or a marketing degree. The sophists were the rivals of the great Athenian philosophers, who prized not popularity or political success but truth and virtue.

The thing that pisses me off so much about the conservative movement in this country is not that I find their positions short-sighted and bigoted. If that were all, presumably we could come together in various fora, share our points of view and possibly even come up with new policies all could agree as beneficial. No, the thing that really pisses me off is that every single one of these people is engaged in pure sophistry to defend these crappy ideas and avoid engaging their ideological opponents in genuine debate.

Should the Democratic party follow suit and become such masters of framing that Karl Rove breaks down and cries at it all, that is the day it will truly have lost what little appeal it still has for me at this point. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, articulated a revolutionary strategy very much like framing. But Gramsci said this was not a matter of propaganda but of education, a means of breaking the workers out of their false capitalist consciousness. Communism itself was still a philosophical position to be defended and justified.

Contemporary progressivism, in order to truly be democratic, must walk a fine line between energetic advocacy and defense of its positions, and sinking into the sophistic slime the conservative movement wallows in.

Lean on me

Sometimes in our lives we all have pain
We all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We know that there's always tomorrow

Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on

Larry Summers: Womens are just dumberer!

Via Armando at Kos, I see that the Office of the President of Harvard University has released a transcript of his 'polemical' comments last month. (You should know by now that this is going to be long.) He talks about three reasons why women are underrepresented in academia and industry, particularly in science and engineering, in what he believes to be descending order of influence (that is, (2) plays a bigger role than (3), and (1) plays a bigger role than either of them):

1. Women are (for whatever reason) less likely than men to choose the demanding career of an academic or scientist.
   Comment: This factor cannot be isolated from the broader cultural standards Summers discusses in (3). Even among middle-class liberal folks striving for gender equity in their households, there is strong anecodtal and sociological evidence that women tend to spend much, much more of their time cleaning, cooking, and caring for children than their male partners do. This, in my opinion, clearly does not reflect some kind of innate mothering instinct, but instead the way men and boys are raised: wives end up cleaning, cooking and taking care of their children because husbands don't pull their own weight around the house. Meanwhile, there's the double standard that a dirty house with crappy food and neglected children reflects negatively on the wife, not the husband, independently of how much they work outside the home. Given this cultural situation, it's entirely rational for women to forgo a career that involves 40 years of 80-hour weeks.
   
   On the other hand, I believe we are rapidly approaching gender equity among physicians, and female lawyers also seem to be quite common, and these fields are just as demanding as academia. This doesn't negate my point in the last paragraph so much as indicate that the situation is much more complicated than Summers seems to think.
   


2. The innatist thesis:
   

   
   The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.
   
   [This is followed by a long and obscure statistical argument, which I've summarized in the header for this point. Then he gives some asinine anecodtal evidence about his daughters calling toy trucks 'daddy truck' and 'baby truck' and how people fell into traditional gender roles in experimental communes shortly in Israel. Then he explains why he thinks all the discredited research into evolutionary psychology has shown there are innate differences:] When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address.
   

   
   Comment: Again, there is no way to separate this factor from the simple cultural issues in (3). Indeed, the fact that women succeed as science and engineering majors in college, ie, do well with the math and science itself, and only fail to develop careers in their field after graduation, ie, once they have to deal with the scientific and engineering establishment, seems to me to clearly support the case that there is discrimination against women as professional scientists and engineers, and undermine the innatist argument.
   
   He finishes up this point with a pathetic qualifier, but the damage has already been done. I have to agree with Armando over at Kos, the guy is either an idiot or a misogynist or both.


3. Women are discriminated against both during the hiring process and in the workplace.
   Comment: So long as this is expanded to include other, more general cultural and sociological factors, I agree that this is a major problem to be addressed. However, as I've said above, I do not believe there is any justification for sharply separating this point from the other two: discrimination and double standards put differential pressures on men and women, allowing the former the luxury of dedicating themselves to their careers in ways the former cannot, which both (groundlessly) lead to beliefs in innate differences in ability.

It should be clear by now my fundamental critique of Summers' deeply ignorant and offensive argument: the three factors he identifies cannot be sharply delineated on an empirical level. Cultural factors are simply too pervasive to conclude that women and men have inherently different preferences and abilities. Which is what feminists have maintained for about sixty years now.

Edit: Fixed some odd spacing. There's a shorter summary of his inanity here, link via Atrios.

My paper is good because I spellchecked TWICE

Echidne has a few choice quotations from David Horowitz' Giant Index of The Evils of Liberal Professors.

"This complaint applies to the discriminating nature of grading of my English teacher…On the last one, I wrote about how family values in the books weve read aren't good. I know the paper was pretty much great because I spell checked it and proofred it twice. I got an D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its okay to be gay." [sic] - Ohio State, English, 2/9/05

"We were then required to watch an immoral Seinfeld episode dealing with masturbation, an exercise with little sociological value. She then gave a lecture on 'moral relativity,' which she defined very closely with 'cultural relativism.'" - St. Louis University, Sociology, 2/13/05

"Talked about flags as symbols of states and argued that new Iraqi flag was not a result of a transparent and fair process…Claimed AS FACT that other Arab societies had red, green and black in their flags…" - St. Michael's College, Human Geography, 4/30/04

Perusing the list Atrios generated, most of the complaints seem to be along the lines of 'the professor expressed an anti-Republican opinion in class!' or 'we did not read any books expressing a conservative point of view!'.

Here's the thing: we're working off the empirically justified assumption that most of the people around us are just as liberal as we are. Should we make jokes and bitch about how we don't like or understand Republican voters? Ehh, probably not. But we're people -- we slip up, and we're willing to apologize when we see we've genuinely hurt someone.

At the same time, it's our job to try to get you guys to learn the ideas of the field of our specialty. This is because we've studied it intensely for years or even decades; possibly even longer than you've been alive. We're simply more qualified to write the syllabus and lecture than you are. You've got to trust us when we tell you that Antonio Gramsci (communist) is more respected among political scientists than Ann Coulter, and his ideas and arguments are more worthwhile to examine than hers. But of course you write your own term paper: if you want to cite Ann Coulter, Ayn Rand, or David Horowitz (post-him being a communist, of course) in your paper, and your paper actually uses these writers to address the issues brought up in class in a relevant and coherent fashion, you will deserve and should receive a good grade.

On the other hand, if your paper on Margaret Sanger and her stance on abortion can be summarized as 'Abortion is murder! James Dobson and Ann Coulter both say so!' (only with 'murder' and 'is' misspelled), you will have earned your F by failing to address the assigned topic.

The idea of accountability

Excellent post on the (non)justifiability of torture over at Kos. It got me thinking a bit about Bush's current defense of his policies: his administration had an 'accountability moment' -- the election -- and since the American people apparently approved of his policies, they are now exempt from attributions of blame for their actions prior to the election. Hence, it seems to go, because a slight majority of Americans voted for Bush and his administration, they are not morally responsible for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, even if they approved of those policies themselves.

This strikes me as completely bizarre in two ways, both of which tie into Bush's rhetoric of moral absolutes. First, it is an explicit argument that one's moral accountability for one's actions can be negated by events after the action in question. Granted, I'm not an ethicist, but the idea of ex post facto exculpatory circumstances strikes me as ludicrous (and, in a legislative setting, in violation of the Constitution): you can't justify stealing a loaf of bread because two days later your boss unexpectedly fired you. There is a legal notion of a statute of limitations: a time limit after which one cannot be prosecuted for a crime; but such a statute must still be in place prior to the crime's committal, and I suspect this is largely pragmatically rather than ethically grounded. By contrast, the background for Bush's moral absolutism is a fundamentalist Christian theology of hellfire and damnation, in which humans are to be divinely judged for all their sins and sentenced to eternal punishment.

The second bizarre contrast is with the explicit, and quite radical, moral relativism of the argument: the citizenry must be actively and self-consciously responsible for determining who may and may not be held morally accountable for their actions. It is not that mere social conventions, out of anyone's real control, have just happened to lead to Bush's moral exemption; rather, the people themselves have granted him this status through their deliberate choice. Most pointedly, it is not God who has determined whether or not to hold these men and women responsible.

All of this is driven home by the fact that this extreme moral relativism is used to justify the methods of prosecution of the war on terror[ism] (the Jus in Bello), while the necessity of its prosecution (the Jus ad Bellum)is justified (by Bush) with moral absolutist rhetoric. (cf. Wikipedia's entry on Just War)

The Bush Administration: Incompetastic (but not politically)!

So it turns out that

In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission.

And not only that, but also

The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system. The administration provided both the classified report and a declassified, 120-page version to the National Archives two weeks ago and, even with heavy redactions in some areas, the declassified version provides the firmest evidence to date about the warnings that aviation officials received concerning the threat of an attack on airliners and the failure to take steps to deter it.

Five months. That would be October. That would be right before the election. That would be right right before the election in which several people I know voted for Bush because they thought he would do better at keeping us safe from terrorists.

Thanks, guys!

Cavalcade of evolutionary psychology continues!

Over at Echidne. I've never liked Steven Pinker, ever since I read some of his stuff in a class I took back in college on evolution. Stephen Jay Gould referred to the work of evolutionary psychologists as 'Just So stories', and the 'research' these people turn out really is pretty craptacular. Steven Pinker is somewhat better than a lot of these lunatics -- but that's not saying much.

Storm on the horizon

Two excellent pieces on the contemporary abortion-rights movement over at Salon.

But, Kissling said, 'I think it's pretty sad if the reality of pro-choice thought is that a discussion of morality leads to an antiabortion position.' Kissling has always trod the delicate line between her pro-choice compatriots and her Catholic belief. The Roman Catholic hierarchy remains the mortal enemy of reproductive freedom -- be it abortion or birth control. 'I've thought about the morality of this ad nauseam for 35 years and come to the conclusion that making the choice [to have an abortion] can be a profoundly morally correct decision,' said Kissling. 'It can be morally incorrect too, but so can having a baby.'

Questions of legal rights ultimately (or at least should ... ) reduce to moral questions. The anti-choice movement has been slowly but steadily gaining ground for the past twenty years because of the failure of pro-choice advocates to maintain their core position: there is nothing immoral about abortion, and reproductive autonomy in general. It is complicated and fraught with emotion, as most things involving people are, but it is not immoral. What is immoral is the anti-choice position, which demeans women, pregnancy, children, and the conditions in which people actually live in favour of pursuing a fiction of motherhood as the raison d'etre of women.

However, the reader should note that the rejection of this fiction is not the rejection of motherhood: indeed, it is only once one recognizes the autonomy of a woman's choice whether to be a mother or not that one can truly appreciate motherhood. In a way, the fiction that women are 'meant' to be mothers undermines the very notion that it is meant to glorify, reducing it to a necessity like eating or breathing rather than making the hard choice to undertake a difficult and noble project. The only true parent is someone who has chosen to be a parent.

Both of the Salon articles are inspired from this essay.

Budgetary Fun

Salon:

Bush wants to cut student loan program

Bush to seek $419.3 billion for defense

The Best Thing Ever

Yet another entry in "The Best Thing Ever" competition making a run at the title. Watch this and you will be amazed and hilarified.

Thanks to Anne for sending me the link!

The evolution of the ass

Echidne has hilarious parody of the sort of 'reasoning' prevalent in evolutionary psychology. Go read her for the full context.

Maybe humans inherit big buttocks from their fathers, too? But why did this gene (if it exists in humans) survive? Here's where the scientific evolutionary psychology comes to my aid. The rules are something like this: Figure out how something that appears today might have once been useful, then explain its prevalence by the fact that it was once useful. It's a neat method, as lots of time is being saved by not having to go out to gather evidence or set up laboratory experiments, and it has the additional advantage (to me, at least) that nobody can prove my theory wrong. So here's my theory entitled 'How Buttocks Came to Be'.

A long time ago and far away lived a tribe of humans. Some of them were slender as a reed, and where we have buttocks they only had a small tight knot. Others had very large buttocks dragging behind them on the ground as they walked. Yet others were just right, not too slim and not too fat. Like we are.

Once a year the tribe would gather together for a mating ceremony in which all the men would fight each other for the right to inseminate all the females. (The females, as is common in evolutionary psychology in general, are going to be ignored from now on.) The mating ceremony took three days: On the first day all men would sit in a circle until they couldn't take it anymore. All those no longer sitting at sunset were discontinued. On the second day all remaining men would run around in a circle, nonstop, until the sun set. The fastest runner at this time would be declared the winner of the insemination ceremonies. The third day was spent on insemination.

Well, dear reader, you can guess what happened. None of the stick-figurelike knot guys could sit on the ground all day. They developed terrible sitting sores and despite firm determination and great stamina eventually had to admit defeat and get up just to get the blood moving again.

The really big-butted guys had a wonderful time with the first day's tournament. They could have easily sat for another week. But the next day they had to run and run, and as they ran their buttocks dragged behind, hit rocks and sticks and just hurt. Then they started bleeding. Besides, it's hard to run fast with something like that. However, valiant they were, these men, too, were disqualified. Only the fastest of the just-right guys got to pass his genes on.

And that's how buttocks came to be.

We must destroy this safety net in order to save it

There's lots of stuff all over the blogosphere today about the unveiled Social Security plot plan; I'm not going to bother with the digest, you're all big girls and boys. Atrios, though, has what I consider the definitive smack-down of this nefarious scheme dumbass plan.

I was born in 1980; many of you were born right around that time as well. According to the lovely chart the CBO has provided for us, I am scheduled to receive $20.5k (in 2004 dollars) the first year I collect social security. Not great, of course, but better than nothing. And significantly better than the $13k total (social security + kinda-private account) I can expect from the Republican plan.

'But wait, Mister Smarty-pants Liberal Commie Fascist Pinko!' you might be saying, 'Dear Leader told us Social Security's going to be bankrupt, and you won't get that $20.5k anyways; $13.1k isn't great, that's true, but it's better than nothing!' That's where we look at the third column of the CBO chart: payable benefits. Assuming we don't do what we've done in the past and tweak the system to keep it running, I can still get $19.7k my first year on social security. That's roughly half as much again as what quasi-privatization is going to give me! And the younger you are, the more the system is going to screw you!

And that's not all! Not only will paid benefits be significantly smaller, but this system will cost a shitload more than the current one. Two reasons: transition and administration costs. This is a windfall of epic proportions for the private brokerages who will manage your semi-private account. Or it would be if the real goal of this plan wasn't to make the Social Security system so cumbersome and facile that it would be easier just to scrap it twenty years down the line. 'Starving the beast' was the way Milton Friedman, the free market messiah most of these supposedly pious Christians truly worship, put it.

Sex and genius

On Friday, the Association for Women in Mathematics chapter at my school hosted a mathematician with a background in women's studies who spoke on the notion of 'genius', with some attention to the Larry Summers fiasco. In a paper she's currently writing, she argues that the idea of 'genius' -- at least in the Western tradition -- is a bundle of slightly incompatible notions, including perseverence, innateness of ability, independence and autonomy, transcendence (disconnectedness from the mundane world), and masculine virility. A sub-thesis of her work is that this bundle of notions might explain the treatment of brilliant women, who almost universally are regarded as either sub-par intellectually or as unfeminine.

Though I only skimmed her paper, and she did not talk about the connection much during the talk, I believe her argument is one I've seen before, in such feminist philosophers as Monique Wittig and Simone de Beauvoir: all the above 'virtues of genius' can be identified with 'qualities of masculinity', and set opposed to 'qualities of femininity'. Women, according to classical stereotypes which are still prevalent in various degrees today, are capricious and unreliable, innately mentally and physically deficient compared to men, dependent on a husband or father and simultaneously responsible for the care of others, domestically fertile rather than heroically virile, and immanent (completely of the mundane world; it is an antinomous with transcendent in the above list). Hence, according to this dichotomy, an intellectual woman is, by definition, a contradiction in terms: either a 'failure' as a woman or a failure as an intellectual.

I've emailed her, asking for permission to link to the paper so you can read it for yourself (not that any of you will actually be interested); for the time being, you can check out her website.

Update: She has let me know that she doesn't want her paper available quite that publicly; however, feel free to contact her via the email address on her site.

Democrotastic!

Iraqis vote today, and, of course, the NYT has a glowing article on how well things are going. Like the Afghani elections that, to my knowledge, didn't really do much of anything, what's important here is not, as the article suggests, how many eligible voters turn out and how much violence occurs; this election is only worthwhile to the extent that it actually helps calm things down there -- to the extent that, a decade from now, it is looked upon as the first election of a legitimate Iraqi democracy. Personally, I remain skeptical.

There's also this piece, which briefly discusses women's attitudes towards the election. It's kind of hard to see the point of this article, since it basically amounts to 'Some women are going to vote independently of their husbands and religious leaders; some are not.' Gee, thanks for the profound insight, New York Times! This quotation caught my eye:

Muhammad Abboud, a journalist, speaking of his wife in a response that was revealing in itself, said: "Basically, I've given her full freedom on whom to follow politically. I don't oppose any political attitude."

Oh, how nice of you! You've given your wife permission to think for herself! You're so much better than the guy Echidne points out:

Al-Yawer was among the first to cast his ballot, voting alongside his wife at election headquarters in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad. As poll workers watched, he marked two ballots and dropped them into boxes, and then walked away with an Iraqi flag given to him by a poll worker.

''I'm very proud and happy this morning,'' al-Yawer told reporters. ''I congratulate all the Iraqi people and call them to vote for Iraq.''

I think about weird things

Michel Foucault, a late 20th century French philosopher, argued for a notion of an ars erotica, sexuality as a form of self-expression akin to art. By this I believe he meant to give sexuality a place outside the usual normative moral structures: sexual acts, like artistic acts, are not to be interrogated according to whether they are 'right' or 'wrong'.

But, prima facie, this leads to the possibility that sexual acts like rape cannot be condemned. So, if we are inclined to follow Foucault in liberating sexuality in this way, what must we do to establish this anormative space? Perhaps morality (in some sense; Foucault himself often seems critical of all normativity) can establish the boundary of such a space, but not determine the internal structure? Then, as a less theoretical matter, how is this boundary to be established?

I Hope Johnny Mack Is Playable

I know some of you out there like the Outlaw series of games (Golf and Volleyball for the uninitiated) and, well, it looks like there's another formerly tame sport that's about to get it's x-treme factor turned up to eleven.

Pokemon Causes Cancer!!!

From Gamespot's weekly Rumor Control feature:

Few things provoke as severe a love/hate reaction as Pokémon games. That said, even the most rabid Pikachu-basher wouldn't accuse the franchise of being carcinogenic (though the TV show based on the games was accused of causing seizures). However, in the purest technical sense, "Pokemon" does cause cancer. That's because "Pokemon" is also the name of a cancer-causing gene that was recently discovered. In a study published in the January 20 issue of Nature, researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer outline how they isolated the POK Erythroid Myeloid Ontogenic factor--or POKEMON, for short. What's next? A leukemia gene called Dragon Ball Z? A terminal case of Yu-Gi-Oh! Syndrome?

Here's the link to the actual Sloan-Kettering place.

US Foreign Policy: Preventing Perpetual Peace

Hidden in the middle of David Brooks' latest banalism was this disturbing statement:

Their favorite kinds of institutions are the kinds they created in response to the tsunami disaster: the kind with no permanent offices and no permanent staff, the kind that is created to address a discrete problem and then disappear when the problem is over. The phrase for this is coalitions of the willing.

Organizations like the UN and World Court have been formed by nation-states in an attempt to manage international affairs peacefully, in an effort to stop conflict before it starts and provide a forum for fairly resolving all those issues which must be managed on a global scale. Hence, they have been regarded almost universally by theorists of international relations as the only route to a long-term peaceful and just global society. Ad hoc coalitions like the neocons praise can never function in the long term the way a body like the UN can; while they may be of some use in particular cases, rejecting universal organizations in favor of the ad hoc ones is a rejection of the universal humanitarianism Bush claimed to support in his state of the union address.

Good news, bad news

The FCC, now that Michael Powell is gone, won't be appealing to the Supreme Court for permission to basically do away with media ownership restrictions. That's the good side of things.

The bad side is why they made this decision:

Officials said one reason the administration decided not to seek Supreme Court review is that some lawyers were concerned that the case could prompt the justices to review related First Amendment issues in a way that could undermine efforts by the commission to enforce indecency rules against television and radio broadcasters. Over the last year, the agency has issued a record number and size of fines, and has been pressed by some conservative and other advocacy groups to be more aggressive.

Granted, not quite as big a deal, but less respect for the theocrats getting all worked up over a skimpy bathing suit on the OC would've been nice.

That's offensive!

Salman Rushdie on the Enlightenment, freedom, and offended conservatives.

Theodicy

This thoughtful piece in the Guardian comes quite close to my own views.

Surely Professor Dawkins was ... confusing scientific explanation with metaphysical interrogation. Science - atheistical science, if you will - can tell us how the world works, but cannot answer the eternal metaphysical wail: why do we suffer so?

My aphorism is: Science can describe the world of our experience, but philosophy and art are there to ask 'why?'

Stop Propaganda Act

Any speculation on how this is going to be spun?

It's absolutely necessary, of course, and doesn't stand a chance of passing under this administration and this congress. But even just proposing this is an excellent move by the Senate Dems.

'Government'? 'Freedom'?

Thoughtful musings over at Echidne:

One example of this is in the use of the word 'government'. As a crude oversimplification, Americans mean something very different from Europeans when they use this word. For many Americans, the government is a potentially tyrannic meanie that is after the hard-earned money of the tax-payers and has no real reason for existing in the first place. For many Europeans, at least those from the so-called old Europe, the government may be something viewed with a bit of sceptism but it's not seen as inherently different from other organizations human beings create. If governments are not to be wholly trusted, neither are large firms or large churches and so on.

This is all linked to the meaning of the word 'freedom', and this is surely the one word where definitions vary all over the place. Who knows what George Bush has in mind when he talks about freedom? He appears to believe that the god of the Methodists has given it to all the people on this earth, but he has never given a Biblical reference to this promise, nor has he ever explained what he means by freedom. I suspect that he's talking about the freedom of corporations from laws and regulations, not really about the freedom of individuals from exploitation by corporations. His actions support this view more than any other view.

Fair and Balanced Inauguration

Fascinating clip, via Frank Rich.

Must ... choke back ... vomit ...

Via Atrios,

Times insiders say Safire turned down Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s offer to succeed Daniel Okrent as the newspaper’s ombudsman.

Daniel Okrent's nothing amazing, but he's a hell of a lot better than what that shitasstic (note spelling) hack would be.

And the liberation progresses ...

Shouldn't be any surprise that the status of women in Iraq is pretty craptacular.

A year ago, in the weeks after the invasion, hundreds of women marched in the streets outside this hotel in central Baghdad. The women were optimistic, most walked without veils and they made forceful speeches in front of the TV cameras.

Those days of mass protest are over. Today there are barely a dozen women present. Half are veiled and most have come with male relatives or colleagues for protection. It is a quiet indictment of the occupation and underscores the astonishing collapse in security, particularly for women, that it has brought. "Do you feel how threatening it is to go out in the streets? Can you guarantee that you are safe and alive by the end of the day?" asks Yanar Mohammad, the conference organizer and one of the most ardent women's rights activists in Iraq. "It is the insecurity that handicaps the organizing of women."

The few women there describe how things have changed for them since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent rise in Islamic parties. Many more cover their hair now, sometimes in belief, often through peer-group pressure or simply to protect themselves in anonymity. "Veils are imposed on young girls," says Nadam Moaeed. "What do girls understand from this veil? It will have a bad psychological effect. She will become a negative presence in society."

[...]

It was not always this way. In the 1950s, Iraq was the first Arab country to appoint a female government minister. Women worked freely in banks and government and administrative departments and were involved in a vibrant public debate. The changes came in the 1990s, when Saddam began to appease the tribes and the imams. He allowed men to take four wives and ruled there would no longer be any punishment for a man who killed a woman in his family if he suspected her of an "honor crime".

Incidentally, if you haven't seen Osama yet, I highly recommend it. It's an excellent film, but extraordinarily depressing. Like, Requiem for a Dream depressing.

City of WOW

City of Heroes just had a wallpaper contest for the fans -- the results are pretty awesometastic.

Your fingers are incorrect for parking!

Some Germans have done a `study' which `explains' why women `are' bad at things like parallel parking: their ring fingers are often too short! Read about it over at Echidne, which I'm now adding to my blogly rotation.

Be sure to check out the comments, too; came across a link to this largely irrelevant but still interesting article.

More sex and science! Hooray!

Following up on the post none of you read because you all suck, there's a halfway decent article in the NYT that actually presents some variety of perspective.

Cavalcade of gender and science!

Bit of a kerfluffle today in blogland and on the NYT over some Harvard colloquium last week. I suppose, as our resident self-appointed commentator on feminist topics, I should put up something.

Okay, first, a digest of links: Atrios, again, and one more time; Echidne, references by Atrios. Apparently she'll have more later. There are also some inane op-eds in the Times itself, one by an evolutionary biologist who recently wrote a book on sex among animals, and another by one of the authors of the Bell Curve. As Atrios points out, the last one is the sign that this discussion has official jumped the shark, so feel free to not even bother with any of this.

Okay, now, my thoughts. My speciality is no longer politics or economics, but philosophy, and my interest in this debate is the issue -- touched on to some extent by Echidne and the Judson op-ed -- of 'essential' gender or sex differences. My position, following Anne Fausto-Sterling, starts with the observation that, notoriously, we can't study essential differences between groups of humans, simply because we can't isolate a (group of) human subject(s) from their sociological environment, nor from our own background. Prejudice and bias simply creep in too easily. A great example of this is a study I read about a few years back, which purportedly demonstrated an innate difference between the way men and women pursue mates, along pretty classical (and completely bullshit) lines: men show off and compete amongst each other to impress women the most, and a woman chooses from among her suitors for the one who's demonstrated the most impressive qualities. The evidence the authors of the study had? A survey of a couple thousand American college freshman and sophomores.

(Somewhere, there was a mention of current studies by biologists on sexual dimorphism and other clear, dramatic physiological differences between the sexes of other species. The difference between studying essential sexual differences between male and female humans and fruit flies is, obviously, that we're bringing a lot less cultural baggage to the table with the fruit flies. Feminist philosophers of science, and like-minded commentators, have pointed out subtle but telling instances of sexual bias creeping into science, however -- fertilization was traditionally thought of as an active sperm cell penetrating a completely passive egg cell, mirroring Victorian beliefs about proper sexuality, for example, while recent work has shown the egg is almost as active as the sperm in the process. So the alternative below applies to biology more generally, though often the prescription is not as radical as with investigations concerning humans.)

But even more, this inability to get a handle on 'human nature' suggests that trying to work towards such an objective account might be a mistake from the beginning. The alternative Fausto-Sterling suggests is to do away with the essential/environment (or nature/nuture) distinction altogether: a human being (or any organism) is a product of the interaction between genetics and environment in such a way that neither can be considered in isolation. Without the environment, the genes are just long fatty acid chains; and without genes, the potential organism is just a disorganized blob sitting in some surroundings.

One of Atrios' post is an excellent illustration of something similar in an economic context: you can't take either gender discrimination by employers or the path of a woman's career as fundamental, because the two determine each other by their interaction. Hence the proper object of investigation should be the relationship between and interactions of gender and employment -- and how the situation can be rectified -- not assuming one is fundamental and asking how it determines the other.

On the broader question of gender and our society as a whole, I would therefore suggest that it's a mistake to ask, eg, whether fewer women are engineers and scientists because (a) some essential difference in ability or preference, or (b) differential attitudes and treatment of women interested in engineering and science. Instead, ask whether a gender-neutral corps of scientists and engineers would be better (and in what sense of better) than our current non-gender-neutral corps, and how we can go about encouraging (or discouraging, I suppose, if that's the conclusion you ended up with) that gender-neutral corps. Not whether discrimination against a group is 'rationally justified', but whether and how the situation can be changed.

Burning down the house

Here's a bit of literary-ideological analysis of the inaugural speech.

As a rule, I'm not fond of this sort of psychoanalytic method; I feel it's too hard to really get at other people's motivations, thoughts, and feelings. But this is interesting.

The Constituion and Mr. Bush

Juan Cole says it with pictures. Via Salon.

In which I laugh my ass off, but in a depressing fashion

For once, I wish
David Brooks was right, and not a complete tool:

With that speech, President Bush's foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Sounds awesome. Of course, you'd have to be a complete idiot to actually think this administration was going to be anything more than 100% opportunistic about its foreign policy (via Kos):

White House officials said yesterday that President Bush's soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Nor, they say, will it lead to any quick shift in strategy for dealing with countries such as Russia, China, Egypt and Pakistan, allies in the fight against terrorism whose records on human rights and democracy fall well short of the values Bush said would become the basis of relations with all countries.

What can I add to this but HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA?

ewww

You can almost HEAR the disturbing sound of William Safire going down on Bush. I thought this guy was retiring.

Anyway, for those of you who think this linguistic fellatio might actually contain a legitimate dichotomy between the ideals of universal freedom and universal peace, I just wanted to say that I can't think of a single instance where freedom was won through warfare alone. Yes, violence played an important role in razing an undemocratic system in certain instances, but after the government lay smouldering, it was the work of the people to rebuild. And in recent decades, violence hasn't done a lot of liberating; mostly it's been a tool by, and for the ends of, tyrants.

There is no necessary conflict between peace and freedom; and the end of European colonialism and the US civil rights movement suggests peace may be one of the best paths to freedom.

Fucking Safire.

Is there a crisis?

No there is not, sir.

There's Gold In Them Thar Hills!

Something Awful's Comedy Goldmine Wednesday's are a lot like their Photoshop Phridays, except that they usually suck. This week, however, is different!

At Least He Didn't Poison His Opponent Like That Crazy Guy From Ukraine!

Salon has a nice summary of the scandals of Bush's first term. Who knows what he'll do now?!

Fuck EA, Fuck Them In Their Stupid Asses

So, remember how Electronic Arts paid the NFL three hundred million dollars for the exclusive use of the players and teams of the league just when Sega, their closest rival, began to nip at their heels with Sega’s ESPN Football line? Well today EA has entered into a 15-year exclusive deal with ESPN to make games with the ESPN brand. Man, you fuck with EA and they don’t just kill you, they kill your whole family…what a bunch of assholes.

I’ve been on an EA boycott for a while now, and you all should be too. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop playing all games made by EA, just buy them all used at whatever game store you buy from because EA gets no money from used game sales.

This Is A Non-Smoking Planet, Thank You For Your Cooperation

I know you guys check Space.com every day anyway, so this post is probably a waste of everybody's time, but I wanted to let everyone that NASA and the European Space Agency have landed a probe on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, and has been sending back some pretty sweet pictures. Evidently Titan is rocky with liquid methane oceans. Pretty sweet.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Presdent of the Yunitud States

Over at the panda which has left, Jesse has some 'highlights' from W's interview with the Post. Here's the bit that makes me hurt in the soul:

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

This is a vile, vile man.

I was talking to Manda about what kind of scandal could get him thrown out of office, and I honestly don't know. His supporters don't seem to care that he lied to get their children shipped off to Iraq and blown up, or that his new Attorney General thinks torture and the elimination of habeas corpus are just super-duper. At this point, if the White House chef came forward and announced to the world that W eats a live baby for dinner every night, we would see the following reaction from serious conservative 'intellectuals':
1. The chef, originally employed by Clinton, is clearly carrying out a Democrat smear campaign;
2. Even if it was true that W ate live babies for dinner, he was simply carrying out a practice initiated by Bill Clinton, who lied about sex to the American people shortly after eating a DOZEN babies;
3. In our post-September 11th world, we must trust our President to do what needs to be done, even if we find those actions to be unsettling.
And then, the entire South shrugs its shoulders and goes back to such important things as who will be America's Next CEO Supermodel, while I run off to write up lecture notes for this week's classes so I can stave off crushing depression.

Paul O'Neill's half-assed proposal

Paul O'Neill, the former Bush II Treasury Secretary, has an op-ed over the NYT today (meaning Sunday). There are some good bits -- the idea that ' Those of us who are more fortunate can help those who are not.' is rather refreshing. But, on the whole? He still wants mandatory, though government-supplemented, savings by workers in anticipation of their retirement.

Now, why does he want to do away with the perfectly well-functioning current system, in which today's workers support their parents and grandparents? Why is it a problem that today's 'contributions are a tax, not savings'?

Let me define what I mean by financial security. Financial security begins with ownership of real assets; so the money saved each year in this plan would be the property of the person who saved it.

Ummm, no Paul, sorry; not only is that not a definition of financial security, it's not even a necessary condition of financial security. One of the reasons Stalinism has been so appealing to underemployed Eastern Europeans over the last ten years is, in that system, where they owned nothing, they were guaranteed financial security: everyone got a warm apartment and the basic necessities to get by. And, obviously, 'ownership' doesn't come into play there.

Social security is a brilliant, healthy system. Yes, it will require minor tweaks in thirty or forty years, but thus far Americans have always been willing to make those changes, and I expect they will be able to make them in the future. Privatization is a scheme concocted by radical laissez-faire ideologues to shrink the role of government in making sure everyone has a decent life. Don't listen to them, and don't listen to Paul O'Neill's craptacular compromise.

The Counter-Feminist Noble Lie

The Tool's latest is a nice illustration of what I call the Counter-Feminist Noble Lie, which runs as follows: Ladies! That biological clock is ticking! Better have kids when you're young, and put that career on hold, or you'll wind up barren and miserable!

The first, and most obvious, problem with this is that it presumes women want both children and a profession; and many of those who end up not having children will suffer 'a profound, soul-encompassing sadness'. Yes, I'm sure Gallup asked whether those women who never had children experienced deep Angst over their decision. For my purposes here, though, I'll assume most people would, ceteris paribus, like both a few (1-3) children and moderate career success. I will also readily concede that the current model for the life of a professional is based a man dedicating himself to his job for several decades, while his wife maintains the house and raises his children; the gendered terms in there are deliberate.

Now, let's take a look at The Tool's central argument for the Noble Lie:

For example, consider a common life sequence for an educated woman. She grows up and goes to college. Perhaps she goes to graduate school. Then, during her most fertile years, when she has the most energy for child-rearing, she gets a job. Then, sometime after age 30, she marries. Then, in her mid-30's, when she has acquired the maturity and character to make intelligent career choices, she takes time off to raise her kids.

In short: 'Being a stay-at-home mom takes lots of energy, so you'd better do it when you're young, ie, in your 20s! Lots of tough decisions to make in your career, so better do it when you're in your 30s and 40s, and you know what exactly you're looking for!' The thing is, both full-time childcare and pursuing a professional life require lots of time, lots of energy, and lots of tough decisions; his argument is, to use some debate lingo, not unique to his conclusion -- an argument of the same form leads to the opposite conclusion.

Why is this actually a lie, and not just a crappy argument? Because, for a couple of twentysomethings who want both a couple of kids and a couple of successful careers, there are many many more options than `she should raise the babies now' and `she should raise the babies later'. For example, here's what I can imagine as a perfectly plausible day in my life, ten years hence:
In the mornings, my partner makes sure the kids are awake, fed, and get to school, then goes off to her office -- she's an up-and-coming doctor or lawyer or engineer, and they start bright and early. A short while later, I head off to the university, where I'm a few years into a tenure-track position: my day consists of teaching a few classes, starting around midmorning, a little time grading and meeting with students, and a lot of time doing research. Midafternoon, the kids are out of school and either show up at my office or I'm waiting at home for them. We spend the afternoon together, and I have dinner ready when my partner gets home from work. We eat and spend time together as a family, then I have to spend the evening working on my current article, while my partner enjoys her time with the kids. Once they're in bed, she and I have our time together.

Obviously, a schedule like this requires the flexibility of an academic career, so that I can be home early in the afternoon most days; a pair of, say, a doctor and a lawyer might not be so fortunate. The solution, I feel, is to change the model of career development -- to move away from 'the professional man supported by his wife', and not offer women 'graduate school for homemakers', but instead give young professionals the sort of scheduling leeway they need to divide their time evenly between job and family. In this model, professional development and family development are both equally important components of one's personal development, irregardless of gender.

In other words, women -- and men -- should be able to have both a career and a family, if that's what they want; not terrified by the spectre of empty nest syndrome and falling into the old pattern of domestic wife supported by her professional husband. Once a couple is in that pattern, it's hard -- especially for her, so many years out of school and so set in one routine -- to get back out of it. As the Chronicle of Higher Education documented a few months ago, once someone leaves school for more than a year or two, their ability to return drops spectacularly, whether they leave after their high school diploma, bachelor's degree, or master's degree. This is why the supposed tension between family and career is so insidious anti-feminist.

Even more on Creationism ...

Jesse has an excellent post on Creationism and schools over at the panda which has left.

What came through most clearly in textual interpretation of religion was how little we actually discuss what was in the core of those texts. Popular religion exists through understandings, not readings. In much the same way, a tradition of understanding through repetition rather than exploration and analysis leads one to assume other traditions with hierarchies of knowledge (the sages and scholars alongside 'the rest of us') work in much the same way. 'Understandings' combat with each other, and therefore science, which is rigorously impersonal in a way that religion isn't, becomes a simple series of 'understandings', and it simply works the way they understand (read: desire) it to.

Just to develop my bizarre proposals for seconday education even further, I would also be in favor of having religion classes in high school as electives. Not theological indoctrination classes, but classes on the history of a religion, its influence on the culture it was practiced in, and various theologies which have developed in the religion. This has been tried, occasionally, but usually it's taught and attended by religious people who turn it into an unconstitutional theological indoctrination class.

Intelligent design and schools

I've been thinking a bit about Creationism and Intelligent Design the past few days -- I think there was an article in Salon this weekend, or late last week, that might be what got me started. But I'm not going to bother tracking it down: all you need to know is that there is a drive, burnishing over the past few years, to supplant the status quo in high school biology classes with a `balanced' presentation of `several alternative theories of species development' and some of the `scientific criticisms' of Darwinian Natural Selection. The scare quotes are there because the only alternative that ever comes up is Intelligent Design, and the criticisms come from fringe wackos, not actual mainstream biologists who, for example, get published in peer-reviewed journals.

If you don't know, Intelligent Design is basically a `guided evolution' theory: when it's actually presented as a scientific theory, and not the ravings of some lunatic Christian, it sounds just like Natural Selection, only it picks out certain features of organisms which it claims are too complicated to have happened by chance, and then hypothesizes/concludes some supernatural intelligent agent was responsible for somehow intervening in evolution so these features would come about.

In and of itself, it's a philosophically interesting, defendable theory. I don't think it holds up, but that's only incidental to my point here. You see, I'm broadly in favor of the inclusion of Intelligent Design, along with Natural Selection, in the standard high school biology curriculum.

Breathe. I can explain.

What I do not want is a platform in classrooms for idiots to spout off their own nonsensical religious beliefs. But a discussion of Intelligent Design, and the controvery surrounding theories of evolution more generally, would be a fantastic chance to get teenagers to think about what science actually is: what a scientific theory is (and is not); what constitutes evidence for and against a theory; maybe even the place science holds in our society and culture. In a sense, I want the current curriculum, where students learn about Darwin's finches and so on over the course of a week or so, but then a week of just a little philosophy of science.

What I like most about this idea (besides exposing teenagers to philosophy) is that it appears to be a concession to the Intelligent Design movement, but might serve to undermine it -- let this crappy idea wither in the sun, or be left on the shelf of the marketplace of ideas, whatever metaphor you prefer. It probably wouldn't actually work that way, but a philosophy can dream. Even if it doesn't kill off ID, I still think this plan's ability to foster discussion among teenagers about intellectual topics is fantastic.

And It's Official

Christine Gregoire has been certified as the next governor of Washington State as Dino Rossi sucks on eggs. I'll be really interested to see how this effects the election in four years...

Taxonomy Of Nerddom

I know not everyone follows Penny Arcade, so for those that missed this a few days ago, here is the heirarchy of nerdity. I think I'm somewhere in the middle of the chart in terms of actual nerd points, which I think supports my claim to the nerd thrown because I have enough nerd cred to relate to the majority of nerds while remaining unnerdy enough to have some outside perspective to my nerdity. Like any good King, of course, I would have plenty of advisors both more and less nerdy than I.

Song of The American Fat Lady

Well, I'm back in New Jersey and back in classes, so it's time for me to get back in the saddle of blogging.

First up, today we can celebrate the end of the search for WMD in Iraq with nothing to show for it. Sure, the Right gave up on WMD in Iraq a long time ago and moved on to other justifications, but the bottom line is that this WAS the main reason given for starting a war with Iraq and it's turned out to be a colossal screw up at best or a devious lie at worst. What's the death count in Iraq at now? 1200 with ten times that many injured? Iraq's threat to us was in passing on weapons they couldn't use to terrorists that could. The weapons, and therefore the threat, simply didn't exist.

Imagine this country today where rather than getting bogged down in this quagmire we had simply worked with special forces around the world for several small engagements with terrorist camps without full scale invasion of the country. Our military wouldn't be stretched paper thin; we wouldn't be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a fruitless exercise; our soldiers would be safer and America would be equally as safe. Even though we'd still probably have a shitty president, the fact that of those two possible worlds we're in this one is criminal.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Where Was God?

William Safire (I can't wait until this tool is gone from the NYT Op-ed page forever) offers his own 'solution' to the Problem of Evil:

Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.)

Now, in regards to the tsunami: maybe it's just my crazy atheist reasoning, but I think it'd be better if God hadn't caused a giant wall of water to fall on several hundred thousand people, even if most of them got to go to heaven. Presumably, they're going to heaven because they're good people, not because of the giant wall of water thing. If you get something you were going to get anyway, it's not exactly a reward.

National Review solves the Problem of Evil

Well, Happy New Year and all that. I thought I'd get us started again with one of my patented Long-ass Very Boring Posts on Philosophy Stuff You Don't Care About. In particular, the Problem of Evil.

The PoE is one of the major arguments against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent, Christian-type God; I personally find it quite persuasive. The dilemma goes something like this:

1. If God were benevolent and all-powerful, he would not allow pointless harm to come to human beings.
2. Events like the tsunami and diseases like AIDS or Ebola cause pointless harm to human beings.
3. Hence God is not both benevolent and all-powerful

I'm not going to defend this by really fleshing it out in great detail -- there are some obvious objects one can make to this setup. But what's important is the contradiction between the loving, paternal nature of God according to Christians et al., and the gratuitous suffering inflicted on humanity by nature. There's evil, and yet God is supposedly not evil.

Well, Michael Novak (I think he's the son or something of Bob Novak, that op-ed guy who blew Valerie Plame's cover) has solved the Problem of Evil. His response has two parts. First, he notices that the people who use the Problem of Evil as an argument against the existence of God are using it AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF GOD! Those damn sneaky atheists, trying to use an apparent contradiction to refute an idea!

Then, secondly, Novak points out that God is the creator and so, like, a lot more powerful than us and stuff, and we shouldn't go around judging him, because he can kick our collective asses. Hence, he has a far superior love for any human than we do. That's right -- all those kids who were swept out to sea and drowned, or instantaneously crushed when a 30-foot-tall wall of water landed on them, are an example not of cruelty and unnecessary suffering, but of God's perfect love. Because, you see, God knows (or knew) all those children he killed personally, not as the abstraction you or I know them.

Thank God for mercilessly slaughtering 150,000 people! Hallelujah!