Debate, Gender, and Authority

When I wrote about debate as a poor tool for building knowledge a couple of months ago, I left one issue implicit rather than explicit. I did this because it would have derailed discussion around the main point. Why? Because there are issues of parity in debate as well as almost anywhere else.

I argue very well in text. When I set my sights on demolishing what I consider to be an unfounded position (as opposed to discussing, say, what we do and don’t know about a topic), I frequently get comments from people who say they don’t want to get on my bad side. I hear from friends that they don’t want to get on my bad side.

People who don’t like me call it propaganda. They don’t say I’m bad at it. They don’t engage with my arguments. They just suggest that I don’t “play fair”. You know, they lost the argument, but not because they were wrong.

On top of being able to construct convincing, even devastating arguments, I have speech and theater training. I understand how speech, appearance, and body language are projected and read. I’ve rehearsed all of those until they’re largely under my conscious control. As long as I have a microphone to overcome the fact that my voice doesn’t carry, I do well on a stage.

Despite all that, I never get asked to debate.
Continue reading “Debate, Gender, and Authority”

Debate, Gender, and Authority
{advertisement}

The Reading List, 5/14/2014

I share a lot of links on Twitter and Facebook that I don’t blog about because I don’t have much to add. The reading list is a periodic feature where I share those links with my blog audience too. Of course, you’re still welcome to follow me on Twitter.

Around FtB

The Wider Web

  • Most Fitness Apps Don’t Use Proven Motivational Techniques–“Creating a good motivational app isn’t simple, Conroy notes. For instance, people need different motivation aids to start exercising, and then to continue once that becomes routine.”
  • Finnish Weird–“This [free] publication introduces you to suomikumma, “Finnish Weird”, showcases a few of its bright stars, and also gives you a couple of short stories to read.”
  • In Greece v Galloway, Even Kagan Just Doesn’t Get It–“How does a round robin of various religious prayers and secular invocations at city council meetings fix the problem of making a single meeting welcoming to all citizens?”
  • Why There’s So Much Confusion Over Nutrition and Health–“In reality, there’s significant agreement on diet and health issues among experts, but the general public is conflicted. So why are we so confused when experts agree?”
  • Call Me Crazy: Why Sanism Matters to Queer and Feminist Activists–“Indeed, some of the most common reasons for treatment in insane asylums in early medical history were “sexual perversion”, masturbation, and homosexual tendencies.”
  • Judicial Hijinks in Effort to Kill Walker Criminal Probe and Destroy Evidence–“Perhaps even more astoundingly, Randa ordered prosecutors to destroy all evidence gathered in the investigation.”
  • Lying to Men–“I have been lying to men since I was old enough to know the difference between truth and lies.”
  • How Internet Trolls Improved My Self Esteem–“Back when the insults began in earnest, it would have been shockingly easy to hurt my feelings. What I realized, though, was that the trolls were so terrible at it.”
  • White House solar panels power up–“Obama will – once again – bypass a deadlocked Congress and use his executive authority to announce $2bn funding for energy-saving measures at federal government buildings, as well as new financing and training programmes for solar installations.”
  • FBI investigating Bundy supporters in BLM dispute–“Bundy supporters have insisted in emails and calls to 8 News NOW that no one in the crowd pointed weapons at BLM or Metro, but officers told the I-Team that is exactly what they saw, that many with guns set up behind women and children.”
  • Axes of Access Don’t Intersect for the Disabled Patient–“A person with multiple sclerosis (MS) can run into these poor fits between environment and form at any turn of the road or the wheelchair, but the last place one might expect a difficulty is in the healthcare environment.”
  • Are you an atheist? Get mad at the US supreme court. Believer? You, too–“And it will only intensify the clashes between those who want to invoke specific deities, and those who have amorphous or other religious beliefs – as if both of those groups weren’t preparing for future battles over prayer already.”
  • A modern pope gets old school on the Devil–“Largely under the radar, theologians and Vatican insiders say, Francis has not only dwelled far more on Satan in sermons and speeches than his recent predecessors have, but also sought to rekindle the Devil’s image as a supernatural entity with the forces­ of evil at his beck and call.”
The Reading List, 5/14/2014

Meet Lady Dunya

On Saturday, I spent a good chunk of my day making grenadine from scratch. The process involved making pomegranate molasses (from juice because I did have one or two other things to do that day). I also made lemon poppy seed muffins with the zest and extra juice of the lemons, because I had an hour to spare in the kitchen, but I haven’t settled on a recipe I’m entirely happy with there, so I’m not sharing.

The grenadine, though? I’m more than entirely happy. I was a little dubious about the rosewater when I read the recipe, but it took the grenadine from “This is a very nice pomegranate syrup” to “I want to put this on everything and eat it. We should get some vanilla ice cream.”

I didn’t actually get the ice cream. Continue reading “Meet Lady Dunya”

Meet Lady Dunya

When They Called Me, "Rasta"

Last week, Shelley Segal posted a video from her new album. The song is “Morocco”, and the video was shot in a market. I’m pretty sure I smelled the food when I watched it.

I have a weakness for footage of Mediterranean bazaars. The food, the clothing, the music from happier pieces of my childhood and adolescence without the dust, the din of voices, the crowds that I have a harder time handling now.

Then there was Shelley and the song. I particularly like Shelley as a live performer, and this song captures her energy better than I think her older recordings do. It’s always nice to see the face of someone you’ve gotten to talk to and like too. It made her more of a proxy for me in the Moroccan market, a sense added to by the fact that I would stand out there in some of the same ways she did, though not necessarily the ways featured in the lyrics.

The song itself has come in for some criticism from Moroccans, and Shelley has been attacked, for the fact that the lyrics deal with drug use, poverty, and sexual harassment. In part, I get it. I sympathize. When something is titled “U.S.A.” and covers materialist consumption, contempt for the poor, and bible thumpers, I know it’s giving a skewed version of the reality of my country. Those things are there, but they aren’t everything.

On the other hand, I also know that what someone sees of a country they visit depends on who they are. I’ve received a discount on my lodging, had servers and shopkeepers bring up local art and music events, and had conversations about politics and history when I’ve traveled because I’m not “one of those Americans”. What kind I am, I’m not sure, but people obviously make judgments about what I’ll be interested in based on how I look and carry myself. Sometimes, they’re even right. When they’re wrong, it can make an interesting story.

So when I hear Shelley’s song, I don’t hear someone saying this is what defines Morocco. I hear someone saying, “I went to Morocco with dreadlocks, a guitar, and a lip piercing. Here is what they said when they called me, ‘Rasta’.” That isn’t just not the whole of Morocco. It’s a slice of Morocco that very few people visiting would get to see.

“Morocco” isn’t so much a picture of how one tourist viewed a country as it is a story of how one country viewed a tourist. As a fellow tourist and a person who loves story, that makes the song worthwhile to me, even as I understand that people in that country may object.

When They Called Me, "Rasta"

Research, Advocacy, and Services

As he did last year, my husband is participating in the MS 150 this year to raise funds for–here, I’ll let him tell you:

Why I joined the movement

Having multiple sclerosis means you can wake up with blurred vision. Or your memory may fail you for no apparent reason. Or that you may not always be able to walk. The symptoms of MS are different for everyone — the only certainty is that it will affect another person every hour of every day.

Why I ride

I’ve registered for the MS 150 because I love to bicycle and I believe that the National MS Society performs valuable services that deserve to be supported.

Why you should sponsor me

The money I raise for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society by riding in the MS 150 will be used to fund cutting-edge research, drive change through advocacy, facilitate professional education and provide programs and services that help people with MS and their families move their lives forward.

In a perfect world, medical research and assistance wouldn’t need to be funded by unpredictable donations from the public, fueled by showy spectacles of bike riding events, but as long as it is I’ll be here to give my support to people in need.

He takes the fundraising part of this as seriously as he takes his riding. He raised $1,000 last year and is looking to do the same this year. He’s nearly 75% funded, with a fair number of those donations coming from our local atheist community. If this is your sort of thing, please consider helping him meet his goal.

Research, Advocacy, and Services

Let's Call It a Hitler

So by now you’ve probably seen that Ricky Gervais is once again desperately clinging to a word that he desperately needs to…well, for some reason anyway, I’m sure. I first saw it on Facebook:

If you grabbed Hitler and shouted “stop killing innocent people you cunt”, someone on Facebook would call you out on your sexist language.

As I pointed out there, if you grabbed Hitler and shouted at him, people would rightly point out that he’s dead and hasn’t been killing people for nearly 70 years, which just raises the next question: What are you really doing that’s so vitally important you can’t spare a moment to deal with sexism?

When Ophelia posted more of Gervais’s “defense”, such as it is, it struck me how hard he was working to defend something that’s fundamentally useless. It just doesn’t work as a serious epithet, unless your entire point is the misogyny. It’s even more useless for a comedian. Continue reading “Let's Call It a Hitler”

Let's Call It a Hitler

The Reading List, 5/11/2014

I share a lot of links on Twitter and Facebook that I don’t blog about because I don’t have much to add. The reading list is a periodic feature where I share those links with my blog audience too. Of course, you’re still welcome to follow me on Twitter.

Around FtB

  • A PSA for All My Dear Feminist Allies–“And what is really painful is not only that you correlate people like me and sexists, but that you use US to insult THEM.”
  • The Legend of Ben–“The creepypasta is itself a masterful work; it’s obvious a lot of effort went into building the narrative elements with the amount of actual hacking that would have to have been done to make certain effects happen in the game.”
  • I Don’t Apologize For My Privilege Either–“But guess what? No one has ever asked me to in the world I live in, which, unlike that kid, is not made up of easily vanquished straw men.”
  • Intern full-time at the Sunday Assembly – for £20 a week–“You’d think a group that cared about this as much as Jones claimed the SA did would get the message – it was, after all, the message most stressed in the piece that made him contact me.”

The Wider Web

  • You’ve been accepted to graduate school! Now here are some sexist comments–“I wonder if all women, beaming with joyous success, filled with a sense of accomplishment having just achieved the near impossible, heard these comments when they told their friends, family, and peers their wonderful news.”
  • 23 Ways Feminism Has Made the World a Better Place for Men–“Over the course of their lengthy legal careers, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband joined forces only once, to advocate for single men.”
  • Stop making fun of Christie for being fat–“It’s a lesson every heavy kid learns in homeroom: the only thing people hate more than a fat person is a humorless fat person. You better at least pretend to be in on the joke.”
  • “Why do Muslim women accept and believe these things anyway?”–“That the question itself, framed with such an air of bafflement, implying weakness and stupidity on the part of its subjects, that implies also an air of smugness, superiority on the part of its questioner, preempts in its very tone the concept of there being real, compelling reasons outside the scope of the absurdity the question assumes.”
  • Y All the Hype?–“The Huffington Post quoted one of the studies’ authors as saying that these ‘special’ genes ‘may play a large role in differences between males and females.’ Yet what the Nature articles actually show is the exact opposite.”
  • What’s holding women back in the workplace? It’s the sexism, stupid–“For example, women are constantly being exhorted to self-promote so that supervisors and managers notice their skills. However, while women who self-promote may be considered more competent, they are also considered less likeable and are less likely to be hired.”
  • Here, A Hypocrite Lives: I Probably Get It Wrong On Leslie Jones But I Tried–“Surely, she seems to be saying, there’s a world where someone like her can be what she is while simultaneously being desirable (I think she missed the section on colonialism in the bookstore, too).”
  • Supporting Diversity – Con or Bust–“Initially Loncon 3 has donated five new attending memberships to Con or Bust, and has agreed to donate up to another 20 to match donations from our members.”
  • 10 Simple Words Every Girl Should Learn–“I routinely find myself in mixed-gender environments (life) where men interrupt me. Now that I’ve decided to try and keep track, just out of curiosity, it’s quite amazing how often it happens.”
  • Plan B One-step Emergency Contraceptive 1 Tablet–Now available on Amazon and at a good price. No need to deal with “conscientious” pharmacists or drug stores.
  • Concern for Equality Linked to Logic, Not Emotion–“Some respondents reacted more strongly than others — hence the high versus low justice sensitivity — and an analysis of the high sensitivity individuals’ brain activity showed that they were processing the images in the parts of the brain where logic and rationality live.” [Take fMRI studies with a grain of salt, but this is an interesting avenue for further research.]
  • A Better Life: The Film by Chris Johnson–“I want to change the way the world sees atheists, and the way atheists see each other and the world around them.”
The Reading List, 5/11/2014

Saturday Storytime: Falling From Earth to Haphazard Sky (Tadpole Remix)

I was flipping through a bunch of recently published F&SF stories, waiting for a title to catch my eye when a name caught my eye instead. E. Catherine Tobler. Checked the blog. Nope, hadn’t featured one of her stories before. Then I read this one and, oh, yes, that was going to change. Only on looking at her website did I realize I’d tweeted a piece from her on the new SFWA bulletin shortly before. It’s a pleasure to be able to feature her fiction.

He isn’t adjusting well, they say.

They want to observe him. They want him to come in, so he isn’t always so alone in the house he called home. He’s walking the meadows to mush, his neighbors say. Spends all night spinning circles in the grass.

They wonder at his pat answers. His time in the station–two years, he is reminded, reminded of investments in time and money–should have left a significant, perceptible change upon him. They slide him back into the scanner to look inside every nook and cranny.

He recalls with chilling precision the way, in school, a frog upon a black wax tray was placed before him. Spread upon its back, the frog’s legs pinned to the wax, belly pale and bulbous. Swollen with preservative fluids. He closes his eyes and he can smell that smell, can taste it in the back of his throat. Closes his eyes and can remember the tug of frog skin perceived through the length of scalpel. They don’t cut him open, but he feels the same tug.

They slice him into monochromatic layers, thread-thin. Sagittal, coronal, transverse. They disassemble and reassemble and ponder and question. He is no different, they say. But he must be! they say.

He feels the motion of the galaxy (falling, one into another) and the slide of one planet through the gravitational plane of another–so far distant it impacts nothing, nothing but him–and he cannot tell them. He feels the endless suck of a black hole, feels a speck of debris caught in the event horizon; this debris possesses a desire to be at long last swallowed whole yet holds the knowledge that it never will be. Forever suspended.

They ponder his brain and his heart, but never his courage. He wants them to ask the questions they don’t, the questions he cannot put into any kind of proper words. Those words have not reached this planet yet, but are streaming ever closer. Light year by light year, invisible through space, but en route. He feels that tug, too.

Keep reading.

Saturday Storytime: Falling From Earth to Haphazard Sky (Tadpole Remix)

"Atheist Art" Amy Davis Roth on Atheists Talk

So much of the history of Western art, particularly what we refer to as “fine art”, is tied up with religion. In the last few hundred years, we’ve seen much more art that exists without reference to any gods, but we still see very little art that is expressly atheist in nature.

Amy Davis Roth, aka Surly Amy, has been working to change that. You probably know her from her Surly-Ramics, ceramic jewelry carrying atheist and pro-science messages and pictorial designs . Recently she’s been painting more, including iconographic flowers that sold in the art show at last month’s American Atheists National Convention. For the last couple of years, she’s also been heading up a team of atheist, humanist, and skeptic artists at Mad Art Lab on the Skepchick network.

This Sunday, she joins us to talk about what motivates her to create art and what we may be looking for as atheism develops an art of its own.

Related Links:

Listen to AM 950 KTNF this Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio at 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to [email protected] during the live show. If you miss the live show, listen to the podcast later.

Follow Atheists Talk on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates. If you like the show, consider supporting us with a one-time or sustaining donation.

"Atheist Art" Amy Davis Roth on Atheists Talk

TBT: Negotiables

This post was first published in April 2009. It astounds me how many people continue, years later, to think this is about some specific behavior or another instead of about consent.

Having been mostly away from the internet for the last couple of weeks, I’m late to the party as usual, but I still think there’s something that needs to be said about the reception that Sheril of The Intersection received at Discover Blogs. Well, not so much about the reception itself. Sheril said just about everything that needed to be said about that. Scicurious’s take on the incident is well worth reading, as well, as is DrugMonkey’s commentary on why this should and does matter to men too.

So after all that, and everything else that’s been said, what’s left to talk about? Maybe the fact that every single time a discussion like this occurs, someone wants to know when compliments are appropriate. Sure, the temptation is there to dismiss the questions as distractions from the discussion at hand, but it is a real question for many people. Some of those comments are honest cris de coeur. And the conflicting responses, plus the occasional “never outside a relationship” aren’t helpful.

The real answer is both blindingly simple and incredibly difficult in practice: it’s negotiable. Continue reading “TBT: Negotiables”

TBT: Negotiables