The Old Post Office

Manchester Town Hall

Oh hai B&W reading peeples.

Washington!

Where’dja go, you ask eagerly.

Well to start I walked through part of Arlington, because I felt more like being outside and walking then I felt like getting on the Metro. At Pentagon City I decided to take a deep breath and try to figure out the Metro. I had about six internal temper tantrums in the process of doing so, but I did it in the end. Went to L’Enfant Square – don’t ask me why; it seemed like a good idea at the time – bumbled around for awhile getting oriented – then managed that and went to the Smithsonian “castle”, which reminded me pleasantly of Manchester Town Hall – the Natural History Museum – around the White House -

The south side first, then the north, and on the north side there was a little gaggle of Christians standing in the middle of Pennsylvana Avenue opposite the gates, with a guy shouting Jesus stuff  into a microphone. They have a good sound system: I’d been hearing the guy for a couple of blocks. I fumed rather, and chatted with a cop about how rude they are, then I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue to Lafayette Park making the blah blah blah gesture at them. The guy stopped and then said, “why don’t you join us?” and I shouted – I was a few yards away – “because you’re driving me nuts, and you’re making way too much noise.” That was satisfying. Futile, but satisfying.

Then I passed the AFL-CIO building and got all excited about some murals I saw inside, and went in to ask if I could look at them. I could except I couldn’t, because the room they’re in was being set up for a meeting, but there was one in the lobby, and besides I got a visitor’s label which I’m going to keep forever, and a nice talk with the union guy at the front desk. Union!

Then Dupont Circle and environs, then the Old Post Office including the tower. I love the Old Post Office. I think it and Manchester Town Hall were separated at birth.

And I’m at it – on the way to DC to talk about women in secularism.

It’s cloudy. Phooey. It’s been cloudless for days but now it’s cloudy. Seattle is interesting from above, and I always like being able to look at it. Oh well.

On the airport train I saw a LOLcats ad that started “Oh hai train peeples” – which made me laugh despite boredom with LOLcats in general.

Oh hai airport peeples.

Soon it will be airplane peeples. Then hotel peeples. Then conference peeples. If you’re one of the latter, say hello. Or oh hai.

Yikes. One of those days.

Two tweets right on top of each other but arbitrarily…and yet how connected they are.

London Complains‏@LondonComplains @CathElliott Well grumble ye not. When London’s declared a commie femicunt-free zone you won’t be able to get past the barricades anyway. x
Retweeted by CathElliott

Jessica Ahlquist‏@jessicaahlquist“@tmsmith123: @jessicaahlquist it would so make my day if I heard you got gang rape by a bunch of black guys with AIDS.”

[Jessica quoting @tmsmith123]

Uh oh…

A 15-year-old housewife lied to her husband when she told him she was having an affair with her uncle, a court heard today.

The husband of the Syrian teenager lodged a complaint at Al Qusais Police Station on November 14 after noticing the uncle’s number on her mobile phone.

When he confronted his wife she said her uncle often called her to flirt and that the two had been meeting for sex while he was not at home.

When investigators questioned the teenager she told them that her uncle – a 38-year-old from Saudi Arabia – had taken advantage of her young age and the problems she was experiencing in her marriage to convince her to have sex with him.

The uncle, you’ll be astonished to hear, denied it. Then – hurrah! – science backed him up.

DNA tests showed the uncle had not had sex with the teenager, so charges against him were dropped.

Say what?

How the hell could a DNA test show that?! What DNA test is there that could show that?

That’s some voodoo science they got going there.

Prosecutors said the teenager insisted on her version of events throughout most of their investigations, but eventually confessed to filing a false report to authorities.

Dubai Juvenile Court is scheduled to deliver a verdict on May 22.

That “15-year-old housewife” is probably a dead girl walking.

H/t Roger

I’ve talked about Sally Haslanger’s “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)” before – last October – but I’m off to DC tomorrow for the Women in Secularism conference so I feel like talking about it again.

In graduate school I was told by one of my teachers that he had “never seen a first rate woman [in] philosophy and never expected to because women were incapable of having seminal ideas.” I was the butt of jokes when I received a distinction on my prelims, since it seemed funny to everyone to suggest I should get a blood test to determine if I was really a woman. In a seminar in philosophical logic, I was asked to give a presentation on a historical figure when none of the other (male) students were, later to learn that this was because the professor assumed I’d be writing a thesis on the history of philosophy.

You know Rawls and the veil of ignorance?

John Scalzi offers the same metaphor but in a different vocabulary.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

One of the most painful passages to write in Does God Hate Women? was the one about women accused of being witches in Ghana. It drew on news reports, like this from the New Jersey Star Ledger:

Near death after a 30-mile, weeklong walk, Tarana says she arrived at the Gambaga camp, which has sheltered accused witches since the late 18th century. Chief Ganbaraaba, she says, took her in, had her wounds tended to, and sent for Tarana’s children.

Not one has come.

You can see why that segment was tough going.

E. J. Dionne, pleased with himself, tells us he’s not going to leave the Catholic church.

I’ve never been a fan of Dionne’s. He’s so centrist, so conventional, so smugly mainstream, so insistent on received wisdom.

So it figures that he would get all bristly at the idea that the Catholic church isn’t a wholly admirable institution.