David Futrelle is WRONG

I have caught him in a gross error. He notices that MRA Paul Elam detests faux feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, and makes an erroneous generalization.

I turns out that Elam is one of the very few carbon-based life forms in this sector of the galaxy to actually believe that Sommers, who’s devoted most of her career to bashing feminists, actually is the feminist she pretends to be.

This is incorrect. A great many carbon-based life forms actually enthusiastically present Sommers as the very model of a modern feminist, and are disingenuously dumbfounded if you explain to them that she’s actually an anti-feminist. Unfortunately, that list of carbon-based life forms includes surprisingly many high-profile atheists, including Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins.

I think criticizing Futrelle instantly qualifies me for an official MRA membership card, doesn’t it?

STEM+Liberal Arts

Gosh, @UMMorris ought to just plaster this article by Loretta Jackson-Hayes everywhere, mailing it out to the parents of prospective students. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training, she says. Yes, we do. I agree with every point she makes. Well, except maybe the part where she mentions Carly Fiorina as a good example. But the rest…

Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections of corpses enabled his incredible drawings of the human figure. When introducing the iPad 2, Jobs, who dropped out of college but continued to audit calligraphy classes, declared: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” (Indeed, one of Apple’s scientists, Steve Perlman, was inspired to invent the QuickTime multimedia program by an episode of “Star Trek.”)

Many in government and business publicly question the value of such an education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment. Some medical schools have also caught on to this. The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has been admitting an increasing number of applicants with backgrounds in the humanities for the past 20 years. “It doesn’t make you a better doctor to know how fast a mass falls from a tree,” Gail Morris, head of the school’s admissions, told Newsweek. “We need whole people.”

By all means, let’s grow our STEM graduates as aggressively as possible. But let’s make sure they also have that all-important grounding in the liberal arts. We can have both.

Now we just have to persuade the non-STEM side of campus that grounding their students in a little more science and math would be a good thing, and we can take over the world.

Standing in a weird place on the Democratic nomination

Well, this is awkward. I don’t particularly like Hillary Clinton, but most of her supporters seem cool. I very much like Bernie Sanders, but a lot of his supporters seem to be assholes. So what am I to do?

The latest incident is that Sanders’ followers shouted Dolores Huerta off the stage when she offered to help translate at a Nevada caucus. Dolores Huerta? Civil rights and labor leader? The so-called Democratic Socialists chanted “English only!” at a woman who is a prominent activist for unions, equal rights for women and minorities, and for a more just immigration system?

Who the fuck are these people?

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Angry white guys

Sady Doyle hits another one out of the park. She discusses the phenomenon of the angry white male public intellectual and their anxieties.

Rather, the root at the problem of this kind of online harassment is that political and intellectual authority has for centuries been the domain of white men. The rise of feminism and civil rights; increased cultural awareness of Islamophobia; and the very real possibility that a woman may soon break the 200-year-plus lock that men have had on the United States presidency are all challenging that authority. Intellectual spaces have become more accessible for everyone. And that’s caused some men to wield their authority more anxiously, and brutally, to those who challenge it.

These anxieties are profound and pervasive. We’re used to seeing them expressed by people with the luxury of anonymity and unaccountability. To see them coming from “legitimate” sources is depressing. But there is an upside. By bringing online harassment out into the open and signing their real names to it, Dawkins, the Bernie Bros and others have let us know that the people ready to attack anyone who threatens the status quo are not necessarily strangers or faceless losers. They can also be people with real power.

That shows us exactly how entrenched ancient attitudes about authority really are. What’s at stake is not simply one election, or what a few people have to say on the Internet. It’s whether marginalized people have a place in the public conversation at all.

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Hype alert

deadpool

My wife and I are going to see Deadpool tonight, I think (this may be one time the theater is overcrowded here in Morris). I’m concerned. This is one movie I’ve heard a lot of gushing hype about, and I have high expectations.

That usually means I’m going to be grievously disappointed.

Stay tuned, I’m going in to the 7:00 showing.


I’m back!

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