Negation

Two more of the people who were killed in the Nairobi attack: Elif Yavuz and Ross Langdon.

Elif Yavuz was a malaria specialist working in Tanzania. The Johns Hopkins News-Letter reports:

This evening, the Hopkins community learned that Elif Yavuz, an alumna of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was killed in the terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall this week. More than 60 people, including Yavuz’s partner Ross Langdon, have been confirmed dead so far.

“The entire SAIS community mourns the loss of Elif, who committed her all-too-brief life to serving others around the world. We express our deepest condolences to Elif’s family and friends,” SAIS Dean Vali Nasr wrote in an email to the SAIS community.

Yavuz, a 33 year-old Dutch citizen of Turkish descent, was a malaria specialist working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. [Read more…]

“I’m not interested in teaching books by women”

Then via PZ a brilliantly transgressive and original Canadian guy who writes novels and got a gig teaching novels at the University of Toronto despite no PhD. He talked to Emily M Keeler for a series she does for a website at Random House, nicely titled Hazlitt.

I’ve just moved, so my library at home is unfortunately in storage. A thousand, maybe twelve hundred books are in storage. The books here, this tends to be what I teach. These are, of course, the treasured Proust, one of my great joys is not only having read Proust but having read him twice, and having listened to the audio CD twice. There’s two versions, one’s 50 hours and one’s 150 hours. They’re both dazzling. I like volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s the most entertaining, it’s the funniest. It’s very, very funny about human vanity, particularly gay vanity.

But the photo under that shows the Random House edition of Proust, which of course is a translation. It’s a little odd to say you’ve “read Proust” just like that when you’ve read him only in translation. It’s not odd in casual conversation of course, but when you’re talking for publication and you teach at a university – well I would think you’d be aware that reading a translation isn’t just straightforwardly reading the author.

But that’s not the interesting bit. [Read more…]

Dave gets mail

Creepy mail. Very, very creepy mail.

Twitter pic:

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Stalker baby Jesus.

But also – the usual “I made all the good things” crap which ignores all the bad things. “Today I gave someone cancer for you. In fact I gave thousands of people cancer. I caused thousands of spontaneous abortions. I broke backs, I watched while cars crashed into each other, I killed hundreds with that earthquake in Pakistan, I did nothing to stop those suicide bombers in Peshawar on Sunday or the shooters in Nairobi on Saturday, I give people malaria, and food poisoning, and Crohn’s disease, and mental illnesses. All because I luuuuuuuuuuuv you. Please call. Dad says hi.”

Bed, breakfast and a tract

Remember the Christian couple who run a bed and breakfast in Cornwall and refused accommodation to a gay couple because their religion? They’re going out of business, but not because everything fell apart after they lost their case – no, it’s because their b&b is shit. It sounds like Fawlty Towers except dirtier and with extra added piety. Barry Duke at the Freethinker gives us the insalubrious details.

One Christian reviewer on Trip Advisor had this to say of Peter and Hazelmary Bull’s Chymorvah Hotel:

Awful! Simply Awful.

I am Christian but that’s not the reason I went there. But I felt the place had a terrible atmosphere. I am vegetarian and there was a very limited menu. I felt like I committed a crime when I mentioned I was vegetarian. The look I received from woman could kill you. The room was cramped, not particularly clean and smelled strange, it was also cold and damp.

I really don’t like the thought of religion being forced down my throat whilst on holiday/taking a short break. [Read more…]

She stoops

I took a glance at the stats, as I do occasionally (mostly to see if there are spikes from the slyme pit), and saw a spike from AtheismPlus. So I looked at the page.* Ima go all #FTBulies/AtheismPlus whrblgrbl now.

Kidding! But it is pretty…dense.

*New improved link.

The Stereotypes, Identity, & Belonging Lab

Meet the Stereotypes, Identity, & Belonging Lab (SIBL) at the University of Washington, headed by psychologist Sapna Cheryan.

In the Stereotypes, Identity, & Belonging Lab (SIBL) at the University of Washington, we are interested in understanding how people’s choices and behaviors are shaped by cultural factors, such as stereotypes and social identity. Our lab is primarily concerned with developing and empirically testing theories that inform current social problems, particularly inequality and prejudice, in the hopes of bringing attention to these problems and working towards feasible solutions.

The top item on their news page at the moment is a newspaper piece by Jennifer Walsh on the harm done by stereotypes about scientists, which cites Sapna Cheryan. It starts with Bill Nye on Dancing With the Stars. [Read more…]

Guest post: “Equity feminism” explained

By embertine in a comment on You say tomato I say mascarpone.

My preferred version of feminism is pretty fundamentally different from the equity flavour, and I don’t think that’s a minor squabble. The conversation generally goes something like this:

Equity Feminists (EFs): Equality of opportunity does not equal equality of outcome.

Me and Mine (Ms): Hard to say until we have equality of opportunity.

EFs: We DO have equality of opportunity!

Ms: I don’t think we do.

EFs: The law says we do.

Ms:  That’s a good start!  But the law can’t erase bias and harmful stereotypes.  Those still exist.

EFs:  No they don’t!  You see sexism everywhere because you have a victim mentality.  You’re the REAL misogynist.

Ms: *sigh*

 

You say tomato I say mascarpone

Marc David Barnhill suggests that “intersectionality” is relevant to this issue, and I replied that in a way that’s another way of talking about mattering and the mattering map.

Some intersections are relatively trivial. Some places on the mattering map are very small, or picked out in frivolous colors. It’s possible to be very passionate about Star Trek or Shakespeare or hip hop or Emmylou Harris while still being perfectly willing to make alliances with people who hate the cultural products you love and love the ones you hate. It’s not just possible, it’s easy. Lots of categories are like that. They may be important for friendships, but they’re not important for alliances. [Read more…]