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.

In other words…women can’t think.

I suspect this is one reason male atheists kept ignoring female atheists for so long (and some would like to go on ignoring us now). There’s an implicit stereotype that women can’t think, and organized argumentative atheism depends on thinking, so organized argumentative atheism had better keep women out or else it will fill up with stupid women talking about shoes. It will become Real Housewives of Atheism, and who the fuck wants to watch that?

My point here is that I don’t think we need to scratch our heads and wonder what on earth is going on that keeps women out of philosophy. In my experience it is very hard to find a place in philosophy that isn’t actively hostile towards women and minorities, or at least assumes that a successful philosopher should look and act like a (traditional, white) man.

Same again, with atheism replacing philosophy. There’s an implicit assumption that a prominent atheist should look and act like a (traditional, white) man. A woman atheist? Doesn’t compute. Makes the stuffing come out.

Problems arise when schemas clash. Valian uses the example of women in the military (Valian 1998, 122-3). The schema for women has us assume that women are life-giving and nurturing. The schema for the military, of course, has us assume that troops are life-taking and aggressive. In such cases, it is difficult to accept anything that seems to be an instance of both schemas. The deeper the schemas, the more difficult it is to tolerate a conflicting case.

Same again, with atheism replacing the military. Women are nurturing; men are aggressive. It takes aggression to face down god and god’s enforcers.

So, what to do? Persist. Show up. Keep talking. Perform the battle against god with words, which is the only way god can be fought. Be there. Push. Lean. Lean more heavily. Persist.

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. [Read more…]

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. [Read more…]

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. [Read more…]

I’ve just started reading Alom Shaha’s The Young Atheist’s Handbook, and it’s wonderful. Gripping, moving, funny, thoughtful – all the good things.

In the introduction he talks about “things in primary school which made me suspect that I had gotten a raw deal in having been born Muslim.” Other kids didn’t have to go to a religious building after school; they didn’t have to fret about being “good Christians”; their lives didn’t revolve around religion – plus Jesus sounded like a lovely man.

I couldn’t even read ‘our’ holy book because it was written in Arabic and, according to our local imam, all it seemed to say was that we should be really, really scared of Allah and that anyone who was not a Muslim was going to burn in the fires of hell for eternity. [p 13]

Not an attractive takeaway for a child, or for anyone. [Read more…]

There’s another thing about Romney’s chuckle chuckle notpology.

“Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” Romney said in a live radio interview with Fox News Channel personality Brian Kilmeade.

Here’s what the other thing is about that. He was responding to the Washington Post article, so he knew what he was notpologizing for – he knew that it was for collecting at least five other senior boys to attack a junior boy, hold him down while he screamed for help, and cut off his hair. [Read more…]