It doesn’t look a day over a thousand

Happy birthday to Waterford. Today is its 1100th birthday. It had a celebration with fireworks and pretend Viking ships.

Waterford was founded 1,100 years ago by the Vikings,and a free outdoor spectacle took place on the city’s quays tonight, produced by street theatre company Spraoi.

Telling the story of the arrival of the Vikings in 914 AD, the event had dance, performance, pyrotechnics, light, music, narration and special effects.

Three stylised Viking ships which took two months to build were also on display.

Thousands of people attended despite stormy weather with flooding.

Vikings! Fireworks! Viking ships! It sounds great.

Who apologizes to whom for what

Melissa Harris-Perry apologized for what sounds like a mean joke.

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry offered a tearful and passionate apology to the Romneys on Saturday for remarks she and her panelists made about the family’s adopted black grandchild.

In a segment last week, Harris-Perry joked about the grandson while one panelist, actress Pia Glenn, sang “one of these things is not like the other” and comedian Dean Obeidallah sought to draw a parallel to the Republican Party’s problems with diversity. The remarks drew heavy criticism from high-profile conservatives like Sarah Palin and Scott Brown.

And today she apologized.

I wonder…did Rush Limbaugh ever apologize for calling Sandra Fluke a slut?

“Although ultimately nobody was really harmed”

Martin Robbins has a brilliantly lucid guest post, hosted by Janet Stemwedel (aka DocFreeRide), at Adventures in Science and Ethics about what was wrong with the way Bora Zivkovic returned to the internet.

First, the optimistic version of the story, then, what’s wrong with it:

Bora Zivkovic was an outstandingly talented science blogging expert. A fundamentally good man, he made some terrible mistakes that affected three women he worked with, although ultimately nobody was really harmed. Those mistakes cost him his friends, reputation and career. Now, he’s paid the price, and hopefully we can forgive him and welcome him back into the community he’s done so much for.

It’s a pleasing, comfortable narrative that many of us would love to subscribe to. It’s also toxic and wrong, and an acknowledgment of this from Bora (and his supporters) would be a welcome step on the road to genuine redemption. [Read more…]

Sparked by

From a couple of weeks ago there is this Huffington Post article by Hilary Aked, finding deep sinisterness in the opposition to gender segregation at university events.

She starts by saying the furore was “sparked by” the Student Rights report. But that’s not clear at all – the report played a part, but far from the only part.

After that, there’s a lot of hand-wringing about the Henry Jackson Society, without anything really showing what difference it makes. She does at least admit as much, which is a nice change from Gopal and Penny, but she adds,

However, it is vital to situate the origin of such a controversy and origins like this should, I think, lead us to pause and consider whether the narrow framing of this issue is problematic. Is the current discussion, provoked by Student Rights’ report, more about feminism or Islamophobia? [Read more…]

More angry at women, more hyper-masculine in their beliefs and attitudes

A study by David Lisak of U Mass Boston, Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence [pdf]. A significant point:

There is also a set of newer myths about rape, myths that have been
spawned by the new generation of victimization studies that have emerged since
the 1980’s. These studies documented that rape was both far more prevalent than
traditional crime surveys indicated, and that most rape victims did not report
their victimization. These studies also clearly revealed that most rapes are not
committed by strangers in ski masks, but rather by “acquaintances” or “nonstrangers.”

These realizations led to the general adoption of new language and new
categories of rape. Terms such as “acquaintance rape” and “date rape” emerged
and took hold. Unfortunately, these new terms have created a new mythology
about rape. The term “date rape,” which has become woven into the fabric of
public discourse about sexual violence, carries with it the connotation of “rape
lite.” Victims of date rape are typically viewed as less harmed than victims of stranger rape; and “date rapists” are typically viewed as less serious offenders, and frankly less culpable than stranger rapists. Date rape is often viewed more in
traditionally civil than in traditionally criminal terms: as an unfortunate
encounter in which the two parties share culpability because of too much alcohol
and too little clear communication.

One of the consequences of this new mythology of date rape is that there
has been very little, if any, cross-communication between the study of date rape –
a literature typically based in, and focused on college campuses – and the longestablished literature on sex offenders and sexual predators. In fact, in the author’s personal experience, there is typically considerable resistance within
civilian universities to the use of the term “sex offender” when referring to the
students who perpetrate acts of sexual violence on campuses. This resistance is
one of the legacies of the term, “date rape,” and it has served to obscure one of the
unpleasant facts about sexual violence in the college environment: that just as in the larger community, the majority of this violence is committed by predatory individuals who tend to be serial and multi-faceted offenders.

That’s a disturbing fact. I think I’d thought of it in just the mistaken way Lisak points out: as different from stranger rape, and thus more opportunistic than something done by predatory individuals. The latter version is an unpleasant thought.

And then there’s the motivation…’

Many of the motivational factors that were identified in incarcerated
rapists have been shown to apply equally to undetected rapists. When compared
to men who do not rape, these undetected rapists are measurably more angry at
women, more motivated by the need to dominate and control women, more impulsive and disinhibited in their behavior, more hyper-masculine in their beliefs and attitudes, less empathic and more antisocial.

I recognize the type.

Tub-thumping jingoism

The Independent comments on Gove’s tantrum and Evans’s response.

Today, one of Britain’s most eminent historians hit back at what he described as an “ignorant attack” by Education Secretary Michael Gove on his analysis of the conflict.

Writing in the Daily Mail yesterday Mr Gove accused Professor Sir Richard Evans of failing to acknowledge the debt owed to the soldiers that were killed in the Great War claiming he had previously dismissed attempts to honour their sacrifice as “narrow tub-thumping jingoism”. [Read more…]

Gove takes to Daily Mail to set historians straight

Once again, I find myself surprised. I didn’t know anyone bothered to defend the First World War these days; I didn’t know anyone had bothered to do that since about 1930. I was under the impression that the defenders started falling silent at a pretty sharp clip in 1915. (That last one is hyperbole. There was a lot of oppression and repression of opponents of the war as long as it was going on. Bertrand Russell did a stint in the slammer for it.)

But once again, I was wrong. Michael Gove is bothering to defend it, and talk smack about people he dislikes in the process. The Daily Mail (yes) is on the case. [Read more…]

It’s all about the hits

Says a guy at pubshare, and he ought to know.

He starts with a picture of a not-hot woman saying women are not for decoration, while hot women laugh at her. Geddit? Feminists ugly, hot women not feminists. Ugly women feminists because ugly, hot women not feminists because not ugly.

Then he explains that provocation gets hits, so when women talk about sexist shit, they’re just making sexist shit more popular. [Read more…]

People’s Front of Students v Students’ Front of People

The Times Higher reports on…well it’s too complicated to paraphrase.

Headline: Students’ unions hit back at group monitoring campus extremism

Subhead: Student Rights’ agenda questioned by LSE, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths unions

The article starts:

Three students’ unions have condemned a group that monitors extremist speakers on campus for “targeting Muslim students”.

Student Rights, which refutes* the students’ unions’ claims, released a report in May 2013 on events organised by Islamic societies that found that a quarter of those it monitored had enforced gender segregation. [Read more…]

Nothing but shame

Shaheen Hashmat has thoughts on Islam and Honour Abuse.

It’s not just Islam. On the other hand it’s not completely independent of religion either.

I look back on my own experiences and I know that religion was used as justification for absolute control and horrific abuse. Some awful things were done to me by my family.

That’s the thing, you see: it’s used as justification. Nothing else can do that as effectively. One of the projects of atheism is to make it less effective that way. [Read more…]