A new private bus company in Cardiff had a fantastic wink-wink nudge-nudge idea for advertising its all-day fare.
What?
Butterflies and Wheels
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A new private bus company in Cardiff had a fantastic wink-wink nudge-nudge idea for advertising its all-day fare.
What?
Originally a comment by Eric MacDonald on The war against infidels.
Essentialism is a fairly universal tendency of seeing things as have defining qualities. Without some kind of essentialism it would be hard to distinguish one sort of thing from another. Science, for example, has its essentialists (indeed, the periodic table is based on essences), and no doubt the fans of football, cricket and hockey, chess, monopoly, and other games, have what they consider to be essential properties of their favourite games. Your claim, therefore, that “essentialism is one of the cognitive biases that both underlies and is encouraged by religious thinking” is really quite misleading. Wittgenstein, as you are no doubt aware, was opposed to this sort of essentialism, by pointing out that the meaning of a word is constituted by its use, and he used the example of games to make his point. There is no one essential feature of all games, he suggested, that determines the use of the word ‘game’. I think he was probably wrong. Games are almost always characterised by quite contingent rules and limitations, so that playing a game is only possible if there are some things that do not constitute “moves” in the game. Otherwise, we have rather untstructured play, instead of a game.
So, of course, when we are talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism, or any other religion, we are going to home in on some of a religion’s most characteristic features. You want to let Islam off the hook, by suggesting that in picking out features of Islam that seem to characterise it (in some sense universally), we are being both arrogant (in claiming to speak thus about anything of which we are not believing members), and xenophobic (in this case Islamophobic). [Read more…]
More on the way deliberate, planned racial segregation has crushed people’s aspirations as a matter of policy, this time from Jamelle Bouie.
In the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived before he died in police custody on April 12, one-half the residents are unemployed and one-third of the homes are vacant. Sixty percent of residents have less than a high school diploma, and the violent crime rate is among the highest in Baltimore. You can paint a similar picture for the neighborhoods and housing projects on the east side of the city as well. If you are poor and black in Charm City, your life—or at least your opportunity to have a better life—looks bleak.
But then, this is by design. In the early 20thcentury—as in many American cities—Baltimore civic leaders endorsed broad plans to “protect white neighborhoods” from black newcomers. [Read more…]
More on that question of empathy and fiction we were talking about the other day, from a 2010 article by Joshua Leach on the ur-B&W.: Individual Rights and Collective Responsibility.
This is a truth commonly understood: that people fighting for human rights are not animated by self-interest or callous self-regard. In fact, human rights arise out of our most fundamental collective moral imperative: namely, to protect the weak and vulnerable from harm. Empathy is where they begin and end.
According to Lynn Hunt’s fantastic book, Inventing Human Rights, rights language grew up in tandem with eighteenth century epistolary novels, such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, which introduced empathy into fiction and extended human feeling across class boundaries. By presenting the lives and needs of servants and governesses (women at that!) these novels made possible a kind of affectionate identification that traditional literature could not provide. Even if modern readers have a hard time relating to these sentimental eighteenth century novels, we can see the same sort of effect at work in Charlotte Bronte and other later writers. The goal of the author is clearly to present the hero or heroine as an individual worthy of respect, dignity, and personhood. As Jane Eyre declares at one point to Mr. Rochester: “Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings?… Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart!” This is not a self-interested or individualistic ideal—precisely because it insists on the rights of individuals!
Individuals in the plural. Tories like to portray human rights as all about me me me, but they’re not, because it’s about every me, not just my personal me.
This is probably the article that brought Richard Rothstein to the attention of the producers at Morning Edition and then Fresh Air: This Is One Reason Why Places Like Ferguson and Baltimore Have Become Explosive.
(Rothstein has written a number of articles. I’m going to read every one I can find.)
In Baltimore in 1910, a black Yale law school graduate purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting African Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore’s mayor proclaimed, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”
Republican legislators in Wisconsin have thought of a new way of tormenting poor people: say they can have food stamps but ban ALL THE FOODS.
On Wednesday, Wisconsin Republicans in the statehouse took the first step in their agenda to punish people who use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Assembly Bill 177 seeks to ban people who rely on food stamps to survive on a daily basis from buying a huge list of products deemed unworthy for the mouths of poor people and their children.
The legislation specifically bans poor people from buying any kind of shellfish, including lobster, shrimp, and crab.
Too fancy! Too fancy for the likes of poor people who have low wages because rich people like it that way. No shrimp for you, peasant. [Read more…]
I was asking that question about why revulsion from torture isn’t universal five years ago, too, almost to the day. I’ll just repost it.
Lynn Hunt asks a pertinent question in Inventing Human Rights:
Voltaire railed against the miscarriage of justice in the Calas case, but he did not originally object to the fact that the old man had been tortured or broken on the wheel. If natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty of judicial torture, as Voltaire said later, then why was this not obvious before the 1760s, even to him? Evidently some kind of blinders had operated to inhibit the operation of empathy before then.
The facts aren’t enough. Science isn’t enough. There has to be emotion too. People have to care. It’s that simple. If people don’t care, the facts are just facts, they’re inert.
This is also why relief organizations use one person (and animal welfare organizations use one animal) on fund-raising appeals: we’re wired so that we empathize with one person much more strongly than we empathize with a million. If facts were enough for morality, we ought to respond a million times more strongly to reports of a million people in desperate straits, but in fact we respond much less strongly to a million people than we do to one.
What’s going on with the Rohingyas? Why are some thousands of them stranded in boats in the Andaman sea? What’s the deal?
The Rohingyas – a distinct Muslim ethnic group who are effectively stateless – have been fleeing Myanmar for decades. But a combination of factors means that they are now stranded in rickety boats in the Andaman sea, causing international alarm.
There are believed to be several thousand Myanmar migrants in boats off the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia with dwindling supplies of food and water, and not wanted by any of these countries.
Wait. Back up a step. What does that even mean? What does “a distinct Muslim ethnic group” mean? What does “distinct” mean? What does “ethnic” mean? [Read more…]
Meet Washington state legislator Ed Orcutt, Republican. He thinks bikers are bad for the environment.
This is from 2013, but it’s funny enough to be resurrected now.
Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.” [Read more…]
The US military and the people who should be supervising the US military are doing such a bad job of addressing sexual harassment that the UN has taken notice, Jenna McLaughlin reports at Mother Jones. How impressive is that? I feel so proud.
The US military has a problem with sexual violence. That’s the conclusion of the Universal Periodic Review Panel, a UN panel that aims to address the human rights records of the 193 UN member states. This is the second time that the panel has scrutinized the United States; the first was in 2010, when the list of concerns included detention in Guantanamo Bay, torture, the death penalty, and access to health care. Its latest report came out Monday morning, and there was a surprising addition to the predictable laundry list of US human rights violations.
In one of 12 final recommendations, the UN Council urged the US military “to prevent sexual violence in the military and ensure effective prosecution of offenders and redress for victims.”
As opposed to, you know, not preventing sexual violence in the military and not ensuring effective prosecution of offenders and redress for victims. [Read more…]