Via Peteryxx, on the stereotype thread – an article on why so few movies pass the Bechdel test.
The “Dykes to Watch Out For” test, formerly coined as the “Mo Movie Measure” test and Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel…
To pass it your movie must have the following:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man [Read more…]
An atheist soldier is told to bow head and fold hands, refuses.
Yesterday morning, at a rehearsal for their AIT graduation at Fort Jackson, which was being held in a chapel, the graduating soldiers were ordered to bow their heads and clasp their hands in front of them while an invocation was being given. One soldier refused to do this, and immediately shot off an email from his iPhone to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) while the rehearsal was still going on.
Brave. Good luck.
Later in the day, the soldier wrote out the whole story in an email to MRFF, excerpts of which appeared in a post on the CNN blog, “Military backs off threat to pull atheist from ceremony.” The CNN post now has hundreds of comments, mostly supportive of what this soldier did.
Well, no doubt Fox News will put an end to that situation…but good while it lasts.
Reading Delusions of Gender. Great stuff.
On p 4 Cordelia Fine (hey I just realized we have something in common) tells us about implicit associations. We can’t avoid stereotypes just by not believing in them – they stick anyway, down below where we’re not aware of them and can’t root them out.
The principle behind learning in associative memory is simple: as its name suggests, what is picked up are associations in the environment. Place a woman behind almost every vacuum cleaner being pushed around a carpet and, by Jove, associative memory will pick up the pattern…Unlike explicitly held knowledge, where you can be reflective and picky about what you believe, associative memory seems to be fairly indiscriminate in what it takes on board. [p 5] [Read more…]
Libby Anne has another post on the absurdity of Vision Forum. Here’s the thing: they have a crush on the Titanic. The Titanic – you know, the big new ship that sank ten minutes after it left the dock. It’s like having a crush on a plane crash, or a traffic jam. Transportation Love.
Well but you see what you’re not realizing is that the Titanic was totes Christian. Why? Because it was women and children first. Yes it was, my darling. So much so was it that the captain took the precaution of posing for pictures beaming down on sparkling little bourgeois children in the few hours before the ship sank, so that people afterwards would be able to know how Christian it all was, and rejoice.
And speaking of beating up on children –
Britain’s madrassas have faced more than 400 allegations of physical abuse in the past three years, a BBC investigation has discovered.
But only a tiny number have led to successful prosecutions. [Read more…]
Dismal, tragic, shameful, embarrassing…but not at all surprising. The US has the worst rate of child death through violence of any industrialized country, by far. What a disgusting statistic.
Another big win for religion.
At least three people in London with HIV have died after they stopped taking life saving drugs on the advice of their Evangelical Christian pastors.
The women died after attending churches in London where they were encouraged to stop taking the antiretroviral drugs in the belief that God would heal them, their friends and a leading HIV doctor said. [Read more…]
On the other hand, I did like something Julian said in part 3 of Heathen’s Progress, on the putative truce between religion and science.
First he cites the bromide, science asks “how” questions, religion asks “why” ones.
It sounds like a clear enough distinction, but maintaining it proves to be very difficult indeed. Many “why” questions are really “how” questions in disguise. For instance, if you ask: “Why does water boil at 100C?” what you are really asking is: “What are the processes that explain it has this boiling point?” – which is a question of how.
Critically, however, scientific “why” questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, “why” is usually what I call “agency-why”: it’s an explanation involving causation with intention.
So not only do the hows and whys get mixed up, religion can end up smuggling in a non-scientific agency-why where it doesn’t belong.
This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.
That’s very useful.
It’s funny, too, that people do that. The idea is that a mega-meta-person is a more satisfying answer than a mere process or brute fact. But why is it? Given that you can ask “why” about the mega-meta-person, you would think that answer would be satisfying only for a few seconds, or a few minutes for the indolent. I don’t really get why “it just did” or “no one knows yet, but people are looking” is less satisfying than “a mega-meta-person did it.” Not to mention that the latter is a great deal less plausible than the former.
Paul Berman says calm down, Occupy Wall Street isn’t that bad.
Occupy Wall Street is a festival. It is declaiming truth, and this is good. Wall Street has led the country and the world over a cliff. Somebody needs to say so. The damnable conga-drummers in the downtown streets have appointed themselves to say so. The drumming is not too articulate, but the job of festivals is not to be articulate. (It is the job of magazines to be articulate.)
Anyway, the demonstrations, in their anarchist spirit, leave room for other people, more sensible or more sophisticated or, at least, more elderly, to put the protests in a properly institutional form. Last week I marched with the trade unions in support of Occupy Wall Street. The unions may not always be right, but they were not in fantasy’s grip. They were expressing the grievances of people with ordinary jobs, which is, in fact, the right thing to do. My particular delegation was the Jewish Labor Committee. The New Republic editorial worries about a danger to liberalism. The Jewish Labor Committee poses not the slightest danger to liberalism. On the contrary!
Solidarity forever.
Salty Current did a post the other day about a page at SourceWatch that had come to be a site of woo-promotion and HIV-AIDS denialism. Next day Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy/SourceWatch, left a note saying the post was helpful and more help is welcome.
Without the Google alert, I might not have discovered your criticism of one of
the tens of thousands of articles on the site. If you have future suggestions
for correction or improvement, please help us in updating the article at issue
or alert us to the issue. We are a small ngo with a small staff of editors along
with some who volunteer on SourceWatch.
So there you go – a chance to do some crowd-sourcing work.
