I can do this thing. I’m making a big push today to get students prepared for my final exam, and I’m making myself available in the bioclub room to provide tutorials and reviews all afternoon — I kind of expect maybe 3 or 4 students to show up, which has been my past experience, so I’ve also got my big stack of term papers to grade during all the long lonely gaps. The grind will be done, though, and then aside from proctoring an exam Thursday morning and another stack of grading, I’ll be done! And it will be like Christmas! The real Christmas!
(Episode CCLXXXII: Louis C.K., Ph.D.)
If you were a spider, you’d eat the old thread.
Oh well, the IDiots still think that mistletoe is a magical plant.
Only magic can make life. Too bad evolution is magic, then, because, uh, then it’s stupid. Materialists/religionists/causists!
Glen Davidson
Pteryxx @previous incarnation:
thanks for the book tip. I just ordered Art & Fear from Amazon UK (among a few other items) – holidays aren’t complete unless I have a pile of good books to go with all the chocolates =)
Art & Fear seems very interesting. Can’t wait to read it.
So, I just over slept and missed my latin exam. I set two fucking alarms and neither of them went off.
Happy belated birthday, Sally! (And I think I’ve missed a number of birthdays in the past due to partial bankruptcy, sorry bout that)
Just heard my favourite aunt is coming all the way from East Asia to spend some time with us in January, we’ll also make a trip to our relatives in Sverige! Jag älskar Sverige på vintern!
Also, how can you see a top politician is having a political scandal: when he has to employ Clintonesque defence strategies such as “eehm technically speaking, I didn’t get this cheap loan from my business partner when I was a state governor, it was actually his wife who loaned me the money”. Happening to the highest-ranked politician in Germany right now (not the most powerful, just by protocol)
Excellent video—I hope all those assholes who’re always running around screaming about the alleged war on Xmas one day realize that without their whining, no one would have bothered to make videos like this, and fewer of their religious allies would be exposed to such well documented arguments against their common beliefs.
walton:
Well, it’s not an ethno-religious minority, but there is definitely a group of people who feel this way. Just look up naturism (or the old classic nudism).
I’m a member of one site (I’m not much of an “-ist”, but I try to keep a godless perspective in the hat since much of the conversation revolves around “god made us this way, why should we have to hide it?” type of thinking). While most of the members aren’t actively fighting to walk down any street unclothed, the issue really does come to a head on private property and things like beaches. Especially beaches, since historically many “hard to reach” beaches that were used clothing-optionally are being encroached upon by so-called “textilists” who then object to people running around in the altogether.
We’ve got such situations going on here in California: there was a “rule” made, years ago, that said the state would not infringe upon “traditionally” clothing-optional beaches unless other laws were being broken (public sex, generally). It’s called the Cahill Policy, but the current parks administration has decided to basically throw it out if they want to “popularize” a beach. So, now, there’s a beach (San Onofre) that has been clothing-optional for 70-80 years where people without suits are now getting ticketed. It’s moving through the courts, and the state is losing most of the cases, but it’s still harassment.
There are other common situations, such as where someone will be sunbathing in their own back yard and get cited (and possibly put on a sex offender’s list) because a neighbor was on a ladder, saw them, and got “offended”. It’s really all rather ridiculous.
Hi, thread.
Starstuff, that’s a right scunner :((((
Sorry to hear it. Hope you shot the alarm clocks. :(
Is there any way you can make up the exam at a later date?
Tights on men? Are we talking under clothes or exposed to the world? I have long underwear of the cotton variety (good for lounging, but I prefer sweatpants) and of the polyester variety (for if I actually needed to keep insulated in the cold), and they keep my legs toasty.
flash mob!
Tights are an amazing thing. I went on a pub crawl this past weekend, and wore tights under my pants. Kept nice a cozy the whole time.
Of course, I did gather a large amount of information on the physiological and psychological effects of tequila on the human body as well. But I’m not fully sure. I may need to embark on another data-gathering expedition.
Why did I read that as ‘peasant’?
Tights? I don’t even wear looses unless it’s a wedding or funeral. Okay, I do actually have winter weather tights, but they are more to reduce wind and salt burn while commuting and not so much for long term wearing.
Video evidence of child abuse by christians.
http://youtu.be/jQKigCl30Sk
Just got this crock of shit from Eugene Delgaudio in my inbox:
There’s more, but I’m sure that’s too much already.
Is it worth my while to ‘unsubscribe’ or should I just delete?
Richard: I agree. I think nudism should be legalized, as I said. If someone wants to walk around naked, it’s none of my, or the state’s, damn business. And if public nudity were more common, it would cease to be regarded as “indecent” or inherently sexual. Our culture’s fear of nudity, and its automatic sexualization of the naked body, is not universal: norms have been different in many other societies and historical periods.
But there are far fewer xenophobic overtones to anti-nudity laws than there are to anti-veil laws, for obvious reasons.
HockeyBob,
But everything would be better if people would just stop being different.
SteveV:
I’ve been getting those bullshit emails too (addressed to niceloadedquestionsasshole@adomainthatIown). I read ’em because I love seeing bigots in a panic.
I’ve talked to my professor and he said I can take the exam tomorrow. He’s awesome.
Chas,
Did you wake up dumb as fuck today, Chas? I am talking about Gingrich’s own words. My link provided a quotation. Did you read it?
Gingrinch himself: “The fact is, the Palestinian claim to a right of return is based on a historically false story. Somebody ought to have the courage to go all the way back to the 1921 League of Nations mandate for a Jewish homeland, point out the context in which Israel came into existence, and ‘Palestinian’ did not become a common term until after 1977.”
Gingrich, when asked to speak again about his earlier comment, offered out of the blue that he meant the Palestinian right of return is illegitimate.
Therefore what I said is correct: “Look at what Gingrich means by his comments. He means that therefore the Palestinian right of return is illegitimate.”
You will admit your error?
+++++
It is equivalent to what Gingrich said, and honestly I can’t even imagine what stupidity you’ve contracted in this case that makes you unable to see it. Gingrich’s point is that “Palestinians” do not exist, are not a real thing.
If you are unfamiliar with the claims made about Israeli Jews that I was talking about, I shall clarify: the claims are that real Jews do not exist today, probably not anywhere but certainly not in Israel.
It is an ontological claim premised on the unreality of an invented identity.
Well, dang. I’ve been sitting here prepared to help the students out with their studying for my final, and I’ve had a grand total of ONE (1) stop by. I’ll give ’em another hour, and if interest continues to be this low, I’ll bag it and go to my office.
hockeybob @ #15-
That was just awful. Hideous, even. “Nothing could be finer than an Intelligent Designer”? Who writes that kind of shit?
I might be going to hell, but at least I’ll be with the good music.
I don’t know what you mean. In a lottery monarchy, the state would maintain the institution just like executive departments are maintained today between elections. Whatever amount of stability is desired can be forced. The monarch could be disallowed from replacing certain secretaries for a particular length of time upon taking office, for instance. Whatever else substantively constitutes institutional stability, you ought to specify.
Sucketh Maximus!
No, you should not eat peasants. Peasants are revolting (or, at least, they fucking well should revolt!).
How dare they! Sexual promiscuity should be limited only to the rich white men (and their living blow-up dolls).
Adademica Awesomea!
This just shows what a fantatsicalicious professor you are! You are so good at helping students grok in fullness that they do not need to study.
Either that, or your beard scares the poop out of ’em.
=========
And, under the heading of You Can’ Make This Shit Up!
Good evening
I hate Tuesdays.
Care to split hairs?
Yes, fooling around, putting yourself forward, showing the world who you are, doing your thing, all qualities associated with boys, is part of the improvising. Sure, the reality is harder than that, but what shapes our perception of whether something is boyish or girlish isn’t as much reality as the idea thereoff. And girls get discouraged from that from early on.
pelamun
And there goes my respect for the last conservative politician I had any of.
These could both be true.
Good point. I failed to consider that they are not mutually exclusive.
I wish they’d hurry the hell up, I need a date.
:-( Commiserations. I understand completely. That’s really shitty.
(I’m trying desperately to write papers and supposedly preparing for a final exam at the moment, so I empathize. Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my entire damned life thus far preparing for exams, taking exams, and recovering from exams.)
I think I’ve reached my limit for accommodationists and religious smorgasbordians for the day.
God, I want to slap the world silly.
Ogvorbis: “you should not eat peasants”. Quite right too!
A gentleman would only ever eat fox chunks in a jelly made from paupers’ tears.
And I just realized that I was really wrong in writing that. It is fine to eat a peasant AS LONG AS YOU HAVE ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT!!!!
PZ:
I spent three hours a week in my ‘office’ this semester.
Know how many students stopped by?
If you guessed ‘three’, you would be guessing three too high.
Walton,
Well, not any more, there isn’t — now you have to look at old NatGeos to see how they were, once.
But I was being extreme, there — point being is that we all have to conform to certain rules regarding attire, we just don’t get to say it’s religiously-important and make a hullabaloo about it!
For example, I saw this on the news the other day: No beards, ponytails for Victorian police, and guess what?
(Presumably, by this sort of rule female police officers who are practicing Muslims will be allowed to wear face-masks)
—
PS Sorry, I didn’t mean to chide you when I wished you’d respond, only to indicate I wanted to respond to your response. You’re allowed to sleep!
walton:
Sounds familiar. I’m supposed to be studying for my organic chemistry and ecology exams right now, but I really need a break, so I’m crocheting and wasting time on the internet for a bit.
I feel like my brain is a wet sponge. It just can’t absorb anything else.
But the good news is that I never have to do calculus again!
Brownian, I hate to be the bearer of bad nes, but it jsut got repetitively, cluelessly, annoyingly, worse.
Walton,
:)
That’s because you have!
Thank you.
I meant it in the sense they seemed to be using it, as if it were a sort of free-for-all, in which improvisers are “fooling around,” doing something “just for the hell of it,” “playing the clown,” “making it up as they go along,” and so on. There were lots of descriptions like that, which were consistently wrong.
In whatever sense they’re “exploring” it, it is something they’ve in many ways decided upon in advance. Improvisers are doing more compositional work than if their parts were written out by someone else, but that isn’t to say everything involved in that process happens right at that moment. They’ve almost always played the changes before and should have a very good idea what they’re going to do with them ahead of time. They’re constrained to do certain things and not others. There are still bad notes, and you have to have some well-devised exit strategies to get out of them when (not if) they occur. It’s almost never the case that they’re making it all up on the spot. If they were doing that, it wouldn’t sound much like jazz, because playing jazz means working with certain styles, idioms, rhythms, progressions, etc., not just freely exploring possibilities without any constraints. As an example, there are millions of different twelve-tone sequences they could be exploring, but that’s not the sort of thing jazz players tend to do. They tend to do other things, but not whatever arbitrary thing comes to mind.
The implications for classical music were also wrong. It isn’t nearly as rigid a process as people make it out to be. They are put in somewhat different terms — differences of interpretation, the blend and balance and character and flexibility of an ensemble — but the demands on a performer are comparable and are immensely important for the quality of a performance. People tend to underestimate that by a long shot, and misunderstand what it means when musicians are “just playing the notes on the page.” Every score is limited in the kind and amount of information it contains, so the performers have to do the rest which is a lot. It’s not that I think improvising and playing from a score are the same thing, but that the differences are greatly exaggerated.
That said, I’ll stand by my earlier comment that it probably doesn’t make that much of a difference what the case is. Popular misconceptions count just as much when it comes to how children are socialized.
This isn’t just splitting hairs. One thing you could do is not stereotype different kinds of music, in addition to not stereotyping boys and girls. If there weren’t such a perceived difference between jazz and classical (or art and science or whatever), then any perceived differences between girls and boys would probably have less of an effect. And I’m pretty sure I’m not just assuming the conclusion I want either. Having a lot of experience with both, I had already come to the conclusion that they’re not so different, independent of any concerns about gender issues. So we could try to work with that.
“Meet the meat”.
:)
–
@Og, it happened:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3286721.stm
The eeuuuwwwometer busted a needle on that one.
Ogvorbis,
I can’t look. I really can’t.
*yawn*
If you’d actually read what I’ve written you’d probably have realized that this is more or less what I said. Those things are the popular beliefs about jazz and improvising and they perfectly match up with the popular beliefs about boys.
You know, just like the popular beliefs about boys, girls and maths are not the reality, but have a tremendous effect.
Yes, but – while I agree with you that allowing special religious exemptions is silly on its face – the answer is not to enforce uniform cultural hegemony on members of minority religions. Rather, the reason is to ask why these “rules regarding attire” exist in the first place, and, if they serve no important purpose, to get rid of them.
The stupidity here is not that Sikhs get an exemption; the stupidity here is that cops’ facial hair is regulated in the first place.
(Not only is it a pointless and arbitrary rule, I also see it as insidious in another way: that particular rule is imported directly from military discipline, and applying such rules in the civilian police context contributes to the paramilitarization of police forces and the encouragement of a macho culture, in which suspected criminals are seen as an “enemy” to be combated with violence, rather than as citizens with rights. Military and paramilitary forces are good at fighting an identifiable enemy, and should be reserved for that purpose; they are very bad at policing civilian populations. I’m even unsure as to whether it’s healthy to have military-style uniforms and ranks for police: in Britain, originally, the rank titles chosen were deliberately non-military-sounding, although the British police have nonetheless become steadily more militarized over the past century.)
Now see, I was heading more towards oral sex, not cannibalism. Fava beans, anyone?
I understand. Absolute cluelessness.
Religion has become the most available means for resisting state-mandated conformity.
While I would be glad to see a much broader secular basis for claims regarding freedom of conscience — and we should be brainstorming how this might be done — in the meantime we should recognize that religion’s claims of conscience provide us with the most available foothold we might use to expand into an equivalent secular resistance.
We have an opportunity in the near future to insist that atheists’ consciences are just as important as those of religious people, and demand that we be afforded the treatment they now get. If, instead, religious consciences are legally downgraded to be as worthless as atheists’ consciences, we will all lose.
What we currently have, by holding laws that affect religion to stricter scrutiny, is another means of challenging arbitrary state authority, a way of demanding that a law not be assumed constitutional with the burden of proof being upon the citizen to challenge it, but instead that a law be assumed unconstitutional with the burden of proof being upon the state to justify it. Religion is not the only means of insisting upon stricter scrutiny, but it is a valuable one, and the one most likely to be expandable into a secular freedom of conscience one day.
Damn, Walton — you’ve taken all the wind out of my sails.
(Nice)
QFT. I think you hit the nail on the head there.
Is euthanasia legal in Germany? Because if not, it doesn’t matter if the victim volunteered to be eaten or not, it’s still murder.
ॐ,
That’s pretty well-said, and pretty insightful.
Are you yawning at yourself? You didn’t describe it as if it were a misconception. You stated it as fact, as did others. Fuck, then it’s “splitting hairs,” and now you yawn like you knew that all along or that it isn’t even relevant. So I’m going to drop out of this conversation now. You’ve got this covered.
@Ogvorbis
I lied: I waded back into both frays a-swinging.
So, the new cat? The one who crawled under the couch? Yeah.
An hour and a half after she went under there, she meowed a couple of times. No biggie, I thought, she’s gotten herself stuck up under there under the rip in the lining. Went to get her out, and … no kitty. Huh? Tipped the couch and cut out the entire lining, no kitty. I was there the whole time and never saw her get out, but maybe she did when I blinked or something. Couldn’t find her.
Half hour after that, a couple of short, “help!” kind of meows from seemingly nowhere, but somewhere in the room. Started looking in earnest. No kitty. Felt all over every part of the couch, looked in all accessible openings, no kitty. Searched behind the entertainment center, pulled out all possible things in the room, no kitty. Tried the “stop and listen” technique, nothing.
By then I was getting a bit frantic. I was starting to think of very bad scenarios ending up with a stuck suffocated kitty somewhere in the house. Spouse was doing the same, although neighter of us would say anything out of fear of freaking out the other. Half an hour of searching later, heard one tiny little “oo” half-strangled kind of sound, the kind that sent me straight into lose. my. shit. mode. Spouse calmed me down, after ripping apart most of the room again suggested the couch one more time although we had searched it about 6 times already. Tipped it over, then just sat. And sat. About 10 minutes later, I heard the tiniest of scratching sounds near my ear, in the arm of the couch. Got the scissors and cut the entire side of the arm open, and there she was, curled up in a little rectangular box space I didn’t even know existed in the couch. She wasn’t cramped up and squashed at all, so I don’t know what the scary sounds were, unless she made those on the way to the space I found her in. After a few more minutes of searching managed to trace the path she took to get there through the inside of the couch, through a little crawl space and then another one. Put her in the back bedroom with a chaperone, then got some fabric and a staple gun and some duct tape and fixed the damage I had done and then sealed up the bottom of the couch so she can’t do that again.
Sheesh.
carlie,
IANAL, but Armin Meiwes tried to plead “Tötung auf Verlangen” (killing by request), but this is hard to attain legally, as the will of the victim being killed by the person pleading so is hard to establish as per this norm (also if the perpetrator had been planning to kill the victim anyways, it still leaves avenues open for manslaughter charges). The prosecution in the case was successful in blocking this defence and attaining a manslaughter conviction, for which he got 8.5 years.
The euthanasia situation is complicated, there is no law addressing the issue specifically (for instance Austria has a specific article in its penal code against assisted suicide). IANAL again, but the consensus seems to be that turning off “the machines” is not legally liable, and done on a regular basis, but anything that goes towards “active euthanasia” would be NG.
Worst Christmas party ever?
This is the way a Ward Christmas Party at a mormon church was described:
Lynna:
Yup. You got me beat.
A college party which climaxed with three drunk basketball players puking into the artificial tree and the punch bowl. And I’d take it over yours any day of the week.
It’s complicated, but there are several things that are “half-active” and legal.
What is legal is to give high doses of painkillers that do shorten the patient’s life, but that are primarily given with the prupose of aleviating pain, but they’re not allowed to give you a simple overdose.
You can clarify lots of things with patient’s will which means that doctors can just stop giving you treatment.
This can also be decided by a legal guardian. My best friend’s father was in the situation where he could not speak anymore. His kidneys were failing, so he needed dialysis, there was a big blood clot in his leg that would kill him if it made it too his heart, which meant that they couldn’t give him enough blood-thinner necessary for the dialysis and he was constantly on morphium. He started to fight against the dialysis, the thing that kept him alive in his miserable state. So the family got him a legal guardian who agreed with them and the doctors that he was making his will clear to not have further treatment and they stopped
Which are all things that are totally not in any relation with the canibal case.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding an education system here, but if you don’t want to do calculus, why did you have to do calculus?
Hm. I’m going to throw in despite the fact that I won’t have time (at least today) to participate much more, but I should point out one thing. If by “available foothold” you’re speaking in purely contemporary pragmatic terms, I’d agree. But your comments about brainstorming and expanding suggest something beyond this. Historically, there’s a long history of anarchists and others resisting state (and religious-state) authority explicitly on the basis of conscience. Religion is the only basis for resistance that’s been recognized or accepted to whatever limited degree by states. It isn’t the only basis that’s existed. So it’s not so much about invention or expansion but about recovery.
Argh! This business of letting 18-20 hr go by between posts, and then trying (futilely) to catch up in some halfway competent fashion is killin’ me!
First, this thread:
Starstuff:
I totally empathize about the exam: My a couple years ago, my daughter overslept the start of a final exam and ended up running through snow (December in New England), in flip-flops and pajamas, with tears streaming down her face, to arrive halfway through the allotted time. She ended up not needing extra time and got an A- in the class, so “no harm, no foul”… but the story has been retold many a time in our family. I’m glad your prof was cool about it.
***Previous Thread***
SC:
(@655): Ah, not only was I clueless, I was lacking in cultural referents: I’m no more than a casual Dead fan, and probably couldn’t quote more than 10 total lines of lyrics from their whole oeuvre.
(@656): Yah, I’ve been watching Last Chance Kitchen (on OnDemand; I hate watching TV shows on my computer monitor). At first I was dismayed at the fairly transparent ripoff of “Redemption Island” from Survivor, but I confess I’m enjoying the little ep-lets. I’ll be curious to see the exact mechanics of reintroducing the LCK survivor into the main competition, and how the other chefs react.
***
Walton (@592):
Well, leaving aside the well established fact that you and I simply disagree about the extent to which a democratic government represents the “will of the people” (or, for that matter, whether said “will of the people” even exists)… of course. I was simply reacting (admittedly somewhat hyperbolically) to the (also somewhat hyperbolic) OMG! My country sucks! tone of some of the initial comments to the story.
But I don’t actually mean (and this is partially in response to love moderately as well) to be defending this action or the Canadian government generally. I’ve been careful to say at each turn that it’s a complex issue, and that I don’t know enough/haven’t thought hard enough about it to have a clear position. In particular, I know hardly anything about Canadian politics, and so can’t begin to assess the true motivations behind this action.
I do think a case can be made, based purely on social utility and without reference to any cultural or religious bias, that showing one’s face is an essential element of taking a public oath. Certainly that was the argument articulated in the original article, and it doesn’t strike me as wrong on its face, if it’s not being advanced disingenuously. However, as I’ve said several times already, I’m not sure it matters, because the action will inevitably be seen as Islamophobic, and absent the ability to untangle invidious intentions from innocent ones, we probably just can’t “go there,” whether it makes sense or not.
I was being a little bit flip when I said “Islamophobia is why we can’t have nice things,” but I really do think there are areas of potentially fruitful discourse and reasonable lines of argument that are rendered off limits by the ease with which they’re conflated with xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and racism. Don’t misunderstand me: This is not just a recapitulation of the right’s whines about political correctness; it’s really the mirror image of their position instead: They claim we’re prevented by the gol dang libruhls from saying things we ought to be able to say; I’m saying there are things that might make sense, but we really ought not say or do them, because the risk of unintentionally giving aid and comfort to socially destructive ideas and opinions is too great.
***
love moderately:
To answer one specific question, yes, I think there would be (probably somewhat muted) uproar even if it were Christian who demanded the right to hide their faces while performing public declarations and acts. Aside from all other questions of religious or cultural garb or iconography, I think the act of hiding one’s face is uniquely disturbing to the social order, because we are such social animals, and seeing each others faces is so critical to that. I’m no anthropologist or sociologist, but I think hiding the face is pretty universally a sign of either shame or stealth, antithetical to full social participation… and I’d hazard a guess that’s true among apes as well.
If it were any other question of banning religious garb or symbols, I wouldn’t hesitate to condemn it… but the more I think about it, the more I think some aspects of citizenship (or just membership in a human social group) arguably really do require literally barefaced performance.
Walton argues that banning the veil is an assault on Muslim women’s personal autonomy, and it’s hard to disagree. But at the same time, imposing the veil strikes me as an almost certainly deliberate strategy on the part of [some specific subset of] Muslim men to deny women the basic ability to participate in larger society (in part because there’s so many things you can’t really do without showing your face). Two competing wrongs, it seems to me; as I said, it’s a thorny issue.
Also, despite my recent confessional moment, let’s keep the floggings private rather than public, eh? ;^)
And now… off to celebrate the Lovely Bride’s™ birthday!
I’ll ketchup later, I just wanted to get this out there before I do:
Thanks for reminding me of a Minnie Pearl joke … which my GoogleFu can’t find. It goes something like this. ‘I was staying at this fancy hotel and looked out the window and saw a naked man with his blinds open in another room.
I immediately called the desk to complain. They sent this manager fella right up and he said he couldn’t see anything thing at all. I said “well, if you move this bureau over and put this chair on top of it you can see right into his room!”‘ (apologies to Ms. Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon for not doing justice to her joke.)
It’s required for my major. I doubt I’ll have to use it again.
Ah. So there is a function?
…I’m in no position to say you’re wrong (you’re probably not) but speaking as a faceblind, strange, preferentially Internet denizen… ugh.
Bill: While I don’t have time to reply in as much detail as I’d like, see this article:
France’s burqa ban: women are “effectively under house arrest”
I also wrote about it on my own blog a while back
In brief: you can’t “liberate” women by arresting them, nor by telling them what they should and shouldn’t be wearing. Authoritarianism and criminalization are not generally good strategies for solving social problems (I’d say the same with regard to drugs and commercial sex work, for instance), and tend to increase, not reduce, the amount of exploitation and danger involved.
Good news, everyone!
Devil breeding efforts meeting with success
(Watch the video too, if you want a dose of cute)
Well, I tried cleaning the underside of my “delete” (that is, backspace) key. It still doesn’t work. Fortunately the other “delete” key still does. Otherwise I’d be fucked.
Dinner with Josh and my friend was SO lovely. It really made my day. I’m so thankful for friends who will take you out to dinner on short notice.
Hey, interesting note from my local news: keep an eye out for stories about a fraternity from my alma mater, the Uni. of Vermont (UVM). Recently a fraternity (Epsilon Phi Sigma, I think) sent out a survey to new recruits, including the question, “If you could rape anybody, who would it be?” It’s now blowing up into an Incident. The administration is investigating, the fraternity may be put on suspension, and my brand spankin’ new feminist organizing group is getting on TV and getting calls from the Associated Press!
It’s not really that thorny. You don’t fix domination and oppression with more domination and oppression. Muslim men are telling Muslim women what to wear… That’s bad, so let’s get the State to tell Muslim women what to wear instead! Smashing idea–what could possibly go wrong?
John:
They are cute little devils.
Yep.
I was thinking narrowly of what arguments we might use to secure the religious exemption for everyone. To the degree that it has been recognizing as a legitimate loyalty to something larger than the state, for instance, a sacred duty to preserve human rights everywhere might also constitute a greater loyalty.
SallyStrange @ 67-
I didn’t think my opinion of Fraternities could sink any lower. Until rape humor, that is. At least I’m assuming it was meant to be funny.
If you punish the women wearing a burqa, you are punishing the women. And just to make it worse, they have very little choice.
Don’t be afraid
Of the guy in shades, oh no
I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can
So I can
See the light that’s right before my eyes
Re. Og, if it has a function, it’d better not be a Green’s function. I hated those fuckers with a passion.
Yes, this was the point where math and I parted company. (Characters of irreducible representations was just a knife in the back as I left. *scars*)
love moderately, is this corny enough to counter? (Damn how I sometimes hate growing up in the 80’s)
John: baby Tasmanian devils got a loud squee out of me. There’s something so charming about the way such soft, cuddly looking babies open mouths full of sharp teeth and go AARRRRRRRGGHHHHRRRRRAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR.
Then you didn’t really take my hypothetical seriously, Bill.
In truth, if this were a common enough Christian practice, then Canadian laws would have always been crafted to work around the issue. There wouldn’t be an uproar any more than there’s an uproar about Christians sending their children to Christian schools.
No anthropologist indeed; it isn’t antithetical to social participation in Muslim countries. It is how social participation occurs.
Where hiding the face is the common way of things, it is just the common way of things. Other methods of gauging sincerity are devised.
But you’re wrong, and now that you’ve failed to address my arguments to the contrary, your argument is a non-argument.
“If the concern were really about confirming the woman’s identity, it would be sufficient to require her reveal her face immediately beforehand to women who are officers of the state.
If the concern were really about ensuring that each woman speak the oath, this could be handled various ways: by use of microphones, by having veiled women take the oath by themselves or in groups small enough to differentiate individual voices (before or after taking the oath again in the larger heterogenous group, if taking the oath among one vast corpora is socially vital).”
If this was not about excluding Muslims from citizenship, then workarounds like these would be sufficient. Do you see the problem now? Those were your justifications for the alleged necessity of the practice, and these are the reasons why they aren’t necessities after all. You can’t just keep on asserting it.
Sally,
That makes sense to me. So the French burqa law would be out. But what about barring veiled women from teaching in public schools? In Germany, the argument has been made, as the veil is a symbol of oppression, these are values the state doesn’t want to see represented by its teachers (another argument goes it is a religious symbol, but several Southern states have nuns teaching public school wearing habit and a cross, so unless you argue Christianity privilege, that won’t fly). There was a case where a education student sued her way into the teaching assistanceship which only public schools can provide (as opposed to private schools), during which she was allowed to keep her veil on. Since the only way to get your certificate is to complete this assistanceship, the state govt in question could not bar her from that, though it could choose not to employ her after completing it.
Fuck you, Youtube.
I did not want into my wine at two in the morning.
(Ignore the friggin’ ‘related’ videos.)
Folks mist the joke in Oggies “Ah. So there is a function?” and my “It’s a steep learning curve” (IRT ‘R’).
I’m very disanointed in you.
!
heretic.
changeable moniker got the function joke. And even came up with a fresh green function as an example.
StarStuff: “But the good news is that I never have to do calculus again!”
I’m sorry, but this makes me feel very sad. I have to say that I certainly didn’t love calculus classes, but calculus is one of the more useful skills I attained as an undergrad. I use it in my day job. I’ve used it in personal financial planning. I’ve used it when figuring out how much paint to by for a room. I use it while driving. Calculus is everywhere. It is how the world works.
Starstuff, it is not your fault that you hated calc class. The way they teach the subject is fucking criminal, just as with statistics. Do me a favor and stay open to letting the world around you teach you calculus…and statistics and physics. Good luck
On Boy’s geography final, Dysan Spheres showed up in one of the questions. He described the concept and then explained that a Niven Ring would be much more effective, cheaper and would require less material. He also pointed out that Dysan Spheres would be far more energy absorptive if the Brin Fractal Sphere model were used. No idea yet if the professor will like the answer or not.
Og, I’m a slow tpyist with a slow connection. I only seen CM’s line after I poited.
++++++++++++++++++
If it wasn’t for Dirty Jobs I would never have heard of a bearcat.
Kitteh can has Carlie =^_^= Commiserations about the couch. :-S
Interesting how “dope” has had all these meaning drifts. Like various words for cereals in, say, German, or corn in English.
Yep.
(“Lick my ass, you wanker!”)
…where “always” means “for the last 100 million years” :-)
It happens only if you post the whole URL.
…Quite. :-)
*lightbulb moment*
Alethea H. Claw is Cath the Canberra Cook?
And chocolate! :-)
I looked into the second article and… it’s incredibly funny. The newt is stupid enough to actually believe his own word peels! He actually believes his own hollow, floppy word peels! X-D X-D X-D
He’s stupider than Sarah Palin. Mark my words.
Heh. The edition we have renders this “Er aber, sag’s ihm, er kann mich –– –– –– (geht ab)”.
Day saved.
That makes it sound like “I know what you are, but what am I”.
Somebody’s what?
That depends on the mom.
Seconded :-)
*vehement nodding* :-) :-) :-)
Ecomorphologists use it a lot. Want to know how much your little Mesozoic dinosaur or mammal climbed? Take a heap of measurements on its feet and see what it clusters with. And so on ad infinitum vel nauseam. :-)
This thread makes me so happy… ^_^
It’s much simpler. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Canada would need to pay billions and billions next year because the country’s CO2 emissions have risen by 30 % instead of falling by 6 %.
Strip-mining tar sands in Alberta will do that to a country.
Dude, there were lots of those. You haven’t even shown us a gorgonopsian!
Wikipedia is also wrong in claiming this is the only one with two canines per half of the upper jaw. Two clicks away is Raranimus, which had two canines, as shown by the presence of replacement canines on the tongue side of the first canines.
(…Almost everything the Raranimus article says about Tetraceratops is wrong, and Olson’s Gap was based on misdating a couple of formations around the world.)
One such mushroom is said to have been contained in the magic potions druids gave to warriors. See also: berserk. …Except the Wikipedia article doesn’t say anything about any such substance in that species, so maybe my source* is a mistranslation?
* Some book I don’t remember, of course.
That’s just the social contract, which applies to all non-hermits worldwide. It’s not comparable to a pledge and isn’t country-specific.
For the human sex talk you’ll have to go back about two more days.
:-)
Wow. That’s progress. Did the Turks introduce it?
I wore tights in winter till I outgrew the biggest gender-neutral ones that were available. (Well, the second-biggest – the biggest ones had so much polyester-or-whatever in them they charged themselves electrically from just looking at them, so I never wore those, given how hairy my legs are.) Since then it’s been socks + so-called long underpants (long-johns, right?), which I never actually wear as underpants. I think “long underpants” are deep hypocrisy.
In my autistic system of classification, pants belong to the outermost (third) layer of clothing, like jackets and stuff. As long as I had tights, whenever I came home in winter, I took my jacket and my pants off and ran around in sweater and tights, the second layer. (Much more comfortable than pretty much any pants. Remember, jeans or corduroy pants are armor plates to me.)
Real men don’t know pain. And their fashion designers don’t know brain.
(Speaking of which. My mom remembers the time before tights. Stockings. Freezing mid-thighs all winter long.)
Ah, yeah. My dad shudderingly remembers being a schoolchild in Paris* in the 1950s. Shorts in December, because boys wear shorts and men wear trousers – it wasn’t about weather, it was about age and only age. TSIB. To some degree it has even stuck – he’s (mildly) surprised and amused every single time I put on shorts and go into public, even when the weather is so hot that he (always colder than everyone else) wears shorts at home.
* Very complicated biography.
Yep. Especially warm trousers with tights underneath let you sit down in any central European winter.
I wonder how much of this is thanks to Lisa Simpson.
Ah, yeah. I know that kind of thing. :-(
I don’t, for the simply reason I never either did it and never wanted to do it. I always considered it a silly fashion: like any other fashion, somebody seems to have declared that this was cool now, so everybody followed it blindly, without ever thinking about whether it would be, like, comfortable to wear. ~:-| Exactly the kind of peer pressure I’m immune to.
Uh, no, under the name “Simeon Sakskoburggotski”, noteworthy only because -ski is usually Macedonian, contrasting with the usual Bulgarian -ov.
Also, he was deposed at the age of six. He may well be the exception that proves the rule.
*facepalm*
You verb Sweden for the winter? Awesome!
Unsubscribe so they notice you.
:-) :-) :-)
I’ve seen the skull of a Tassie devil. It looks as powerful as it is. It’s fucking incredible.
No problem.
I got to meet a binturong once. She really did smell like popcorn.
Count me in with the heretics.
—
Aaaaaaand just because: ichneumon wasps.
pelamun,
Not according to Muslims; it is a symbol of freedom.
(Freedom to voluntarily submit, that is*)
—
* This is what ‘Islam’ means, no?
Huh. No matter what I do these days, I always get to bed no soooner than 2 am. It’s 2:15 now.
o_O
I can (just barely) imagine using integration to figure out how much paint to buy, but… driving? Do explain.
Dyson.
FIFM.
Forgot to comment this. Let’s say LOL. :-)
So students should instead learn that it’s best to discourage these women from entering the teaching profession.
High heels are also a symbol of oppression; shouldn’t the states ban them too?
I see sources saying that Baden-Württemberg and Bremen have banned teachers from wearing hijab, most typically referring to the headscarf, not just the veil or niqab. Is that right; they’ve banned even headscarves?
Refusing veiled women the ability to participate in an occupation for which they are otherwise qualified is hardly empowering or liberating for them. And teaching students that women who don’t conform to the “normal” feminine dress codes of the majority culture will be barred from the workplace is hardly a particularly healthy or empowering message.
Any gendered clothing can be a symbol of sexist oppression, if there is gender-specific social and cultural pressure on women to wear such clothing when they would rather not. This includes “sexy” clothing as much as “modest” clothing, and skirts and heels as much as headscarves and veils; it isn’t a trait intrinsic to the clothes themselves. Identifying the burqa uniquely as a “symbol of oppression” that must be eliminated from schools and public life, and pushing women of minority cultures into conforming to the “normal” feminine dress codes of the majority culture whether they like it or not, isn’t an attempt to empower women. It’s an attempt to enforce cultural hegemony.
It is just not a simple matter to say that Muslim women wearing hijab, or niqab, are doing it because Muslim men are forcing them to. Some are. Some aren’t:
Another:
ahs, it’s you. Got confused about your changing nyms ;)
First, the states in red have banned teachers from wearing headscarves
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Kopftuch_im_Schuldienst_Deutschland.png
It’s many more states, than just two.
The most famous case was in Ba-Wü: the daughter of the former Afghan ambassador to Germany, German citizen, suing the Ba-Wü state govt in 1999. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fereshta_Ludin
I haven’t looked at all the different state laws, but it seems that the idea is that any kind of symbol that calls into question the loyalty (to the constitution, to democratic principles, to the rule of law) of state officials, especially those in the education sector, fall under the various laws. Several state laws mention the “christlich-abendländische Grundordnung” (Christian-occidental foundation of German culture/society), so this is why nuns do not have to take off their habit. But the legal situation is complicated.
The idea of pushing Christianity as part of German culture has been an agenda of the conservatives for some time now, and is partially supported by the constitution, a fact I deeply deplore.
One more thing though: one of the lessons of the Weimar Republic is the idea of a “wehrhafte Demokratie” (“democracy capable of defending itself”). This is a decidedly different approach than in the United States. This is why Germany has made denying the Holocaust a crime, and seeks to ban organisations and parties from both the right and left fringes (though the era of leftist terrorism is mostly past now, so the focus is on right wing extremism right now). This is also behind the idea of barring veiled women from becoming school teachers.
In principle I do support this idea of wehrhafte Demokratie. As far as the veil goes, there is no consensus as the map shows. Even the German left is split, with many prominent feminists, such as Alice Schwarzer, appearing to support a ban of veiled school teachers.
G’night, all. Off to bed. Tomorrow is Monday after all.
John Morales,
I don’t know if really means “submission” in Arabic, I don’t have a good dictionary handy. But I know it’s the same root as salam “peace” (s-l-m).
Jag älskar Sverige
ॐ:
Yeah, right.
Never mind “I do this because I want to be closer to God, I want to please him and I want to live a modest lifestyle,” said Ms. Ahmed, who asked that her appearance without a veil not be described. “I want to be tested in that way. The niqab is a constant reminder to do the right thing. It’s God-consciousness in my face.”
Which is the reason, which is the
excusejustification? :)(I mean, come on! She’s being tested, but it’s “liberating”?)
—
Bah. When we bike-riders see each other on the road, we often acknowledge each other: “Fucking car-drivers@!”
(In-group acknowledgement is not a justification)
Some are doing it against the wishes of the older generation:
pelamun, well, don’t take my word for it; check it out.
(Get back to me if you still dispute my understanding)
damn, pressed a button too early.
John Morales,
I don’t know if really means “submission” in Arabic, I don’t have a good dictionary handy. But I know it’s the same root as salam “peace” (s-l-m).
wut?
BTW, do you know the song Jag älskar Sverige (with bad English subtitles) by Die Ärzte. It’s a bizarre song….
ॐ @98, right. Non-conformist rebels, they are.
John, I don’t necessarily dispute it, I’ve heard it many times. What I’m not sure about is whether
a) it is the original meaning, and no longer is used in this way
b) it still can be used in the meaning of “submission”, or could be used in Classical Arabic.
c) folk etymology. maybe there is a different word with the same root, and thus it became the explanation (like Islam – religion of peace, because salam is the same root as Islam).
Can’t really investigate this without a good dictionary…
David Marjanović:
That is fabulous.
That might have a little bit to do with it, if it is the case. (I only meant that as an anecdote.) On the other hand, she wasn’t known for playing classical saxophone. Indeed, the existence of classical saxophonists in general isn’t really what I’d call “well-known.” Anyway, that would make it harder to explain why there are so few women jazz saxophonists.
On a practical level, it’s easier to switch to sax from flute or another woodwind, so that’s almost certainly a part of it. Girls are generally encouraged to play woodwinds, piano, vocals, and strings (except the big manly bass); but not so much standard jazz instruments (saxes and piano excepted) like brasses, drums, bass and guitar.
In addition, as I implied in the last thread, wind ensembles can seem more in-your-face than others (for practical reasons because of the instrumentation), so I guess it’s possible that girls might be put off by that or given a harder time without it being noticed, because of their socialization in other contexts. Since those kinds of ensembles are where budding jazz musicians are usually educated (rather than choirs and orchestras), that sort of difference could have a significant effect.
John, you are talking to someone who believes that the concepts of male and female are destructive and oppressive.
Direct your bahs to the wind.
What my quotes indicate is that these women are operating upon what you would call “the absence of coercion by others when making choices.”
walton,
The govt position would be that since Ms Ludin was finally allowed to complete her assistanceship, she is not barred from this profession. In fact as of now she is teaching at a private school with ties to Millî Görüş, an organisation under observation by some state security services.
Also, in a system where the state grants tenure to government officials including those teaching in public schools (though some aren’t tenured, it varies from state to state and type of school etc), the government wants to be certain about their loyalty.
Now I do think that merely having a headscarf on doesn’t necessarily mean you identify with a militant Islamic organisation, and thus these laws represent overreach by mostly conservative state govts.
When I was in SE Asia, I felt excluded by this greeting, because this greeting is reserved for Muslims ONLY.
or rather where the greeter says
“Salam aleikum”
and the greetee responds
“Ya wassallah salam”
(since I never got to use it, I might misremember the response ;) )
You Whiny Sniveling Little Atheists Are Pathetic!
PZ, you might want to make this a stand alone thread.
And so it becomes a comfort in Europe: «”Answers to these questions can be inferred from discussions about other aspects of their lives and their experiences of growing up as a Muslim minority in a Western country. These discussions clearly revealed that their inclination towards religion was a coping strategy designed to deal with their sense of isolation from the majority culture and a conscious assertion of identity:
“[After starting to wear the hijab] now when I step out on to the street, people perceive me as a Muslim. Other Muslims say salaam to me and recognise me as a Muslim. I really like that – I like to be recognised as a Muslim. (N. Khan, personal communication, 23 August 2006)”»
(All I know personally is that it is not reserved only for Muslims here in middle America.)
The response here is “wa alaikum salaam”.
ॐ:
Very post-modernist of you.
Close enough; I directed them to the flatulous. :)
Right.
(Quite free, their choice is)
ahs,
it’s because SE Asia is not part of the Arabic world. You might have heard of the bizarre argument in Malaysia when the government threatened not to renew the licence of a Catholic newspaper if it continued using the word “Allah” for God, instead of the Malay words such as “Tuhan”. In Indonesia, the issue seems less dire, because Catholic missionaries have been using “Allah” for centuries…
In an Arabic speaking country, this wouldn’t become an issue because “Allah” just means “God”…
“Arab world”, not “Arabic world”
What a fucking stupid comment. I have explained my opposition to gender before. I don’t know what postmodernism is. I do know what has hurt me.
Again, what I said: “It is just not a simple matter to say that Muslim women wearing hijab, or niqab, are doing it because Muslim men are forcing them to. Some are. Some aren’t […] Some are doing it against the wishes of the older generation”.
All of that is true.
If you believe that all these women I’ve quoted from the US and UK are in danger of being murdered — by their fathers who disapprove of them wearing hijab, no less! — then you are an idiot.
Nuance, can you do it?
Notice the source of my citation from #98:
Women Living Under Muslim Laws.
Do you mind explaining again? I don’t think I’ve caught your explanation before and I’m curious.
BWAHAHA
That’s one pathetic article. Amusingly so, at least up until it takes a dark turn into the glorification of human sacrifice:
wtf
ॐ:
The concepts of male and female are biological, not just societal; ignoring biological reality is post-modernist.
(Gender may not be sex, but we’re a sexed species, like it or not.
Denial is futile)
Murder is the extreme outcome, that much is true.
(Try to put UK or USA in that search term; threats suffice)
Yeah. Basic risk assessment, too.
(What problems does a woman from an Islamic background face when not wearing a burka vs. what problems does she face when wearing one?)
MrFire, you might find the link that was on the source page illuminating. This story has also been used as part of the rational of Unganda’s Kill The Gays bill.
I love the name of the missionary group, Catholic White Fathers. Oh, that white man’s burden, civilizing the savages.
Hooray!
In the past two days, I have formally submitted my Ph.D. dissertation to the university (together with a small mountain of paperwork), arranged for binding, and (as of 5 minutes ago) been hired for a post-doctoral fellowship.
*dances*
Oh, there’s not much to it. It’s ressentiment all the way. My life would have been substantially better in a world where there are no particular expectations of a boy beyond those of a child. I am angry that I was raised as a boy, and angry that nothing better could have come from being raised as a girl. Nothing good comes of it all. Lest I give an inaccurate impression, I am not intersex. There are just no inherent reasons why we have to have gender at all, rather than mere awareness of physical difference.
You’re fucking stupid to attach these assumptions of what I must be talking about, John.
@ Esteleth
Congratulations! Sounds like a good two days.
ॐ:
“the concepts of male and female are destructive and oppressive”
What are you talking about, if not gender?
What is gender, other than perceived sexual identity?
(Sex is real; gender is conceptual. But the latter ineluctably proceeds from the former)
I can dig what he means by gender.
Concepts cannot be biological. What a stupid comment. Genes, hormones, physical features are biological.
Then it must be your contention that every woman who is not wearing hijab is being threatened for it.
From not wearing a burqa?
Jesus Christ. You are so fucking out of touch. The headscarf is not uncommon here. I have never personally seen a woman in a burqa, ever.
I love checking the spam folder of my blog. Those spam comments are so hilarious.
Walton (@65) and SallyStrange (@68):
Unless I badly misunderstand things (which is always a possibility), the French and Canadian cases are fundamentally different. I do, in fact, oppose a broad proscription of a given mode of dress based on religion or culture, and I’ve said so before. From an American POV, it’s utterly shocking to suggest that anyone should be fined or detained based on what clothes they’re wearing (let’s set aside questions of lewdness or public exposure for the time being, shall we?).
But AFAICT, that’s not what’s going on in Canada. Instead, what they seem to be saying is “for this specific public function, it’s necessary that you show your face.” Not, IMHO, the same thing as a ban on a mode of dress.
FWIW, I was talking about this over dinner with the LB™, who is an ESOL teacher at a university-based language institute, and she said most of her veiled Saudi women students have gotten dispensation to show their faces in (mixed-sex) classes, because the teachers’ ability to see their faces when they’re speaking is pedagogically important. The notion that there are occasionally functional/situational reasons to drop the veil is not the same thing as demonizing these women for their mode of dress.
That said, for all I know the Canadian government may in fact be pursuing an Islamophobic agenda, of which this rule is one part. I’m not saying it ain’t so; I’m just saying it ain’t necessarily so.
***
love moderately (@77):
No, I took you seriously. Of course cultural norms are accommodated in their own locale, so yes, if it were common for Canadian Christians to cover their faces, Canadian law would probably accommodate that. But if foreign Christians in Canada had a cultural norm, in contrast to the local norm, of covering their faces, I think the concern would be nearly the same as it is with veiled Muslim women (especially if the face-covering norm was gender specific, as it is for Muslims). I say “nearly” rather than “exactly” because you’re right: There definitely is an endemic pro-Christian bias in North America. But I really believe that, except in the (AFAIK very few) cultures that practice it, covering one’s face in public challenges the social order in a way that no other variation in dress (short of outright nudity, perhaps) really does.
Your arguments to the contrary? I’ve argued that there are practical reasons why people need to be visibly who they are, and to be visibly doing what they claim to be doing, for certain public functions. You’ve argued that there might be multiple ways to satisfy those requirements. I don’t disagree. How is your point “to the contrary” of mine? How are the two points even in conflict? The argument I intend to be making is not incompatible with the argument I understand you to be making.
Once again, I’m not defending this specific action by the Canadian government, and I’m definitely not defending broad proscriptions on modes of dress (e.g., the French laws Walton referenced). I’m just saying that people going around hiding their identities all the time poses some functional challenges for an organized society… and those challenges are exacerbated by the undeniable existence of Islamophobia in North American society. No part of this position defends Islamophobic positions, and no part of it denies the prevalence of Islamophobia.
Really? My (admittedly imperfect) understanding was that even within the Muslim world, it’s only a relatively small fraction of countries and cultures in which the full veil is common… and that in those places, the people who go veiled — women, that is — really don’t have full social participation, in any meaningful sense of the word: They can’t drive, their ability to be educated is severely limited, they can’t freely associate or move about without restriction in public, they only this year attained the nominal right to vote (in Saudi Arabian, in any case)… and let’s not even talk about personal autonomy over their physical and intimate lives, shall we? The veil may or may not be a tool in denying these women full social participation; it is demonstrably not enabling their full participation.
And covering the face surely limits the ability to participate in societies where covering the face is not the norm. This is, as I’ve said, exacerbated by the overlay of genuine anti-Muslim prejudice, but I really do believe it would still be more or less true regardless of religion, ethnicity, or gender: We’re hard-wired to read each others’ faces for all kinds of social cues (and, of course, to confirm identity for all sorts of more formal social purposes); hiding the face breaks that link, and voids the social interface.
In what country or culture do the same people who commonly go with their faces covered at all times also participate fully in their society? I’m not aware of any, personally, but I’m ready to be enlightened.
Much more broadly, I think there’s an inherent potential conflict in liberalism: We believe strongly in peoples’ right to self determination (I believe strongly in that, regardless of what you might have concluded from this discussion)… and we also believe strongly in basic individual human rights. When the results of cultural self-determination end up denying individual rights, we have a conflict that’s difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. Which, I suspect, is why we observe Deep Rifts® among otherwise simpatico progressive secular humanists, especially around how to think about the Islamic world.
So, in the final analysis, I stand by my original assertion that it’s a thorny subject.
Now, off for more birthday observances….
It is the unnecessary notion of “sexual identity” (which, like all identities, is invented), and all the expectations which attach to this.
Esteleth, congratulations! (and dancing empathetic rats if you should fancy)
—
re the hijab and all… don’t women choose to wear spike heels sometimes? (along with some particularly fabulous guys?) Not only do such symbols have different connotations to different individuals, they can also be re-appropriated, or re-contextualized. *shrug* *flees*
*reads the article Janine linked*
Hmm, a christian hater who uses a child’s horrible death as an example of gods righteous love. *sigh*
But good news everyone, we atheists have a vaulted belief system!
*send grog over the intertubes*
John Morales, you are conflating sex and gender. Sex is determined by parts. It is biological. Behaviors that people exhibit purely because of their sex are things like getting erections and menstruating. Society certainly affects how these things are viewed, but has essentially zilch to do with the fact that they occur or not occur (minus certain modern medical developments). Gender, by contrast, is determined by society. Gender stereotyping (men are strong/women are weak, men are leaders/women are followers, etc) comes from society and does not inherently logically flow from biology.
When ahs complains about the highly negative effects of gender stereotyping and enforcement, this is what is being complained about. Ahs is not saying, “I reject that I have [parts]!” but “I reject the role that society demands that I, as a person who has [parts], must perform.”
Oh, and this:
(“gender” and “sex,” respectively) is not true in many cases. Androgyny, for example. Also, being trans.
ॐ:
Sex is biological, gender is its conceptualisation.
Did I or did I not refer to risk assessment?
My contention is that women have been murdered specifically for not wearing one, but have not been murdered for wearing one.
(And so forth for lesser outcomes; on the balance, a Muslim woman is better off wearing one, whether in our society or in an Islamic one)
So, it’s not an actual issue, then?
(I’ve never personally seen a woman who had acid thrown in her face, either. I guess it must not be an issue, either, by that reckoning)
Oh, God.
Ah. Stuff like:
On so many levels, you can just see the forthcoming movie being directed by Mel Gibson, can’t you?
Esteleth:
No. I am distinguishing between them.
<sigh>
Again: Gender is a concept derived from sexuality. Did the latter not exist, I doubt the former would have any relevance, outside of fantasies.
(Without sex, what meaning does androgyny (gynoandry) have? ;) )
Wearing a headscarf won’t get you killed, but you may be physically attacked. Odd trends. I don’t know that, if I were facing a choice between being merely physically attacked vs. getting killed would hesitate for a second. The choice is obvious. But the attitude that one is expected to be grateful for the privilege merely of being shunned and occasionally physically harassed must also grate on one’s morale.
It is in fact a ban on a mode of dress for this specific public function.
And that’s a choice they make, now isn’t it? Because the school reaches out and explains to them why it would be helpful to see their faces? Does the school require it absolutely upon penalty of expulsion or an automatic failing grade?
It is demonizing these women for their mode of dress when it is a barrier to becoming a citizen. It is saying you cannot become a Canadian as long as you’re dressed like that; you are automatically disqualified and must remain an outsider. Hell yes that’s demonization of the foreigner.
I know, I know, Canadians are not Republicans.
And could accomodate it, therefore it the rule is not necessary.
But that’s not much of a response to what I actually said: “This rule would never have been proposed or even imagined if face veils were a common Christian dress rather than dress of the outsider.”
True I didn’t explicitly specify the dress of “Christian Canadians” but if it’s in contrast to the dress of the “outsider” then I think it should be clear enough that I was implying “rather than the dress of non-Canadians”.
It’s contrary because you originally claimed that showing one’s face during the oath was necessary, and when you responded you did not clearly alter your claim to account for my examples of how showing one’s face during the oath is not necessary.
You simply repeated that “showing one’s face is an essential element of taking a public oath.”
If by this you now mean that “showing one’s face to an officer of the state before taking a public oath is essential”, then you gave no indication of your changed mind.
Yes, you are. By providing arguments that this requirement might meet a legitimate governmental interest, you are offering a defense of it. In a court where it was not stipulated that this rule should be held to stricter scrutiny, your defense would likely carry the day.
You can very well say you’re just defending it for the sake of argument, as the devil’s advocate, and that may be true, but you’re defending it nevertheless.
You wish.
Sorry, but you just don’t get to pretend this. Whether you’re defending Islamophobia is not a matter of your intentions.
Dude, unless you wish to make the case that the veil is in fact a cause of denying these women full first-class participation, then you concede the argument to me.
I never said what you want me to be saying.
What remains true is that social participation occurs while wearing the veil. It is not because of the veil when a woman’s court testimony is not equivalent to a man’s.
IMHO, because there isn’t a good term to communicate the concept to gender-minded people. Neuter? Asexual? Blech. Like “atheist”. Why do we have to be defined as “absence of” anything?
FTW
I am saving this line for future reference. Elegance.
I really don’t get the winky smiley here. What’s up with that?
I know you aren’t necessarily defending this, but “loyalty” is a very creepy concept. (The word, in this context, makes me think of the anti-Communist oaths required of state officials and professionals in the US during the McCarthy era.)
That said, I can’t say absolutely that there should be no political litmus-test for employment as a teacher; I’d have to say that I wouldn’t want a white nationalist teaching in a state school, for instance (indeed, this has been a major issue in the UK with members of the British National Party). But this is probably a special case, as I see white nationalism / racism as a much bigger and more imminent threat to freedom in European societies than any form of Islam, radical or otherwise. Even so, I can’t think of a good way to draft laws or policies so as to ban the employment of white nationalists without also legitimizing the exclusion of members of other fringe political and religious groups.
Pterryx, fwiw, “asexual” does have a meaning – someone with no sexual attraction..
SallyStrange, yeah. Rock and a hard place. I don’t envy them.
(Note my main cavil was at ॐ’s claim that Islamic women (generally speaking) are uncoerced regarding choices of attire, when in a Western society… because pressures aren’t coercion.
(different story in Islamic theocracies, such as Saudi Arabia)
‘Tis amusing ॐ thinks I don’t do nuance, when I’m recognising the difficulties they face, both pro- and con-.
At the end of the day, “blood is thicker than water”)
SallyStrange @141, the winkie represents an explicit acknowledgement that the question is rhetorical.
(Leave it out, it becomes implicit, though it remains rhetorical)
John, what I find fascinating is that you refuse to acknowledge that a alma could choose to veil herself. Why is that?
Surely if they are adults and have so chosen they deserve to have that choice respected, even if you personally disagree with it or wouldn’t choose it for yourself.
*headdesk* Right, I forgot, thanks… my brain just constructed it as parallel to “atheist”, maybe with some plant biology thrown in, I dunno. (prob’ly shouldn’t be attempting to have thoughts atm…)
Uh huh. So, you are saying, that without biological sex, conceptual gender would not exist?
…
And? What are the implications you are assigning this pretty obvious observation?
Sexual orientation and its basis in brain structure and function
Neurobiological research related to sexual orientation in humans is only just gathering momentum, but the evidence already shows that humans have a vast array of brain differences, not only in relation to gender, but also in relation to sexual orientation.
Fucking autocorrect.
“Alma” should be “woman.”
This is complete bullshit, John.
What I did was quote specific women who indicated that their experience is not one of being forced.
“It is just not a simple matter to say that Muslim women wearing hijab, or niqab, are doing it because Muslim men are forcing them to. Some are. Some aren’t […] Some are doing it against the wishes of the older generation”
And I said that these specific women are operating upon what you would call the absence of coercion by others when making choices.
+++++
I made no claim about Muslim women in general except that they are all operating under X or not-X.
Oh, that makes more sense. I had assumed you were making a poetic allusion to the soul, and was trying to figure out what you meant.
(Y antes de morirme quiero / Echar mis versos del alma. Now that’s making me want to listen to Guantanamera. But my headphones are broken. Dammit.)
walton,
the German term is Loyalitätspflicht “loyalty obligation”. In Germany, in exchange for life tenure for govt officials (and a govt pension), the govt official also gives up their right to go on strike. So in Germany the police and public teachers with life tenure can’t strike. As far as I know, the definition of loyalty just means that the govt official in question support the constitutional order and not try to undermine it or topple it. Reestablishing a Nazi state, or communist rule, or a theocracy of any stripe would definitely fall under “anti-constitutional activities”.
Germany went through its own version of McCarthyism in the 70s with the rise of the RAF terror (not Royal Air Force, the other one ;) ), and especially conservative states implemented the Radikalenerlass (“radical person order”) which stipulated govt officials to swear that they never were members of the KPD or its successor organisations (the KPD was outlawed in the 60s, after which the DKP was born, which managed to stay clear of the constitutionally dangerous waters*) ). IIRC, to this day members of the DKP can’t become govt officials in many German states.
But this is something that continues to evolve. The concept of wehrhafte Demokratie involves a balancing act between protecting democracy and leaving the various freedoms guaranteed in the constitutions to all groups.
*) while radical organisations can be outlawed by the interior minister, a political party needs to be tried before the Constitutional Court, a lengthy process designed to protect political parties from arbitrary govt actions.
el alma que anda en amor ni cansa ni se cansa
And no.
The referent of “sex” is biological. “Sex” is its conceptualization. “Gender” is something else.
Esteleth:
Whyever do you imagine that? My only contention is that such a choice is not made in vacuo, but rather has a certain significance due to outside factors.
PS re: “Alma” should be “woman.” — that’s OK, a soul is a person, in the vernacular. :)
—
Close enough.
I quote that to which I responded for the third time: “the concepts of male and female are destructive and oppressive”.
Since we are a sexed species, the concept is rather inevitable, no?
(Consequences are irrelevant to the biological fact)
My high school Spanish is failing me… “the soul that walks in love neither tires nor becomes tired?”
Generalísimo Google tells me that it’s a Taizé chant. A genre I’ve always enjoyed. But I can’t listen to it, because my fucking headphones are too damn broken.*
(No hablo español. He olvidado todo.)
(*A subtle homage to Jimmy “The rent is too damn high” Macmillan.)
Sorry. I’m becoming slightly delirious from tiredness.
Hmmm. Reminds me of something I was reading earlier…
Catherine Mackinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory.
(In case anyone was wondering, there is a reason why she refuses to capitalize “marxism”: “It is conventional to capitalize terms that derive from a proper name. Since I wish to place marxism and feminism in equipoise, the disparate typography would weigh against my analytic structure. Capitalizing both would germanize the text. I also hope feminism, a politics authored by those it works in the name of, is never named after an individual.”)
(Why she decides not to capitalize “germanize”, on the other hand, I have no idea.)
ॐ,
Fair enough; I did respond to is as if it were a general claim.
Hmm.
To what does it refer, if not sexual identity?
Walton, you got it right.
My high school Spanish is failing me… “the soul that walks in love neither tires nor becomes tired?”
Una traducción perfecta, no falta.
By golly, it’s like you can’t even see what you’re doing when you attach that word “identity”.
I don’t even know what my blood type is. It’s surely a matter of record with local hospitals, but it is not my identity.
A good thing you’re not Japanese then ;)
I just finished the scarf that I’m giving to my mother for christmas. Now I have to decide if I want to put fringes on it. Decisions decisions.
ॐ:
That’s your answer?
Tsk. Disingenous, that.
(Care to deny you identify as male?)
Here’s the scarf.
So, fringes or no? I’m having a hard time deciding.
That I have been taught to so identify is the whole of my complaint.
I know this wasn’t aimed at me, but so you know, I don’t identify as either one. I resent the near-ubiquitous presumption that I should.
Fuck. I really wanna read this thread right now. Been busy the last couple of days, but I’m all about some of the conversation that’s happening here right now.
But I have some news: Earthquake, Mag 7.3, in the heart of Papua New Guinea.
It will take a while for news to filter out, but the highlands of New Guinea are among the most populated areas of the planet, and yet are amazingly lacking in modern technologies of daily life.
My main concern just now is landslides. In South Asia and parts of China it would be brittle buildings made of poorly secured stone or just stone/brick that is cut/molded in ways that it’s impossible that it would stand up to the forces of an earthquake. Those buildings are horrifically dangerous in a temblor 6.0 or greater.
In Papua, New Guinea, the homes aren’t built of stone or brick very often, so these collapses are unlikely to be a factor in injuries or deaths. However, the landscape is very hilly and often cannot stand a quake while maintaining position. Large landslides can kill many in a short time.
IANAGeologist, merely a science geek with geologist friends, but I do have lines of knowledge & I’ll try to keep info coming if anyone here needs it. Of course, even if you have family in PNG, beyond the existence of the quake itself, my geology buds will likely not be more useful than what trickles out of the mainstream media…
Still, post here if you want me to follow up….
Crip Dyke,
what about Papua (aka known as western part of New Guinea)? Or was only the eastern part affected?
PNG is the country with the highest linguistic density in the world…
ॐ:
Colour me confused.
I mean, I can’t deny I identify as male (gender), middle-aged (age), Australian (nationality), married (marital status) etc.
These are just the way things are, I don’t see the problem in acknowledging reality.
—
Pteryxx:
So, you don’t identify as male, female or other?
(Then what do you identify as, gender-wise?)
For the record, I’m also resentful about the societal pressure of having to identify as a certain gender..
Okay, quick follow up. We’re now getting news that the quake, although very strong and located directly under the landmass of PNG and not at an offshore distance, probably occurred at significant depth. 100km or more, most likely. I’m not an expert in geology & certainly not in the geology of PNG specifically, but 100km down the rocks are much more plastic in general than they are at the surface. Thus they can absorb some of the energy without passing it on.
Thus it’s less likely that there will be significant casualties. Looks like I was a bit quick on the draw, but thank goodness this was a deep quake, not a shallow one.
so where’s the epicentre?
The Indonesian press isn’t reporting anything for Papua right now.
I think offshore earthquakes have more casualties because of tsunami related floodings and landslides, yes.
Acknowledging what we have been taught is not the same as holding it necessary that we ought to have been taught such.
When one of the anti-nationalists around here begins complaining that there ought not to be such concepts as “Australian”, you understand that to be a complaint that “Australian” is not necessary, and you do not mistake it for a complaint that “Australian” is an empty concept.
Moreover, when someone complains that “atheist” ought to be no more relevant than “aleprechaunist”, and hopes that one day the word will become archaic by disuse, you don’t mistake that for a complaint that “atheist” is currently irrelevant.
As far as gender identity goes, I do not resent the fact that I have been born with a gender.
I passionately resent the fact that there are so many social stereotypes and assumptions attached to biological gender.
I don’t think of myself as having a gender identity at all. It’s simply not relevant to my concept of myself. The traits I do identify with, like being outspoken, or aggressive, or creative, get gender-coded by OTHER people who then assign a gender to me based on what’s in their own heads. It ticks me off. I’ve always been this way; hence my anecdotes from fundie grade school where I kept asking blunt questions about gender-coding, trying to get the girls to play tackle football and the boys to play jump-rope and whatnot.
Note that I’m still extremely sexual. I talk about sex every chance I get. (And do more then talk, when I can.)
(I prefer to be called “it”, but given what I’ve learned about LBGTQ people in the last few years, I don’t ask for that because “it” is seen as dehumanizing.)
ॐ,
True, that. But what exists is not (ahem) necessarily necessary.
Consider that so long as nations exist, everyone has a national identity (whether single, multiple or none) — this is analogic to gender identity so long as sexes exist.
PS Addendum to my previous:
One can be an Australian resident while being a German national.
(To flesh out the analogy)
New Guinea is the island. “Papua, New Guinea,” is the country of Papua on the Island of NG – it occupies the east half and that is where the earthquake occurred.
Indonesian New Guinea is the western half of the island, which is part of the land territory of Indonesia. Indonesia has two “principalities,” “provinces,” or “states” (I don’t actually know what Indonesia calls these political subdivisions).
Confusingly, the 2 “states” of indonesia on NG are “Papua” and “West Papua”. It is unlikely that West Papua will be significantly affected based on the location of the quake towards the east (and because that region is one of shorter hills/mountains with more of the population along the coast and less in a hilly interior).
However, “Papua Indonesia” could still be significantly affected.
We usually see deaths in earthquakes on New Guinea when the magnitude reaches 6.0 or so and the earthquake is shallow (about 30km or less is usually considered “shallow IIRC, but I’d have to check that fact). Below shallow and above about 100km is intermediate. Below 100km is usually considered a deep quake.
When I saw the note that it was 7.3 and under the mainland, I knew from history there was a potential for major catastrophe. I forgot to check the depth. The e-mail back from my girlfriend (not girlfriend) after I expressed concern for serious casualties was much less concerned than I had been. However, it’s not easy to predict how this energy will funnel up to the landmass above. It is still possible that we’ll see significant casualties, but we won’t see nearly as many as if it had been a shallower quake & I’m now hoping there will be few if any.
And that about completely exhausts my knowledge of Papua, New Guinea, tho’ my girlfriend will be relieved to find out that I was actually listening when she was describing why that part of the world is so endangered by quake activity… ;-)
Um, I guess I also know that they have rivers and are on the same geologic plate as Australia. Some people there are poor. Some of them fish. Many of them are both poor and fishers.
Okay, now I’m really at my limit.
Nope. That’s like saying it’s analogous to “blood type identity” so long as blood types exist.
I’d say it’s more like whether bellybuttons are innies or outies, at least to me. There’s a spectrum, often it’s hard to tell, and they can change. And, not unimportantly, who gives a crap.
Thanks, Crip Dyke.
About nomenclature:
Indonesia uses the following administrative divisions:
province (provinsi) – regency (kabupaten) – district (kecamatan).
There is no country called Papua. The island is called New Guinea. Its eastern half belongs to a country called Papua-New Guinea, abbreviated PNG.
Its western half used to be called Irian Jaya, and was ceded to Indonesia by the Netherlands in 1975. It’s been renamed to Papua. So whenever I say Papua, I mean the western half of New Guinea (this gets even more confusing if you also discuss the old colonial names, for the Dutch, German and British parts etc).
Now, there are four special provinces in Indonesia, standing out from the other 29:
– Jakarta, capital region
– Yogyakarta: the sultan of Yogya was on the right side of history, which is why his city has retained it status as a monarchy city state while all others were abolished because they were Dutch collaborators
– Aceh: after the peace agreement, governed by a special autonomy statute, allowing Aceh to implement shariah law province-wide
– Papua: also governed by a special autonomy statute.
In Papua, the so-called autonomy has been cause for resentment and concern for quite some time. Under the dictatorship, Papua was as autonomous as is the Autonomous Region of Tibet in China, but after democratisation started, there was also a significant movement towards local autonomy. This has been implemented nationally, at the level of regency (kabupaten). Since this means that money will be distributed at a local level, every regency and their dog want to become their own entity. A similar proposal was then put forward to divide Papua into three provinces, allegedly in the spirit of local autonomy also.
But Papuan activists protested this move because they saw it as a step towards undermining Papuan integrity by dividing it into three pieces. The idea was to create Papua Barat (West Papua), Papua and Papua Timur (East Papua). West Papua was split off first. At that point, the constitutional court heard the complaint by Papuan leaders and ruled that the tripartition indeed violated the autonomy statute. But because West Papua had already been established, it was allowed to exist, while East Papua didn’t materialise.
Many Papuans resent this, and refer to the entire western half as Papua, while legally speaking there are two provinces, Papua and West Papua.
TL;DR, sorry. But I’ve taken an interest in local autonomy issues in Indonesia.
ॐ, we’ve drifted a looong way from the initial contentions about burkas.
Again, I maintain they are rooted in biological reality, and thus whether or not such concepts are destructive and oppressive, they are accordingly inescapable due to our biology.
(Would these concepts be “destructive and oppressive” if society didn’t assign roles to them?)
One of my complaints about gender is how people who hold that we don’t have to make biological parts into an identity receive confusing four-syllable insults for it.
Does not follow. They are no more inescapable than whether I am publicly identified as a member of the R1b haplogroup.
Inshallah, I am done talking to you about it. It is senseless self-abuse for me to pursue any conversation with you in which I care much more about the topic than you do.
ॐ:
And no less.
What good is an agonist without an antagonist? :)
I’m not going to try to respond to everything; just a few points, and then I’ll leave the field to all y’all:
Hmmm… let’s imagine the draft is reinstated, and people are required to report for a mandatory government-administered physical that necessitates briefly stripping down to underpants. There might be many things objectionable about that scenario, but in any case, it couldn’t reasonably be construed as a ban on trousers… not even in a limited sense. It’s simply a functional requirement.
Regardless of anybody’s motives or agendas, it seems to me that there’s a qualitative difference between saying (as I gather the French have) “you can’t wear that in public anywhere, because it makes you look Muslim” and saying (as I gather the Canadians are) “I need you to take that off for a couple minutes so I can do my job.” Either or both may be bad policy (IMHO the former is certainly abhorrent policy), but in any case, they are not the same kind of policy.
It would certainly be demonizing if Canada were saying to these women, “you can’t be citizens because we don’t like the way you dress”; if, OTOH, they’re saying, “we’re quite happy for you to be citizens; you need only take the oath in the specified manner,” that’s a different matter. If we stipulate (because I acknowledge not everyone here actually accepts) the existence of nation-states and the validity of citizenship as a concept, then nations have a perfect right to determine how outsiders become naturalized citizens. Show me that Canada has deliberately constructed barriers out of fear and hatred of Muslims (as, I agree, may well be the case) and I’ll be right there with you at the protest rally… but it’s not impossible that this is simply a case of people’s own cultural norms (whether individually chosen or enforced from within the culture) not allowing them to comply with otherwise reasonable procedures.
Wherever people move from one cultural locale to another, there will inevitably be some degree of tension between the norms of the incoming people and those of the local culture: It does not automatically follow that these tensions, and attempts to deal with them, are manifestations of hatred or invidious prejudice. They may be that, of course, depending on the facts, but they may also not be. Despite your repeated taunt…
…I don’t actually know (and have repeatedly said I don’t know) whether the Harper government is better, worse, or different in some oblique way than U.S. Republicans (who themselves represent a wide range of relative badness over the years), and I don’t know whether, if I did have the facts, I would judge this to be rank Islamophobia or an otherwise reasonable move that unfortunately looks like Islamophobia in the current political climate. What you call my “defense” of the rule has, at every point, been entirely conditional. My argument has been: “If A then B… but if C then D, and honestly, I have no idea whether A or C is true. And even if A is true, it risks being mistaken for C, which is a problem in and of itself. It’s complicated.”
What really happened is that I saw a comment to the effect of OMG, look at the shit Canada is up to now! and I followed the accompanying link, fully expecting to find quotes from some raving Pat-Buchanan-like xenophobe bloviating about how all those people were nothing but terrorists. Instead, I found what seemed to be bland quotes from a civil servant to the effect of, “terribly sorry, you know, but I’m afraid I need to see your face for a moment, just to do my job prop’ly”… and it occurred to me that whatever this was, it wasn’t necessarily what I had expected it to be. And then I started thinking about all the social functions — formal and informal — to which literal face-to-face interaction is essential, and the underlying question started to seem complex to me, and I thought I’d better think about it some more.
So I did.
Out loud.
Here, in a space that is, usually, a productive place to think out loud.
Anybody who took any of that as advocacy on behalf of Islamophobes or Islamophobic ideologies was simply mistaken.
And with that, good night, all….
You guys (and I use that word advisedly) are hilarious.
Yeah, I daresay they would, solely by virtue of dividing intelligent, rational, loving beings more or less into two camps. If we were a and α, and those concepts were purely biological with no cultural roles involved at all, someone who wants children with a lifemate could still discount half of everyone around them simply because they don’t have a full slate of chromosomes between them. Assuming they could easily find a donor or adopt, maybe this wouldn’t be a big deal, but still. It’s annoying when accidents of biology impinge on personhood.
Personally, I don’t care what gender y’all are. Unless it’s relevant to the discussion, I don’t WANT to know. It’s about as important to my conception of you as whether you have wisdom teeth, or were born on a Thursday. (I have to try and remember to get the pronouns right because it’s important to you all who HAVE a gender identity, not to me.) (Also, I’m not free of sexist assumptions either… and that burns me to no end.)
Okay, time for a change of subject:
What are your opinions on Trap-Neuter-Return protocols for management of feral cats? There’s been an ongoing letter debate in the local newspaper, with representatives from the local SPCA and PETA chiming in. (Oddly enough, the PETA representative supports eradication.)
Merciful heavens, that is not what’s going on here. It’s a requirement that the woman display to men a part of herself that she is not accustomed to displaying to men, as a barrier to citizenship. If it were just about doing the job, it would be sufficient to allow her to confirm her identity in a private room to a woman who is an officer of the state.
No, the specified manner is specifically one that conflicts with her Muslim identity.
Do you understand the concept of strict scrutiny, Bill?
It is not the case that anything a state might simply have a legitimate interest in doing is automatically justifiable. That has been my point in emphasizing repeatedly that there is a government interest here but that is not sufficient to automatically override a religious objection.
Your argument is prima facie enough to justify a law which is considered at the lowest level of scrutiny; I do not dispute that. My point is that more should be required. The USA’s practice, by which religious identity is a suspect classification, is the correct one, and this rule would never last under our courts. If Canada does not have a functional equivalent to suspect classification, then Canada is doing freedom wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-9BVz-GGw Anyone remember this guy?
*nostalgic*
ॐ:
So, would Katherine qualify?
(She’s a woman, only in a man’s body)
I’m reading The Born Again Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible by Ruth Hurmence Green.
It is a thing of beauty.
*growls at John*
<meta>
But the thing is, I’m not trying to justify a law, not to any level of scrutiny. I’m just kicking around ideas, some of which are new to me. That’s usually the case. You seem to have a much more goal-oriented notion of this conversation — and of conversation here generally — than I do. I don’t think of this place as being like a court or a legislature; I think of it more like a coffeehouse or a late night in a graduate student lounge.
For example, before I followed those links, it had never really occurred to me that there might be any even vaguely plausible state justification for such a requirement; now that I’ve heard one articulated, I have Stuff To Think About®… and as I have repeatedly said, my thinking has not yet led me to any firm conclusions; just more questions. Like I said, just thinking aloud. Hence all the qualifiers and conditional constructions in what I’ve written.
Not that I think my conclusions, when or if they come, will matter much to anyone but me. You really needn’t worry that Canadian law will stand or fall based on my rambling ruminations, in any case.
</meta>
Doesn’t matter one way or another what their intentions were; their intentions aren’t going to determine the outcomes.
The emphasized bit implies you don’t understand strict scrutiny.
There’s a false dichotomy implied here, anyway. In truth, this could be a reasonable procedure serving a legitimate government interest which was deliberately constructed to make Muslims understand they are not wanted. Both of those things can be true.
Yes. And? I make a great many inflammatory conditional statements; I would not dream of pointing to their conditionality as a moral detergent.
I certainly hope no Islamophobic bigots find this thread. How wonderfully useful it would be to them. “Muslims can’t be trusted: look, even a liberal Democrat admits that ‘hiding the face is pretty universally a sign of either shame or stealth.'”
“If it were empirically true that gay marriage threatened civilization, then the homophobes would have a very good argument for outlawing gay marriage. Likewise if forced Christianity was truly the only thing that prevented mass murder.”
When I make conditional statements like this, I try to be cognizant of the possible consequences of doing so. It is arguable that I should not make statements like this at all. If I were to respond by pointing out their mere conditionality, that would be no counterargument.
Benjamin Geiger
I don’t understand what Trap-Neuter-Return programs are trying to accomplish.
Extermination would be more practical if the goal is simple reduction of the feral cat population.
Pteryxx:
Hey, I’ve had a swan hiss at me; that was scary enough!
(Why no, I neither knew its sex or its gender!)
Basically, prevent the feral cats from breeding and let them disappear through attrition. (Also, make sure they’re vaccinated against major diseases, most notably rabies, while they’re trapped.)
Looks like they found the Higgs Boson just in time to give mankind the recommendation that we really were on a good way to figure things out. But it looks like we are well and truly fucked.
love moderately:
If anybody’s really cherrypicking shards of comment #199, posted at 1:41 am, to one out of thousands of posts at one of millions of blogs to find the foundations of social policy, then we’ve got way bigger problems than anything you or I might say. Really, it’s just conversation.
‘night (for real, this time)….
[On the way out the door… really… I promise…]
rorschach:
Yikes! Read John Barnes’ SF novel Mother of Storms… or don’t, if you want to sleep. 8^(
Thanks Bill D, put on my next Amazon book list…:-)
If the following statement were true: “If we stipulate (because I acknowledge not everyone here actually accepts) the existence of nation-states and the validity of citizenship as a concept, then nations have a perfect right to determine how outsiders become naturalized citizens”
that would necessarily require that “[how] to determine how outsiders become naturalized citizens” would be evaluated at a lower level of scrutiny.
For if it were evaluated at the highest level of scrutiny, it would be a false statement. At higher scrutiny nations do not have a perfect right to do anything; there is an immediate presumption of unconstitutionality.
A person’s notions of legitimate governance depend on certain assumptions about the rights of a state.
So whether someone is wrong on the internet, or wrong at the coffee house, I want to explain to that person when they’re evaluating their Stuff To Think About on incorrect assumptions.
It doesn’t matter that we’re not in court now; the parameters of the issue itself are necessarily legalistic.
Many of us are more influential than we realize, even when we aren’t posting on a blog with a high Alexa rating. I don’t feel I have any responsible choice but to take you seriously.
ॐ:
Me: So, would Katherine qualify?
ॐ: <conspicuous silence>
I thought it was conspicuous enough when I said “Inshallah, I am done talking to you about it. It is senseless self-abuse for me to pursue any conversation with you in which I care much more about the topic than you do.”
ॐ, well, yes.
You got nothing with which to contend, ere it be self-abuse.
(Because gender has nothing to do with sex, oh no!)
I wasn’t going to even try and dignify that with an answer until I calmed down. Leaving out for the moment that you dragged another regular into this (*I* volunteered), and presuming that you’re not actually intending to be a ginormous ass about this (which presumption is rapidly fraying):
You made a crapload of assumptions by even posing that question. First off, the prospective citizen wearing a veil is doing so because of her own identity as a woman. She’s wearing it largely because of a gendered culture and/or religion that requires differentiation, both for who wears the veil and who looks upon it. For her to bare her face privately to a witness requires only that the witness present as sufficiently feminine-gendered to satisfy the prospective citizen. Someone ambiguous, such as myself, probably wouldn’t be acceptable to her regardless of that person’s legal, physical, or genetic sex. And that’s because of HER belief system, not mine. You have no right to decide who does or doesn’t “qualify” as a particular gender.
Because trans and intersex people exist, a person who considers herself a woman has a woman’s body, and a person who considers himself a man has a man’s body. That holds true no matter WHAT reproductive organs they possess or lack. For all you know, the person behind the veil may not have the organs you think she does.
Pteryxx,
Really? What are they, supposedly?
If one is a woman in that culture, one perforce wears a veil.
Gotcha.
Mmmhm. Your reiteration is needless, but: sure.
So, feminine gender is purely determined on appearances that meet expectations?
And her belief system is due to her acculturation, and acceptance thereof. Still with you.
I made no decision, other than to accept someone’s claim as to their gender. Is that problematic for you? Should I not do so?
Well, then. Katherine has a woman’s body, no?
Um. You are conflating me with this putative Muslim woman who apparently can only expose her features to an acceptable appearance of femininity, as culturally-perceived.
My question was whether Katherine qualified, and your answer is apparently “no”, because though she is a woman (and perforce has a woman’s body), its appearance is that of a man.
==
Well, since you left it out, I don’t need to respond to it. ;)
No. Yesterday, Sean Carroll time-traveled to today to report that they didn’t find it.
Still no reports on the cause of John Morales’ density. Stay tuned.
http://www.firstpost.com/tech/higgs-boson-why-physicists-hate-the-term-god-particle-155838.html
“Lederman has a lot to answer for,” said Higgs himself, now 82, on a visit to Geneva some six years ago.
Wrong. It’s negotiated, between the person who knows their own gender regardless of appearance, how they choose to present themselves to others regardless of actual gender, and whether those others accept the person’s presented or stated gender, or make assumptions about it. With strongly differentiated and obvious gender signalling, the assumption’s likely to match the presentation. For instance, you’re posting under a masculine-coded name (presentation); but you also flat-out stated you consider yourself male. Therefore I’ll refer to you as male regardless of what any part of your body looks like.
Look up the concept of gender presentation.
Pteryxx:
So, let me adumbrate: A Muslim veil-wearing woman need only sufficiently perceive someone as female for that person to be acceptable for her de-veiling (so long as perceived males are absent from the proceedings), but ambiguous people would probably not be acceptable by dint of their appearance; however, this is irrelevant as pertains to the perceived person’s actual gender, since that is negotiated between the person and any given observer.
Right?
Hey, it is not I who is a Muslim veiled woman, and indecisive as to whom it is acceptable to unveil! :)
(Actually, I never veil myself, so the issue is moot)
Why does the argument have to be couched in these (for many, emotive) terms?
Let us rather bring in a hypothetical (and most certainly not muslim) example where the persons face is hidden:
A cult of Pastafarians has fled Pastafaria and arrived in Canada. They have been granted asylum but now wish to seek citizenship.
It is common knowledge that women and children are held in low esteem within the community and they are made to go about in public with paper bags over their heads. They all claim that this is what they wish to do (bruises and welts to the contrary). How do the authorities now allow these people to take the oath? (They are adamant they may not remove the paper bags from their heads and even more adamant that this is their own free choice.)
Q2: It appears later that there are actually no religious grounds for the paper bags – the guys are just being menz. Does this change anything?
So you added domestic abuse. Well played.
@ ॐ
I should rather say I removed the religious “justification” for what essentially boils down to abuse. It just stands out so much more clearly this way.
A big issue that I would like to add, that does not really involve abuse per say, is that of the simple need to show one’s face in public. To be part of public interaction and discourse. And not have that limited in any way. I understand that there is sometimes a need to be anonymous, but I do not think that society is helped in any way by us going about in public in masks. (My argument would sooner point to the Tonton Macoutes then muslim women in this regard. It really can be a very bad and antisocial thing.)
In local news: school for killers
(Made me think of Walton’s arguments)
What need is there for us to help society by going about in public without masks?
consciousness razor,
I dont know you, but
does not seem to be entirely accurate.
Going by this writeup.
10:30 this morning, and I get a house call from a Jehovah’s witness. Turned out that she was married to an atheist, and she’d heard all my answers before. Mithras? Josephus? Zoroastrianism? The Phoenician gods? Coouncil of Nicaea? She knew all about them. I usually dispose of JWs them in less than 30 seconds, but she was one tough nut to crack. In the end, she got desperate, and mentioned that bit in Isaiah about god suspending the Earth in space. After that, she was toast…
They’re sending out a new breed of JWs. Be warned :0)
Hi rorschach. You can call me CR for short, or fuckwit, or whatever.
No, it’s consistent with that article:
Etc, etc. In other words, they did not find it. It’s possible that these “hints” actually are due to a Higgs Boson, but it was already pretty clear that they’d need more data before confirming that whatever-they-were-looking-at wasn’t statistical noise.
Hi there.
I’m just skimming…
Totally free lesson for today: Don’t sing “Rudolf the rednose reindeer” with your kids while your mind is actually on something else and you’re angry. Unless you want them to annoy the christians to dead with the line about the fucking christmas eve.
pelamun
That’s the thing, it’s either all or none.
I would make a difference between headscarf and burka, because I think that unless you’re teaching blind people, facial expression is a crucial tool for teachers, but given the actual situation we have, I actually want muslim teachers wearing a headscarf in schools. Sure, they need to confirm to the laws and regulations, they have to teach evolution and everything and if they can’t do that they can leave, but I think that it would be a good thing to have a role-model for muslim girls and their teachers where they aren’t forced to make a choice between integration and their religion/culture.
Not because I’m terribly fond of islam, but because those who lose out on the current situation are those most disadvantaged: muslim girls.
DDMFM
I was more thinking about the time as a kid when you tried whether your kiddie scissors could cut the tights or not. I don’t think that teens who cut holes into their jeans get a bad conscious about it ;)
Morning all.
Quick question that I’ve always wanted to ask, regarding the phrase ‘I couldn’t care less’.
In the US, this phrase seems to be ‘I could care less’, while still meaning the same thing as it does in the UK.
But the literal interpretation of ‘I could care less’ gives it a very different meaning, implying that you do care in part.
Any idea why the difference, or is this just one of those idiosyncratic differences in language?
I personally use “couldn’t care less”, but the consensus seems to be that enough people use the other form that everyone knows what they mean, and it’s become acceptable.
Still drives me crazy. But that’s just me. And I’ll be gosh darned if I’ll let “literally” be used to mean “not literally” without a struggle.
it’s not just you.
“could care less” gets under my skin, on my nerves, on my wick and right up my nose … like a crumb in the bed, a crease in the sock, a stray eyelash in the eye, a shred of spinach between the teeth.
I know what people mean, I know it’s trivial, I know I’m flinching at nothing – but it’s Deeperestly Rong with a capital X and it annoys the hell out of me.
Breaking news, just now: “Afghan woman imprisoned for adultery after being raped by relative freed after President Karzai intervenes on her behalf”. I thought the Taliban were no longer in control?
Loud,
Many subscribe to the assumption that it was originally a sarcastic expression which got fixed, apparently in AmE in the 1960s.
This type of thing is not uncommon, here are more examples:
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxcouldc.html
In Chinese, there is an expression 好容易 hao3 rong2yi4, which literally means “very easy”, but is now used in the sense of “with great difficulty”. So this isn’t even limited to English.
I never get these people who all get in a huff about “couldn’t care less” being “illogical” (I didn’t say you did). First of all, language isn’t always logical, but in this case there is a good explanation…
Giliell,
I used to support laws like that, also being swayed by the opinion of feminists of the likes of Schwarzer. But two things made me change my mind
a. I got angrier and angrier about Christian privilege in Europe. Having nuns teach school in habit while making Muslim women take off their veil is just one of those. Many such laws blatantly talk about the “abendländische-christliche Grundordnung”. Hello, Leitkultur…
b. after I’ve actually lived in a Muslim country, I’ve come to appreciate that the veil means different things to different people.
Individuals have no obligation to conform their choice of clothing to others’ ideas of what “helps society”. How a person dresses is no one’s business but his or her own. People’s bodies are not the property of the state.
I find this framing extremely objectionable. First of all, we know, by their own accounts, that not all women who wear the burqa or niqab are forced into it by their families or communities. (This is particularly true in France, where wearing the burqa is not and has never been customary in mainstream Muslim communities.) See:
It is simply false, a propagandistic myth, to suggest that all women who wear the burqa are coerced into doing so. Of course you can argue that they’ve internalized the gendered norms of a sexist culture, but that’s quite a different argument; and it’s remarkably paternalistic and patronizing to suggest that the state ought therefore to “protect” them from their own choices.
Secondly, we also know that for women who wear the burqa, whether forced or voluntarily, the ban makes life worse and increases the prospect of their being effectively confined to their homes. Not just because of the threat of arrest – enforcement thus far in France has been very lax – but because of the increase in attacks by private citizens:
Even for those who are forced to wear the veil, the ban makes their lives even worse:
This law is not “helping” women, and its proponents should really try, y’know, actually listening to the views and experiences of the Muslim women who they’re supposedly trying to “protect”. Of course, they won’t, because it’s not about freedom: it’s about cultural hegemony, and attacking an unpopular and visible religious minority.
In general, solutions that involve criminalizing the people one is ostensibly trying to “protect” are a very, very bad idea. I can’t think of a single instance in which such an approach has actually improved matters. (See also: the War on Drugs.)
The only people who should be criminalized are the people who inflict violence on others. Not the people who are the victims of that violence. You can’t liberate people by arresting them, any more than you can liberate people by bombing them.
By way of an analogy: even those feminists (Catherine Mackinnon, Melissa Farley, Janice Raymond and so on) who believe that prostitution is by definition violence against women, and that it should be outlawed, are opposed to criminalizing prostitutes themselves. Instead, they advocate criminalizing the customers and the pimps. (I don’t agree with them – I think the sex industry should be legal and regulated – but that’s beside the point.) Similarly, even if it were universally true – which it is not, as I pointed out above – that Muslim women who wear the burqa do so only because their husbands have coerced and threatened them, the logical answer would be to arrest the husbands, not the women.
I’ve always been conflicted about this. Ultimately because to me the veil is a symbol of oppression. The leading German feminist I have cited also has called the veil a means of “sexualising and objectifying young girls” and has called for a veil prohibition for young school girls in Germany. Germany enforces the obligation to go to school, so no-one would be able to keep their daughters at home to spite such a law. (Presumably, the French law also has stiff fines for husbands keeping their wives at home, but unless French ID cards have to renewed in person and renewed every 2-3 years, I don’t know how the French state will be able to actually do anything about it). The feminist in question even wrote a book about it. Here’s an article criticising her book (German). There seems to be a disconnect between the old-school feminists and those with an immigrant background, maybe Hiryaan Ali excepted, who appears to be a vocal prohibition proponent as well.
I was checking out stills from the coming film ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, and was amused by this visual tokenism:
http://tinyurl.com/d3zfpy5
Now, how do we know these are supposed to be smart people, and not any ole schmucks :D ?
That’s right, they wear heavy rimmed glasses.
walton,
barring school girls from wearing the veil would actually put the criminal burden on the parents. And presumably Alice Schwarzer (I haven’t read her book) wouldn’t dispute their rights as adults to wear the veil, though she also supports barring teachers from wearing it..
Ayaan Hirsi ali, not Hiryaan Ali..
Sure, but I was protesting the new and more sweeping French law, which does criminalize adult women who wear the veil. Though I am also against barring veils in school: see the case of Cennet Doganay.
Yeah, arresting the husbands will encourage them to let their women go outside.
—
walton
your first link @231 is borked.
Playing devil’s advocate here:
Though she was not criminalised, since she was past the age of obligatory education, she would have been expelled had she continued to be in violation of school rules.
If she had been under the age of obligatory education, her parents would have been held criminally liable. (A German family wishing to home-school their kids in the Christian fundie spirit, actually sought and received asylum in the United States)
Well, as I pointed out, I don’t advocate criminalization of the burqa in any context whatsoever. (Though obviously husbands who are perpetrators of domestic violence, Muslim or not, are already committing a crime.) Rather, I was pointing out the total idiocy of arresting women – the people who the law is supposedly trying to “protect” from oppression – for being dressed a certain way in public.
It’s this one, which I’ve already linked elsewhere on the thread.
Ok, that failed again. (Apparently I have to type in the http:// manually, since the browser keeps deleting it from the URL line.)
It’s this one.
@ CR 221
Or as the Tonton Macoutes would say: “Quel besoin y at-il pour nous d’aider la société en allant en public sans masque?”
@ Gilliel
This. And I would extend that idea to say not just teachers, but everyone. Facial expression is a very important means of communication for us social human animals.
@ Walton
Very high sounding words there. I beg to differ. You are in point of fact very restricted in terms of what you do or don’t wear (Wearing a mask into a bank? Going about naked? Not bothering to wash … or wipe your ass? Are there limits?) No-one is suggesting you are the property of anyone. But I am not so sure how true it is that one need take no regard for others wrt how we dress or how we look after our bodies.
Walton, I specifically created a hypothetical group of people to get away from the burka for a few minutes. They are Pastafarians (ie: atheists) for FSM’s sake. So that we can have a discussion (at least for a while) about masked anonymity in public (be it by way of paper bags or hats and sunglasses) without religion hijacking the whole show.
It would be an interesting sociological experiment if we all went about in boiler suites with paper bags over our heads. What effects would this have? Would we compensate for the lack of facial expressions by some other means? Or just become inured to the loss? Perhaps we may even experience a sense of freedom. (I don’t for a moment suggest we actually coerce everyone…. not even half of the population. Let this run purely as a thought experiment. No humans need be harmed.)
I’m not too familiar with the French law, but wasn’t that the idea, very very steep penalties for husbands, and only relatively modest fines for the women. But as I said, I wonder how the French state actually wants to find women confined to their homes and punish their husbands if that’s the law’s intent.
Which is itself oppressive: access to education is a right, not a privilege, and should not be conditional on removing the veil. To drive devout Muslim girls out of school isn’t going to empower them; it will do precisely the opposite, excluding them and depriving them of opportunities.
Which is also an absurdity, but I’m not going to get into a tangential debate about state education versus homeschooling.
None of those should be criminal. Wearing a mask into a bank is not, in fact, a crime in itself; the bank might very well ask you to leave, as is their right as private property-owners, but unless you actually attempt to rob the bank, it’s not illegal. Going about naked, as per above, should be legalized. Not bothering to wash may be irritating for those around you, but it is not, and should not be, criminal.
That’s a straight-up recipe for abuse if I ever heard one. Not every husband, and not every woman, but certainly SOME.
It’s clear that the law protects no one and serves no purpose for the public good other than to demonize the concept of veil wearing. People should be free to express their religion in ways that do not harm other people, regardless of what someone else thinks of the structure of the religiosity behind it.
Or, to go by Theophontes’ argument: yes they should still be allowed to retain their bags. I’m not so convinced by the facial expression argument that I support taking away people’s choices about what to wear to express their identity, whatever that may be, because of it.
In the same vein: is there anywhere else where public schools demand that boys MUST have short hair (as in not even bangs! Girls with long hair have to tie it back when it reaches the collar) as a pre-condition to attending the school?
How does one go about challenging this kind of thing?
theophontes,
One more time, advocatus diaboli:
the Turkish law, and the French law, to a certain extent, have shown that this isn’t the case, devout Muslim girls still opt to take off the veil rather than foregoing an education (and I dimly remember that there is dispensation for that for a Muslim to violate religious law, like eating pork and other non-halal food if it’s the only option). In Turkey, devout female students would take off their veils just outside the university gates, and put them on again upon leaving. Proponents would argue that this has enabled those girls and women from oppressive households to go without the veil without having to fear repercussions from their family.
oops. The last bit was addressed to walton, not to theophontes. Apologies.
The objectionable part was your reference to:
You may protest that you were talking about a hypothetical situation, but it was a clear attempt to reframe the issue in terms of “these women are all being forced to wear the veil and beaten up by their husbands”. Some are, of course, but it is important to point out that others do so of their own volition; in some cases it’s even an act of rebellion against their families’ preferences.
And the fact that it’s a religious issue is important – not because religion is special or deserves special privileges, but because issues of conscience, whether religious or secular, raise the most fundamental questions about personal autonomy – particularly when something so intimate as one’s clothing and the display of one’s own body is involved. There is no good justification for denying these women the freedom to dress however they please, except in certain very restricted circumstances when it becomes a health or safety issue; there is certainly no good justification for forcing them to violate their self-perceived obligations of conscience. “Society” has no legitimate stake in policing women’s bodies, in this context or any other.
Germany, Austria, several cantons of Switzerland, Italy and Sweden have prohibition against wearing masks in public. In most countries, only in the context of demonstrations (in the German case, also against having in possession any object that can be used to conceal oneself), but apparently in Italy, this is a general prohibition.
That may well be true in some cases. But it’s dangerous to generalize across the board. Again, remember – as per the multiple specific accounts I’ve cited above – that not all girls or women who wear the veil are being forced into it. Some sincerely believe it to be an obligation of conscience; some choose it even against their families’ wishes. That is a choice that they should be free to make, and they should not be forced to choose between their schooling and their personal beliefs about something so intimate as the display of their bodies in public. Conversely, some who are being abused might fear reprisals if they take the veil off to attend school. Of course we can’t quantify this problem, because it’s largely underground and accurate statistics are not available; but if even one Muslim girl is forced to forgo her education because of these laws, it is too many.
myeck #227 –
FFS, I literally explode every time I hear this, too!!!!
In all seriousness, it does make me bonkers. I don’t know why people use “literally” to mean the exact opposite of literally. Although it does make it one of those interesting words that is its own antonym. Cf. Impregnable/Impregnable; Inflammable/Inflammable; Sanction/Sanction; Weather (a storm)/Weather (a mountain);cleave (together)/cleave(apart)/clip (together)/clip (apart)/Splice (together)/Splice (apart); ravel/ravel; quantum (minimum possible size, subatomic and thus sub-microscopic)/ quantum (huge and noticeable); resign/resign; skin/Skin; and Temper (make less strong, like, “tempered her anger”)/Temper (make more strong, “tempered his resolve”).
PS – if you have any other examples of words like this, please mention it. I’ve kept a list for years, every time it occurs to me that a word is its own antonym I try to remember to record it on a little list I have. I find it particularly fascinating that cleave/clip/splice/and ravel all mean pretty much the same for the first 3 and very similar for the last one (ravel) and all mean their own antonyms as well. What is it about disconnecting/reconnecting things that makes a word more likely to be its own antonym?
@Pelanum
Why should they risk this, risk rejection from their religion and punishment and “repercussions”? For what purpose? To empower them? They should be able to get an education regardless of what they look like.
“Hey gals, you’ll be punished either way, with us though at least you get a degree”?
How does that even make sense?
But if even one Muslim girl is influenced to break free of a misogynist prison because of having the veil challenged it’s not worth it?
-Below are miscellaneous links, everything from physics to medicine
— — — —
NB! -HPV vaccine does not appear to encourage risky sexual behavior http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-hpv-vaccine-risky-sexual-behavior.html
US court battle escalates over morning-after pill http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-court-fray-morning-after-pill.html
NB! -Study tracks safety of underground CO2 storage http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-tracks-safety-underground-co2-storage.html
‘Shrilk’: Inspired by insect cuticle, researchers develop low-cost material with exceptional strength and toughness http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-shrilk-insect-cuticle-low-cost-material.html
Over 100 Beluga whales ‘trapped in Bering Sea’ http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-beluga-whales-bering-sea.html
Small reactors could figure into US energy future http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-small-reactors-figure-energy-future.html
In third-degree burn treatment, hydrogel helps grow new, scar-free skin http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-third-degree-treatment-hydrogel-scar-free-skin.html
New model suggests early humans lost fur after developing bipedalism http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-early-humans-lost-fur-bipedalism.html
( -if we indulge in binge drinking, will we eventually regress to a furry state? :-)
Did a good sense of smell give us an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals? http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-good-evolutionary-advantage-neanderthals.html
New test to indicate likely spread or recurrence of breast cancer http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-recurrence-breast-cancer.html
FFS. You can’t “liberate” women by arresting them, excluding them from the public sphere, or confining them to the home. You’re smarter than to buy into this bullshit.
On this thread, I have cited multiple, specific personal accounts of individual women and girls whose lives have been completely screwed-up and worsened by this law, in multiple ways. The proponents of the law have not cited a single counterexample. This is not a progressive law; it’s not a feminist law; it’s a paternalist, infantilizing law aimed at imposing cultural hegemony on a visible minority population. I don’t know how much more evidence I have to show to that effect before people will be satisfied.
Good point, Ing, but the choice shouldn’t be between identity and liberty, punishable either way in any case, thanks for being a woman in the world today. That in itself is misogynist.
Also, it just shouldn’t. *pouts*
But walton,
show me the testimony of one Muslim girl who chose to quit school or university instead of taking off the veil.. Your French case comes close, but this strikes me as one of these religious dispensation cases, only that she made up the religious law on the spot for herself.
In Turkey, wealthy families chose to send their daughters overseas, but middle class families complied with the law.
(Again, I’m not in favour of the law. I personally think it should be up to the free will of the individual.)
“-HPV vaccine does not appear to encourage risky sexual behavior”
This news item will of course be ignored by the godbots who favor “thruthiness” over thruth.
To Alice Schwarzer and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it’s the veil which is the paternalistic, sexualising and objectifying symbol. For them, barring the veil is feminist and progressive, Schwarzer even has written an entire book about the issue (which I didn’t read).
I don’t think I personally agree with the forced approach, but at least acknowledge there are feminists who support this.
Poor guy.
I call this one out every time I see it or hear it.
That’s just Craig doing his Woody Allen impression. I hear it’s spot-on.
Also, people saying “literally” this and that and they “could care less” use to literally make me crazy, but I’m better now. Now I laugh at their ignorance while keeping the raging, slathering screaming and hair-tearing inside. Mostly. Sometimes. Well, more often than not. Uhm, I think.
It seems it’s you that’s ignorant here, ignorant about language change. Unless your statement was ironic, then ignore me..
For a tangent:
This is quoted over and over:
I’m interested in what kind of pychological treatment a 13-month-old would receive.
Of course there are. There are feminists who support all manner of non-progressive political stances. Melissa Farley thinks porn and prostitution should be outlawed (albeit criminalizing customers and pimps, not prostitutes themselves), and also has gone so far as to argue that sadomasochism, even if consensual, is inherently sexist and anti-feminist. Janice Raymond doesn’t think trans-women really exist, and describes them as “she-males” who are guilty of “invading women” and “reducing the real female form to an artifact”. Feminism is a broad movement; the fact that you can cite a feminist who supports a position doesn’t make that position a progressive or well-thought-out one.
Enough wrongs make a right, eh?
It was and it wasn’t. I ended up in the nuthouse over grammar issues, amongst others. I’m better now. Mostly. Also, an ellipse has 3 periods. Not two. Not four. Three.
TWITCH
Tell me what about “it was an ironic statement which became fixed” you have trouble understanding.
Also who died and made YOU arbiter of what’s wrong or right in English? You can only do that for your idiolect, it’s quite arrogant to impose your idiolect on others, that doesn’t reflect well on you.
No-one is forcing you to use the phrase, it’s your arrogant stance towards those who do, which is the issue.
A linguist friend once told me, prescriptivists are the creationists of language… Instead of noting the interesting variation in language use, you try to impose your own arbitrary standards on them and chide them for not following your own.
walton,
Alice Schwarzer is not just some feminist, she is the most influential German feminist alive. But without having read her book on the veil issue, I don’t want to argue her position, so I’ll just let it stand. Of course you’re right that being a feminist doesn’t mean you’re automatically right on all relevant issues… But to me, the veil issue never has been an easy question..
@ Walton
burka
I don’t know if this is a good argument. It is the abuse itself that needs to be dealt with. (It would not surprise me in the least if there are many women being fritzled away as we type. Here it is not even a question of covering up.)
It is at this level that the problem should be tackled. Going back to my reference to abuse, this is a general problem around the world, that is covered up in very many ways. How can society check up on people that are hidden from view (covered up or worse, locked up).
I am broadly against hiding behind anything in public. Yes, it may be a free choice. But it has the potential to, and does, hide a multitude of sins. I think this will likely come down to a public policy siding with the general interests of everyone vs the right to masking of individuals.
Probably more important and far more difficult is to prevent the covering up of abuse for whatever reason, given that the options are so available. I shudder to think how many black eyes and broken bones are covered over in countries such as Saudi Arabia.
/burka (not really what I wanted to get into)
pelamun
Thankfully, no one has to die for this. That said, there are rules and norms, right and wrongs. And “could care less” and using “literally” to mean “almost” or anything other than actually “literally”… well, that’s wrong.
There are no Grammar Police that will arrest your ass for these transgressions, but that doesn’t make it less wrong.
There are millions of people who do use it like this and in fact, commit even worse crimes against grammar. That doesn’t make it less wrong.
And “language change”… I don’t think that term means what you think it means. Of course, since a “linguist friend” told you all about prescriptionists, you’re all up to speed with the whole prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate and the finer nuances of living languages and how they work, change and evolve.
Right?
Gen Fury,
I vary between two and three dots…
The thing is, in your own idiolect, “could care less” may well be wrong. But right and wrong are relative terms. Assuming that your idiolect should be followed is presumptuous, that’s what I was trying to say. So don’t laugh about the language use of others, just note that their idiolect is different from yours.
Also, it’s different if we’re talking about standard English. While English is unique among the major languages in not having an official standardisation body, there is a standard language people follow in official situations. But a conversation with your buddy isn’t one of those…
By what norm? Reference please.
Go back to the bit where I tried to explain what an idiolect is. And try to understand the concept of register, and what a standard language is, and whether this applies to idiolect.
Actually, I’m a linguist myself.
there’s no grammar police, but beware the Tone Police
Then there is the use of “unique” to mean “sort of unusual”.
*grind*
No. Sorry, but no. Words have meanings. If what’s meant is actually “could care less”, as in “I, Gen, could care less about pedantic grammar issues and would probably be healthier for it”, then it’s a correct usage.
If “could care less” is meant to mean “don’t care at all, care-o-metre is at fuck-all”, well, that’s wrong usage. And claiming “idiolect” or “patios” or “regional variation” or “non-standard English” doesn’t change the meaning of those words or the potential impediment to successful communication.
“Communication is not just words. Communication is architecture.” Tad Danielewski
Also, I find that laughing at it rather than going crazy over it works out better for me in the long term. Your concern is noted, though. kthxbai.
Actually among linguists, there’s no “debate”. There is place for prescriptivism in language, wrt the standardisation of language. It’s the mistake of prescriptivists to try and extend this approach to all registers and lects.
Also, you’re a linguist, Pelanum? And yet you “vary between two and three” periods for an ellipse? Wow, thanks for the lulz of the day. You remind me so much of someone I ‘know’ on another forum.
I R LINGUIST. MY SENTENCE NO VERB.
Again, by what norm? By yours? Answer this question first.
Gen Fury,
are you idiot? This is not an academic journal, it’s an informal blog. How many dots I use for an ellipse is totally irrelevant here. It really shows you haven’t got the slightest idea of how language works….
“are you an idiot?”
“Literally” abuse: It’s about taking very good descriptive word that is perfect for a very specific concept and, through misuse, turning it into just another mushy word that could mean nearly anything. It’s hindering communication. It’s ruining language. So the prescriptivists can bite me on that one.
that “I could care less” is an impediment to communication is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard in this debate. This is really funny..
GenFury, in honour of your stupidity, I vow to use two or four-dotted ellipses only on TET from now on! At least as long as I remember this vow….
Cheers for all the replies with regard to ‘could care less’. I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds it frustrating!
pelamun, thanks for the info in #230, very interesting. But with regards to arbitrarily determining which conventions to break when communicating, and expecting to be understood, that’s rubbish. For example, if I choose sometimes to use vowels and sometimes not, then I can’t complain when someone calls me out on it. Language needs a universal set of rules, otherwise it becomes meaningless.
And Gen, I’m fairly sure you mean ellipsis, not ellipse :)
/pedant
Rey Fox,
I think you probably mean “descripitivists” here. Well, this is polysemy. The intensifier use of “literally” has been attested since 1827, Arthur Conan Doyle used it in 1892. So it’s pretty well established. In academic usage (which is where standardisation occurs), this usage is often frowned upon, and no-one forces you to use it as an intensifier.
But give me a situation where this hinders communication? Do your conversation tend to consist of single sentences only? I don’t think it’s ever unclear from context, and there are synonyms available to disambiguate should the need arise for the two uses:
1. virtually
2. actually, really
RE: ellipsis/ellipse – and pelamun for that matter at #280, or does it not matter which word we use to indicate a series of three dots that denote an unfinished sentence?
You misunderstood me. You can arbitrarily change your idiolect, but you can’t expect to be understood. If speakers with different lects meet, they tend to subtly change their usage patterns to get closer linguistically, this is called linguistic accommodation. If you’re British and move to the United States, you will usually adopt American usage patterns, or at least move closer to it, usually starting with the vocabulary (and many Brits have been exposed to American usage through the TV anyways).
Also language change has been studied. People don’t just change entire domains of their language arbitrarily (there are exceptions like this isolated house in Iceland, but this story might be apocryphal). So turning vowels on and off just doesn’t fit what we know about language change. Also linguists wouldn’t just take your word for it. If you claimed to never split an infinitive, but you would be observed to actually do so, we would arrive at the conclusion that you actually did a poor job of describing your own idiolect to us, as your own usage data contradicts you.
Language doesn’t have a universal set of rules, it consists of arbitrary symbols. There are certain universal tendencies, like all languages have vowels and consonants etc, but there is no requirement that DOG needs to be used to refer to canines.
@Loud
LOL! Can I shout DAMN YOU AUTOCORRECT! / browser-based spell-check for us puir wee ESL users? This is hilariously ironic, thanks for pointing it out, I’mma giggle at that all night now.
@Pelamun
Whatever dude. If it’s that important to you, I hereby grant you the right to use whatever words in whatever way … oh wait.
I still reserve my right to giggle at it, though. I mean, come on. If someone says “I literally exploded with joy!” I’m going to imagine them exploding. That’s pretty damn funny. And when someone says “I could care less about your stupid secularism” I’m going to laugh at what they’re actually saying and how it contrasts with what they think they are saying.
Loud,
did I use “ellipse”? Oops. My mistake, was influenced by GenFury. Ellipse and ellipsis have the same plural though…
In German ellipse and ellipsis are the same word, Ellipse, seeing that they both come from έλλειψις.
In my idiolect of English though as well as standard English, conflating the two is a mistake. In an academic/educational context, it wouldn’t hurt to point this out.
You’re free to do so, but doing so doesn’t reflect well on what kind of person you are, apparently having the need to feel smug and superior about other people’s idiolect.
GenFury,
I also notice that you still haven’t answered my question from 273.
Yes. And Catherine Mackinnon is a brilliant theorist, probably the most influential of feminist legal scholars, and has done more than any other lawyer to integrate women’s rights into the mainstream legal discourse. In particular, her efforts played a huge role in introducing laws and policies against sexual harassment, and in identifying sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.
Nonetheless, I think Mackinnon is entirely wrong when it comes to her prohibitionist stance on porn and prostitution; and her theories have been used to justify some nasty authoritarian policies. (And the entire sex-positive feminist school of thought is also very critical of Mackinnon on these issues, so I’m not just pulling these assertions out of my ass.) My point is that someone can be intellectually brilliant, sincerely passionate about social justice, and at the forefront of hir field, and yet can still be catastrophically wrong about an issue like this.
And I think the biggest problem, in general, is the impulse towards prohibitionism; the assumption that the state can solve social problems by outlawing them and using coercive force to eliminate them. It’s often a case of “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Unfortunately, it rarely works, and often comes at a terrible social cost.
pelamun #287:
Fair enough about idiolect, I did misunderstand you. But using two, three, or four dots for an ellipsis on a whim makes no real sense. Surely that’s just wrong? Do you sit and chuckle to yourself smugly after posting, thinking ‘Ha! I’ve just shown those language pedants, see how you like a two period ellipsis!’
I could use ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’ and people would know what I meant, but I’d look stupid. Should we encourage this?
Gen #288:
Autocorrect it is! It took me a few posts to notice, anyway :)
Does anyone remember the discussion a while ago about “opaque” starting to mean “transparent”?
(or vice versa)
pelamun 291:
That’s because I don’t feel like battling this battle right now – I have more important things requiring my attention and care and I really, really should “care less” about this grammar thing. Especially now, in times of high stress.
Feel free to claim victory, as per my post in 288.
Loud,
Orthography is the most arbitrary of language domains, because written speech is secondary to the spoken language. I didn’t check the Chicago Manual, they might say there it has to be three dots, but even here, there is variation between registers. Surely it doesn’t really matter if I use 2, 3 or 4 dots? Sometimes, for dramatic effect, I might even use more……..
Encourage what? Using “your” instead of “you’re”, or making people look stupid? I used to get all worked up about “it’s” vs. “its”. I mean it’s embarrassing in a formal context, but why the need to do so in an informal situation such as blog discussions?
But I disagree slightly about “you’re” vs. “your”. There are typographically different enough that some people might actually run into a parsing error, so it might be somewhat of an impediment. Not to me personally though.
GenFury, 295:
it’s not about victory. If you come in here with this attitude that it’s virtually/literally/actually (take your pick) self-evident that these phrases are wrong, then this is an understandable thing to ask: by what norm?
Your failure/refusal to answer tells me a lot about the mindset of prescriptivists, and probably behaviour such as this was what reminded my linguist friend of creationists.
This thread
starting at #11
pelamun
I have explained why “could care less” IS “virtually/literally/actually” AND self-evidently wrong:
because those words en English don’t mean what the “speaker” intends if the intent is “don’t care”. Do you need me to cite fucking dictionary references for that?
Also, I’m not a prescriptivist. Just FYI.
“en” is supposed to be “in”. Stupid keyboard, how you werk?
I think -r is a verb ending, but I don’t understand the älska- part, even though the rest of the sentence is obvious. :-]
Of course not. :-)
:-o Wow, that went fast! *happy happy joy joy*
I received the official dead-tree confirmation of my postdoc today. The Humboldt Foundation must be swimming in money.
*blink*
Wow.
That’s a paranoid law.
There’s a book called Girl Friends about a bunch of teenage girls who are friends.
Actually, it’s even called West Tibet (Xīzāng). Remarkably honest.
Hah. The Republic of Austria had to prove that both of my testicles had descended! They couldn’t possibly rely on my, um, testimony – seeing as it was still 1914 in 1999, I might have been desperately lying so they’d let me join the army. *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* CRASH *headfloor* and so on.
(as Phoenicia indeed is!)
…
…It’s a bit too early to put it into this kind of words, but we’re definitely living in interesting times.
Latest comment over there:
(And fat.)
Of course they could. That’s why I never tried.
Similarly, I was confident enough about what would happen if I jumped out of the window that I never carried the experiment out.
I didn’t know whether a particularly sniny fossil shark tooth could saw into a plastic-covered tablecloth. So I had to try that. It worked beautifully.
And the map you posted shows all of former East Germany (except former East Berlin) keeps allowing headscarves, while most of former West Germany forbids it. That can’t be a coincidence.
In phylogenetics, forty-five wrongs make a right. (Free full text.)
Translation: her ego and especially her craziness are big enough that the media notice her and hardly anyone else.
Not sure how you define “major”, but neither does German.
Dunning, meet Kruger. Spelling isn’t part of language.
Then why hasn’t language been ruined long ago?
Bead used to mean “prayer”.
You’re too fast for me….
Alice Schwarzer
I wished she’d retire.
Don’t get me wrong, German women owe her much. But like Mackinnon (I think the two of them actually worked together), she’s very sex-negative, which makes her very unpopular with the younger generation of feminists and, well, women in general.
To put it polemically: There seems to be only one set of clothes you’re allowed to wear as a propper feminist and that’s what Alice Schwarzer wears. You mustn’t show too much of your body, or you’Re a sexualized object, and you mustn’t cover too much of your body, or you’re a sexualized object, too.
It is, frankly, tiring.
Banning the veil in schools
Sounds like a good, simple idea and that should make people’s alarm bells go off.
The idea misses the reality of those girls by far. First of all, the German situation is very different from that of other countries. To get those girls out of the country would be rather easy, since they usually have the citizenship and family in the countries their families come from.
It also misses the reality those girls live. It would take away more of their freedom than it would grant them. Their families would watch them even more closely, and activities after school that are organized by the school, which are sometimes the only events those girls are allowed to attend might be off the table then, too.
In short, it puts the whole onus on the girls, makes their lives more difficult and forces children into a situation where they are torn between their families and their education, something that happens frequently already.
As a society, we should protect those girls, and those women, not prosecute them.
Yes I was on the anti-Humpty Dumpty end of that.
Also SOPA is voted on tomorrow. Everyone call and bitch at your rep.
This has been like the week of the most horrible legislation ever. It also shows how full of shit both parties are.
@John Morales:
What the fuck!? How dare you bring me into your little angry rant against SGBM, you fucking douchebag!
You know you could have used a hypothetical “transwoman”! You specifically used me to elicit an emotion from SGBM! You are a fucking asshole!
Here in the US, federal employees are not allowed to strike (the last ones to try was Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO (and I may be forgetting a word) under Reagan — and the country loved it when he fired all of them who were on strike). So when the GOP cuts my pay by 12% and increases my share of life and health insurance premiums and guts what little is left of my retirement, the only thing my union can do is use adverts to try to show the unfairness of the situation and lobby congress.
David Marjanović
Fair enough, David.
My dislike of the phrase “could care less” to mean “I don’t care” is purely personal and based upon a common (mis)understanding of reasonably standardized dictionary meanings of words. In some idiolects that may be different, just as “no means yes and yes means anal” in some idiolects and “than” is the same as “then” in some.
I still don’t have to like it and I will still laugh at it when I see it. Not out loud, you understand. Heavens no. A silent chortle at the irony of the message getting distorted.
Esteleth, congrats on the post-doctoral fellowship!
–
The idea is to prevent feral cats (frequently abandoned pets) from adding litters after litter of born-feral cats to the feral cat population. In related news, our local animal shelter spays/neuters pets before adopting them out, to prevent a ‘second generation’ problem of unwanted cats, either to be dumped back into the (already-stressed) shelter, or turned loose to fend for themselves, hit-or-miss.
As long as people keep dumping their cats, they can’t be “attrited” out.
–
I’ve heard it both ways, here in the Midwest. Possible meeting point of regional variations? Dunno. Add me to the “annoyed by this usage” list.
Something that caught me by surprise when I moved here was “if you don’t care” used where I would use “if you don’t mind”, when asking someone to do some little thing for you. I don’t see them as meaning quite the same thing.
–
*clenched tentacle salute*
I use 2 when I end a sentence right behind an abbreviation, and I’ve seen a few other people do this, so that could cause confusion. (I know, common printed practice is to use just one, but this trips me up when I read every time.)
Then why do you behave as one?
Momentary relapse into worse times. I hereby apologize to all.
Oh, I missed this…
I understand your point, but that’s a pretty good illustration of why such measures shouldn’t be accepted. The draft is an absolute atrocity, and a “mandatory government-administered physical”, in any context, is a gross violation of civil liberties. No doctor has a right to examine my body without my consent, ever, unless it’s urgently medically necessary to save my life and I am unconscious or otherwise incapable of consenting.
(The draft is another reason why I would never become a US citizen; even though there is no actual draft any more, I would object in principle to being expected to register with Selective Service, as I deny that any state has any right to demand that I register for military service against my will. My body and my life are mine, and if I ever choose to sacrifice them for anyone else, I will do so only on my own terms, not because the state has demanded that I do so.)
See, this is why I’m uncomfortable with talk of “duties of citizenship”. If we accept rhetorically that one owes a duty as a “citizen” to one’s “society”, it can very quickly be twisted into a claim that one owes a duty to sacrifice oneself “for one’s country”, and, tacitly, to sacrifice oneself when the state orders one to do so. And if the state can dictate to me how I should live my life because its dictates represent the collective will of “the people” and the needs of “society”, then if the majority of the people want to institute a draft and force me to sacrifice my life in some ridiculous war, what recourse have I?
The better view is that I am an individual, living on a planet with a few billion other individuals, and that “nationality” is simply an arbitrary accident of birth. I owe duties as a person to treat other people with kindness and respect, but I owe no duty to the state, to “my country”, or to any other abstraction or collective.
Katherine,
*hugs* Are you ok? I wasn’t involved in that part of the discussion, but I’m sorry you got dragged into this against your will (and I’m sorry if I encouraged it by talking about gender identity in general).
GenFury
Ah, you’re taking the dictionary as the justification for your norm? So yes, I want to see fucking dictionary references. Many dictionaries usually only have standard language use. But a good dictionary also has other speech registers. And this dictionary here has a usage note of “could care less” as “informal”:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/care
The same dictionary about “literally”
Is that another one of your jokes?
David
You never memorised “I love you” in the world’s major languages ;) language nut fail :D…
älska is a root exclusive to North Germanic. And you’re right about the verb ending: continental North Germanic has unified all verb endings in present tense to the old 3rd person sg. ending (I think, my Icelandic is rusty). For the copula, it’s är, which is actually the origin for the English are and testament to the close language contact between Norse and English.
Now, now, don’t fall into the etymology trap here. I’m sure you’re aware about the tendency of Mandarin towards bisyllabicity, so they added xī “west” to zàng (4th tone, not 1st!). After all, in the traditional Chinese world view, the Tibetans were the Western Barbarians (the Chinese have four traditional words for barbarians, one for each cardinal direction), so adding that made sense. To claim that this synchronically means “West Tibet” is wrong. You’d have to say Xīzàng xībù or something like that.
Well East Berlin was unified with West Berlin. I think it’s because there aren’t many foreigners in eastern Germany, only 4.4% of all foreigners in Germany live there. Or in relation to the entire population, foreigners in the eastern states make up less than 3%: http://www.bpb.de/wissen/1R6EXS,0,0,Ausl%E4ndische_Bev%F6lkerung_nach_L%E4ndern.html
I did include orthography here, and German does have intergovernmental bodies for that. Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung
@Walton:
*hugs* Thanks. I’m infuriated, that’s about it. It’s not your fault though, there’s absolutely no reason to drag someone else – who’s not even involved in the topic – into an argument. It’s bad form, it’s incredibly rude, and it’s manipulative on the highest level.
Congratulations to everyone with a postdoc.
Is it a seasonal thing?
walton,
the UK had conscription until 1960, and probably could reinstate it by a simple Act of Parliament. Would you then give up your UK citizenship as well? And then do what?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Kingdom
pelamun
Cheers for the exchange, very informative indeed, I’ve learnt a few things. Language, eh? Isn’t it fun :)
Also about Tibet: it’s one of the ironies of Chinese politics that autonomous regions are actually less autonomous than non-autonomous provinces because the autonomy law stipulates that the autonomous regions need to get confirmation for certain laws from the National People’s Congress, while no such requirement exists for non-autonomous provinces.
And while the governor of an autonomous region has to be from the ethnic group associated with the autonomous region, no such requirement exists for the region’s party chairman. So the Tibetan governor is often perceived as a mere figurehead, or likewise for Xinjiang..
If the UK introduced compulsory military service, I would leave the country in order to dodge the draft, and would not go back for as long as there was any possibility of my being conscripted. Most likely, I’d take advantage of my convenient right to take up residence in another EU country. The UK has no right to force me to perform military service against my wishes. (This isn’t far-fetched. I knew at least one Greek resident in Britain, for instance, who will not go back to Greece because he does not want to be forced to perform military service there.)
If it asked me to volunteer because of a state of dire emergency, on the other hand, I might do (in fact I was in the OTC when I was an undergraduate). I’m not an outright pacifist, nor do I have anything against militaries, although I’d far rather live in a world in which they were no longer necessary; rather, what I object to is the idea of being forced to sacrifice my life and safety for the state, when I may well not believe in whatever cause it espouses. It’s particularly morally offensive to be forced to fight in a war in which one doesn’t believe, as so many Americans were in Vietnam.
As for giving up my UK citizenship, I can’t, as I don’t have dual nationality. (Of course one can become a stateless person, but that’s very much inadvisable.)
What’s wrong, Katherine? You don’t like it when your body and your identity are used by random privileged straight cisdude to score academic jabs?
It’s almost as if you’re saying you’re a person, who deserves a little respect. Don’t be silly! You’re a girl!
:-D So true, so true!
Misleading, and you know it.
Don’t most Americans pronounce them the same in the first place?
Nope. You see, I don’t need it much.
So, you love Sweden in winter. I see. :-)
*patting self on back*
Oh. Makes sense.
Oops. I hate it when I forget tones, but I don’t remember them easily (what with complete lack of practice and all).
Ah. Unsurprising.
True.
@Illuminata:
*facepalm* You’re right! How could I have forgotten!? Bitches ain’t shit. It’s the first rule of sex and gender, of course. I apologize for my silliness. I still haven’t got my cheat sheet for “things to remember since you’ve got tits.”
I should add that the difference, though, is that the US still requires male citizens of military age to register with Selective Service, in case the draft is ever reinstated. No such requirement exists in Britain. If such a requirement were introduced, I would engage in civil disobedience by refusing, on principle, to register.
Back in the early aughts (00’s), the US of course started at least one little war. We haven’t had a draft in decades, but with the tech boom, there was a “shortage” of certain kinds of personnel singing into the military. Members of Congress considered – in small meetings and general talk, though never “officially” that I know of – enacting a limited draft for specific fields, namely technical and medical professions.
At the time, I was both in prime draft age (mid-20’s) and in a field explicitly in demand (systems administration, development, DBA). The question of, “What would you do if you were drafted?” became a very real one.
Complicating this, of course, was the fact that I’m gay and DADT was very much in effect. However, the draft (as in “initial”) attempts at legislation for reactivating “selective service” had explicitly conditions for homosexuality: you’d be drafted, force to do your two years or whatever they decided, and then dishonorably discharged (and possibly jailed, depending on circumstances) at the end of tour. In other words, being gay didn’t get you out of it, it just made it worse.
I decided, at that point, that if forced into the military to fight a war I didn’t support, I’d “wash out” in any method necessary, up to and including suicide-by-instructor if that’s what it came to. No body, governmental or otherwise, can force me to act in any way. I can be jailed, beated, tortured, or killed, but I cannot be forced to act against my will.
Now, I admit I have a slightly unusual history/perspective in this situation, but I agree with Walton on this. I’m registered with Selective Service – it happens automatically when we register to vote – but would fight anyone who tried to force it against my will.
pelamun
I concede, in that case. I was wrong and I apologize. I still don’t like the usage, though.
I forgot to mention this word, later also used for Westerners (pop quiz: why South and not West ?)
南蠻 nánmán Southern barbarians
again, cardinal directions added to the word for barbarian.
I can’t really describe it, but I think winter in Central Europe is often quite “mushy”, which I hate. But often in Sweden, I’ve experienced these clear winter days, I love those.
Maybe someone meteorologically more competent could actually explain why this is so. (It’s also not exclusive, of course. I’ve had clear winter days in Germany, and mushy ones in Sweden, particularly one time in Stockholm…)
@Katherine. Well, as it happens, I’ve got my copy of the cheat sheet right here. And, #1 on the list is: “You’re body is public property, and can be used by anyone at anytime for any reason. Except your own reasons, you selfish dirty whore.”
Correction – selective service and voting may not have been automatically linked, but I recall them being done simultaneously at school. I seem to recall them being a single form, but that may not be accurate.
Giliell, on banning the veil in schools:
QFT. That was a perfect summation.
Also, with regard to Alice Schwartz: thanks. You expressed what I was trying to say, more or less. I always feel uncomfortable criticizing feminist activists like Mackinnon and others in the same school of thought, because I know all too well that they’ve done a hell of a lot to make women’s rights part of mainstream political discourse, and I have immense respect for Mackinnon in particular as a legal scholar. I also often worry that I’m speaking from a position of unconscious privilege (in my case, both male privilege and generational privilege) when I criticize that generation of feminist thinkers. But at the same time, it’s important to make clear that a great many modern feminists disagree with many of their stances on sex, and that it is possible to recognize and work against the oppression of women in society without always proposing heavy-handed prohibitionist and statist solutions to everything.
walton,
back when Germany had the draft, you had to leave the country until you were 28 if you wanted to escape prosecution. I don’t think it would’ve been worth it. I was planning to be a conscientious objector abroad, maybe in Southern America to learn some Spanish, but I was among the many fortunate enough not called to serve.
Though it did turn out well for my uncle: he dodged the draft, and fled to his then girlfriend’s home-country, Sweden, and ended up becoming a politician there (but first he became a shipyard worker ;) )….
Gen Fury,
no problem. I personally don’t use “could care less” either, and no-one has said you should.
@Illuminata:
Ahh, thanks. I should write that down.
Sans grammatical error of course ~_^
(If something “literally” makes your head explode, I expect to see pieces, dammit! And gray matter splattered all over the walls and ceiling!! And it can only ever happen the once!!! And how is it that you’re even able to tell me about it, what with you having no head ‘n all?!?!
Regeneration? Cloning? Speak With Dead spell?
</frothing fit >)
–
Merkel presenting EU summit resolution to German parliament: “We don’t just talk about a fiscal union anymore, we’ve begun to create it.”
I was planning to be a conscientious objector abroad, maybe in Southern America to learn some Spanish, but I was among the many fortunate enough not called to serve.
I thought that there was an alternative service clause that allowed one to do some sort of community service work that didn’t involve violence as an alternative to the draft. Am I wrong or was this alternative unacceptable to you?
cicely,
it’s called polysemy. Apparently in the UK, there is another type of downtoner usage, along the lines of
“You literally put it in the microwave for five minutes and it’s done.”
But the intensifier usage has been around for 150 years now, I think the battle is lost….
Except, you know, spelled correctly.
@Cicely:
An appropriate clip :p
Yes, it was called Zivildienst, as opposed to the Wehrdienst. But there was the option to do this abroad, it would take longer and you would get paid less, but since I was interested in languages, and had learnt some Spanish in self-study at home as a high schooler (listening to Héroes del Silencio for pronunciation) I was interested in spending some time in a Spanish-speaking country.
(Note: the draft has been abolished now, hence the past tense)
dianne,
but in order to do the civil substitute service, you had to declare as a conscientious objector first. When it first started, you needed to appear before a tribunal, but with the increase in numbers it became a semi-automatic process. But you still needed to give reasons in your statement, like religious ones, or pacifist ones, or as they told us in the seminars, “I have this penpal in Norway and could never imagine myself taking up arms against him”.
If you wanted to do military service, you didn’t have to do anything.
Did my part and bugged politicians with calls and emails about indefinite detention and SOPA.
I give up if either pass. I CANNOT vote for Obama if the signs them, frankly I suspect if he does that it shows that it doesn’t matter if he wins re-election or we get Rick Perry.
Ing,
but it still matters wrt the Supreme Court, doesn’t it? I think the next term will be crucial for the direction the court will take.
@Pelamun
Oh yes I’m to trust the man who wants to end the bill of rights to appoint someone whose job it is to tell him when he’s violated the constitution. Obama has shown himself to be neither a socialist, liberal, leftist, rightist, christian, muslim but instead a corporatist who couldn’t give a shit if you gave him an enema.
Ing,
be that as it may, but look at the people he has appointed so far? I don’t think Rick Perry would have appointed them. Even compared to Mitt Romney, Obama is still the lesser of two evils…
If the act passes it won’t MATTER who is on the court because there’s no guarantee that we’ll have access to the court.
Fuck. I fucking just fucking ruined another fucking felt fucking flat fucking hat! The fucking things are fucking expensive and I fucking won’t fucking get another fucking uniform allowance until next fucking October so I will fucking well have to wear a fucking old worn out fucking felt fucking hat for the rest of the fucking winter! FUCK!
(I got some heavy grease on the hat while leading a tour and they shit will not come out. Ever. Fuck!)
I think you’re right.
pelanum: I’m sorry, I think I misunderstood your first post. I blame the jet lag. Anyway, I’m glad that this is no longer an issue in Germany, but I worry that having a professional/volunteer military will encourage German politicians to get involved in more “peace keeping” missions abroad. While I think that such missions can work out to the good, they’re most often abused as an excuse for an invasion.
Well, has Obama said anything about SOPA? It seems that Issa is opposed to it..
Honestly I don’t know how Obama could square with himself if he’d be against SOPA but not the “Bill of Rights Can Kiss My Ass” bill.
That will probably not happen because:
– cost issues. The US govt has been bugging the European govts about increasing military expenditures.
– public opinion. The German public is quite opposed to military adventures abroad, probably also influenced by the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike in the US, any military mission abroad has to be approved beforehand by the legislature.
Ing: I largely agree, and I’ve been appalled by the Obama administration’s continuing attacks on civil liberties and its twisting of the law for authoritarian ends.* But I would still say there’s a difference in the quality of judicial appointments. Kagan was a poor choice, but she’s nowhere near as bad as the alternatives with whom the Court could have ended up under a Republican president. The last thing the Court needs is another Scalia or another Thomas. That’s one of the only two reasons why I would favour Obama over Romney, very marginally – that, and Obama’s better stance on abortion and reproductive rights.
(*Among other things, Obama has justified the continuing indefinite detention of those he declares to be “terrorists” without charge or trial, and a massive ramping-up of the CIA targeted drone-killings program, on the basis of the claim that America is engaged in a worldwide “armed conflict” in which al-Qaeda members are enemy combatants, meaning that the international law of armed conflict, rather than ordinary domestic criminal law, applies to them. This is very dubious, from a legal perspective. Drone killings in Afghanistan – which started under the Bush administration – were probably legal under LOAC, since Afghanistan is undoubtedly a zone of armed conflict, and LOAC allows for targeted killings of enemy combatants in an actual armed conflict. But unilaterally declaring that the zone of “armed conflict” includes the entire planet, and that alleged al-Qaeda members found anywhere in the world can be treated as enemy combatants and either assassinated or detained indefinitely without access to the civilian courts, is an utter perversion of the law. It’s not quite as comprehensively awful as the position taken by John Yoo under the Bush administration, but it comes close.)
Not to mention Obama feeling fine signing away woman’s rights and ignoring them, and whistling ideally by while his base gets the shit beaten out of them by police. He is a horrible president
@Walton
My Arab friends have been telling me that Al Queda is really a joke. the claim is that as a network of organizations it doesn’t have any hierarchy and that the data taken from Bin Laden showed they have nothing viable planned. Anyone confirm this or is there just a cultural bias they have. Granted if they’re right that means that we’re literally keeping a phantom enemy alive just for the sake of justifying such laws.
And SOPA is, indeed, a terrible idea. We had a statute with a similar purpose in the UK – the Digital Economy Act – passed in 2010 in the final months of the last Labour government, though it’s not quite as bad.
Ooh! Ooh! *jumping up & down* I know! Take mememememeee!
It’s called word rage. :-)
:-D I need to remember this!
Ing,
that sounds like a cultural bias. Al Qaeda is not a joke, but it was working in a decentralised manner. It’s not surprising that OBL was no longer privy to any planned attacks.
Al Qaeda has branched out (from Wiki):
Al-Qaeda has the following direct franchises:
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which comprises
Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, and
Islamic Jihad of Yemen
Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb
Al-Shabaab (Mujahideen Youth Movement) in Somalia
Egyptian Islamic Jihad
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
East Turkestan Islamic Movement in Xinjiang, China
There are many Islamist terror organisations active around the world. Jeemah Islamiya in Southeast Asia, the organisation behind the Bali bombings. Still active. I think in western Europe you have mainly isolated cells of radicalised youths, with no clear structure, and I think this might be true for incidents on American soil post-9/11. Some attempts have been thwarted by the security apparatuses, but I’m no security expert, so I couldn’t tell you exactly what kind of legal framework was used for that.
*drawing cutlass*
Nevaaarrr!
–
@Katherine Lorraine:
*watching video*
Yes. Like that. Only with more pieces.
(Mean ta say, they’d better have to clean up the mess with a squeegee and a sponge!)
:D
–
cost issues. The US govt has been bugging the European govts about increasing military expenditures.
The US government bugging a country (or in this case, set of countries) often leads to that country doing what the US wants. Of course, most European countries (including Germany) have more ability to fight back than, say, the average South American country, but it may take some counter-pressure from voters to ensure that they don’t cave.
Spending money on “defense” is largely a waste of money. And a huge amount of money goes into it. I was just at a conference and heard a talk on new attempts to develop a vaccine against HIV. They showed the amount of money in the US spent on the Iraq war versus the amount being spent on vaccine development. They didn’t even fit on the same scale-orders of magnitude more money was spent on the Iraq war. They probably should have gone to a log scale. Yet what kills more US-Americans: angry Iraqis or HIV? And when you consider that 99.9% of the “angry Iraqi” mortality could be prevented by not occupying their country…it just seems a very misplaced public health priority. To say nothing of the morality of ignoring a major worldwide epidemic and invading a country for no good reason.
– public opinion. The German public is quite opposed to military adventures abroad, probably also influenced by the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Good. Military adventures abroad should only be undertaken with extreme reluctance. I notice though that Germany hasn’t pulled out of Afghanistan yet. Maybe the public opinion needs to make itself heard more clearly.
@cicely:
Ehehe. I love that clip :p
@357: I’m no expert on al-Qaeda, but my understanding is that talking about al-Qaeda like it was a single organization is inaccurate. It’s more a philosophy or movement than a single organization with a single leader. Thus, searching for the “leaders” is likely to be an eternal, futile task. The only way al-Qaeda is going to go away is by improving social conditions in Asia and the Middle East until people think of them the way we think of the KKK: an embarrassing part of history that no one in their right mind would agree or sympathize with and not in any way a current power.
Dianne
Problem is that there’s a huge consensus on the issue among all the major parties except one, which means that the public is almost left without an alternative.
They just voted to reduce the troops heavily until they pull out by the end of 2013, and I think that at the moment no government could survive any new war. We managed to stay out of the Iraq-mess, which is something at least.
Walton
I know how you feel.
I have a deep respect for Alice Schwarzer, but I also think that she’s terribly wrong on some issues and that, as a public communicator, she’s doing a very bad job at the moment.
“Better” stance being the one where, saying nothing in the face of an unending assault on women’s rights, and whipping out the paternalism over scientific evidence, because that’s way more profitable politics-wise – as opposed to flip flopping from pro-choice to anti-choice because that’s more profitable politics-wise.
I second this 100%:
He’s useless. And he is the better of the two options, regardless of his utter uselessness. That should keep Americans awake at night. This is the *best* we can do?
Another reason to favor Obama: Romney’s tax plan, which involves even more cuts to corporate and high income taxes. This is absolutely the last thing the economy needs right now. Obama likely won’t raise taxes on the wealthy or corporations much, but at least he won’t cut them. I hope.
(From last thread)
I’m not sure whether Bill would like that. (Back to sex talk, are we?)
Re. “could care less”.
David Mitchell has a message from the Queen for you
Well I do think that a major economy such as Germany needs to do its part within the international system, which includes peace-keeping missions. But within the framework of the UNSC and/or NATO, as stipulated by the constitution. It is unilateral missions as conducted by the United States (and the Soviet Union in the past) which run counter to the international architecture proclaimed in San Francisco after the war.
(Sorry for the HuffPo article, but) Male model selling bras. There are more pictures.
I thought the British had literally invented irony? Hm..
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
You have to listen to this version at least once before you die.
In the category of unnecessary surveys, determining that most mormons are Republican is a survey contending for the prize.
A lot of those “independent” mormons are libertarian or hard-right Tea Partiers.
This fact provides fodder for my contention that the mormon church is actually an an agent of anti-learning, some mormons don’t learn and some mormons have learned how not to learn. They just run in the same groove until they dig it too deep to get out. And there’s the fact that mormon legislators have moved to the right of the right, making little things like education, or like ethics in business, even more difficult to promote in Utah
Okay. Good. There’s a little bit of good news.
From the Readers Comments section:
Hey, at least he can spell repudiate.
More on the issue of why Mormons are Republicans:
Democrats = Satan. I knew it. I just knew it.
[meta]
Katherine, I’m bemused by your reaction, but since you’re obviously upset I apologise for using you as an example, rather than a hypothetical person.
pelamun
Forgive me for not getting into that debate tonight. I had a really bad day.
I took my latin final today. It was really easy.
So that’s two down and two to go.
Craig Kee Strete. I read and loved the Dutch translation of Uncle Coyote and the Bffalo Pizza as a kid. While searching that for my kids, I found out that he has written SF as well. Is anyone here familiar with his work? Is it worth looking for it?
@John:
You are a giant asshole
John Morales, just how snooty can you get? Fuck you.
The “Mormons cannot be Democrats” thing somewhat amuses me, because AFAIK, Harry Reid is a Mormon.
Oh, and this quote seems apropos:
Katherine, again: I’m sorry. I feel bad that you’re upset.
—
Weed Monkey, ain’t the first time I’ve inadvertently upset someone and felt I had to apologise for it. How that’s being snooty, I don’t know.
I realize I’m still kinda ‘new’ here and everything, but John Morales disappoints me. I expected a higher level of ethics than that.
I mean, using Katherine as a hypothetical example… yeah, a bit douchey but an honest mistake (I’ve made similar ones myself).
But the reaction when Katherine and others expressed that they didn’t appreciate that? Way douchey. TOO douchey.
John, if you want to genuinely apologize, starting out by saying that you find Katherine’s bemusing is doing it wrong.
Asshole.
Well I do think that a major economy such as Germany needs to do its part within the international system, which includes peace-keeping missions.
Why? That is, are peacekeeping missions a good in and of themselves and if so what are the parameters that should define when they are useful and when not.
But within the framework of the UNSC and/or NATO, as stipulated by the constitution.
Given that NATO is completely dominated by the US, how is participating in peacekeeping missions with NATO different from joining the US every time it sees an advantage to invading somewhere?
John – the way you wrote it was the equivalent of saying “I’m sorry YOU took that the wrong way” rather than “I didn’t mean to hurt you but I did and I’m sorry”. It’s putting the blame for the offense on the person you hurt rather than yourself.
sorry, I meant to say ‘possibly an honest mistake’ in my last post
I’m baffled.
But we’re going out for Vietnamese tonight, so I’m also happy.
I think the vision of San Francisco was a great one, to outlaw all war except for specific situations, like self-defence and collective security (it’s been some time since I studied this, but this would include humanitarian missions, but also situations where the international community needs to step in to maintain peace in a country, or between a number of hostile neighbouring countries). This is a huge step up from the League of Nations, which still recognised the nations’ right to wage war.
The German Basic Law obviously does not allow invasions, but NATO is also a defensive framework, so probably an invasion wouldn’t work even under NATO rules. The UN framework explicitly leaves a place for regional systems of collective security.
I know that the UN is far from perfect, but I’m trying to see it as a glass half full and not half empty. A country such as Germany can work towards improving the international system currently in place, but in order to do so it needs to contribute.
[final]
Esteleth, it is a genuine apology.
Bemused, bewildered, confused, perplexed, mystified — however I put it, what I’m saying is that I still don’t understand the basis for the hurt I caused, only that it occurred and that I was the cause.
(If I didn’t think I was to blame, why the hell would I apologise in the first place?)
—
Carlie,
OK. I thought I’d been clear, but the second case is what I meant to express. I’m not that good at interpersonal communication.
So: Katherine, I didn’t mean to hurt you but I did and I’m sorry.
I am not blaming you for being offended.
(And, obviously, I will try to learn from this, not just avoid it in future)
@John:
Thank you. I apologize for being a bit short with you.
John Morales
You seem to take great care in the precise meaning of words, so you know that using bemused does not indicate that you understand that your actions were wrong, or that you feel regret.
Using Katherine as a cudgel in your argument with ahs was a seriously shitty thing to do.
Katherine was not present, and you have no right to use anyone else’s life experience to try to score points in a debate.
Running at about 30/hour right here, right now:
http://earthsky.org/tonight/radiant-point-for-geminid-meteor-shower
Whoot! Union got someone to warn my boss about what speech makes a harassing work environment! Apparently something happened in a meeting behind closed doors that I’m told didn’t make them look good. Since then I’ve noticed conversations being a lot more professional and civil. I’m starting to get optimistic that I can save my job now rather than that I’m going through a theater to generate a paper trail for inevitable firing. Still fighting the fight here, but round two seems to go to me.
The German Basic Law obviously does not allow invasions, but NATO is also a defensive framework, so probably an invasion wouldn’t work even under NATO rules.
I’m trying very hard to figure out how the war in Afghanistan can be described as anything other than an invasion. Can’t do it. It may be an invasion that one can justify on the basis of there possibly maybe being someone there who might have had something to do with a criminal act in the US…although that was wrong, wasn’t it? Bin Laden was in Pakistan. So, an invasion on suspicion without proof and without, as far as I can tell, any real attempt to settle the issue diplomatically. Sorry, but I think Merkel’s breaking the law.
“You literally put it in the microwave for five minutes and it’s done.”
Is correct usage of literally. (and in my opinion, it’s a ridiculous argument to be having.)
+++++++++++++++
Walton, wearing masks in public in New York is against the law. It was upheld by a Federal appeals court.
I know that the Supreme Court has said there is no privacy in public, (over generalizing am I), but it is obvious to me that if someone wants their privacy, even while in public, they should be allowed to disguise it. Just as I disguise my identity on public social forums.
++++++++++++++
Clenched tentacle salute for Ing!
Gen Fury (@267):
Actually, an ellipse has two foci, and major and minor axes. An ellipsis has three periods. Except that when it falls at the end of a sentence, the terminal punctuation is also used, which means there will be four periods. One of them isn’t strictly part of the ellipsis, but even so…. </pedant>
;^)
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/family/articles/2011/12/11/led_by_the_child_who_simply_knew/?page=full
Just came across this little piece and found it very interesting, WRT gender and sex.
I find it somewhat interesting to see it happening in identical twins, because it’s kinda not what I expected to see.
John Morales does, at times, act like an asshole. So does SGBM.
Katherine was right to vehemently object to being dragged in and JM apologized.
One would think that is enough.
Biology and Christmas myths:
Three cheers for Ing!
—————————————–
I found a five-video series on guitars from Taylor. It was filmed during a road show, and I’ve been watching the first two, shapes and tonewoods, constantly. Even showed the third-grade teacher.
I’ve also been hearing the song that plays in the intro to each video all day, in my head, nonstop. I guess it beats something like The Song that Never Ends.
——————————————
Mom’s had a rough start of the week. Two days of dizziness, and on Monday morning she went to the hospital. Someone from work drove her. Turns out she has a UTI and is now to see a gastroenterologist (?) to make sure this gets the heave-ho. Now she’s on ‘scripts for the infection and the vertigo, although no one said if the vertigo was a symptom of the UTI or something entirely separate. Thank goodness my brother has time to spare – he went back to NYC today after making sure Mom would be OK to drive to work and home for the rest of the week.
Now I know I have to get my license, and soon as possible. I’m just going to have to block off one full weekend to get in the class and 8 hours of road practice come the new year, and to hell with everything else except family or friend matters. If she gets sick again, my brother may not be able to rush down to help.
——————————————–
Those of you who have had the experience of going from a contract job (full-time or part-time) to striking out on your own, you ever have to give yourself a pep talk at any point? Because I just can’t seem to make myself post that ad for proofreading services OR try for an Elance profile….
Lynna
Not only that, they are also pregnant.
Good point.
In which case they really should not be drinking so much that one of them gets a red nose.
What I don’t accept here, even if it were effective in the short term, is the idea of a “sacred duty” and the use of “larger” to suggest that only something sacred in some vague religious or cosmological sense would be larger than the state. Even if it’s the case that a certain quasi-religious vision of human rights has been successful, and it has, the downside of this framework is continuing the dumb religious terminology, perpetuating the notion that states are morally – and not just institutionally/militarily – large, and possibly marginalizing those ideas about rights and conscience that aren’t about “sacred duties” in any meaningful way (that recognize states as small and contingent rather than trying to present rights as divine).
***
Sorry – I wasn’t really expecting you to recognize the lyrics. I did a test goog before I posted to see if the song would come up, and it did for me. But it was silly for me to assume you would know they were a reference in the first place.
I’ve never watched Survivor. It will be interesting (also to see if anyone gets a real run going). I do think it’s a fair way to organize it and gives the eliminated ones something fun to do.
Merkel wasn’t in power in 2001, it was the Social Democratic/Green govt which declared after 9/11 “We’re all Americans” and pledged its support to W.
Legally, the state of defence for NATO was invoked, as the Taliban were harbouring Al-Qaeda leaders including OBL. Self-defence, even collectively, is allowed under the international rules.
This wasn’t just a NATO operation though, but also the UNSC provided legitimacy with resolution 1368, from 9/12. It was a peace enforcement measure in accordance with the UN charter, chapter VII.
On 9/11 2001, OBL was a guest of the Taliban government, there is no doubt about it. There were thousands of Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan on invitation of the Taliban govt.
Ing, woo hoo!!! I’m so glad your Union is defending you. It’s only right, but that rarely has anything to do with reality.
+++++++++++++
changeable moniker, my skies are occluded. I haz a sad.
+++++++++++++
StarStuff, conga rats! I think my nervousness about tests and shows was what enabled me to excel on them. A certain level of stress is healthy,, and productive. Break a leg;-)
Chimpy, there has been a commercial bigot eruption in your little corner of the world.
Pansies Converted Daily
That’s right people, a gun will get you shooting straight. We must break the news to members of the Pink Pistols.
Um, so given that there are workers whose work is not expropriated (teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, contract programmers, self-employed plumbers, hedge fund managers, whatever), are there corresponding women whose non-expropriation-of-sexuality defines them as not-woman?
Confuzzlement reigns.
To this day, I simply don’t understand why NATO wasn’t abolished in 1991 when it’s one and only raison d’être crumbled to dust. I expected this to happen in 1991 (…yes, when I was 9 years old, why do you ask), I’m still waiting, it still hasn’t happened. Instead, more countries have joined NATO for no discernible reason, and even in Austria there has been some debate whether neutrality should be abolished and the military budget inflated so we could join NATO for no discernible reason.
WTF?
There’s one way to interpret it as legal: The Taliban didn’t understand the part of Afghanistan they controlled as a country, they wanted to resurrect the caliphate and rule the Umma, the community of all Muslims. If you accept this claim, there was no country to invade, so nothing illegal happened, in contrast to the completely illegal invasion of Iraq.
That’s a tenuous argument, though, isn’t it.
Shortly before the Afghanistan war started, I said the US should send secret agents (or pay the Mossad – they’re good at such things) to kidnap bin Laden. *sigh*
David Marjanović, I am sorry if I sound cynical here but how often do countries voluntarily reduce their military forces?
Urp. Gen Fury, sorry about #396. I thought I was just being a bit cheeky about a little geeky trivia… and then I read the rest of the thread, and now I see it must’ve seemed like piling on. Sorry; I just happen to love ellipses (both kinds).
***
Loud:
I know this has been covered, too, but…
…the way Emily Dickinson used em-dashes didn’t make much sense, either, but it didn’t mean she was wrong. I actually do think there are correct (which really just means standard) usages of ellipses, not to mention dashes, hyphens, parens, brackets, etc., and I would be careful to use them correctly in formal writing.
But I take comments here to be very casual writing (yeah, I know I sound pretty pedantic and highfalutin’ at times, but this is about as casual as I get), and I tend to use those things more as graphical, rather than strictly structural, elements. Or maybe it would be an even better metaphor to say I use ellipses and dashes as rests in the music of the language.
I’m not a linguist, but I am an editor, and I find I have the hardest time getting the engineers whose work I edit to understand that usage is conventional: They all think whatever they learned in 8th grade English class (or in Technical Writing 101) is Eternal Truth®, and it’s hard to get them to realize that even respected professional style guides give varying answers to many style and usage questions.
And then, having told them that, I can’t get them to understand that, by contrast, structural stuff like number agreement and parallelism really do matter. FML, eh?
Oops. *headdesk* Sorry. Should have refreshed again instead of making a big fat argument from ignorance.
(…though… refreshing may not have worked. TET loads very slowly these days, and generally since it’s on FtB.)
I didn’t say I expected that to happen (even when I was 9). I said I expected NATO to be dissolved. :-)
(Also, when the minister of finance is stronger than the minister of defense, such reductions do happen. Austria is an example right now: lots of old tanks are being sold and no new ones are being bought, because people have finally understood that the Cold War scenario of huge tank battles in the plains of eastern Austria simply isn’t going to happen.)
(…Of course, it never was going to happen. A joke from the period: “How long do the Russians need to overcome the Alps?” – “A quarter of an hour. 10 minutes for laughing and 5 minutes for climbing.” But I digress.)
Like the thrice-accursed Strunk’n’White? :-)
I guess this is possible if those officials have no ties to the armaments industry nor defense contractors. (Mercenaries. Hello Blackwater, er, Xe.)
Walton:
Allow me to pat myself on the back for a second: I perfectly anticipated that objection — it’s the reason I inserted the phrase “There might be many things objectionable about that scenario…” — and I anticipated it would come from you! ;^)
It’s difficult to come up with a hypothetical that doesn’t risk objections that are, to some degree, irrelevant to the point I was trying to make, which was simply this: There’s a distinction between saying, “you can never do X because we don’t like it” and “you must briefly stop doing X because there’s a legitimate purpose that X interferes with”; the latter, IMHO, cannot be construed as a ban on doing X, by any reasonable, common definition of “ban.” (Of course, if you can’t bring yourself to stipulate that states have any “legitimate purposes,” then arguing the appropriateness of a particular rule becomes moot, eh?)
But I don’t really want to dive back into all that, so…
<Pivot!>
…will you be in the Boston area through the winter break, or are you headed home? I’d still like to meet you (you should pardon the expression) face to face, and I’d be happy buy the first round. I’m off work for ~2 weeks starting this Friday evening; you can reach me at formalformofmyfirstname.lastname AT comcast DOT net.
TLC:
Yeah, I saw that article on Facebook a while back. I think my favorite part of the story was when she told her classmates at her new school, and they assumed she was female-to-male and hadn’t started transitioning yet.
In a perfect world, everybody would be born with a body that matched their identity, but the next best thing would be for everybody who is born with a mismatch to realize it before puberty, when it’s (relatively) easier to transition.
Unless it really takes four or six minutes. :p
John, I assumed that was the miscommunication. One of the bits of value in hanging around for so long with the same commenters is noticing what people probably mean when they say something that’s not quite that, and how it might be getting interpreted by others. Sometimes it just takes looking at it from the outside of the conversation to see it.
Ing, that’s great! A little ray of light is a good thing.
Kitten update: she spent last night in our room, and meowed plaintively every half hour all night long no matter where she was or what she was doing (even did it while being petted), although she did curl up between us to nap a few times of her own volition. Today she spent most of the day hiding behind things. Came out for about 2 minutes to play with a ball, and tolerated sitting on a lap getting petted for a couple of minutes. Thinking of naming her Hidey Lamar. ;) She’s still not really eating, but I think once she gets more comfortable she’ll make up for it. If she still isn’t eating tomorrow I’ll try helping out with a syringe of wet food.
Where have my line breaks gone? :(
Oh. The jus ad bellum. My favourite subject. (Well, not really.)
The default rule under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, to which pelamun alludes above, is that it is illegal to use force in violation of another country’s sovereignty. However, there are two exceptions: individual or collective self-defence against an armed attack under Article 51 of the Charter, and military action authorized by the UN Security Council.
The US claimed that Operation Enduring Freedom was an act of self-defence against al-Qaeda, the latter having been responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and was thus legal under Article 51. This is an expansion of the traditional understanding of the right to self-defence; obviously, the paradigm case of self-defence is where a state defends itself from an armed attack by another state, not against an attack by a non-state actor. But the US position, as expressly laid down in the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress on September 18, 2001, is that the right to self-defence against a terrorist group extends to action against foreign states who “harbor” international terrorist groups. This was controversial from a legal perspective, but it seems to have been largely tacitly accepted by the international community. There was no specific Security Council authorization for the invasion, but Resolution 1368, passed to condemn the 9/11 attacks, did expressly recognize “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter,” and stressed that “those responsible for aiding, supporting or harbouring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable”. Later, in Resolution 1386 passed in December 2001, the Security Council set up the International Security Assistance Force to assist the interim Afghan government, and authorized it to use force.
There’s definitely some legal doubt, but the argument for the legality of the 2001 Afghanistan invasion is considerably stronger than that for the 2003 Iraq invasion. (This doesn’t mean that both invasions weren’t stupid, of course.)
janine: “how often do countries voluntarily reduce their military forces?”
The US seems to do it about every 20 years (ok, spending, not forces):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PerCapitaInflationAdjustedDefenseSpending.PNG
I think it depends if there’s a war on. :-(
I probably don’t have time in the next couple of weeks, I’m afraid: I’ve got an exam next Monday and several papers due on Tuesday, and am hence horribly snowed under till then. And after that, I’m flying to Texas on the 22nd to visit Algernon over the winter break.
I’ll be back in Massachusetts at the beginning of January, though, and will hopefully be somewhat less busy, so I’d love to meet you then at some point.
All:
Did anyone take a look at the article rorschach linked to last night? Should I be as seriously spooked over this as I am?
The article doesn’t mention clathrates, but that’s what it sounded like to me. I first heard of clathrates when I read John Barnes’ novel Mother of Storms[1], in which a military skirmish (in a future in which a tactical nuke strike can seem like a “skirmish”) releases vast amounts of methane from the seabed more or less instantaneously.
In the book, the result of this is the generation of the titular “mother of storms,” a mega-hurricane that spins off other storms and threatens to become permanently self-sustaining.
I assume that’s purely over-the-top SF stuff… but I can’t help wondering: How will the previously undetected release of large amounts of sea-floor methane change our estimates of the trajectory global climate change might take? Anyone have anything more than a newspaper story on this? Any thoughts from the scientists in the crowd?
***
[1] Note: I found the book fascinating, but there are aspects of it that are very dark, and may be triggering for survivors of rape or child sexual abuse.
IRT language: Ya know what pisses me off? It’s when people confuse ‘gantlet’ with ‘gauntlet’. There’s even a fucking movie called “The Gauntlet” when they clearly mean a gantlet.
Carlie:
Long time passin’,
Where have all my line breaks gone,
Long time ago?
Sorry; couldn’t resist. ;^)
Bill – “Did anyone take a look at the article rorschach linked to last night? Should I be as seriously spooked over this as I am?”
well, yes. But there ain’t nothing we can do about it, so, no.
I think I may have committed an artistic sin of anatomy. I need reassurance.
Putting a forked tail on a cardinal isn’t a total failure, right? I mean, it’s not as bad as naked maniraptors, right? Right?
Please assure me that I don’t have to toss this carving into the fire pit and start again.
(carving christmas gifts saves money, but in terms of time and effort? Yeesh.)
The Sailor:
The phrase “run the gauntlet” dates back to 1676, so it’s by no means a recent error.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/run-the-gauntlet.html
There’s definitely some legal doubt, but the argument for the legality of the 2001 Afghanistan invasion is considerably stronger than that for the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Isn’t that a bit like saying, “The My Lai massacre was less destructive than the bombing of Hiroshima”?
TLC, the love you made was overwhelmed by any technical (may I say picayune) mistake.
Well, I suppose it depends on the cardinal. If I recall, showing Richelieu and Mazarin with forked tail (and cloven hooves) was a standard in the early to mid-1600s.
====
And I jsut paid my bills. And had money left over. Without doing any credit card pay-and-pay games. Woohoo!
So, off to bed.
G’night.
Best emoticon ever: /人◕‿‿◕人\
I always learn something new in TV tropes. :)
Blackwater *was* Xe and as of two days ago is now Academi, still trying to escape its own reputation.
Source
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
I read it and mentioned it in my catcher-upper. I said we’re living in interesting times. The numbers (a few megatonnes of released methane – yes, from clathrates) don’t sound really scary to me, given the total annual addition of something like 7 gigatonnes of carbon to the atmosphere IIRC, but I suppose they could yet become so, and of course methane is much more dangerous than the same amount of CO2.
Being spooked, however, is useless. You, we, can’t do anything about this particular release anymore. Perhaps make sure that the article gets the media attention it needs in the biggest emitter countries.
The worst-case scenario, which would require much bigger methane releases, is that the whole world – hot deserts and cold deserts included – turns into a tropical paradise in a matter of… I suppose a couple of decades. The sea level won’t rise that fast, because a continent-sized block of inland ice simply can’t melt at such speeds, but… we’d definitely need to evacuate Bangladesh.
For math, wait for a_ray_in_dilbert_space.
[Posting having refreshed and read David M. (Haiku? You’re welcome!)]
Bill Dauphin, “Did anyone take a look at the article rorschach linked to last night? Should I be as seriously spooked over this as I am?”
Yes, and I don’t know. (If anyone has a link to the actual paper/presentation, it would be much appreciated. I went through the AGU conference site but couldn’t find anything.)
Without knowing the details of previous research (e.g., if sea-ice retreat has made this survey possible for the first time?) it’s hard to tell what “a scale not seen before” really means. It seems at least plausible that it’s been happening for years and has only just been observed.
Pfft has a link saying it might be significant on a scale of 1-100ka. I think (hope!) that means 1e3-1e5, not 1-1e5. ;)
*squeeeeee* ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
Pika-pika !!
Wow.
Blackwater, of course, was itself a new name for the Steel Foundation, which originally was Executive Outcomes. I think I forgot a few more names.
Wait, what?
It’s freezing outside!
I’m off to rev up the SUV and make a drink with a parasol in it. /darkhumour
Brother Oggie, I luuuve that feeling. I just had to learn how not to get used to it;-)
Have a good night.
p.s. I thought the fork tailed cardinal ruled. … ;-)
+++++++++++
Benjamin, I was mostly making a funny, but just because people couldn’t spell before there was spelling is no excuse.
+++++++++++
Sailor and Brother Ogvorbis: Google images is messing me up. :/
In most shots, Cardinals have ordinary tails, but in some shots I’m definitely detecting a fork.
I’ve decided to just let it ride, at any rate. The rest of it looks too ‘good’ to give up on.
Also, it makes me sad that a beautiful bird who adds a splash of color to a dreary winter shares a name with a religious rank.
OK, I’m here with the math. The large polar fart is a cause for concern, but not for panic. Yes, CH4 has more warming potential than CO2 (about 20x at current levels). However, CH4 has a lifetime of about 10 years before it is oxidized into CO2 and H2O. During that time, it will give a pulse of warming, but given that CO2 has a lifetime of thousands of years, it’s gonna be an issue for a lot longer. And as David pointed out, it’s not a huge amount compared to our own emissions of CO2.
The main concern here is that it could be the beginning of a large feedback of natural greenhouse gasses adding to what we’re already spewing into the atmosphere. This would effectively negate any efforts we made at controlling our own emissions. The climate system would be a roller coaster, and we’d just be along for the ride. We know that if we warm things enough that such emissions will occur—just as they have when warming was initiated by increases in solar radiation and then accelerated by release of CO2.
The worst case is that we are at a tipping point, and a sudden pulse of warming from CH4 causes more release of CH4/CO2, another pulse of warming and so on. This won’t continue indefinitely. We won’t have runaway warming like Venus. However, already with the modest warming we’ve had to date, the amount of Earth’s land area in drought has increased by 20%. Expect even larger increases if we warm a lot more.
The truly worst case scenario is unlikely to manifest in our lifetimes. Once we see ~6 degrees C of warming, we could see vast areas of the oceans dying off, a decrease in production of oxygen by plankton and a significant mass extinction like that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. This probably won’t kill of the human species, but it would not be conducive to the continuation of an advanced global civilization. Life could really suck for our progeny.
I get cardinals at my feeder all the time, and they definitely have a fork in their tails. It’s not too deep, but it’s there.
Oh, many religious ranks are very memorable, particularly in the farcically-bureaucratic Catholic and Orthodox churches. Who doesn’t love terms like “archimandrite” and “prothonotary apostolic”? And then there’s the Pythonesque honorifics and styles used for high-ranking clergy: cathedral deans in the Church of England are “The Very Reverend X”, archdeacons are “The Venerable X”, bishops are “The Right Reverend X”, and so on. Not to mention Rorschach’s amusement when he discovered that the archbishop of Armagh is the “Primate of All Ireland”.
Walton, but none of them are very right, eh?
Anybody about that really knows horses?
Was reading a story where they hobbled the stallion but let the mare stay free, because they would stay near the stallion. Does it really work that way? (forgive-i’m a city boy.)
Are the birds named after the clergymen, or vice versa, or neither?
Benjamin, the word’s etymology makes it clear.
@Marjanovic
That is not pikachu. Just saying. :)
TLC
re: wrong-tailed bird
Have you no wood-chips? Have you no glue?
Good news, but…. Call me paranoid, call me cynical, call me late for dinner—but if it was me, I’d continue to generate the paper trail. For Round Three, when it comes.
–
*snortle!*
–
Read it; spooked…but since I know that I tend to alarm very easily, I put it on the back burner and set it on “slow panic”. When more knowledgeable people have something to say about it, I will decide whether to take it off the fire, leave it as is, or turn up the heat to “full rolling panic”.
–
They’re Eeeeeevil. What more does anyone need to know?
–
The birds were named for the priests.
Sucks.
The birds are native to the Americas, and cardinals (the priests) have been wearing red since before the 15th century.
OK cicely, been there done that. :-) Lets move on.
Sandiseattle, if I failed to at least nibble at the bait, people would start looking for pods. :-)
–
Sandiseattle
Are you new here‽‽
Oh, wait. You’re not.
Oh-kay, not sure what that was about.
Anyhu, outie, check back later, kinna slow here, all the action is over on the Dr. dan thread it seems.
Rorschach’s link is also all over my FB feed. I just feel glad that I don’t have kids, and I hope that civilisation can stave off falling until I’m safely dead. /selfish pessimist
Chigau: Glue and woodchip repairs are ‘not my style’.
But to my relief, it turns out cardinals do have forked tails, which means my anatomy fail isn’t really a fail at all.
Pretty much done the carving, next I gotta paint it, and finish it with some boot polish, and it’ll be done.
This is a big deal for me. I usually fail at christmas. Not this year, if I can avoid it.
Bankrupt.
And I’m so cleaning my coat and fangs to sniny perfection over Chris Fucking Stedman and his coterie of sycophants. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr (and I’m so not even a “bear”).
then stop diving into it. What do you expect me to do, when someone is wrong on the internet?
It is simply not the case that everything a government might have a legitimate interest in doing is therefore constitutional.
This is not Walton’s anarchism talking. This is not my one world government talking.
This is a basic fact of current jurisprudence.
Religious identification is a suspect classification, thus triggering strict scrutiny of laws that would affect religion.
If the following statement were true: “If we stipulate (because I acknowledge not everyone here actually accepts) the existence of nation-states and the validity of citizenship as a concept, then nations have a perfect right to determine how outsiders become naturalized citizens”
that would necessarily require that “[how] to determine how outsiders become naturalized citizens” would be evaluated at a lower level of scrutiny.
For if it were evaluated at the highest level of scrutiny, it would be a false statement. At higher scrutiny nations do not have a perfect right to do anything; there is an immediate presumption of unconstitutionality.
Please, for my sake and yours, stop being wrong on the internet.
Hi Thread.
So, I had to take a break from Pharyngula for a while. I was having some stress problems that were pretty directly traceable to dealing with sexist slime here, and I couldn’t afford to add to the stress I was already having from school. I’ve read the last two Threads but I don’t have any intentions of reading the parts from when I was gone.
Things are going very well on the academic front. I had a hugely successful presentation that got rave reviews from everybody, including my (in)famously blunt Rock Star Professor, and apparently I didn’t let on at all that I was miserably terrified and my brain turned to mush during Q&A. (Thanks in part to a very useful script: “That’s a really interesting question! I hadn’t thought about it that way before. I’ll definitely have to look into that further.” Helped that it really was an interesting question that I want to look into further (about the influence of the discourse of Roman spectacle on the language of the text I was discussing) so I said it with some sincerity :P) Despite a bad scare on my Greek final, I’ve finished the quarter with all As, one of which had a + after it.
I am also semi-officially an Occupier now. I say semi-officially because I haven’t spent the night anywhere, but I go to many of the GAs. (I also wrote a blog post about my experiences that was very well received.) I’m also kind of in love with the other Occupiers. They’re amazing. At my committee meeting, not only were there feminist posters and stickers all over the point person’s dorm room, but I was very pleased to see that one of the men there was wearing a “this is what a feminist looks like” sticker too. And everything I’ve seen of the whole group seems consistent with that initial impression – I have a lot to learn from them in terms of race- and class-consciousness, and many of them are amazing feminists and skeptics too. We drove someone out of the FB group after he posted something sexist (we tried to gently educate him, but he stormed off in a huff instead *shrug*) and had a similar effect when someone posted an anti-vax video. (She told us we were cyber-bullying her. I wasn’t even wearing my spiked waders, for goodness sake!)
My only real concern is that I’m very aware of the profound influence that some of them are already starting to have on me, which I’ll have to stay conscious and wary of if I want to keep that whole sense-of-identity thing I’ve been working on. I have also begun the process of getting what seems to be an Important Makeover (it’s like an Important Haircut but with everything) – I have been feeling out of my depth and invisible among the Occupiers, and I know this is easy compared to being a professor. While I know this is only part of the process, I’m trying to learn to look and sound less meek and unassuming. It’s hard for me because I still have the impulse to wear fluffy things covered in bows, but I’ll get there.
Also…
HIII! I missed you!!! *excited wave*
Good to see you again, CC! Sounds like you’ve been meeting some interesting people.
Very nice to see you around, CC, and cheers!
Hi CC! Congrats on the presentation and results. Nice to see you again.
Annoying meme of the day: “Marry, fuck, kill”. (For those that aren’t familiar: You’re given three people and you’re supposed to decide which you would do which to.)
Thanks for the update Classical Cipher. I am happy to hear that life is going well for you. *happy wave*
___
Has anyone heard from Patricia lately? I miss her.
__
TLC
I hope you plan to show us the cardinal.
___
I love the horde.
@ CC
*hugs and conga rat’s elation*
She is having more issues with the medical problem she was talking about a few months ago. That coupled with her constant battle with the VA leaves her both tired and not really in the best of moods.
I will let her know that people are asking about her.
Please send Patricia my best.
It’s never the same without her.
*hugs all around* ^_^ Thanks for the welcome! Since I was going to say this but forgot, grog and chocolate to anyone who needs them, conga rats to anyone who deserves them, affectionate hugs to all except John Morales who gets my respectful nod of acknowledgment since I seem to remember he doesn’t like affectionate hugs…
Sorry to hear that about Patricia, though. I miss her too.
I’d hug Morales.
but I’m drunk.
Tethys: And here it is!
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/836/cardinalcarving.jpg/
I’m foregoing the brown shoe polish and trying something different. Mostly because I’m out of brown shoe polish.
(youtube)
Not really grounds for our kids and their kids to be ecstatic.
Good on you and wb, CC !
My best wishes to Patricia !
That could have been an interesting thread skinning this religionist turned woo doctor, but instead it ended up as a shouting match with some 12yo with delusions of entitlement.
Good morning
So, I’m feeling a bit better this morning but still, my stomach seems to be a hard iron ball.
Can you somehow come to term with the idea that you might not have another christmas with your mum before she’s 60 because she’s refusing treatment?
CC
Good to hear of you, and good to hear that you’re doing well.
TLC
Well, just assume that the cardinal had been in a fight where it lost the middle tailfeathers ;)
++++++++
No worry, the only law you can break totally without any fear of consequences is the constitution. :/
But as others said before, it wasn’t Merkel, it was Schröder, which we can be thankful for, because Merkel would have gotten us into Iraq, too. At that time the conservatives were furious.
But don’t forget the attack on Yugoslavia, which has been ruled to be unconstitutional since. There were trials because people called soldiers to desert. They were charged and the charges were dismissed, because there was no legal basis for the attack anyway.
But the constitutional court’s ruling on those issues is bizarre beyond belief anyway. They decided that we mustn’t follow the word of the consitution, but the spirit of the constitution which obviously means the opposite of what the constitution actually says.
You know, much like when christians are claiming that the first amendment means special protection for government endorsement of Jesus.
I suppose that works, Giliell.
Now I have to think of the next carving. Maybe a simple christmas decoration?
Confession time: I’m not religious, but I did a good copy of albrecht durier’s praying hands once. I gave it away to a christian friend of mine though. A very genuinely good person in spite of his religious beliefs (not because of them as some would believe). It’s the only place such a thing seemed right going.
Josh:
Me too, both TET and front page. I will catch up with your snininess. Stedman, ugh.
We did get some cephalopods made for the trees though!
Classical Cipher, congratulations! Sounds like you are doing fantastic, and I’ll just bet you look that way too. :)
Janine:
Shit. Please send her hugs from me and tell her I miss her.
I just found myself watching episode after episode of Extra Credits.
This one is particularly good, though it could be triggering to some. It’s about the game Call of Juarez: The Cartel. (I’m glad I thought the game was a Western, rather than about the drug war; that means I didn’t even consider buying it.) The prior episode is probably worth watching first.
In conclusion: Fuck Techland.
I also wish Patricia well; I remember her fondly.
My best to Patricia as well.
Productivity 0, Playstation 235. Playing New Zealand in a 20/20 Cricket match, 6/359 and now about to bowl. Expect new blog posts in 2014.
In Australian news: Navy appoints first female Admiral.
Ee! HI CAINE! Thanks!
G’night thread. I thought it was time for stomping, but in fact it was four am.
Local music person critical
Brother Ogvorbis
Freeman Dyson himself is having his 88th birthday today!!!
I have already sent him a card. If you want to congratulate him, send a card to Freeman Dyson, Professor emeritus
C/O
Institute of Advanced Study
School of natural sciences
Einstein Drive
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
How about a bit of fun: what kind of liberal are you?
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/bl-liberal-quiz.htm
Me: “You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.”
@Alethea:
Me too!
Hihi, I’m a
But i guess there isn’t a description we wouldn’t agree with
*checks date, temperature*
Jebus, it’s 50 degrees in the morning here in Chiwaukee today. Sniff, almost smells like AGW.
Janine, tell Patricia we’re thinking about her.
Morning/afternoon all (depending upon where you are).
Here’s a funny/interesting link from Bloomberg Businessweek on correlation and causation :)
@Alethea
I’m also a Social Justice Crusader :)
What puzzles me most about this silly quiz is what Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk and Angelina Jolie are supposed to have in common. Anyone?
I am a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme
Not bad for a history major
Jacques Chirac Found Guilty Of Corruption http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/15/jacques-chirac-found-guilty-of-corruption_n_1150290.html?ref=uk
WTF???? A person of power actually held accountable for his actions!!!! That’s un-American! Oh, he does not actually get to do time in prison….
— — — —
Soft-bots: Research challenges traditional image of robotics http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-soft-bots-traditional-image-robotics.html
“Eventually, I think we’ll have designs that make these so cheap that you can just stack them up and throw them away after a single use.”
— — — —
Crows show advanced learning abilities http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-crows-advanced-abilities.html
— — — —
-Alzheimer’s drug candidate (J147) may be first to prevent disease progression http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-alzheimer-drug-candidate-disease.html
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2011/12/15/voter-fraud-just-like-rape/
probably a useful post when someone is talking about either voter fraud or rape, even without comparing one to the other.
Eeee!
Baby sloths too cute!! :3
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/baby-sloth-video/
You are a Working Class Warrior, also known as a blue-collar Democrat. You believe that the little guy is getting screwed by conservative greed-mongers and corporate criminals, and you’re not going to take it anymore.
Woohoo!
Hi CC, welcome back!
My good wishes to Patricia too, please.
TLC, nice work on the cardinal!
TLC, I did some image enhancement to your cardinal, would you like see it?
Science!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/14/supernova-explosion-glimpse-life-created?newsfeed=true
The spectacular explosion of a star in a distant galaxy (left, above) has given astronomers a rare glimpse of how supernovae blast the basic ingredients for life into the cosmos.
Scientists captured images of the colossal detonation in the Pinwheel galaxy (right, above) 21m light years away within hours of the burst of light from the explosion reaching Earth.
++++++++++++++++
http://www.space.com/13942-doomed-comet-lovejoy-sungrazer-sun-preview.html
[…] 7pm EST
Though comet Lovejoy is just 660 feet (200 meters) or so wide, it should put on quite a show as it nears the sun. The comet could become as bright as Jupiter or Venus in the sky just before it’s destroyed, according to the skywatching website Spaceweather.com.
++++++++++++++++
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html
The streak tube scans and captures light in much the same way a cathode ray tube emits and paints an image on the inside of a computer monitor. Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said — enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle.
To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.
Brother Ogvorbis
I’m a “Reality-based Intellectualist” too.
Maybe I’ll do the quiz again and try for something warm and fuzzy.
Dan Barker gets kicked off the Fox News show, Follow The Money.