He just gets worse and worse. He’s now defending Mel Gibson and Passion of the Christ (hey, it made lots of money!) and he just casually mentions something damned ugly.
After a long hiatus, I am attempting to rejuvenate the online gender workshop just in time for the US/Canadian school year.
In the past, we’ve focused on questions and reports back. Last time, we looked at some definitions. The initial exercises needed to be done in a state of gender naiveté. But more in depth exploration can only be done in the context of a common language and common intent. These are never naively assumed; they must be consciously adopted.
Now that we have these, let’s look at some aspects of gender in particular. Most educational focus is on gender identity and gender identification. But I find it more helpful to start with gender attribution. All of us attribute gender to others very frequently, but the process of attributing gender to ourselves is typically limited to childhood. Long before adulthood, cis* folks’ genders are assumptions living in the background of cis* lives. So let’s start by examining an activity with which we all have more practice and more familiarity: telling other people what there genders are. [Un/]Fortunately for you, I have a piece of creative writing that contains a number of good examples of gender attribution: how it happens, when it happens, and what it looks like. As a bonus which will help us segue into future discussions, it also touches on what it feels like when we are conscious of others’ efforts to attribute gender to us. This piece is called Stares. [Read more…]
Charlie Stross just tweeted about Julie d’Aubigny, a 17th century swordswoman and opera singer, who hit the road when her lover killed a man in an illegal duel.
This time, it’s Albert Einstein, who endorsed a psychic in 1932. Einstein said “She told me things no one possibly could know,” the standard cry of the credulous upon encountering a persuasive con artist. He got scolded by a writer for The New Republic.
97% of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, and to highlight that fact, Skeptical Science has launched a media event in which they reveal a comment by a scientist every hour for 97 Hours. Check in to the website to see what’s new every hour, or follow the #97hours hashtag on twitter.
I once read a book by Jason Lisle — it might have been his “Ultimate Proof of Creation”, or maybe “Logic and Faith”, I can’t really remember, it was such a tedious droning bore — and was unimpressed. If you claim to be using pure logic to determine the nature of the universe, and arrive at the conclusion that your idiosyncratic, culturally determined religious mythology is literally and perfectly true, it’s safe to say that you’re doing something wrong.
I’ve been conditioning our cat. From the first day we had her, I did this little thing in which I’d tap on a glass to make it ring a few times before feeding her, with the idea that if ever she escaped outside we’d just ring the dinner bell and she’d come running. Only it’s kind of backfired. She now expects dinner and a show.
Maybe I’m old and not so active in gaming any more, but it just sunk in — I was a heavy gamer back in the 1970s, before most of you were born. I outrank most of the gibbering basement-dwelling FPS fanatics! I was playing multi-player combat games, pulling all-nighters to hammer the enemy, back when it was all about big sheets of paper and cardboard counters and throwing dice. What brought it back is that I remember Greg Costikyan — I played Costikyan’s games back in the ’80s.
The advertising for Zeteticon has been a bit low key, so it’s a good thing I happened to check my calendar! And then I looked at the roster, and it’s a good bunch — Beth and Matt and Fred and Aron and Richard and August and David and Katie, who I have not met before. Come on out to Fargo, ND this next weekend!
I notice I don’t have a title listed, which suggests that once again mail from an organizer has been snared in my spam trap, and I’ll have to go dig it up, but in case they see this, the title of my talk is “Synteny and Creationist Sins of Omission: They always forget about those pesky genes.” It’s about molecular genetics and the ignorance of creationists, if you can’t guess.
