What can you do about a rebellious woman who will not submit to her husband’s authority?

Pat Robertson was asked that question. His answer was simple: you’ve got to stand up to her, and oh, how he wishes he could announce on television that you should beat her.

Well, you could become a Muslim and you could beat her. … This man’s got to stand up to her and he can’t let her get away with this stuff. I don’t think we condone wife-beating these days but something has got to be done.

How clever! To simultaneously advocate domestic violence while distancing oneself from it, and at the same time get in a little Muslim bashing! Who says Pat Robertson is senile? He’s not — he’s just evil.

But he’s wrong. You don’t need to be a Muslim to beat your spouse; we’ve got relatively few Muslims here in mostly lily-white Minnesota, and we’ve still got a tremendous number of domestic violence cases.

  • One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. 1 One in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape.

  • An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.

  • The majority (73%) of family violence victims are female. Females were 84% of spousal abuse victims and 86% of abuse victims at the hands of a boyfriend.

And then there’s this juicy statistic: in Minnesota alone in 2006,

5,295 battered women and 5,131 children used
Minnesota emergency shelter services.

Were they all Muslim? Hey, Pat, maybe you can crack a joke about how those 5,000 women and children have learned a little something about submission and respect.

Around FtB

I scan the main page of Freethoughtblogs every day, and here are a few of the stories that caught my eye this time around.

Why I am an atheist – Inflection

When I was very young, my Dad combed my hair.  I don’t know why; perhaps I was hilariously bad at it.  But it meant that we had a few minutes one-on-one in the morning before he went to work and I went to daycare or the like.  We would talk about whatever was on our minds.  It was on one of these morning that we broached the subject of first cause, or, as a young child would put it, where everything comes from.  He explained about the Big Bang and the Primordial Point.  I don’t remember the words, but the image in my mind is vivid.

[Read more…]

Coral reefs on the Eco-Doom beat

Caribbean Reef Octopus Takes a Stand

ObCephalopod: Cayman Islands reef octopus faces down boring vertebrate (Creative Commons photo by Pete)

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress is taking place right now in South Korea, and a report from Friday’s session is trickling through various social media, including The New York Times’ Green blog: Caribbean coral reefs are in trouble.

From the WCC’s coral reef workshop’s Executive Summary (PDF):

Some Caribbean reef ecosystems are relatively intact compared to average conditions in the region. For example, many reefs in the Netherlands Antilles and Cayman Islands have 30% or more live coral cover, little macroalgae, and a moderate (albeit strongly depleted) abundance of fish. In contrast, reefs in Jamaica  and the US Virgin Islands have well below 10% live coral cover, abundant macroalgae, and virtually no fish larger than a few cm.

When local reefs that are 70% dead qualifies as “relatively intact compared  to average conditions in the region,”  headlines like NatGeo’s “Caribbean Coral Reefs Mostly Dead, IUCN Says” stop seeming quite so alarmist.

The issue with macroalgae is that they encroach on coral reefs and compete with the coral organisms. They’re often present in healthy reefs, kept in control by algae-eating animals. When those fish aren’t there for one reason or another, or when a reef gets a big shot of extra nutrients from on-shore fertilizers or eroded soil, the algae can get out of hand.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute assembled 36 scientists in Panama to assess the region’s coral reefs, and the results of that work are what were presented at the WCC Friday. Researchers are pinning the damage on human interference. The precise mechanism by which we’re killing  the reefs is open to question, but they have some prime suspects:

Caribbean reefs with the highest surviving coral cover and least macroalgae tend to be characterized by little land-based pollution, some degree of fisheries regulations and enforcement, moderate economic prosperity, and lower frequency of hurricanes, coral bleaching, and disease.

The team will have a more complete analysis of their data by mid-2013, and plan to expand their survey to other oceans’ reefs by 2016.

This isn’t a surprise: the degradation of Caribbean reefs has been talked for decades. Coral reefs serve as nurseries for commercially important fish species, they absorb wave energy and thus shelter coastlines from storm damage, and they’re just full of fascinating critters. Reefs can recover from our damage if we start to protect them: parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef recently recovered from bleaching events a lot more quickly than scientists had hoped.

But it’s still awful news.

An email FYI

So you want to get in touch with me? That’s been getting harder and harder as my email gets busier and busier, and also because my email software finally up and died in protest at the load last month, so I had to make some major changes.

My email is now split. If you’re trying to contact me at my umn.edu address, don’t. I sort that out separately and handle it at my office, and have filters in place that prioritize messages from other umn.edu addresses. That is so students and colleagues get priority and their email doesn’t get buried in all those other sources. Of course, if you are a student or colleague at UM Morris, you should use that address.

All you strangers and friends out there should use pzmyers@gmail.com. It peels out all my professional/job mail, so it has slightly less volume now. Only slightly. And it also has a ruthless set of filters on it, so even there it may not work to contact me. Sorry. I may also be setting up a third public address specifically for those of you who want to contact me about speaking engagements, and I’ll put that in the about page when it’s ready.

As for all you trolls and haters: write it on a piece of paper, eat it, crap it out, and flush.

That’s a new one

Apparently, I am now a whore. I can’t be insulted by the accusation, though, since it seems to be applied in the same way as the frequent accusations that I’m gay and Jewish — neither true nor particularly offensive to me, although it does say a lot about the person trying to do the insulting.

Also, it comes from the awful Paul Elam, who seems to use “whore” as every other word. He has…issues.