Pat Robertson thinks putting up a pro-atheist billboard is just like putting up a billboard showing two teenagers having sex.
Dave? Dave Silverman? Boy, do I have a great idea for an atheist billboard now.
Oh, great, another depressing article about the state of American academia.
My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages – data which universities have long kept under wraps – her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.
Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.
By the way, five course per year — the standard 3/2 load — is what I teach. It represents about 20 contact hours per week, and doesn’t include all the preparation time. Or in the case of adjuncts, the commute time: I knew of adjuncts in the Philadelphia area who taught 5 or 6 or more courses, each one at a different university.
And as the article points out, there are additional costs to being in the professoriat. I’m at a small university, and we get several hundred dollars per year for travel (although we’d be in trouble if every faculty member tapped into that fund), but adjuncts typically get nothing, and are entirely on their own. A lot of journals also have page costs if you want to publish…that has to come out of your pocket if you’re an adjunct.
This is a telling quote from the article:
The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.
Oh, look. Guess who just moved in to the north of me, in Fargo? Anil Potti. He is the cancer ‘researcher’ who is known to have fabricated data in 18 papers, made up credentials on his CV, and most entertainingly, hired an online reputation manager to bury his sordid record in a barrage of online pablum.
The Wikipedia article on Potti is fairly thorough. He published in a number of high profile journals, NEJM, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Lancet Oncology, for instance, and wrote about cancer diagnosis and therapeutics — poor work made up to generate buzz, and since retracted. And now he’s working in…a cancer center. Remind me if ever I come down with a cancer, not to go to the Cancer Center of North Dakota. I’d rather have a doctor who doesn’t make stuff up.
Forgive me, I haven’t been keeping up with the Pussy Riot story — this is just the worst possible time of the year for me, with classes starting tomorrow. But I strongly recommend Eric Macdonald’s summary: this is a collusion between an old school tyrant, Putin, and the Russian Orthodox church to silence criticism, and to promote an unthinking, dogmatic nationalism. It’s not just Russia, either, but similar forces are at work in the United States, where God and Country are deeply entangled, and it’s a recipe for world-wide catastrophe.
The problem with Pussy Riot is that they see this clearly, and their music opposes both czar and patriarch. Look at their latest video and you can see their contempt for both.
(You don’t like their music? Tough. I thought it was wonderfully loud and angry and political, and if you don’t care for it, I’m pretty sure Lawrence Welk is still available in reruns on cable. Also, you don’t have to like it to respect the freedom of artists to express themselves.)
There’s also a third cause they’re clearly opposing: the historical confinement of women to very specific gender roles. I don’t know exactly what is going on in Russia, but it seems to be the women who are leading the charge against tyranny. Take a look at the Ukrainian FEMEN, too. Women are becoming the bravest of us all.
They aren’t just fighting against a tyrant and orthodoxy, but against the gender police. I’ve got to admire that.
I like much of what Steven Pinker writes, but I thought his book, The Blank Slate, was terrible for its black-and-white version of the nature/nurture argument. As a developmental biologist, I’m probably about as far to the plastic, environmentally-influenced side of the argument as you can get, and I don’t believe the human mind is a “blank slate”. I don’t know anyone who does (I’m sure they exist, spinning out endless wordy fables in humanities departments…but they’re not operationally significant at all in the biology departments).
Now Pinker gets cited by a British loon who wants to use his arguments as veiled racism, and of course he’s also anti-feminist. So he cheerfully cites Pinker in support, and unfortunately, this is Pinker setting up a false dichotomy…but it’s also Pinker writing wonderfully clearly and economically.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
Oh, man, where to begin…
First, that’s straight from Christina Hoff Sommers, the one ‘feminist’ (she’s more of an anti-feminist) writer the misogynists love to quote. I have heard so many raving nutcases throw around the terms “gender” and “equity feminism” as authoritative put-downs of any attempt to promote feminist issues, when what they really are are silencing tools to misrepresent people’s views.
Equity feminism, as presented in that quote, is nonsense. It’s like those people who claim they “don’t see color”, and therefore they aren’t racist and are treating all non-white people equally. You can’t pretend to be color-blind or sex-blind in a culture that privileges white maleness! Yes, we want to promote equal opportunity for all, but you won’t achieve that by pretending that the historical and social consequences of sex and race don’t exist. Respect human beings as male, female, or trans; as black, brown, or white. Recognize the realities of culture and biology, neither of which are as discrete and binary as postulated there.
It’s like we’re all running a hundred meter dash, and some people get a 95 meter head start, while others begin 100 meters behind the starting line…and we’re all going to agree to turn a blind eye to those inequities because we’ve sworn to pretend that everyone gets a fair start. So no, I’m not an “equity feminist”.
But now look at that definition of gender feminists. I’m sure such creatures exist — in a country with a Tea Party, we all know by now that caricatures do come to life — but look at the details there. Pinker lists 3 defining characteristics, and I don’t agree with a single one of them. 1) Men and women have different biological predispositions (which cannot be reduced to trite cliches, like women are good at housecleaning and men like football), 2) social interactions are complex and cannot be distilled down to a single factor, and 3) there are multiple levels of interaction — individual, race, sex, class — that affect motives and outcomes. Gosh, I differ because I think human interactions are actually complicated!
So I read that nice clear statement by Pinker, and I have to conclude that I must not be any kind of feminist at all.
Either that, or Christina Hoff Sommers is full of shit.
Like so many my weltanschauungen is the progeny of my familial roots.
My father, who passed away in 1982, had few passions in life, one was watching football and another was to castigate any and all religions. I now watch little to no football but I still have my father’s disdain for all things religious. My next birthday is number 57, the same age my father was when he died, his death-day was also his birthday. I have long ago surpassed him in the sheer amount of vitriol, sarcasm, and opprobrium directed at that farcical folly called religion.
I’m going to disagree with Stephanie…I don’t think the petition to bring Alexander Aan to Obama’s attention was a failure. I’ve talked to a number of people about it, and I’ll tell you what the big problem was: it wasn’t Aan, or a lack of outrage at his blasphemy conviction…it was frustration at the pointlessness of talking to Obama. No one had any expectation that signing that petition would do a damned thing: atheists generally are not particularly happy with our current lackluster president. He’s better than the opposition, but that’s setting a very low bar.
It wasn’t lack of concern, it was that the direction that concern was being aimed was uninspiring.
You want to do something? Michael Nugent has posted an excellent list of actions you can take — stuff you can do other than trying to nudge a world leader who wouldn’t give a fuck anyway. Read that and don’t despair.
So North Carolina is reporting their first death (of the year, I presume) from pertussis, or whooping cough. A 2-month-old infant has died of the disease.
Whooping cough is highly contagious and spread usually by coughing or sneezing in close contact. It can be serious at any age, but it is life-threatening in newborns and infants who are too young to be fully vaccinated, state health officials said. Many infants who get whooping cough are infected by caregivers who may not know they have the disease.
This is a kid who was too young to have yet obtained the full range of vaccines, and was dependent on herd immunity…and someone carrying the disease infected them, and ultimately killed them. It’s remarkable that deaths from pertussis are now so rare that one of them will make the news—but the way we’ve made the disease rare is by preventive vaccinations. Every person who neglects to vaccinate is contributing to a deadly disease renaissance.
Especially if that doctor is associated with Physicians For Life, an organization of ideologically warped doctors who abuse science to justify anti-abortion screeds. In one article, they carry out a set of weird calculations to trivialize pregnancies from rape. They go through a series of calculations to throw out most rapes (the woman is too old or too young to get pregnant, for instance…which should set off your alarms right there. Child rape is less of a problem simply because they won’t get pregnant?), and then comes to this weird excuse:
Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman’s body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation.
Does that sound familiar? Missouri congressvermin Todd Akin recently echoed that sentiment, claiming that ‘legitimate rape’ rarely causes pregnancy (and it’s not just Akin — right-wingers everywhere parrot that claim).
Dr Jen Gunter speculates that Akin got his misinformation from Physicians for Life, and also takes apart their claim.
The Physicians for Life site quotes 3 sources, only one is original research. The one article was authored by Goth and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1977 (yes, 1977) and in NO WAY SUPPORTS THE NOTION THAT RAPES ARE RARE OR THAT THE STRESS RESPONSE LOWERS THE PREGNANCY RATE. It is an article about sexual dysfunction among rapists. Put another way, the Physicians for Life have not provided a single published article to support their claims. Interestingly, Physicians for Life also promote the long disproven claim that abortion causes breast cancer.
It’s based on nothing but air and lies, in other words.
