Author: Ophelia Benson

Courtesy of NASA.

Two academics, Stephen F. Cohen a professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, and Peter Reddaway, a professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University, report on problems with the work of Orlando Figes. Remember him? The historian who posted sockpuppet bad reviews of rivals’ work and flattering review of his own at Amazon, and then denied it, and threatened libel, and then let his wife take the blame, and only when that ploy failed too finally admitted he’d done it? And yet is still at Birkbeck?

Many Western observers believe that  Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.

You know there’s a “but” on the way.

Our examination of transcripts of original Russian-language interviews he used to write The Whisperers, and of documents provided by Russians close to the project, tells a different story. A second Russian publisher, Corpus, had no political qualms about soon contracting for its own edition of the book. In 2010, however, Corpus also canceled the project. The reasons had nothing to do with Putin’s regime but everything to do with Figes himself.

He got the Memorial Society, a widely respected Russian historical and human rights organization, to do a bunch of interviews for the book, and then when Corpus was going to do the Russian translation of the book, it looked at the original interviews and found mistakes in Figes’s (English language) book – so many mistakes it decided not to publish a translation after all.

Cohen and Reddaway describe some of the mistakes, and then sum up:

Unfortunately, The Whisperers is still regarded by many Western readers, including scholars, as an exemplary study of Soviet history. These new revelations show, however, that Figes’s work cannot be read without considerable caution. Historians are obliged to be especially meticulous in using generally inaccessible archive materials, but Figes cannot be fully trusted even with open sources.

That’s no good.

PZ has new rules.

Also, the porcupine joke is on its way out.

That’s good; I hate the porcupine joke.

A reader alerted me to a famous Belgian cartoonist’s response to Sophie Peeters’s documentary on street harassment of women.

She translated for me. The title is “More women get verbally harassed on the streets.” The cop is asking the woman, “What did the harasser look like?” She is replying, “Blue eyes, red nose, shabby clothes and not a complete set of teeth.”

Apparently the point is that she’s dressed like a whore and she’s enormous, while the guy she’s reporting to the cop is small and beaten to a pulp.

In other words, bitchez be lyin.

Mick Nugent has the latest post in Amy’s series, and it’s a Mars landing of a post. He gets it. (I know that’s an expression that some people dislike…but it does describe something, as does its obverse.) He gets what it’s like, and how it’s bad and harmful.

We should not tolerate, in any of our online or offline communities, any sexual harassment or abuse or threats of violence against women that we would not tolerate if they were directed against our family or close friends. On the Internet, many women face a pattern of online sexual harassment, including rape threats, in the technology, business, entertainment, atheist, skeptical, pop culture, gaming and many other online communities.

This can cause women to feel hurt and frightened, to hide their female identity online, or to retreat altogether from the Internet. And this can in turn affect other aspects of their lives. Our online identities and online networking are increasingly important to our social lives and careers. And our friends and employers may see this hate speech when searching online for information about us.

…

Most men have no idea of the relentless nature of this type of online abuse, and how devastating the cumulative impact can be. Because most men don’t get the same type of sexual abuse as women do, and because the Internet can seem to be an artificial environment, we can easily become desensitized to abuse that would outrage us if it was aimed at our sisters or friends or daughters or wives or mothers.

You may sincerely believe that people are exaggerating the scale and impact of this abuse, or that is prudish or victorian to be concerned about it. Or you may see it as a trivial problem that goes away when you turn off your computer. If any of these thoughts cross your mind, you should consider some actual examples of what this abuse really looks like, and imagine experiencing this from the perspective of the victims.

And then he provides a whole bunch of examples that illustrate the problem well.

This is a pattern of behaviour, not a series of isolated incidents. It is gradually becoming less acceptable to sexually harass or threaten women in real life. But that message has not yet reached the Internet, where anonymity and hostile debate and absence of oversight make it easier for us to evade responsibility for our actions.

…

There is also the wider context of sexism in general. If we as men faced this pattern of sick online abuse simply because of our gender, I suspect that we would urgently take action to tackle the problem. If we fail to take the same action when women face this problem, our inaction reinforces prejudice and discrimination against women generally. We may not mean to do that, and we may not even be aware of it, but the impact of our inaction remains the same.

Tackling sexism is a complex problem, with no magic answers. We should rigorously analyze the extent of sexism in our communities, both online and offline, and we should test and refine the best ways to eradicate it. But we must not deny that it exists, or reinforce it with prejudice and discrimination. Instead we should actively work to create inclusive, safe and supportive communities, in which we can live together as equals, regardless of our race, gender, sexuality or ability levels.

And he provides a bunch of references with links.

Touchdown confirmed. (Yes I’m going to be a Mars bore now. You’ll just have to get used to it.)

We’re safe on Mars.

We’ve got thumbnails.

That’s a wheel!

Holy shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZlo0wHx9bk

Curiosity has landed safely. It’s sent back pictures. I’m watching a room full of laughing crying hugging partying engineers.

John Protevi on body dimorphism in gymnastics.

…a glaring instance of gender inequality is with the sport that is usually said to get the best TV ratings, women’s gymnastics. The difference is in the disciplines. The men do 6 disciplines: floor, vault, pommel horse, high bar, parallel bars, and rings. The women do floor (but with music, which the men do not have), vault (but with the horse placed horizontal to the runway, whereas it is longways for the men), uneven parallel bars, and balance beam.

The resulting difference in demands produces a striking body dimorphism, with women gymnasts being very small and thin in the upper body compared to the men.

Indeed – also very young; also very small all over as well as in the upper body; also very made-up and with sparkly stuff in their hair. They’re part athlete part dancer part showgirl. It’s seriously weird.

And there’s Colombia, where acid attacks on women are the hot new fad.

It’s heartbreaking.

Every glance at a mirror transports Consuelo Cordoba to the moment when her boyfriend doused her with a skin-searing acid that obliterated her face, leaving her with gruesome wounds that will never heal.

The chemical burned off an ear, melted an eye, ate through her lower face and ruined her teeth. She now wears a skin-tight elastic mask, breathes through a straw-like tube that protrudes from her nose and walks the streets looking “like a monster,” as she put it.

“I would like to go to sleep today and not wake up tomorrow,” she said. “The truth is life is too hard and I am alone.”

What could she possibly have done to deserve that?

The precise reason for the spike here — and not in, say, neighboring Peru — is not known. But women’s rights advocates in Colombia talk about an epidemic of violence against women, from spouse-battering cases so extreme that they make the nightly news to reports of illegal armed groups using rape as a weapon in a murky rural conflict.

“Sometimes in the West we make fast judgments and say, ‘Look how terrible they treat women in the East,’ and we don’t look first at ourselves,” said Monica Roa, the Bogota-based international programs director of Women’s Link Worldwide, a rights group. “The violence here may be different, but it emanates from the same place. This is a culture where machismo reigns, where men do what they want to do.”

H/t Simon Davis.

On a pleasanter note – the Curiosity Rover is close to Mars and will be landing in about ten hours. This is seriously exciting.

The Nasa robot’s flight trajectory is so good engineers cancelled the latest course correction they had planned.

To be sure of touching down in the right place on the surface, the vehicle must hit a box at the top of the atmosphere that is just 3km by 12km.

“Our inbound trajectory is right down the pipe,” said Arthur Amador, Curiosity’s mission manager.

It’s been on the way for eight months. It’s got the best scientific equipment evarrr to drill into rocks and scoop up samples. It’s got energy to last for 14 years.

JPL Mars program.

There’s a guy in Pakistan who, according to some reports, has been holding drink and dance parties during Ramadan.

So the fuck what, you ask. So he and a woman were forced by police to walk naked to the police station.

Really. There’s this religious holiday, which requires participants to drink nothing (including water) and eat nothing from dawn to dusk. Some guy didn’t participate, therefore the cops humiliated him and some woman on the way to the police station. That’s some totalizing religion! No opting out. Don’t like it? Fine, take your clothes off, you’re busted.

The BBC’s Shahzeb Jillani says incidents of public dishonouring are not uncommon in Pakistan, but this incident is particularly shocking because it was carried out by police and filmed on mobile phones.

Last year, several men were arrested for stripping a middle aged woman naked and parading her round the village as punishment for her son allegedly having an affair with a woman in their family.

Shahnaz Bibi told the BBC at the time that her life had been ruined by the ordeal, and she could never go home.

Relentless everyday hatred and humiliation, casually trashing people’s lives for petty reasons or even to punish someone else. It makes me shiver with disgust.