Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Four-fold increase in polio in Nigeria

    In 2003, northern Nigeria’s Muslim leaders leaders opposed vaccinations, claiming they could cause infertility.

  • Who elected Grover Norquist?

    No one, but he runs the show anyway.

  • A look at Schumacher college of woo

    We are told we will learn “How to use inter-disciplinary scientific information in combination with knowledge gained from sensing, feeling and intuition”.

  • Blot her out

    It’s a hard job obliterating women from the landscape. People have been trying for centuries but it’s like weevils or mildew…there’s always a bit you miss and then before you know it – the big chomping jaws come through the wall and eat you.

    The Saudis are struggling with this problem now, and they’ve decided there’s no help for it, they’re just going to have to cover up the eyes too. Otherwise – munch munch.

    Saudi women with sexy or “tempting” eyes may be forced to
    cover them up    , according to a spokesperson for the Committee for the
    Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the news site Bikyamasr
    reports.

    Bikyamasr quotes a spokesman of the Ha’eal district, Sheikh Motlab al-Nabet, as saying the group has the right to order women whose eyes seem “tempting” to shield them immediately.

    It seems inconvenient, because women will be walking into walls or holes in the ground or getting run over, but if you think about it they’re really not supposed to be outside anyway, so it’s ok. If they’re turbulent enough to insist on going outside they’ll just have to have their eyes covered up along with the rest of them.

    They understand this in Jerusalem, ironically enough.

    The segregation of women is nothing new amongst the ultra-orthodox community who itself lives segregated from the rest of the population, by choice. In the downtown Mea She’arim neighbourhood that’s populated by Haredi Jews, signs warn women not to enter the quarter dressed “immodestly”.

    A woman’s appearance is “immodest by nature”, said a Rabbi who insisted he would remain anonymous for fear of “offending sensitivities”. “Our demand isn’t geared at oppressing women – the opposite. Our intent is to protect their honour and dignity.”

    By announcing that their appearance is immodest by nature; funny idea of honour and dignity.

  • Saudi religious police will cover women’s eyes

    The men of the committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice will interfere to force women to cover their eyes, a spokessheik said.

  • Abuse of privilege

    Simon Singh finds Charles Windsor less than reasonable on the subject of alternative “medicine.”

    The heir to the throne will not accept that treatments such as homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic therapy do not work in the vast majority of cases, according to Simon Singh.

    Speaking at the Hay Festival in Kerala, India, Singh said that hundreds of scientific studies had concluded that alternative medicine is ineffective.

    Yet despite this, the Prince of Wales continues to believe the therapies can help patients because of his ideological commitment to the natural world, Singh said.

    ‘He only wants scientific evidence if it backs up his view of the natural treatment of health conditions,’ he said.

    …

    ‘We presented evidence that disputes the value of alternative medicine and despite this he hasn’t changed his mind,’ he told the festival, which is sponsored by The Daily Telegraph.

    This is because he is ‘ideologically fixated’ about the benefits of nature, he claimed. ‘It’s a shame, because he’s so influential.’

    Exactly so, and he abuses his (unearned, inherited) influence to persuade credulous people to use bogus medical ”treatments.” It’s an outrage, and he should be wracked with shame.

  • Simon Singh says P Charles is fixated about alt med

    PC refuses to accept the failings of alternative medicine, despite compelling evidence that it provides little benefit to patients, because he is ideologically fixated.

  • Jerusalem: women push back

    It’s an essential fact of life here: women have simply disappeared from the city space, as if it were solely inhabited by men.

  • Mehdi Hasan urges empathy for Iran

    Via a bold thought experiment: “Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah.” A mullah? Why a mullah? Why not, say, a woman?

  • You know how you tell your little woman to bring you a beer, and she brings you the dog instead?

    Via Dana’s open letter to Nature amiably titled “There is a Crucial Difference Between Being Contentious and Being a Misogynistic Asshole,” we read Anne Jefferson’s open letter to Nature amiably titled “You got a sexist story, but when you published it, you gave it your stamp of approval and became sexist too.”

    A post by Anne JeffersonDear Nature,

    “Womanspace” by Ed Rybicki is the most appalling thing I have ever read in a scientific journal. When I read the Futures (science fiction) piece you published on 29 September 2011, about how the hero and a man friend were unable to cope with a simple errand and how that led them to discover the existence of parallel universe inhabited by women that naturally endowed women with their domestic prowess, but which women were too dumb to observe until the great men of science made their discovery, I checked to make make sure I was still on nature.com. To my dismay, I was.

    The story hearkens back to the “good old” sexist days when men did important things (like write books about virology) and women did unimportant things (like keep their families fed and clothed); when men couldn’t be bothered to be useful around the house and even when women did manage to get science degrees they were better employed as cooks and errand runners. The writer makes the explicit assumption that all of his (and, thus Nature’s) readers are male and have a “significant female other” who helps with their shopping. The story uses a cliched trope that women have an alternate reality, but then adds the extra punch that we aren’t even smart or observant enough to know it. As a woman scientist reading this article, it seems in every way designed to make me feel othered and excluded from the scientific academy.

    That’s how to tell them.

    I particularly loved the bit about the explicit assumption, because I often think that apart from my friends Claire and Mary Ellen, no one else notices those assumptions when they appear. Here’s how this one appeared, in Rybicki’s story:

    At this point I must digress, and mention, for those who are not aware, the profound differences in strategy between Men Going Shopping and Women Going Shopping. In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.

    And the interesting thing is — and this is what sparked the discovery — that any male would be very hard pressed to say where she got some of these things, even if he accompanied her.

    Have you never had the experience of talking to your significant female other as you wend your way through the complexity of a supermarket — only to suddenly find her 20 metres away with her back to you? And then she comes back with something you’ve never seen before, and tosses it in the trolley as if nothing has happened?

    See? He’s assuming that the reader is male (and straight). He’s assuming that women are too busy foraging for shoes to read science magazines, or perhaps anything at all.

    It’s a good thing we have all these waves of feminism (what is it now? 23? 37?), because the first two or three certainly didn’t finish the job.

     

  • Vatican to sue over pope kissing sheikh photo

    Benetton said the idea was to combat hatred, but the Vatican isn’t having any of that blasphemous nonsense.

  • A burgeon too many

    And another thing. What does this remind you of?

    The rise of the Haredim  has been disastrous for the country’s economy,  according to Gershom Gorenberg, author of The Unmaking of Israel.

    Gorenberg writes that  Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is becoming ever  more dependent on the state and, through it, on other people’s labour.

    ”By exempting the ultra-Orthodox from basic general educational  requirements, the democratic state fosters a burgeoning sector of society that  neither understands nor values democracy.

    Quiverfull, and the homeschool movement. The democratic US state is fostering  a burgeoning sector of society that  neither understands nor values democracy – or secularism or human rights.

  • Deface them

    How do you know when the theocrats are winning? Women start to disappear, and at the same time, the ones who haven’t disappeared yet are subject to spittle-flecked hatred…including those who are six years old.

    An Ultra Orthodox Jewish man walks past a vandalized poster showing a woman, in Jerusalem.

     Like that. Posters that feature women have been “defaced” in Jerusalem, the SMH article says, and by defaced it means defaced, as you can see. That poster says, “You think you’re pretty, bitch? I’ll give you pretty, you whore. How pretty do you think you’ll be after I stick a razor in your eyes, you cunt?”

    That’s not “segregation”; it’s not “modesty”; it’s not “religious obligations”; it’s just loathing.

     A torn poster of a woman is seen in Jerusalem. Images of women have vanished from the streets of Israel's capital.

     ”Shut your filthy mouth, bitch.”

    Not content with segregated streets, queues and buses, extremist members of  the Haredi  have turned their attention to the city of Bet Shemesh, 30  kilometres to the west of Jerusalem.

    Here, Jewish girls as young as six, wearing a  conservative uniform of skirts below the knee and shirts to the elbow, are being targeted by the Haredi, called  ”pritzas” (prostitutes) for being ”immodestly dressed” as they walk into  Orot girls school, a state-funded religious-nationalist school. The Haredi are demanding the girls cover up.

    That’s how you know when theocracy is winning – when men start calling little girls prostitutes. In public. Outside a school. At girls on their way to school.

  • How the NHS could save money on homeopathic treatments

    Stop paying specialist homeopathic hospitals, stop buying expensive homeopathic remedies, require patients to consider a placebo instead.

  • Sam Harris is wrong about science and morality

    What he actually does in his book is plain old secular moral reasoning — and not very well — but he claims he’s using science to distinguish right from wrong.

  • When women and girls are the enemy

    Here, Jewish girls as young as six, wearing skirts  below the knee and shirts to the elbow, are being targeted by the Haredi, called  ”pritzas” (prostitutes).

  • It’s all the fault of the new atheists!

    “The extremely aggressive campaign against religion being waged by the New Atheists, led by Richard Dawkins” is why people hate science.

  • Othered and excluded from the scientific academy

    Oh look, we’re back on this corner again. Some drearily unthinking guy writes a patronizing “funny” article story about women for Nature, people say how drearily unthinking it is, and everybody says “oh lighten up, ladies.” It’s just a joke, huh huh huh. Jokes never do any harm, any fule kno that.

    In a pig’s eye, says Christie Wilcox at SciAm blogs.

    Reinforcing negative gender stereotypes is anything but harmless.

    It was Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson who, in 1995, first coined the term stereotype threat. It refers to how the knowledge of a prejudicial stereotype can lead to enough anxiety that a person actually ends up confirming the image. Since that landmark paper, more than 300 studies have found evidence for the pervasive negative effects of societal stereotypes.

    When it comes to women, studies have shown that stereotype threat is very real. Women are stereotyped to be worse at math than men due to lower test scores. But it turns out that women only score lower when they are reminded of their gender or take the test in the presence of men. In fact, the greater the number of men in the room with a female test taker, the worse she will do. The gender profile of the environment has no effect, however, on women’s verbal test scores, where no such inferiority stereotype exists.

    So this kind of thing does matter. There is no “just a joke.”

    Ed may not have meant to demoralize women scientists when he wrote Womanspace, but by reinforcing the stereotype of the domesticated woman as opposed to the scientific man, he did just that. But even worse, as Anne Jefferson said, by approving of such a piece, Nature has given this kind of sexist attitude their highly-valued stamp of approval.

    Shame on you, Nature, for contributing to the kind of environment which leads to stereotype threat – the kind of environment that tells girls they shouldn’t bother becoming a scientist. Because while I can shrug off some bigoted humor, they can’t. They’re the ones harmed by such careless support of antiquated gender roles. I am mad at you for them. You have done wrong by little nerdy girls everywhere, Nature, and you need to acknowledge it. Anything less says that you simply don’t care.

    Please don’t do it any more.

  • Reinforcing negative gender stereotypes is not harmless

    There are long-term career consequences to gender stereotypes.

  • Facts and belief

    Keith Ward wrote a short piece for Comment is Free, a couple of weeks ago, saying something about religion and science and claims and facts. (I put it loosely that way because Ward oscillates between terms a lot, so it’s not easy to specify exactly what he’s claiming. The title of the piece is “Religion answers the factual questions science neglects,” which is an ok summary, but it’s not necessarily written by Ward.) Ward’s piece was in response to Julian Baggini’s piece on whether science and religion are compatible.

    Jerry Coyne wrote a piece responding to Ward’s. Jim Houston wrote a piece at Talking Philosophy responding to Coyne’s, with a response directly from Ward.

    All straight? Shoes buckled? Knives put away in the basket? Off we go.

    Ward said:

    We need to ask if particular religious and scientific claims conflict, or whether they are mutually supportive or not. Some are and some are not, and it would be silly to say that all religious claims conflict with all scientific claims, or that they do not.

    Many religious statements are naturally construed as statements of fact – Jesus healed the sick, and rose from death, and these are factual claims.

    …

    A huge number of factual claims are not scientifically testable. Many historical and autobiographical claims, for instance, are not repeatable, not publicly observable now or in future, and are not subsumable under any general law. We know that rational answers to many historical questions depend on general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment. There are no history laboratories. Much history, like much religion, is evidence-based, but the evidence is not scientifically tractable.

    Wait. Wait wait wait. I spy a bit of smuggling.  “Much history, like much religion, is evidence-based.”

    Objection, your honor. Bullshit (in the technical sense). Equivocation. Smuggling. Playing silly buggers with ambiguity. That claim is true only if you mean something quite eccentric by “much religion”; if you mean what is generally meant and understoody by religion, it’s not true at all. Religion in general, religion as such, is not evidence-based in the sense that history is.

    Claims that the cosmos is created do not “trespass onto” scientific territory. They are factual claims in which scientific investigators are not, as such, interested. Scientific facts are, of course, relevant to many religious claims. But not all facts are scientific facts – the claim that I was in Oxford last night, unseen by anyone, will occur in no scientific paper, but it is a hard fact. So it is with the miracles of Jesus, with the creation of the cosmos and with its end.

    So it is? So it is? No it isn’t. The claim that Keith Ward was in Oxford on a particular night is not inherently implausible; it goes against no known public facts about nature or the social world or geography. The same cannot be said of “the miracles of Jesus.” The mere fact (if it is a fact) that both Ward’s presence in Oxford on October 30 2011 and the miracles of Jesus are unverifiable does not demonstrate that both are hard facts.

    Now, it is true that there is a fact of the matter about both. It could be a fact that Ward was in Oxford that night, or it could be a fact that he wasn’t. It could be a fact that Jesus did miracles, or it could be a fact that he didn’t. But that isn’t what Ward said: he said “it is a hard fact” that he was in Oxford that night. Well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but the rest of the world – on his own account – doesn’t know that. I think he wanted readers to take his “it is a hard fact” as meaning an established, public, accepted fact (despite having just said that it isn’t) and then be rushed into accepting the same of Jesus and his miracles. Tricky.

    The interesting question is not whether religion is compatible with science, but whether there are important factual questions – and some important non-factual questions, too, such as moral ones – with which the physical sciences do not usually deal. The answer seems pretty obvious, without trying to manufacture sharp and artificial distinctions between “hows” and “whys”.

    That’s Ward. Coyne disagreed, and ended with a challenge:

    I challenge Ward to give me just one reasonably well established fact about the world that comes from “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment” without any verifiable empirical input.

    Jim Houston asked Ward to respond to the challenge, and Ward obliged.

    I have been told that Jerry Coyne has challenged me to cite a “reasonably well established fact about the world” that has no “verifiable empirical input”. That is not a claim I have ever made, or ever would make.

    What I do claim is not so controversial, namely, that many factual claims about the world are reasonably believed or even known to be true, even when there is no way in which any established science (a discipline a Fellow of the Royal Society would recognise as a natural science) could establish that they are true or false.

    Here is an example: my father worked as a double-agent for MI6 and the KGB during the  “Cold War”. He told me this on his death-bed, in view of the fact that I had once seen him kill a man. The Section of which he was a member was disbanded and all record of it expunged, and all those who knew that he was a member of it had long since died. This is certainly a factual claim. If true, he certainly knew that it was true. I reasonably believe that it is true. But there is absolutely no way of empirically verifying or falsifying it. QED.

    That seems to me to be an absolutely hopeless “example” of what he is claiming. He is claiming, in a somewhat evasive way, that it is reasonable to believe that claim. I say “evasive” because he (carefully?) put the claim in the passive voice, which enabled him to omit any believing agent or agents. Who is supposed to be doing this believing? Ward himself? Or everyone? It makes a difference, you know.

    Here’s the thing. It may be reasonable for Ward to believe that story (if in fact – in fact – it really was told to him), depending on a lot of things – what he knows about his father, and the like – but it’s not the least bit reasonable for anyone else to believe it. It’s minus reasonable, because in fact it has a whiff of tall tale, or more than a whiff. Once saw him kill a man did he? My, that’s casual. And then Ward is using it to make a point. And double-agents aren’t all that abundant, and they are figures in novels and movies.

    I think Ward is equivocating again: I think he’s expecting us to take the polite or social sense of “believe” which could better be called “taking his word for it,” and treat it as genuine, reasonable belief. I don’t mind taking Ward’s word for it, if there’s nothing at stake, but as for genuinely believing it…I beg to be excused.