In the NY Times magazine, Parul Sehgal considers the word “privilege.”

In the 1930s, W.E.B. Du Bois had an insight that privilege isn’t only about having money — it’s a state of being. He noted a ‘‘psychological wage’’ of whiteness: Poor whites felt that they outranked poor blacks; they could at least vote and access public schools and parks. In 1988, Peggy McIntosh, a women’s studies scholar at Wellesley, expanded on the idea, publishing a list of 46 benefits of being white (for example: ‘‘I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time’’; ‘‘I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for

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Last week, Monday July 6, the Guardian reports…

The Garrick Club, one of London’s last remaining gentlemen’s clubs, has voted to continue its policy of not admitting women as members. At the club’s annual general meeting at the Palace theatre on Tottenham Court Road, 50.5% voted in favour of allowing females to join. The club requires a two-thirds majority before rules can be changed.

Oh well, you may be thinking…it’s a private club; freedom of association; people are allowed to choose their friends; there has to be somewhere people can just…just…

The decision to continue to exclude women is significant because the Garrick Club has a place at the heart of the British establishment, with supreme court judges, cabinet

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That paper by Fiona Watt…

During my time in Cambridge, virtually every invitation I received to join a University committee was prefaced by the disclaimer that “we need a woman”. This had the dual effect of making me feel, on the one hand, obliged to accept and, on the other, less empowered to voice an opinion. In case I, or my colleagues, might forget why I was there, the papers for one senior promotions committee had an ‘f’ next to my name—not ‘F’ for Fiona but ‘f’ for female. When I complained, the person who took the blame was a (female) member of the secretarial staff and not the (male) chair of the committee.

And on the other hand … Read the rest

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Sexism in STEM fields isn’t as bad as you think. It’s worse than that, according to David Kent.

As many of our readers are aware, I have recently taken up a position as a group leader at the University of Cambridge, and in that transition from postdoctoral fellow, I have become even more acutely aware of the severe problems that still exist when it comes to equality amongst male and female researchers. These are not things that are said in public, but rather they are structural and personality barriers that stay behind closed doors. These actions are sometimes subconscious bias (which is difficult to fix at the best of times), but often they are outright bigotry – all

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Another version of the upcoming megaquake when the Cascadia subduction zone snaps, written by Bruce Barcott in August 2011.

On the Oregon and Washington coasts, the S-waves turn the landscape into a rolling sea. Tourists struggle to stay on their feet. Older buildings shift off their foundations. In Seaside, the 1924 bridge that carries Broadway across the Necanicum River can’t handle this dance. It twists, buckles, and collapses.

MINUTE 2:00
People start checking their watches. Nobody can believe an earthquake could keep going this long. For that they can blame the unique features of the CSZ.

“Because there’s so much sediment on it, the CSZ is very smooth,” says Goldfinger. “Once it gets going, there are no ­irreg­ularities on its

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More on the kimono kerfuffle.

Protestors against a kimono try-on event at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston are upping the ante. They have issued an extensive list of demands, following an apology on the museum’s website.

A list of demands? It’s an art museum, not the Filth and Scum Corporation.

The new “list of demands and charges” from the group, which calls itself Stand Against Yellow Face @ the MFA, is nearly 2,000 words in length. They group is offended by everything from the prospect that the MFA planned to curate the photos resulting from the event for its Facebook and Instagram accounts to the fact that the robe, they say, is an uchikake, not a kimono.

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And then there are the kimono wars, which I’ve been ignoring until now.

The BBC tells the story:

Following an uproar of criticism on social media, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) cancelled an event that protesters labelled racist and culturally insensitive.

Museum officials announced that they would cancel “Kimono Wednesdays,” which was originally scheduled to run until 29 July.

Every week, visitors were encouraged to “channel your inner Camille Monet” by posing in front of Claude Monet’s “La Japonaise” while trying on a replica of the kimono Monet’s wife, Camille, wears in the painting.

Protesters quickly labelled this event as racist, saying it propagated racial stereotypes and encouraged cultural appropriation.

The MFA posted this image on its … Read the rest

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David Robert Grimes takes on five myths about GM foods.

One is that GM is untested. Wrong, he says; it’s tested.

Another is that Monsanto is the devil.

Another frequent claim is that Monsanto specialises in “terminator seeds” that are sterile and cannot reproduce, making farmers dependent on the firm. This persistent myth is also false. It is technically feasible to make sterile seeds, but Monsanto does not sell them (and in 1999 pledged never to explore that avenue).

Does anyone sell them?

Another claim is that it’s all big biz – i.e., I assume, all profit-driven. He cites golden rice as one example of academic and humanitarian as opposed to profit-driven research.

Sadly, it has been doggedly opposed

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The other big news today is less subject to ambivalence, more purely a treat – the Pluto flyby. Let’s have some photos from NASA.

NASA ‏@NASA 16 hours ago
Pluto’s bright, mysterious “heart” is rotating into view: http://go.nasa.gov/1Rvnom7 @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby

NASA New Horizons ‏@NASANewHorizons 7 hours ago
After 9.5 years & 3.26 BILLION miles I’m just 2 hours – aka 62,258 miles – from closest approach! #PlutoFlyby

NASA ‏@NASA 3 hours ago
Our 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto reaches historic #PlutoFly! Details & the high-res image: http://go.nasa.gov/1L5MhBg

See it???

… Read the rest

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A deal with Iran. This seems like good news.

World powers have reached a deal with Iran on limiting Iranian nuclear activity in return for the lifting of international economic sanctions.

US President Barack Obama said that with the deal, “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off” for Iran.

His Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, said it opened a “new chapter” in Iran’s relations with the world.

Negotiations between Iran and six world powers – the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany – began in 2006.

The Republican Congress is not keen, and neither is Netanyahu.

Mr Obama, who is trying to persuade a sceptical US Congress of the benefits, said it would oblige Iran to:

• remove

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Originally a comment by freedmenspatrol on The self-justifying loop.

It’s a simple formula: Ensure people can’t succeed, preferably by stealing success from them. Then pretend you have taken nothing. Look at them and see that they have achieved less. From inside that carefully-curated ignorance, which we built a culture to train us in from a very young age, it’s clear that those people just aren’t good enough. Maybe we mistreated them in the past, but we “fixed” all that in 1865, 1954, 1965, 2008, or some other year. The date doesn’t matter as long as it’s far enough in the past that we don’t feel implicated. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people literally tell me … Read the rest

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John Horgan has some observations on meditation.

Journalist Robert Wright, an old friend who has recently gotten into meditation, wrote in The Atlantic in 2013 that more experienced meditators “seem much less emotion-driven, much less wrapped up in themselves, and much less judgmental than, say, I am.” He suggests that if more of us meditated, we might get along better.

I have two words to say to that. Sam Harris.

I rest my case.

I suspect that meditation is as morally neutral as reading or jogging. If you meditate to become nicer—perhaps by thinking “Be nice” rather than “Be happy”–meditation might make you nicer. But meditation can make some people meaner, or rather, help them behave meanly without feeling

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Hilda Bastian has thoughts about outrage.

You didn’t need any academic theory, though, to know that wading into gender generalizations – even flippantly – was foolhardy territory for a formal guest at an event intending to honor women in science at a journalists’ conference. Progressing women’s rights to equal dignity and opportunity has always elicited outrage. But for the last couple of decades, sexist remarks and sexist jokes have, too.

This cartoon by Punch contributor, George du Maurier, comes from 1895. That was the era when anthropological claims about lower female intelligence had been losing ground as a way to keep women out of higher education (Joan Burstyn, 1973). So the ground had shifted to fanning medical fears

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Via Hilda Bastian, via Project Gutenberg, a George du Maurier cartoon from 1895. It’s extraordinary how little we’ve moved on from that.

… Read the rest

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This has me wondering if it would really be that bad to live in Oklahoma, or maybe Kansas – this article in the New Yorker about the fact that when the Cascadia subduction zone finally snaps, the resulting tsunami will wipe out everything west of the I-5 freeway that runs from southern California to the Canadian border at Blaine, Washington. I live a couple of miles west of I-5. The article is titled The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to

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Yet again I’m surprised. Some women athletes decide not to build muscle, because they’re girrrrrrrls.

The Times starts with Serena Williams, who has muscles. She plays tennis – muscles come in handy.

Williams, who will be vying for the Wimbledon title against Garbiñe Muguruza on Saturday, has large biceps and a mold-breaking muscular frame, which packs the power and athleticism that have dominated women’s tennis for years. Her rivals could try to emulate her physique, but most of them choose not to.

Despite Williams’s success — a victory Saturday would give her 21 Grand Slam singles titles and her fourth in a row — body-image issues among female tennis players persist, compelling many players to avoid bulking up.

So…they … Read the rest

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I’m re-reading Mistakes Were Made, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. That’s the one about self-serving bias aka cognitive dissonance, and all the exciting ways it plays out.

One item –

…if we have enslaved members of another group, deprived them of decent education or jobs, kept them from encroaching on our professional turfs, or denied them their human rights, then we evoke stereotypes about them to justify our actions. [p 60]

Thunk. Yes we do, don’t we. Consider racism in America. Doesn’t that just exactly describe our history?

1. Slavery
2. Grudging emancipation, with compensation for the slaveholders and penury for the former slaves
3. Restoration of slavery in all but name through Jim Crow laws
4. Segregation throughout the country, with

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The Tories are all excited about a new way to shred the remaining social safety net. The UK could become even more like the US! Where an illness can make you homeless in an instant!

David Cameron is prepared to look at making workers pay into flexible saving accounts to fund their own sick pay or unemployment benefits, Downing Street has confirmed.

The idea was first floated by Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, who said he was “very keen” to have a debate about encouraging people to use personal accounts to save for unemployment or illness, even though it is not official government policy.

Sure. Fuck unions, fuck collective bargaining, fuck benefits, fuck pensions and … Read the rest

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Lejla Kurić did a public Facebook post on Saturday linking to a catalogue of the murdered men and boys of Srebrenica. You scroll down it and it goes on and on and on.

The third comment was from a denier.

Stephen Browne There was no genocide in Srebrenica. Noam Chomsky can prove that.

The hell he can.

Via this route, I found an article by Ed Vulliamy the day after ITN won its libel suit against Living Marxism, March 15 2000. I’m permanently fascinated by Living Marxism, because they haven’t gone away, they’ve only mutated into their own opposite (or met themselves traveling in the other direction), and they’re still covering the landscape with bullshit.

[H]istory – the

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David Olusoga on Britain and slavery.

The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in

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