It turns out that the pink princess model for girl children in the US is just as parochial in time as it is in place, according to Elizabeth Sweet in the Atlantic.

When it comes to buying gifts for children, everything is color-coded: Rigid boundaries segregate brawny blue action figures from pretty pink princesses, and most assume that this is how it’s always been. But in fact, the princess role that’s ubiquitous in girls’ toys today was exceedingly rare prior to the 1990s—and the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm.

The princess thing makes me pull my hair with disgust. It’s so infantilizing, so diminishing, so ridiculous. I even know one or two grown women who seem to model themselves on the pink princess paradigm, and what could be creepier than that?

In my research on toy advertisements, I found that even when gendered marketing was most pronounced in the 20th century, roughly half of toys were still being advertised in a gender-neutral manner. This is a stark difference from what we see today, as businesses categorize toys in a way that more narrowly forces kids into boxes. For example, a recent study by sociologists Carol Auster and Claire Mansbach found that all toys sold on the Disney Store’s website were explicitly categorized as being “for boys” or “for girls”—there was no “for boys and girls” option, even though a handful of toys could be found on both lists.

Really that just sums up the whole thing right there – this idea that there is “for boys” and “for girls” at all. That’s what sexism is: restricting people to “for girls” or “for boys” as if they weren’t allowed to decide for themselves. The world is for boys, the inside of the house is for girls. Jobs are for boys, domestic chores are for girls. Boys are real, girls are dolls. Men matter, women are vacant.

For a time in the 70s toys actually were marketed in a cross-gender way, showing boys playing with toy appliances and girls playing with carpentry sets. But it didn’t last.

Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children’s television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.

However, late-century marketing relied less on explicit sexism and more on implicit gender cues, such as color, and new fantasy-based gender roles like the beautiful princess or the muscle-bound action hero. These roles were still built upon regressive gender stereotypes—they portrayed a powerful, skill-oriented masculinity and a passive, relational femininity—that were obscured with bright new packaging. In essence, the “little homemaker” of the 1950s had become the “little princess” we see today.

Gotta enforce those gender differences, people. Without it you get ANARCHY and cats marrying dogs.

It doesn’t have to be this way. While gender is what’s traditionally used to sort target markets, the toy industry (which is largely run by men) could categorize its customers in a number of other ways—in terms of age and interest, for example. (This could arguably broaden the consumer base.) However, the reliance on gender categorization comes from the top: I found no evidence that the trends of the past 40 years are the result of consumer demand. That said, the late-20th-century increase in the percentage of Americans who believe in gender differences suggests that the public wasn’t exactly rejecting gendered toys, either.

While the second-wave feminist movement challenged the tenets of gender difference, the social policies to create a level playing field were never realized and a cultural backlash towards feminism began to gain momentum in the 1980s. In this context, the model outlined in Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—which implied that women gravitated toward certain roles not because of oppression but because of some innate preference—took hold. This new tale of gender difference, which emphasizes freedom and choice, has been woven deeply into the fabric of contemporary childhood. The reformulated story does not fundamentally challenge gender stereotypes; it merely repackages them to make them more palatable in a “post-feminist” era. Girls can be anything—as long as it’s passive and beauty-focused.

Police that boundary.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Leo Igwe tells us that humanists and atheists in Africa are starting to speak up.

An increasing number of Africans do not have any religion. Many people across the continent are going open and public with their humanist, atheistic and skeptical views and identity. Non religious Africans are leaving the closet in their numbers. African unbelievers are beginning to organise like their religious counterparts in many countries. One of such countries is Ghana. Ghana is a religious country. But the country’s religiosity does not preclude irreligion. Non religious people in the country are a minority but they are not keeping quiet. They are no hiding. Godless people in Ghana are becoming visible. Non religious people are speaking out. The profile of humanism in Ghana is growing rapidly.

Humanists in Ghana have staged many social gatherings in the past years. This gathering has served a very important need. It has provided religious non believers in Ghana a sense of community. There is a growing humanist fellowship in this west African country.

Humanist fellowship is important because many atheists across Africa feel lonely and lone. Atheists think they are the only ones who entertain doubts and disbelief in God, when there are several non theistic people out there. The social gathering of humanists in Ghana is supplying that missing link. It is connecting non theists in way that has never been the case. Ghana’s religious landscape is changing. Africa’s ‘beliefscape’ is undergoing transformation. Humanists are beginning to discover that there are other people of like minds. The humanist movement in Africa is growing in strength and number. A wave of secularism and freethought is sweeping across the region.

That’s a great thing. Even if you think religion is wonderful, it’s good that people have alternatives to religion. If you think that religion is far from reliably wonderful, it’s even better that people have alternatives.

The humanist group in Ghana is not only making waves locally but also internationally. The group is gradually becoming the hub organised humanism in West Africa. Humanists in Ghana organised its first international humanist conference in 2012. That conference attracted participants from other West African countries and beyond. The event has demonstrated the vibrancy of organised humanism in one of the world’s most religious country.

Ghana Humanism is set to mark another milestone in the coming weeks. Humanist Association of Ghana is organising another international conference on December 20-21, 2014. The conference will be held at W.E.B Dubois Centre, Accra. The theme of the event is “African Youth for Science and Reason”. Topics to be discussed include Communicable diseases (Ebola, etc), Health and Medicine in West Africa, Science, Technology and Reason, Sex and Relationships as African Atheists, Feminism in Africa, Witchcraft Accusations in West Africa etc . There are plans to organise trainings and workshops for participants.

The theme of this conference is a welcome development for the region. Africa needs events that can expose its youths to reason and science. It is imperative that African youths begin to think rationally and scientifically because reason and science are the mainstay of modern development. One of the greatest obstacles to African development is superstition and religious extremism. These superstitious beliefs are common among young people. Religious fanaticism is draining Africa’s youth capital. African youths needs programs that encourage them to think critically as opposed to activities that reward dogma and blind faith. The members of the Humanist Association of Ghana are predominantly young people. This is a positive and promising development for the region. I hope other African youths will emulate their Ghanaian counterparts by embracing the values of reason science and critical thinking.

That’s great news. Tell everyone you know! Leo wants us to spread the word.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And now for something completely frightening.

The Louisiana coast is rapidly sinking into the sea. There are efforts and plans to move sediment around to save New Orleans and some pipelines and fishing grounds, but much of the Delta is doomed (and the planned fixes are hugely expensive, and Louisiana is a  poor state).

Southeastern Louisiana might best be described as a layer cake made of Jell-O, floating in a swirling Jacuzzi of steadily warming, rising water. Scientists and engineers must prevent the Jell-O from melting — while having no access to the Jacuzzi controls.

The problem is human-made. Over the last 80 years, Louisiana’s coast has been starved of sediment by river levees and eviscerated by canals dredged for oil and gas extraction. Now, southeastern Louisiana is sinking at one of the fastest rates on the planet as the Gulf is rising.

Already, 2,000 square miles have sloughed into the Gulf. Without action, the state could lose another 1,750 squares miles over the next 50 years.

If that happens, in 70 years New Orleans could be left on a razor-thin sliver of land extending into the open Gulf, battered by storms rolling over the watery graves of unprotected communities.

The economic effects will reverberate across the nation as the seas swamp half of the nation’s refineries and pipelines that transport 30 percent of the country’s oil and gas. The country’s largest port, an economic door to 31 states, would be vulnerable to run-of-the-mill tropical storms, causing shutdowns that cost the nation’s economy an estimated $300 million a day.

Not a trivial problem.

Most of us have known at least some of that ever since Katrina, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how drastic the situation is.

And the proposed fixes are no guarantee of anything themselves, because any fix they can do will have consequences elsewhere and it’s a mammoth engineering task to figure all that out. Sending a box to Mars looks easy in comparison.

“My concern is that a lot of people think if we just turn the river loose, it will just fill in all those holes we’ve created in the delta,” said Roberts. “Well, certainly it’s not as simple as punching holes in the levees.”

Every diversion project is a move in an ongoing chess match with nature. Each one faces different sets of variables and constraints, and engineers are struggling to anticipate the consequences of each step they take.

“Everything you do at one point on the river — anything you take out or put in — will have an effect on the rest of the river,” said Alex McCorquodale, a University of New Orleans researcher working on a study to determine how much sediment is in the lower Mississippi.

It’s a matter not so much of finding a fix as of juggling bad consequences in different places, or even the same places.

Considering how much remains unknown, a few scientists ask why Louisiana has staked so much on diversions. They worry the state could waste its last chance for the coast on a technique they believe poses its own habitat threats and exists only on computer models.

Gene Turner, a distinguished LSU coastal researcher, points to studies that show high levels of nutrients from fertilizer upstream can cause wetlands loss by damaging plants in areas with high organic soils. He is concerned that the state doesn’t have a backup plan if its computer models are wrong.

“Every building code requires a fire exit, and right now this plan doesn’t have one,” he said. “Saying, ‘This is going to work’ isn’t a backup plan, not when you’re doing something that has never been done before, except on computers.”

Turner has the minority view in the coastal scientific community. Nonetheless, the state coastal agency has asked the Water Institute of the Gulf to gather a panel of outside coastal experts to look into those questions.

And then, all this depends on climate predictions, and there’s reason to think current predictions could turn out to underestimate the rate of climate change.

So read the whole thing; it’s an education in itself.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Not everything Time magazine does is awful. It has an excellent long piece on The Ebola Fighters as part of its Person of the Year feature. (The only trouble is it’s a huge pain in the ass to read because it gives you only a tiny window of written material at a time, and there seems to be no way to convert to the printable version. Apparently that’s fabulous for people reading on phones, but I’m not reading on a phone. grump)

A sample:

Why, in short, was the battle against Ebola left for month after crucial month to a ragged army of volunteers and near volunteers: doctors who wouldn’t quit even as their colleagues fell ill and died; nurses comforting patients while standing in slurries of mud, vomit and feces; ambulance drivers facing down hostile crowds to transport passengers teeming with the virus; investigators tracing chains of infection through slums hot with disease; workers stoically zipping contagious corpses into body bags in the sun; patients meeting death in lonely isolation to protect others from infection?

According to official counts, more than 17,800 people have been infected with Ebola virus in this epidemic and more than 6,300 have died since this outbreak’s first known case in rural Guinea in December 2013. Many on the front lines believe the actual numbers are much higher—and in any event, they continue to rise steeply. The virus has traveled to Europe and North America, where the resulting fear exceeded any actual threat to public health. In West Africa, however, the impact has been catastrophic. The number of Liberians with jobs fell by nearly half as businesses and markets closed in fear of Ebola. Sierra Leone’s meager health care network simply collapsed: Ebola patients were told by the government to stay home rather than look for a hospital bed. In Guinea, the epidemic stoked distrust of government and aid workers. Medical missionaries were driven from villages by violence and threats.

Mistakes were made.

…the MSF team determined that something new and dangerous was going on in the borderlands. Previous Ebola outbreaks had been isolated in a single area, but now the virus was widespread. As MSF’s Liu puts it, “Already there were multiple locations of clusters” up to 100 miles (160 km) apart. In raw numbers, the Ebola outbreak might have seemed small compared with the chronic contagions of cholera and malaria in West Africa. But an epidemic of Ebola, with its ghastly effects, could corrode civil society by spreading panic. The disease leaped to the top of MSF’s priorities.

But few officials wanted to hear it. Liu recalls fruitless conversations in March with ministries of health in the region, “pushing them and telling them that this was going to be different.” Again and again, health officials complained that the doctors—not the disease—would panic the populace. “We were quickly told by a variety of agencies that we were crying wolf,” Liu says.

One skeptic—perhaps the most influential and thus the most disastrous—was WHO, the health arm of the U.N. Underfunded and overly bureaucratic, WHO is, in the eyes of its many critics, woefully inadequate in dealing with rapidly emerging threats like Ebola. Worse perhaps, the agency’s local representatives are notoriously jealous of their turf and prerogatives. At this same critical moment, WHO offices in West Africa turned away a team of experts from the CDC working in Guinea, insisting that their help was not needed, says CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden. The CDC, a large and very well-regarded public-health agency, is unsurpassed in its capacity for action, maintaining some 2,000 field workers in 60 countries around the world. Those workers in turn can often summon resources from the U.S. to smother epidemics in their infancy abroad.

Teamwork at this early moment might have saved thousands of lives and ultimately billions of dollars in direct and indirect costs stemming from the Ebola epidemic. Instead, WHO closed the door, says Frieden.

I didn’t know that. I don’t know if it’s true or just something rivals say about rivals – maybe the WHO would say the same about the CDC and MSF. If it is true, it’s a massive tragedy.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An elegant young Harvard Business School associate professor ordered some Chinese food the other day. Boston.com has the story.

Ben Edelman is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit.

Ran Duan manages The Baldwin Bar, located inside the Woburn location of Sichuan Garden, a Chinese restaurant founded by his parents.

Last week, Edelman ordered what he thought was $53.35 worth of Chinese food from Sichuan Garden’s Brookline Village location.

Edelman soon came to the horrifying realization that he had been overcharged. By a total of $4.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Harvard Business School professor thinks a family-run Chinese restaurant screwed him out of $4, you’re about to find out.

(Hint: It involves invocation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Statute and multiple threats of legal action.)

The correspondence follows. Edelman ordered from a menu on the website of Sichuan Garden, and each item (of four) was charged $1 over the price on the menu. Edelman pointed this out, Duan apologized for the fact that the website hadn’t been updated recently. Edelman demanded a triple refund.

And then it got worse, and then worse, and then worse again. Check it out, because it’s quite a display of patrician bullying and cruelty.

Updating to add: the Guardian also reports.

Duan responded an hour or so later, telling Edelman that his is a “mom and pop restaurant” and plaintively offers to honour the website price. But it was too late for hearts and minds with Edelman.

“It strikes me that merely providing a refund to a single customer would be an extremely light sanction for the violation that has occurred,” he replied. “To wit, your restaurant overcharged all customers who viewed the website and placed a telephone order – the standard and typical way to order takeout. You did so knowingly, knowing that your website was out of date.”

“You don’t seem to recognise that this is a legal matter and calls for a more thoughtful and far-reaching resolution. Nor do you recognise the principle, well established in applicable laws, that when a business intentionally overcharges a customer, the business should suffer a penalty larger than the amount of the overcharge.”

The exchange went on in the same vein. Duan offered to refund the difference, and the $12 which Edelman demanded, to no avail.

A rich guy has been overcharged $4! This must not stand!

Another useful lesson in what not to be.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jenny Kutner at Salon also reports on Dawkins’s unfamiliarity with the Men’s Rights movement.

Noted evolutionary biologist and atheist thinker Richard Dawkins addressed questions of gender discrimination in science head-on at a recent event at Kennesaw State University, responding to a question about the value of feminism in science and the necessity of the men’s rights movement. Dawkins, who has been criticized for contributing to the atheist community’s endemic sexism, said he believes feminism to be “enormously important” — but he wasn’t so sure about men’s rights.

“Feminism, as I understand it, is the political drive towards the equality of women, so that women should not be discriminated against — nobody should be discriminated against — on grounds that don’t merit discrimination,” Dawkins said. “But I don’t, I hardly — is there a men’s rights movement to be supported?”

I look forward to a new series of outraged posts and tweets about these “smears” of Dawkins and his contributions to the endemic sexism in the atheist community. You know they will happen. But…they’re not “smears.” He said what he said. He is who he is – what he says influences many people, so when he says sexist things, yes, he contributes to the atheist community’s endemic sexism.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Aw. Paul Elam is shocked and saddened that Richard Dawkins hasn’t heard of his important movement. Futrelle has the story, starting with who Dawkins is and how often he tweets regrettable nonsense.

He puts his foot in his mouth so often on Twitter that it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between his real account and this absurdist parody.

In a recent interview, he doubled down on some of his most appalling earlier remarks, reaffirming that he believes there is such a thing as “mild pedophilia” and that pregnant women who discover that they are carrying a Down syndrome fetus should probably “abort and try again.” And in that interview he reminded us all again just why so many feminist atheists have turned against him, telling his interlocutor that

I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something … .

I occasionally get a little impatient with British men who talk smack about American women who don’t like being assaulted at work.

So, Futrelle goes on, you might think he’d know all about the Men’s Rights Movement, but nope.

At a recent event at Kennesaw State University – yep, the same place where a student organization tied to A Voice for Men held a little conference not long ago – Dawkins offered a surprising, if somewhat limited, defense of feminism. And he reacted with puzzlement when he was asked about the Men’s Rights movement.

“I didn’t, I hardly knew — is there a men’s right movement?” he commented. “If there is discrimination against men, then that’s bad too,” he conceded, only to add that “I haven’t heard of it.”

The audience responded with laughter.

To AVFM head boy Paul Elam, this was the equivalent of shots fired. In a post today, Elam excoriated Dawkins for not having heard of his little movement, and not being aware of the terrible gynocentric injustices being heaped upon the world’s men.

Oh no! Now Dawkins has both sides mad at him.

That’s where expertise on feminism can get you sometimes.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Justice department released the conclusions of its civil rights investigation of the Cleveland Police Department yesterday. Techdirt reports on some of what it says.

The DOJ’s report opens with the de rigueur statements about how dangerous policing is and how grateful the nation is that there are men and women willing to do this difficult job. But this is mercifully brief. The token belly rub doesn’t even last a full paragraph. The generic praise that makes up the two first sentences is swiftly tempered by these curt sentences.

The use of force by police should be guided by a respect for human life and human dignity, the need to protect public safety, and the duty to protect individuals from unreasonable seizures under the Fourth Amendment. A significant amount of the force used by CDP officers falls short of these standards.

And one more thing – the need and duty to minimize the damage done by their use of force; see previous post.

The next page briefly summarizes how the CPD falls short.

The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;

The unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including tasers, chemical spray and fists;

Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and

The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk.

That’s no good. Law enforcement isn’t warfare. They’re not supposed to be trying to kill us or take us out. They’re supposed to use the minimal force necessary, not the maximum possible.

The pattern or practice of unreasonable force we identified is reflected in use of both deadly and less lethal force. For example, we found incidents of GDP officers firing their guns at people who do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to officers or others and using guns in a careless and dangerous manner, including hitting people on the head with their guns, in circumstances where deadly force is not justified. Officers also use less lethal force that is significantly out of proportion to the resistance encountered and officers too often escalate incidents with citizens instead of using effective and accepted tactics to de-escalate tension. We reviewed incidents where officers used Tasers, oleoresin capsicum spray, or punched people who were already subdued, including people in handcuffs. Many of these people could have been controlled with a lesser application of force. At times, this force appears to have been applied as punishment for the person’s earlier verbal or physical resistance to an officer’s command, and is not based on a current threat posed by the person. This retaliatory use of force is not legally justified.

The bolding is Techdirt’s, I think.

It sounds all too familiar. Cops lose their tempers when people disobey them. I can sort of see why they would, up to a point, but the fact remains that that’s not part of their job and not what they’re supposed to do. The report makes clear that they’re trained to de-escalate, not escalate, but that’s not what happens.

People who want to be cops aren’t the kind of people who should be cops, it appears.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A doctor I know said this on a Facebook thread about the way the police treated Eric Garner, especially after they slammed him to the sidewalk:

Diabetic or not, the man was in respiratory arrest, an immediately life-threatening situation and one which any emergency responder with first aid training should recognize. Prone positioning with hands behind the back is a significant risk factor in inducing sudden respiratory arrest, which is why the hog tie position has been outlawed in many jurisdictions. Garner showed visibly obvious signs of severe respiratory distress. His diabetes was about the 987th issue on his list of Problems. If police officers are unable to recognize that a man they had just arrested is in respiratory arrest, they are a danger to public health in the conduct of their duties.

I find that compelling (so I got permission to quote it). You would absolutely think that would and should be part of police training. How could it not be? They train to use physical force and restraint; how could they not be trained also to recognize the potential dangers of that physical force and restraint, and what to do about them?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Well merry Xmas to you too, Fort Lauderdale. (Look, I said it! I’m an atheist and I said merry Xmas. Booya.)

Fort Lauderdale was, until a judge suspended operations, happily arresting people for feeding the homeless in city parks. Nöfuckingel.

A Florida city that made it illegal to feed homeless people on the street and arrested a 90-year-old charity volunteer for defying the ordinance must sit down for mediated talks with opponents of the law after a judge issued a 30-day stay of the law on Monday.

Meanie judge. The cops were having so much fun busting do-gooders for giving food to poor people.

Fort Lauderdale’s city council passed the homeless feeding ban last month after an all-night session beset by protesters. Arnold Abbott, a World War II veteran and longtime charity volunteer in the community, was among the first people to be arrested and charged with violating the new law. “One of the police officers said, ‘Drop that plate right now,’ as if I were carrying a weapon,” Abbott told Local 10 after his arrest. Days later, he and other volunteers served the homeless again while police looked on and filmed them.

That guy fought in Dubya Dubya 2 and yet he’s unpatriotic enough to ignore a LAW that says you can’t feed the homeless in the park? What the hell happened to The Greatest Generation, huh?

Like several other cities in Florida and elsewhere that have enacted similar crackdowns on helping the homeless in public, Fort Lauderdale’s policy is the brainchild of a man called Robert Marbut. Marbut believes that on-the-street feedings only enable the homeless to remain homeless and the poor to remain poor, and makes claims about how panhandlers behave that are contradicted by research findings.

Marbut charges cities between $40,000 and $50,000 to share his insights, which are then used to justify legal crackdowns such as Fort Lauderdale’s.

Ah that’s nice. This crank goes around Florida handing out his crank Wrong Things and gets paid 40 to 50 k for his trouble, while homeless people get new obstacles. That’s the American Dream right there.

The National Coalition for the Homelessestimates that Fort Lauderdale was the 13th city this year to impose restrictions on where homeless feeding programs can be located, and the 22nd to make it harder to feed the homeless in general.

A Broward County official who works with the Fort Lauderdale government complained to the Sun Sentinel that the press coverage of the anti-feeding law has created an unfair and inaccurate picture of the city as a hard-hearted community. But the feeding ban is only the latest in a sequence of petty crackdowns. Earlier this fall the city made it illegal to sleep in public. Over the summer, city leaders passed a law empowering police to confiscate any personal belongings stored on public property, in an apparent effort to discourage homeless people from keeping what few possessions they have with them on the streets.

Or they could speed things up by shooting all the homeless people for “resisting arrest.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Last September, as schools started up after the summer break, some teachers at P.S. 220 in Queens, New York wore matching Tshirts to school, even though the teachers’ union urged them not to. You can probably see why the union said don’t do it.

Photo Credit: NYPD Facebook

Eric Garner was killed by the police in July. The Tshirts were a message. They were an ugly message.

Tensions between unions for city teachers and police officers are heating up over a United Federation of Teachers directive telling school employees not to wear T-shirts to work backing the NYPD.

At issue is an online message circulated earlier this week to UFT members cautioning them against a grassroots members’ plan by some to show the sartorial support for police on the first day of school — and that violators could be reported to the schools chancellor.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Steve Novella did this piece about Dunning-Kruger last month. Is it wrong that I find some of it extremely funny?

Like this, quoting Dunning…

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

I see someone bouncing along like one of the creatures in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, puffed out by the hot air of something that feels to them like knowledge. And so I laugh.

Also Dunning:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.

We do pick up a lot of clutter as we proceed. I recognize my own clutter pretty regularly – I’ll start to think I know something about the law and then remember it’s just something I saw on some tv show about cops or prosecutors or both. Our brains are Velcro to all the passing junk that floats by.

Novella this time:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is not just a curiosity of psychology, it touches on a critical aspect of the default mode of human thought, and a major flaw in our thinking. It also applies to everyone – we are all at various places on that curve with respect to different areas of knowledge. You may be an expert in some things, and competent in others, but will also be toward the bottom of the curve in some areas of knowledge.

Admit it – probably up to this point in this article you were imagining yourself in the upper half of that curve, and inwardly smirking at the poor rubes in the bottom half. But we are all in the bottom half some of the time. The Dunning-Kruger effect does not just apply to other people – it applies to everyone.

This is one reason I think the distinction between what we know and what we’ve been told is important. If we’ve only been told, the chances are good that we’re in the bottom half on that subject.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Marcus Ranum on Oops I forgot to do a title.

TRIGGER WARNING: serial killer, murder

1. The audience is different. Porn is for adults, whereas video games are generally at least in part intended for younger audiences.

Apparently you haven’t heard of the internet. Which is amazing, since you’re using it to post your comments.

2. Porn isn’t intended to be normative. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t function that way, of course, but it generally isn’t intended as such by either producer or consumer.

Intent is totally magical. Because if I don’t intend to hurt anyone when I drive drunk, it doesn’t count if I actually run over a dozen nuns, right? Of course porn is normative. Indeed, we have been effectively mainstreaming it and removing age controls for the last decade.

I don’t know if there have been any interesting advances in our understanding of fetishization and what used to be called paraphilias since I was an undergrad in the early 1980s but even at that time my impression was that “early impressions matter” (pace Freud) and a young person’s sexualization is critical to their adult sexuality (i.e.: sex is largely a learned behavior in humans). If that’s the case, then society may be reinforcing rape culture, dominance, and other fetishes in people at a younger age. If anyone reading this has any references on that subject, I’m interested; I’ll do some research of my own tonight during my evening reading time.

Kink exists. Kink is, in large part, about pretend scenarios of people abusing each other and getting off on it.

I am tempted to observe that you clearly know nothing about kink, or are so kinked that you see everything through the lens of your kink only.

Kink certainly exists. But, why? I am not saying there is anything wrong with kink – if you go back and re-read what I wrote earlier, the issue I am raising is whether there is something wrong with mainstreaming something that may not be understood by the viewer, deliberately or accidentally. I haven’t watched any gestapo/concentration camp porn but I’m rather willing to bet that the person in the SS uniform doesn’t grab the person in rags with the shaved head by the (oops, no hair) front of their rag smock and ask them politely if they consent. Maybe you can correct me, if I am wrong about this. I am very happy to be wrong about this.

Saying “kink exists” with the implication that kink will always exist does not get you automatically to “… therefore its OK.” Perhaps where we should be going is asking whether some kinds of kink reinforce and establish harmful societal norms. Perhaps some forms of kink should be put in the closet.

There are plenty of women who get off on porn that depicts women as weak and helpless. That’s not wrong.

I know a guy who gets off on porn that depicts women as murdered then used for sex. One of my kinkster model friends has been in a lot of those videos, covered in stage blood with a silicone throat-cut moulage. Sure, and it’s a safe and healthy way for a single mom to make a living but … sometimes she knows what’s going on in the videographer’s mind while he’s shooting it. Maybe what you see is a healthy escape-valve for a kinked guy and a safe living for a single mom who enjoys working the flexible hours. Me? It creeps me the fuck out, and I’m a kinkster and I’ve been a pornographer. I know another guy in the kink community (hey, maybe you know Moraxian?) whose idea of sexuality is pictures of girls (it’s always girls) “in distress” – by which I mean tied to a table about to be cut with a power-saw, or duct taped to a chair with a fake bomb in their lap. The images are consistently low quality and, when I asked him about it, he explained that high quality photography ruins his customers’ fantasies. Presumably because his customers’ fantasies consist of having a serial killer-style image stash. Who is unhealthy in that situation:
a) the photographer
b) the photographer’s customer
c) me, for thinking the photographer and his customers are disturbing
d) all of the above

The issue I am trying to expose here is the line between when two consenting adults do something for their own enjoyment, and when consenting adults mainstream something that may contribute to a dangerous cultural trend. Yes, we find it appropriate to critique mainstream movies (consider “Django Unchained” and its representation of racism and violence) if they appear to be promoting racism or sexism or fascism or … fuck, whatever’s dangerous. We find it appropriate when the Myth Busters say “don’t try this at home, kids!” when they are making explosions. We find it appropriate (most of us, anyhow, barring a few misogynist cranks) when someone makes a feminist critique of video games. It is appropriate to make a feminist critique of porn, too.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another bit to add to the pile of awful.

As Tamir Rice’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side upon learning he’d been shot, police officers “tackled” her, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the Cleveland officer who shot Tamir, her mother and a Rice family attorney told reporters Monday.

The mother, Samaria Rice, was threatened with arrest herself as she “went charging and yelling at police” because they wouldn’t let her run to her son’s aid, she said.

Two little boys had come to her door and told her the police had just shot her son. At first she thought they were messing around, but then she realized they weren’t.

She ran to the scene, admittedly frantic, and arrived at the same time as an ambulance. Officers wouldn’t let her check on her son, she said, “and then I saw my daughter in the back of a police car, the same one the shooter got out of.” Family attorney Walter Madison said police placed Tamir’s sister in the car with Loehmann.

Samaria Rice said she calmed down and asked police to release her daughter. They told her no, she said. Not only would they not release her daughter, but later, she said, they made her choose: Stay with her daughter or accompany her son to a hospital.

She chose the latter but was told she couldn’t ride in the back of the ambulance with her son, so she rode in the front seat on the way to the hospital, she said.

That’s fabulous police work. They knew by then that the gun was a toy – so on what possible grounds were they detaining his sister? On what possible grounds were they refusing to release his sister, and refusing to let his mother sit with him in the fucking ambulance?? They knew they had just shot a playing child in the stomach, and they wouldn’t let his mother sit with him in the ambulance. What.the.hell.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by John Horstman on Knowing v accepting.

All knowledge is functionally Bayesian – it’s a matter of probability of being true, which we can sometimes even formally quantify, but it’s never 100%, with the exception of constructed abstractions (like mathematics or other formalized abstract systems, where things can have definite truth values because we construct them that way) and the existence of at least one ‘mind’ – some system capable of cognition such that I can even be here considering the questions.

This is due, as Ibis3 points out, to the solipsism problem, which can never be resolved – not even if there was a god (or some other outside observer of the universe) and you or I met it, because those experiences would still be subjective and questionable (indeed, many people HAVE met a god as far as they are concerned, and I doubt the veracity of those experiences categorically).

What’s ridiculous is the “therefore god [or other mystical claims]” leap Armstrong is implicitly defending – once you know that (nearly) all knowledge is provisional, you need some basis for whether you provisionally accept any proposition, and with what degree of certainty. Evidence that is validated by multiple subjectivities (assuming that other people exist, of course; and if they don’t, then really, none of this matters because I’m just arguing with myself, on the Internet, which is actually a delusion, so whatever) has been demonstrated over a long time to be our very best means of determining what is most likely to be true. Side note: this is why the scientific method has proved so useful, though that epistemic approach shows up everywhere we have groups of humans, as with cultural norms, shared historical or cultural narratives, etc. – we agree, so it is true (even when it isn’t). So what defenders of faith ignore is that lack of certainty does not mean that anything imaginable is thus equally certain – even without the possibility of perfect knowledge or actual independent verification (everyone verifying what I see could also be my own delusion), not all possibilities are equally likely.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Well this is a surprise. A US court declined to dismiss a lawsuit against Pastor Scott Lively. Pink News reports:

An appeals court has refused to dismiss a case against homophobic pastor Scott Lively, who is set to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Lively is an American pastor who cheered on anti-gay legislation in Russia, branding Putin an ‘unlikely hero’ for passing it.

It previously emerged that he addressed an anti-gay conference in Uganda just before the country’s homophobic law was first drafted, and he is facing a charge of crimes against humanity for his role in encouraging the country’s law, and similar ones around the world.

I’m amazed. I don’t think “free speech” should be extended to advocacy of death to others, but I don’t expect US courts to agree with me, so I’m amazed.

The US First Circuit Court of Appeal this week refused his bid to have the case against him dismissed on free speech grounds – meaning the case will go to trial.

The short judgment said: “Although it is debatable whether the district court has properly parsed the petitioner’s protected speech from any unprotected speech or conduct, his right to extraordinary relief is not clear and indisputable.

“The petition is denied.”

Good.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Raw Story reports on a conversation event Dawkins did last month, in which he expressed surprise that there’s such a thing as the Men’s Rights Movement.

During the event on November 21, Kennesaw’s Michael L. Sanseviro asked the outspoken atheist about the contributions of feminism to science. He also asked Dawkin’s opinion of the men’s rights movement.

“Of course feminism has an enormously important role,” he replied. “Feminism, as I understand it, is the political drive towards the equality of women — so that women should not be discriminated against, nobody should be discriminated against on grounds that don’t merit discrimination. So, yes, feminism is enormously important and is a political movement which deserves to be thoroughly well-supported.”

Much to the amusement of the audience, Dawkins expressed confusion about the existence of a “men’s rights movement.”

“I didn’t, I hardly knew — is there a men’s right movement?” he remarked.

This is one reason he should just stop pontificating about feminism. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know he doesn’t know, so he says bad harmful things, and because he is still madly popular among the atheists and Fans of Science, he does a lot of damage.

On the other hand, after that, he said good things.

Sanseviro then asked Dawkins about same-sex marriage, and whether it violated “the evolution principle.”

“I don’t care what’s against the evolution principle. I’m all for going against the evolution principle,” Dawkins replied.

He warned against turning the survival of the fittest into public policy.

“Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.”

“Study your Darwinism for two reasons,” he implored, “because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.”

He said the same thing in the eponymous first essay in A Devil’s Chaplain. He starts with Darwin on the cruelty of natural selection:

Darwin was less than half joking when he coined the phrase Devil’s Chaplain in a letter to his friend Hooker in 1856.

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature,

A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. Of waste there is no doubt. As I have put it before, the racing elegance of cheetahs and gazelles is bought at huge cost in blood and the suffering of countless antecedents on both sides. Clumsy and blundering though the process undoubtedly is, its results are opposite. There is nothing clumsy about a swallow; nothing blundering about a shark. What is clumsy and blundering, by the standards of human drawing boards, is the Darwinian algorithm that led to their evolution. As for cruelty, here is Darwin again, in a letter to Asa Gray of 1860:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

He runs through some examples on each side – hooray for natural selection v natural selection is a bastard – and then says he’s with T H Huxley:

Here is T. H., in his Romanes Lecture in Oxford in 1893, on ‘Evolution and Ethics’:

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on Imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from It, but in combating it.

That is G. C. Williams’s recommendation today, and it is mine. I hear the bleak sermon of the Devil’s Chaplain as a call to arms. As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs. My previous books, such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, extol the inescapable factual correctness of the Devil’s Chaplain (had Darwin decided to extend the list of melancholy adjectives in the Chaplain’s indictment, he would very probably have chosen both ‘selfish’ and ‘blind’). At the same time I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’

Just so.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

BBC – don’t do that. Use your heads. Have some god damn sense.

Don’t do that headline.

Uber banned in Delhi over taxi driver ‘rape’

Yes I get that scare quotes take up less space in a headline than “alleged” – but that’s not a good enough reason to use them. Don’t do that.

Authorities in the Indian capital, Delhi, have banned international taxi-booking service Uber after a driver allegedly raped a female passenger.

A transport department official said the company had been “blacklisted” for “misleading customers”.

The 26-year-old woman used the smartphone app to book a taxi home on Friday but says she was taken to a secluded area and raped.

The driver has been remanded in custody for three days.

He was arrested on Sunday and appeared in court on Monday afternoon.

He hasn’t been convicted. I get that. But don’t call it a ‘rape’ in the headline. Scare quotes are not the equivalent of “alleged” and they’re not a good substitute for it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s Monday morning, so let’s have some deep thought to start the week. This deep thought is courtesy of the Huffington Post and typed by Debbie Davis, a “writer, communicator, journalist.” (All three of those? Wow, she wear many hats.)

I have a strong faith in God. I believe He is our Creator, and made us in His image. I pray for His guidance and wisdom daily.

To say it is “foreign” to me to consider that not all people feel this way, is not a very broad-minded view, and is not realistic in today’s world.

Wait what? Who’s the accused here? Who said it’s foreign to her, who took this not very broad-minded view? Why’s she fuming at this unknown person right at the start of her article? She’s a writer and a communicator and a journalist, so you’d think she could be clearer and tidier than that.

I realize there are those who have never experienced or tried to understand the relationship between God and mankind.

Ah, no. Stacking the deck there, deep thinker. Assumes facts not in evidence. We don’t know there is any “relationship” between god and humans because we don’t know there is god.

Without judgment, each person must decide where their faith is, or isn’t.

But how can they do that without judgment? You need judgment to decide things.

No, she doesn’t mean it that way, she means something like “each person must decide and people shouldn’t judge each other.” But she’s such an inept writer, communicator, journalist that she couldn’t manage to word that comprehensibly.

So I’ll spare you much more of her clumsy writing…well except this one more bit of clumsy:

However, it was not until the day at the luggage store that I was confronted with how to respond to someone who called himself an atheist.

It was near Christmas time, and I, along with one of my teenage sons at the time, went to the local mall to find a present in the luggage store.

One of her sons at the time. Now he’s her uncle.

So anyhow – the way she was “confronted with how to respond to someone who called himself an atheist” is like this: the guy on the till was a grumpy old geezer (like me only a guy), and when she said “Merry Christmas!” at him he said he was an atheist, at which point her world teetered on its axis. She expressed incredulity at him, he was unmoved, and it looked for awhile as if Christmas might be over for good. Then she realized what she had to say. She asked him if he’d ever pondered a bird (emphasis hers), and he said no.

“Well, will you do me a favor, do yourself a favor, and next time you are at a park, sit down on a bench, and wait until a bird perches nearby. Then take a close look, a really close look, and watch the bird’s chest, where you see its heartbeat. Watch the bird’s chest go in and out, breathing, and you can see its tiny heartbeat. Even if it’s a tiny hummingbird,” I said, “you can see its heartbeat beating up and down.”

The man said nothing. Then he said, “So?”

I responded “When you gaze upon that bird’s heartbeat, you will see how wonderful a creation there is, and I hope you will ponder that bird, along with Creation. Ponder the bird’s heart beating, its beak, its feathers, its amazing beauty, and know that no human, no man or woman, could ever create such beauty. Only something much much bigger than ourselves could do that.”

Notice she didn’t tell him to ponder a rat, or a slug, or a slide of bacteria under a miscroscope, or a rotting corpse, or an earthquake, or the genocides of the past several decades, or anything else that doesn’t fall under the heading “beauty.”

I say this as someone who loves hummingbirds and ponders them every chance she gets.

Histoire naturelle des oiseaux-mouches, ou, Colibris

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)