Nice.

America’s favorite Irish-terrorism-supporter-elected-to-Congress took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to thank the Staten Island grand jury for its decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July death of Eric Garner after being placed in a chokehold while under arrest.

“Thanks to SI grand jury for doing justice & not yielding to outside pressure,” King (or a social media intern) pecked out Wednesday afternoon. “Decision must be respected.”

The congressman — who once reaffirmed his support for Irish terrorists after their attack on Royal forces in Ireland, and who thinks journalists should be arrested for practicing free speech — added: “Compassion for the Garner family.”

Ah yes “outside pressure” – otherwise known as citizens objecting to a death in police custody.

Apparently CNN was sufficiently charmed or appalled by King’s tweet to invite him to chat yesterday evening.

Despite the video evidence of Garner repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe” as officers tackled him the ground and choked him until he ultimately died, King would not allow that excessive force had been used.

“First of all, the death was tragic, and our hearts have to go out to the Garner family,” King began. Getting that obligatory statement out of the way, the congressman reiterated that he does not believe the officer should have been indicted and proceeded to defend the police actions.

“If he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died for this,” King said of Garner. “The police had no reason to know he was in serious condition.” On Garner repeating “I can’t breathe,” King said, “the fact of the matter is, if you can’t breathe, you can’t talk.” He even suggested that Garner may have been faking those symptoms so the police would go easier on him.

If you can’t breathe, you can for a short interval gasp out a few words.

Then you die.

“People are saying very casually that this was done out of racial motives or violation of civil rights,” he continued. “There’s not a hint there that anyone used any racial epithet.”

You have got to be kidding.

What next? They talk to Daniel Pantaleo and he tells them, “I don’t see color”?

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

So, we’re just going to keep doing this now?

A grand jury in Staten Island has decided not indict New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in relation to the death of Eric Garner.

That’s even though Pantaleo was seen on video putting Eric Garner in an apparent choke hold in July, according to city officials and lawyers for Garner’s family. An apparent choke hold that actually choked him to death. His last words were, “I can’t breathe.”

Fuck.

There is a federal investigation.

An official with the U.S. Department of Justice confirms there is a federal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Eric Garner.

…

Garner family attorney Jonathan Moored told the Associated Press that the family was “astonished” by the grand jury’s decision.

Garner, an unarmed black man, died July 17 after being placed in an apparent chokehold by a white New York City police officer. The incident was caught on tape, and shows that Garner was unarmed and posing no apparent threat to the half-dozen officers who surrounded him. After he was taken down in the chokehold by Officer David Pantaleo, other officers held him down. You can hear Garner on tape saying, “I can’t breathe.”

Bill Bramhall/New York Daily News

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

Reading Katherine Stewart’s The Good News Club. In chapter 7 she goes to Austin to sit in on Texas Board of Education hearings in March 2010. Many astonishing things were said there.

The conservatives on the board want to make clear that the free enterprise system that makes America great has nothing to do with a universal concern for public policy and the common good – a concern they believe carries the dreaded taint of socialism. On a list of characteristics of good citizenship for grades 1 through 3, the board majority decided to expunge references to “justice” and “responsibility for the common good.”

That one makes me feel something very like nausea of the brain.

Another part of making America great involves eliminating all forms of the word “democratic,” which in the majority’s view might suggest a link between American history and the political party where all of America’s haters end up, namely, the Democratic Party. Thus, at [Cynthia] Dunbar’s insistence, the board replaces “democratic” and “representative democracy” with “constitutional republic,”  and “democratic societies” with “societies with representative government.” [p 166-7]

And then there’s that word “slavery”…

At the behest of board conservatives, the word “slavery” is removed from the standards, replace by the awkwardly euphemistic term, “Atlantic triangular trade.” [p 167]

Not so much euphemistic as completely opaque.

This shit is terrible.

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

Originally a comment by Hj Hornbeck on Guest post: Sexism squanders human resources.

Historically, families have always had at least two “incomes.” Even people who buy into a strict division of labour between the sexes concede that all sexes brought food to the table, from picking berries to doing farm chores. This is quite stable against adversity; if one person cannot provide for the family, they can try to subsist on another person’s contribution. Arbitrary restrictions on what each sex can do artificially limit that capacity, and endanger survival.

On rare occasions, though, a single provider has been enough to feed an entire family. Artificial restrictions aren’t a factor anymore, and don’t face the opposition they would in a two+ income society. But of course, no culture has ever fit on that extreme, so you wind up with a mixture of both. Nor has any culture been free of economic swings down to the individual level.

This suggests a theory: during economic downswings, societies are pushed towards feminist attitudes, as sexist attitudes squander human resources. During upswings, there is no strong draw either way, but as it’s tougher to correct justice than perpetuate it societies tend to gradually drift towards anti-feminist attitudes. I dub this “Foul-Weather Feminism.”

Early drafts of that paper included two anecdotes to support this. Iceland, for instance, has been sympathetic to feminism for some time. In 1975, a radical woman’s movement called the Red Stockings suggested all women should go on strike. This came to pass on October 24th, when 90% of Iceland’s women refused to work or look after the children.[1] Yet by 2009, Iceland had a greater gender pay gap than all of Europe, one that persists to this day.[2] Why? Well, Iceland was profiting greatly from the housing bubble in the USA, thanks to deregulation and aggressive investment in foreign countries, which led to a huge economic boom in a small country.[3] As banking was predominantly a male profession there, this inflated the gender pay gap.

Iceland suffered a significant economic crash in 2009, a 10% loss in GDP between 2008 and 2010. In response, during the 2009 election they voted in Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as Prime Minister, the first woman to hold that position in Iceland and the first world leader to be openly lesbian. Her government implemented a vast number of reforms, most notably the criminalization of the purchase of sex and the shutdown of all strip bars in 2009; gender quotas were implemented in 2010, as well as a bill allowing single women to receive donor sperm.[4]

Japan saw an incredible economic boom after WWII, thanks in part to shrewd investment in infrastructure and foreign economies, plus a practice of tight industry-government and industry-industry relations that reduced bureaucracy and waste due to competition. [5] With only one income necessary to sustain a family, and every person promised a job for life, their culture drifted towards heavy sexism. So what happened after that bubble burst?

Japan has suffered from a decade-long recession, and seen sluggish growth in comparison to other developed nations. In 2006, Maki Fukasawa wrote an article on what she dubbed “soushoku danshi” or “grass-eating boys,” who rejected the strict gender roles that their fathers had embraced and were exploring behaviors previously held to be feminine. Roughly 60% of men under 23 now fall into this category, and 42% of those between 23 and 34.[6] The last decade has also seen the rise of “nikushoku onna,” or “carnivorous women,” who also reject traditional roles by taking the initiative in relationships and pursuing men more aggressively.

Digging up supportive anecdotes is pretty easy, though. In my paper, I look at two decades worth of global economic data in search of a similar effect. Child care is almost universally undervalued, but in a contradictory way: parents looking after their children receive no income and few benefits for it, yet third parties looking after children do earn an income.

This means that during an economic downturn, the shift from single to multiple income would cause a “boost” in overall GDP and smooth out small economic bumps. It isn’t an actual boost, mind, it’s just that an undervalued task is being assigned more value. A 100% feminist society would see no cushion, because child care would not be undervalued, and a 100% sexist society would see no cushion, because gender norms would prevent the necessary economic mobility. Interestingly, this also provides a secondary way to measure the gender gap: if women are truly undervalued compared to men, then an influx of women would have less of a “boost” than an influx of men. By comparing the size of each effect, we can measure the gender income gap on a global level.

And I found… pretty much what you’d expect. The cushion effect exists, and it’s greater for an influx of men than it is for an influx of women. Again, here’s the gory details.

[1] Rudolfsdottir, Annadis. “The day the women went on strike.” The Guardian, October 15th, 2005.
[2] Eurostat, “Gender pay gap statistics.”
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9311_Icelandic_financial_crisis#Causes
[4] J.E. Johnson, “The Most Feminist Place in the World.” The Nation, February 21st 2011.
[5] Jesse Colombo, “Japan’s Bubble Economy of the 1980s“. June 4th, 2012.
[6] A. Harney, “The Herbivore’s Dilemma.” Slate, June 15th, 2009.

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

Because it’s winter in the northern hemisphere.

Sociedad Argentina de Horticultura posts amazing photos on Facebook, and Bernard Hurley frequently shares them and makes my eyes bug out.

Like this one:

And this one:

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

Human Rights Watch had things to say about Iran’s proposed penal code in August 2012.

The new provisions also expand upon broad or vaguely defined national security crimes that punish people for exercising their right to freedom of expression, association, or assembly. One troubling amendment concerns article 287, which defines the crime of efsad-e fel arz, or “sowing corruption on earth.”

Legislators have expanded the definition of efsad-e fel arz, a previously ill-defined hadd crime closely related to moharebeh (enmity against God) that had been used to sentence to death political dissidents who allegedly engaged in armed activities or affiliated with “terrorist organizations.” The new definition also includes clearly nonviolent activities such as “publish[ing] lies,” “operat[ing] or manag[ing] centers of corruption or prostitution,” or “damage[ing] the economy of the country” if these actions “seriously disturb the public order and security of the nation.”

Under the current penal code, authorities have executed at least 30 people since January 2010 on the charge of “enmity against God” or “sowing corruption on earth” for their alleged ties to armed or terrorist groups. At least 28 Kurdish prisoners are known to be awaiting execution on national security charges, including “enmity against God.” Human Rights Watch has documented that in a number of these cases, the evidence suggests that Iran’s judicial authorities convicted, sentenced, and executed people simply because they were political dissidents, and not because they had committed terrorist acts.

The criminalization of “enmity against God” is grotesque on so many levels. Maybe the most striking one is that it amounts to treating it as a crime to object to any aspect of reality. God is omnipotent, therefore, if you complain of anything (except kaffirs and enemies of God) you are an enemy of God, or at least vulnerable to the accusation. It’s a reactionary’s charter.

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

A small but I think telling item. Dave Silverman said in a public Facebook post an hour ago that Bill O’Reilly “talked shit about us, but did not invite us on.” Dave is sarcastically pleased that BillO is afraid of him.

He has a real point though. I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that O’Reilly is indeed reluctant to have Dave on his show again, for reasons that have to do with what a bully O’Reilly is.

O’Reilly is a big man, a burly man. He has a loud voice. He uses his size and his loud voice (and his control of the show) to intimidate people he invites on his show to talk.

Dave says he’s been on the show twice, and I think I’ve seen both. I think I know very well why BillO doesn’t want Dave on the show – it’s because Dave is a pretty good physical match and just as good as O’Reilly at shouting.

So what does that say about O’Reilly? That he’s both a bully and a coward.

What does it say about the US that people like O’Reilly and Limbaugh are so popular?

Nothing good.

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

More news from Iran:

On November 24, 2014, Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a criminal court ruling sentencing Soheil Arabi to hang. The court transferred his file to the judiciary’s implementation unit, opening the way for his execution.

For what? Did he murder someone?

A Tehran criminal court had convicted him in August of sabb al-nabbi, or “insulting the prophet,” referring to the Prophet Muhammad, which carries the death penalty. Arabi’s legal team has asked the judiciary to suspend the death sentence and review the case.

Insulted “the prophet” how? Facebook posts.

Nastaran Naimi, Arabi’s wife, told Human Rights Watch that intelligence agents linked with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards arrested her and her husband at their home in Tehran in November 2013. They soon released her but transferred her husband to a special section of Evin prison that the Revolutionary Guards control, where they kept him in solitary confinement for two months, subjected him to long interrogation sessions, and prevented him from meeting his lawyer, she said. They later transferred Arabi to Ward 350 of Evin prison.

All because of the bruised dignity of “the prophet.”

Vahid Moshkhani, Arabi’s lawyer, told Human Rights Watch that instead of upholding or overruling the lower court verdict, the Supreme Court unlawfully added the charge of efsad-e fel arz, or “sowing corruption of earth,” to Arabi’s case. In addition to carrying a possible death sentence, the charge also forecloses the possibility of amnesty, he said.

What the fuck even is “sowing corruption of earth”?

The circumstances surrounding the recent execution of another man, Mohsen Amir Aslani, have increased concerns for Arabi. On September 24, prison officials at Rajai Shahr prison in the city of Karaj executed Amir Aslani, whom the judiciary had convicted of “sowing corruption on earth” for allegedly advancing heretical interpretations of Islam and insulting the prophet Jonah. After the execution, a judiciary spokesman, Gholamhossein Esmaeili, denied that authorities had executed Amir Aslani for his religious beliefs, and said his hanging was related to “illicit” forcible sexual relations with several women. In fact, the Supreme Court had overturned Amir Aslani’s death sentence on three separate occasions, and ruled that the rape charges were invalid due to lack of evidence.

Perfect – insert fake rape charges to make it all look less horrendous. That’s helpful.

Human Rights Watch previously expressed concern regarding the broad definition of “sowing corruption on earth” in the revised penal code, under which authorities can prosecute, convict, and sentence political dissidents and others exercising their basic rights to freedom of speech, assembly, association, and religion.

I have a feeling I “sow corruption on earth” every time I tap on the keyboard.

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

The outrage of the moment in Sommers-land is the journalistic failings of a Rolling Stone article reporting on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. Rebecca Traister at The New Republic discusses this meta-story (so note we’re at level 4 here).

Over the past few days, several publications have reported journalistic lapses in Rolling Stone‘s blockbuster story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. The reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, never contacted the men that her subject, a student she calls “Jackie,” alleges raped her. Erdely also did not acknowledge in the body of the piece that she did not contact them.

These are serious charges: Journalists are supposed to seek multiple perspectives on the stories they report to try to present the fullest and fairest assessment of events; this is especially true when one source is alleging that a criminal act took place. It’s ironic and telling, though, that Erdely’s doubters have blown up their suspicions well beyond the available evidence, calling her story a “hoax” and comparing it to the fabricated pieces published by Stephen Glass in The New Republic and other magazines.

Imagine my lack of surprise.

It’s a massive leap in logic to move from a reasonable journalistic critique of Erdely’s reporting and disclosure practices to writing, as former George journalist Richard Bradley does in his blog post, “I’m not convinced that this gang rape actually happened.” It is symptomatic of exactly the patterns of incredulity and easy dismissal of rape accusations that keep many assaulted women and men from ever bringing their stories to authorities or to the public.

The reporting can be badly flawed and the story still be true, after all.

Consider that the weaknesses of the criminal system prompted Jackie not to tell her rape story first to police, but rather to friends—many of whom, she claims, blamed her and urged her not to go to authorities—and then to the university’s private system, which she says treated her poorly. It’s not so hard to imagine that by the time she got to Erdely with her story, she might reasonably have been fearful of retaliation. It was Jackie’s discomfort with identifying her victims, and her fear of the consequences, Erdely told The Washington Post, that led her to tread too delicately in her investigations.

Well let’s face it – people who report being raped always face horrible consequences. Always.

Erdely, in her role as journalist, should have done things differently, should have tried to speak with the figures accused or made explicitly clear that she had not spoken to them. Those handling cases in which more official systems have broken down do everyone, including themselves, a terrible disservice in not behaving with obsessive care.

Remember when PZ published Alison Smith’s account? He made it explicitly clear that he was doing just that.

But do not forget, as we go about what is sure to be the unpleasant business of turning our suspicions on Erdely—and in turn, on Jackie—that the swift shift of focus is central to what’s so jacked about systemic inequalities (and our impulse to pretend they don’t exist) to begin with.

It’s no coincidence that this is what Sommers and her allies are focusing on.

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

The Catholic church in the US wants to operate as if it were a separate country from the US with full diplomatic immunity and perhaps national sovereignty as well. It wants to declare itself immune from the laws and thus permitted to do whatever it damn well wants to.

Mother Jones has the story.

A teacher at a Catholic grade school in Indiana got in vitro fertilization treatment.

[A]fter church officials were alerted that Herx was undergoing IVF—making her, in the words of one monsignor, “a grave, immoral sinner”—it took them less than two weeks to fire her.

There they are again. Raping children doesn’t make a priest “a grave, immoral sinner” but getting IVF makes a woman “a grave, immoral sinner.” That’s a healthy moral system.

Herx filed a discrimination lawsuit in 2012. In response, St. Vincent de Paul School and the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, her former employers, countered with an argument used by a growing number of religious groups to justify firings related to IVF treatment or pregnancies outside of marriage: freedom of religion gives them the right to hire (or fire) whomever they choose. But in this case, the diocese took one big step further: It’s arguing that religious liberty protects the school from having to go to court at all.

“I’ve never seen this before, and I couldn’t find any other cases like it,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Center for Liberty. The group is not directly involved in the lawsuit but has filed amicus briefs supporting Herx. “What the diocese is saying is, ‘We can fire anybody, and we have absolute immunity from even going to trial, as long as we think they’re violating our religion. And to have civil authorities even look into what we’re doing is a violation.’…It’s astonishing.”

They want it all – everything. Special status that sets them apart from the state and the (non-Catholic) people who make it up, and allows them to do whatever they want provided they claim it’s part of their religious whatever.

The diocese argued that a trial on this question would violate its freedom of religion and appealed the judge’s decision to a three-judge panel on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. “[If] the diocese is required to go through a trial,” attorneys for the diocese and school argued, it would “irrevocably” deny Fort Wayne-South Bend the benefits of religious protection. Herx’s attorneys are fighting the appeal.

They’re nothing if not greedy.

Yesterday the court

ruled that religious freedom exemptions do not give theFort Wayne-South Bend Diocese immunity from Emily Herx’s sex-discrimination lawsuit. Herx’s lawsuit can now go forward in US District Court.

But the church will keep trying. It will never stop. It thinks it’s on a cloud above the rest of us.

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

Originally a comment by Golgafrinchan Captain on Feminism has gone too far.

I don’t feel any shame for being male but I do feel shame for some of the things I’ve done as a result of certain aspects of “lad culture.” For example:

During the later years of high school, I worked construction in the summer. On a few occasions, I whistled at women walking down the street. None of my co-workers joined in but none of them said anything either. It only took a few occasions for me to realize that I wasn’t getting the reactions I had seen in movies and on TV.

The first couple of times, the women just ignored me but, the last time, I received a glare. I stopped doing it but, being male, I had the luxury of not having to think too deeply about it until I started really reflecting on gender issues many years later. I can’t change my past behaviour but I now always speak up when I see crap like that. Again, I have the luxury of being a pretty big person who isn’t likely to get assaulted for telling off a harasser/bully. *

I still see this behaviour in movies and on TV (especially in commercials). I wonder what’s going through the minds of the actress as they tee-hee about the attention (“gotta pay the bills, gotta pay the bills, …”). Same goes for the scenario where a man and woman are slow dancing, the man lowers his hands to her butt, and it’s the woman’s responsibility to move his hands back up, while bemusedly shaking her head. It’s mild sexual assault but it’s presented as being funny.

* Note: one of the best things I learned in Early Childhood Education is the impact of bystanders in bullying. The target has a limited ability to change the behaviour of a bully. Bystanders have a great deal of power to either reinforce or stop bullying, and it often just takes someone saying, “not cool.” That’s the real reason for labels like “White Knight”; bullies want to eliminate any support their targets have. I don’t care what gender, race, weight, etc. the target is, I fucking hate bullies. It’s a hard habit to break, but I also now try to say “target”, “recipient of {some_crap}”, or “person who was {some_crap}ed” instead of “victim.”

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

L’Anse aux Meadows is really pretty fascinating. (Thanks, Mr Erdoğan, for the spur to check it out again.)

The evidence at the site also suggests that more southerly voyages might have taken place, and that other settlements might be found. Archeologists believe L’Anse aux Meadows was a base camp which afforded a way-station to further explorations of North America.

Rather like the ISS and even the Mars Rover. Those Vikings from Greenland or Iceland were the demon engineers of the 11th century.

Excavations revealed a number of artifacts that are diagnostic of a Viking site. From 1961 until 1968, the Ingstad excavations uncovered Viking artifacts including a ringed pin, a soapstone spindle whorl, a bone pin, a whetstone, iron boat rivets, worked wood and other objects. There was evidence of iron-smelting and forging, and hearth charcoal is dated to A.D. 1000. The style and construction of the three longhouses and outbuildings are identical to 11th century Iceland and Greenland. The artifacts indicated weaving and iron-working, activities which were not practiced by Native Americans until after A.D. 1500. These finds confirm L’Anse aux Meadows as the earliest European settlement yet known in North America.

It may have functioned as a kind of garage or shipyard with a dry-dock.

Later excavations by Bengt Schoenbak and Birgitta Wallace for Parks Canada revealed more about the purpose of this settlement and the type of activities that took place here. Their work produced further evidence of wood-working and iron-smelting, suggesting that the main activity at the site was repairing damaged vessels or constructing new ones from wood obtained in the nearby forests. Butternuts and worked pieces of butternut wood-a tree that was not native to Newfoundland but was present one thousand years ago in northern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick-were also found. This discovery indicates that the people who lived at L’Anse aux Meadows had traveled further south into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and had brought back nuts and wood native to those southern areas and were sampling the region’s resources as described in the sagas. These finds suggest that the L’Anse aux Meadows site was a base-camp or gateway to the rich lands around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is likely the Vinland of the sagas.

Now, this is very cool:

The excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows provide a small bit of evidence for these contacts in the form of two artifacts obtained by the Norse from skraelings. One is a beautiful oval soapstone lamp found in the smelting hut. Unlike thick, roughly-made soapstone lamps made by the Norse, this lamp is thin and delicately carved and is an unmistakable product of a Dorset Eskimo carver. How this piece arrived at L’Anse aux Meadows is mysterious, because there were no Dorset people living in Newfoundland at this time. It seems likely that the Norse obtained this lamp by trade or by taking it from an abandoned Dorset site they visited in Labrador.

So the Norse were adventurous explorers but clumsy artists while the Dorset Eskimos made delicately-carved artifacts. And it’s something of a puzzle how the Vikings got a Dorset lamp. That’s reminiscent of Otzi the Iceman, who had with him some tools that present a puzzle as to where they came from and how he got them. I’m enthralled by that kind of thing – trade routes and exchanges far in the past that are unknown to us now.

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

Another Tuğçe Albayrak, this one in India.

Hyderabad, November 30:

A 19-year-old BCom second year student was beaten to death allegedly by his senior when the former objected to eve-teasing of a girl student at a private college here, police said.

The accused, Satish Kodkar, allegedly hit the victim Harshavardhan Rao twice on his neck and chest after which he fell on the classroom bench and hit his head on the edge of the bench, a senior police officer said.

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

I mean seriously, why do we call Cristoforo Colombo “Columbus”? It’s not as if “Colombo” is terribly hard for an English-speaker to say. It’s not even like “Iraq” which for some reason many Americans seem physically unable to pronounce the way everyone else does. It’s quite a simple name, with no trilled ‘r’s or guttural ‘g’s or ‘ch’s. There is the difference between Italian ‘l’ and American ‘l’ but I think we can get away with that. So why do we call him by the wrong name?

It’s not as if me call Michelangelo Mike Angelo. It’s not as if we call Fra Angelico Bro Angel. It’s not as if we call Mussolini Muscle Leany. So why “Columbus”?

Maybe all the existing Columbus-based names. The capital of Ohio. The university on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The movie company.

One of the passages David Sedaris read from his diary when I saw him a couple of weeks ago went roughly like this:

I think the Washington Redskins should keep their name, but change their logo to a bag of potatoes.

Maybe we should start afresh and call Columbus Bro Eyetalian Explorer Dude.

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

So Coke is now selling expensive milk. Wut? I have no idea, but it is. And guess how it advertises its new expensive milk.

Yuuuuuuuuuum, right?

Laura Bates sees more good old everyday sexism.

Is this milk for drinking, or are you just expected to pour it lavishly over your head as you sit at the breakfast table, pouting sexily at your dry cereal? Why don’t men seem to be invited to partake in this new gastronomic experience? And given the enormous levels of dairy wastage likely to ensue, can you really justify charging double the price for it compared to normal milk?

Joking aside, seeing these images of women’s bodies being used, once again, to advertise an unrelated consumer product (“Drink what she’s wearing”) is a tedious reminder that when it comes to the objectification of women in advertising, we seem to be slipping backward instead of moving forward. Yes, there’s a tenuous argument to be made that the link is valid if the milk is being promoted as healthy and good for your body, but that doesn’t explain the sexualisation of the women, nor the lack of any male counterparts.

This is just the latest in a never-ending stream of examples of women’s bodies used as advertising fodder with scant regard for relevance or originality. Examples are tweeted to the Everyday Sexism Twitter account with depressing regularity. Want to promote a new games console? Why not use a headless woman’s bodywith two pairs of breasts? Advertising a restaurant? What you need is a picture of a naked woman covered in spaghetti! Trying to spread the word about green electricity? Go for a picture of a sexy woman with a lightbulb in her mouth. Decorating a van to spread the word about your curtain and blind business? Don’t forget to pop a lingerie-clad model on there! And everyone knows nothing says “LED technology” like an enormous picture of a woman’s naked arse.

Everyday sexism is post-feminist sexism, I guess. We’ve had feminism, and it fixed all the things, so now we’re post it, and sexist advertising is fine again, because we know all about it, and we can always just say it’s “ironic.”

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

The Guardian article about Erdoğan’s Bartonesque way with history said that

Some researchers believe Vikings reached America before the end of the first millennium.

No, it’s not some and it’s not “believe” – there’s solid evidence that they did. It’s from
L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

In the early 1960s, archaeologists Helge Ingstad and his wife Anne Stine Ingstad undertook a close survey of the coastlines of Newfoundland and Labrador. Ingstad, a Norse investigator, had spent the majority of his career studying Northern and Arctic civilizations, and was following up on research into the Viking explorations of the 10th and 11th centuries. In 1961, the survey paid off, and the Ingstads discovered an indisputably Viking settlement near Epave Bay and named the site “L’Anse aux Meadows,” or Jellyfish Cove, a reference to the stinging jellyfish found in the bay.

Eleventh century Norse artifacts recovered from l’Anse aux Meadows numbered in the hundreds, and included a soapstone spindle whorl and a bronze-ringed pin process, as well as other iron, bronze, stone, and bone items. Radiocarbon dates placed the occupation at the site between ~990-1030 AD.

It was a failed settlement, that lasted only 3 to 10 years.

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

So Erdoğan is the David Barton of Turkey, I guess. He says “Muslims” (which ones? Indonesian?) arrived in the Americas three centuries before Signor Colombo.

Speaking on Saturday at a gathering of Muslim leaders from Latin America, Erdogan said contact between Islam and Latin America dated back to the 12th century.

“It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492,” Erdogan said. “In fact, Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178.”

“In his memoirs, Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba,” Erdogan said, adding that he’d like to see a mosque built on the hilltop today.

A mosque, eh? No chance it was just Colombo assuming a building he saw was a mosque simply because it looked somewhat like mosques he had seen in Spain? After all he assumed the place he was in was the far East simply because it was the first thing he bumped into sailing west from the Iberian peninsula.

Scholars have disputed the claim in Columbus’s writings, saying there is no archaeological evidence of Muslims having lived in the Americas before Columbus, an Italian, made his expedition in 1492 on behalf of the Spanish crown.

Yes but who needs archaeological evidence when you’ve got Colombo’s assumptions and snap identifications?

Erdoğan has been getting some mockery, and he’s mocking back. This should go well.

In an aggressive rebuttal of the criticism heaped on his comments in some quarters, Erdogan suggested that the purported discovery of the Americas by Muslims should be taught in schools.

“A big responsibility falls on the shoulders of the national education ministry and YOK [higher education board] on this issue,” Erdogan said at a ceremony in Ankara. “If the history of science is written objectively, it will be seen that Islamic geography’s contribution to science is much more than what’s known.”

So I wonder how Erdoğan knows that, exactly. A snap judgement by Colombo seems like a weak reed.

His claim had been mocked by some prominent columnists in the Turkish media. Mehmet Yilmaz, of the Hurriyet newspaper, suggested that Erdogan’s next claim should be that a Muslim, rather than Isaac Newton, discovered gravity.

I think Erdoğan should team up with David Barton and the pair of them should re-write all the history.

History books say that Columbus set foot on the American continent in 1492 as he was seeking a new maritime route to India. Some researchers believe Vikings reached America before the end of the first millennium. A tiny minority of Muslim scholars have recently suggested a prior Muslim presence in the Americas, although no pre-Columbian ruin of an Islamic structure has ever been found.

There is archaeological evidence for the presence of Vikings in North America in the 11th century. It’s not just a mention of a putative mosque by Colombo.

In an article published in 1996, historian Youssef Mroueh referred to a diary entry from Columbus that mentioned a mosque in Cuba. But the passage is widely understood to be a metaphorical reference to the shape of the landscape.

Metaphors weren’t invented until 1642. By a Muslim, by the way.

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

Apparently a guy called Peter Lloyd has for some reason gone to the trouble of writing a book that Christina Hoff Sommers wrote several years ago. I wonder what the point of that is.

spiked doesn’t though, spiked is all agog. spiked just can’t get enough of people saying edgy things like “well really when you get right down to it it’s men who are second-class citizens these days.”

Lloyd, who somehow combines writing for both the Daily Mail and the ‘women in leadership’ section of the Guardian, was prompted to write Stand By Your Manhood in response to the ‘dismissive, patronising and skewed narrative about heterosexual men’, which he suggests is apparent in the mainstream media.

He argues that it has become normal to consider masculinity as entirely negative and problematic, and to present boys as ‘defective girls, damaged by default’ who need to be medicated, educated and socialised out of their masculinity. Whereas once manhood was celebrated in all its stiff-upper-lipped glory, it is now considered threatening. Lloyd welcomes the progress society has made in recent years, and he is happy that homosexuality is no longer so stigmatised. However, he warns that there is a danger that things have gone too far in the other direction, and that shame is now attached to masculinity, with heterosexual men, in particular, being made to feel guilty if they don’t frequently display a more feminine side to their personalities.

Faaaaaaaaaaascinating. Please tell me all about it, while I just curl up here and take a little nap.

Lloyd suggests today’s men’s movement is a response to strains of feminism that first appeared in the late 1970s – these strains were far more explicitly anti-men than pro-equality. He claims today’s feminists perpetuate the idea that women are oppressed and ‘refuse to let go of old arguments’ despite the changes that have taken place in the real world. Often, Lloyd argues, there are monetary incentives for feminist campaigning groups, such as the Fawcett Society, continuously to propagate an image of women as victims of a non-specific patriarchy.

Oh my goodness that is so interesting. Isn’t it?

Certainly it is not in the financial interests of groups like Hollaback and FCKH8 to question the facts promoted in their campaigns against sexism. Lloyd blames the media for unthinkingly picking up on such campaigns and escalating an anti-male sentiment. As a result, he says, feminism can seem like a ‘hate movement’ and men have not had a voice to challenge these newly dominant perceptions.

Huh. So Peter Lloyd thinks all men are sexist? He must think that, if he thinks campaigns against sexism equate to anti-male sentiment. But why would he think that? I don’t think that, and I’m not even an MRA.

Campaigning against racism isn’t anti-white, you know. Campaigning for LGBTQ rights isn’t anti-straight or anti-cis. Why would campaigning against sexism be anti-male? Why do people make these hateful false equivalencies? Saying “don’t keep pushing me down” does not equate to “it’s my turn to push you down now.”

Those promoting men’s rights through social media can appear to be the older brothers of lad culture: far less fun to be around but just as mindless in their instinctive reaction against a new social order that seems to have brought women, and feminism in particular, to the fore. Lloyd, however, is clearly intelligent and has thought these issues through. He’s unapologetic about lad culture, applauding ‘the utter enjoyment and raw expression of masculinity’ that it represents. If lad culture can be seen as a rebellion against feminism, it is, he argues, entirely unconscious and simply a manifestation of young men over[t]ly embracing their gender identity.

The way white people overtly embracing their white identity is only unconsciously a rebellion against anti-racism. Uh huh.

He hopes Stand By Your Manhood will provide a ‘reality check’ for today’s more militant feminists, and enable men to stop feeling like they have to apologise just for being themselves.

Does “just being themselves” mean catcalls on the street or groping on the bus or punching women who talk back?

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

Good god – can Brendan O’Neill really be that thick? Confusing Bill Cosby’s ontological status with his legal status?

Bill Cosby – what a creep. Drugging all those women, molesting them, raping some. Can you believe we worshipped this guy when he played the joke-making everyman Cliff Huxtable in the Eighties? Well, now we know better. He isn’t the loveable avuncular dude we all thought he was. Rather, as those memes slicing through the internet like knives in Caesar’s back reveal, he’s a ‘serial rapist’. As one especially popular internet tag has it: ‘America’s fave dad by day – serial rapist by night.’

That has been the tenor of the discussion about Cosby on the web over the past fortnight. And it has been as ugly as hell: vindictive, gossip-fuelled, backward and positively medieval in its rush to condemn a man before he has been found guilty of a crime. Whatever you think of Cosby – I remember even as a kid I thought The Cosby Show was pants – this media-led public criminalisation of someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime should chill you. Because the fact is, Cosby is innocent of rape.

Just as you are. Just as I am. At least until such a time as someone does the very hard job of proving beyond reasonable doubt that he did rape someone. There’s a phrase for this, I think. How does it go? Ah, yes: ‘A man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.’

No, not a man, Brendan. A person, an accused, a defendant – not a man. It applies to women too.

But never mind that. Dear god is he kidding? The fact that X is presumed innocent in a court of law does not equate to “X is innocent.” The “phrase” he trots out itself doesn’t say that – it doesn’t say “is innocent,” it says “is presumed innocent.” There’s a difference.

The presumption of innocence matters in court, and it matters for what can legally be said, which is why news media use the word “alleged” so liberally. But it doesn’t change the facts. It’s possible for a guilty person to be acquitted in court and it’s possible for an innocent person to be convicted in court. Neither of those changes the facts either. X is innocent if X is innocent, not if a court finds X not guilty.

So, no. O’Neill is completely wrong to say “the fact is, Cosby is innocent of rape.” He doesn’t know that, just as I don’t know Cosby is guilty of rape. He and I both don’t know what the fact is.

Does Bill Cosby rape women? Has he ever? We don’t know, but justice – Enlightenment itself – demands that we say, ‘No. Prove otherwise if you can.’

No, it does not. O’Neill is confusing how the legal system is required to treat defendants with what everyone else is supposed to say and think about them. Justice doesn’t require us to pretend we know defendants are innocent any more than it requires us to pretend we know they’re guilty.

I have news for these twenty-first-century Salemites: Bill Cosby, we must presume, is innocent. And given that the passing of the statute of limitations means he’s very unlikely to be brought to court to face his accusers, he will remain innocent. I’m sorry if that gets in the way of your search for a demon to yell about, but that’s life: liberty and justice are more important than your weird psychological need for evil.

Ah yes, so if a guy succeeds in getting away with rape for years by the simple expedient of drugging his victims so that their testimony becomes worthless, then hahahahaha statute of limitations you lose and HE’S INNOCENT so hahaha suck it.

Horrible man.

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

I know nothing about this except what I read here, but it sounds like a wretched situation: David Colquhoun on bullying (of scientists by senior scientists) at Imperial College.

This week’s Times Higher Education carried a report of the death, at age 51, of Professor Stefan Grimm:Imperial College London to ‘review procedures’ after death of academic. He was professor of toxicology in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial.

Now Stefan Grimm is dead. Despite having a good publication record, he failed to do sufficiently expensive research, so he was fired.

“Speaking to Times Higher Education on condition of anonymity, two academics who knew Professor Grimm, who was 51, said that he had complained of being placed under undue pressure by the university in the months leading up to his death, and that he had been placed on performance review.”

Having had cause to report before on bullying at Imperial’s Department of Medicine, I was curious to know more.

And he found out more. Read it.

At the end he posts a bunch of horrified tweets by other scientists and academics.

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