It was just in April that I posted about Oscar Brown Jr, the soulful singer and songwriter who was also something of a social activist. Somehow I missed the news that he just passed away on May 31st. On the day I wrote about him, he was giving a show here in Chicago, his hometown; now I’ll never have then chance to see him perform live. A service will be held on June 24.
Friday Random Ten with a twist: use your iPod to divine the future, by using the first ten songs to appear in a random playlist as Tarot cards in the Celtic Cross spread. Full explanation, including a key to the positions, here.
This week, let’s ask a specific question: “Will the Democrats recapture the White House in 2008?” The songs say:
Well, isn’t that special. The Covering and Crossing make sense, as they refer to current influences and obstacles; clearly, the oracle is reminding us of the gradual takeover of our formerly secular country by Jesusland. But there’s good news in the Root, which refers to past influences: perhaps they will be hitting the road soon? The appearance of Precognition in the Past is an obvious reference to the Downing Street Memo and the Bush Administration’s ability to see the need to invade Iraq long before intelligence could actually make the case.
But the auguries for the future are more ambiguous. The Future speaks of heartache. The Inside, referring to our hopes, fears, and expectations, seems to think we’ll get lucky. And the Outcome, wrapping up the whole story, is a Sex Mob tune.
Is it possible that Rep. Sensenbrenner will succeed at repealing the 22nd Amendment, and (to his horror) our next President will be — Bill Clinton?
David Appell links to a powerpoint presentation by Joel Parriott, a self-described “worker bee” (really, Science Program Examiner) at the Office of Management and the Budget. Parriott, who received a PhD in astrophysics from Michigan, is trying to explain to scientists how they are viewed by the OMB when they come to ask for money. The interesting slides are where he explains the “Ethos and Mythos” of each community, and how scientists can most effectively make their case (edited slightly for clarity).
The idea that science should drive the case is interesting. It’s obvious in some sense, but earlier in the document we read about the priorities driving the President’s 2006 budget, and they are mostly about the war on terror and spreading freedom. But one thing that is clear is that the government likes to hear the same thing from disparate groups of advisors — maybe all those NASA and HEP panels do serve some purpose after all.
How to ask the government for money for science Read More »
Update: Well, that was fast. Before I even got the post published, word is out that Mukhtaran Bibi may have been released! Who knows exactly what prompted the decision, but perhaps a well-timed blog campaign actually had some effect. On the other hand, it may just be a sham, as Kristof suggests (via Majikthise) — so it’s worth keeping the pressure on.
Update again (6/16): Apparently, she is still not free to travel. Perhaps unsurprising to see the US State Department joining in the “soothing” but misleading public statements.
Ezra Klein points to a post by Tom Watson about the arrest of Mukhtaran Bibi. Nicholas Kristof tells the backstory:
Last fall I wrote about Mukhtaran Bibi, a woman who was sentenced by a tribal council in Pakistan to be gang-raped because of an infraction supposedly committed by her brother. Four men raped Ms. Mukhtaran, then village leaders forced her to walk home nearly naked in front of a jeering crowd of 300.
Ms. Mukhtaran was supposed to have committed suicide. Instead, with the backing of a local Islamic leader, she fought back and testified against her persecutors. Six were convicted.
Then Ms. Mukhtaran, who believed that the best way to overcome such abuses was through better education, used her compensation money to start two schools in her village, one for boys and the other for girls. She went out of her way to enroll the children of her attackers in the schools, showing that she bore no grudges.
But then, Mukhtaran made plans to visit the U.S. Presumably she would tell people about some of the less pleasant aspects of the current situation in Pakistan. As Ezra explains:
Pervez Musharraf, our erstwhile ally in the War on Terror, couldn’t have that. Mukhtaran Bibi was put under house arrest last Thursday. When she tried to walk out, police pointed guns at her. When she tried to make calls, they snipped the landline. When she moved to the cell, they took her to Islamabad and put her in prison. Then, for good measure, they released her rapists — a warning shot.
As good a reason as I’ve ever seen to bring political pressure to bear on a repressive government. Tom Watson suggests that everyone write to Pakistani officials to express their outrage, and has collected the relevant email addresses:
His Excellency Mr. Jehangir Karamat ambassador@embassyofpakistan.org
Mr Mohammad Sadiq is Deputy Chief of Mission and assists the Ambassador in the overall functioning of the Embassy. He deals with both political and administrative issues. dcmsadiq@embassyofpakistan.org
Mr Aslam Khan is Minister (Political) and deals with political issues minpol@embassyofpakistan.org
Mr Shahid Ahmed is Counsellor Community Affairs and deals with the Pakistani community in the United States. shahidahmed@embassyofpakistan.org
Brig Shafqaat Ahmed is the Defence & Military Attache of the Pakistan Embassy. da@embassyofpakistan.org
Mr Ashraf Hayat is the Minister (Trade) and deals with Pakistan-US trade issues. commercialsection@embassyofpakistan.org & compk@rcn.com
Mrs Talat Waseem is the Press Minister and Media Spokesperson of the Embassy pressinfodiv@embassyofpakistan.org
Don’t delay.
The 30th edition of Tangled Bank, the carnival of science-oriented blog posts, is now up at The Geomblog. I didn’t submit anything, but Suresh has noticed that the squishy sciences tend to be over-represented in these carnivals, so he decided to take the initiative and include pointers to some interesting physics and math posts. So my entry on the arrow of time was included, as well as a nice older post by John Baez on topology and a newer one by Cosma Shalizi on Gödel’s theorem.
The US Senate passed a resolution, sponsored by Mary Landrieu and George Allen, that officially apologized to lynching victims for the Senate’s failure to condemn lynching several times in the 19th and 20th centuries. Not a difficult position to get behind, really. Except that it was passed by voice vote, rather than by a roll call, because several Senators would not support the resolution.
So, who are the Senators who bravely hold the pro-lynching position? Unfortunately it will probably be impossible to ever know for sure, unless the Senators themselves tell us. Not only was their a voice vote, but it’s possible to add your name as a co-sponsor of a Senate resolution even after it’s already been passed. From Kos, here’s the list of non-sponsors:
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)Christopher Bond (R-MO)Jim Bunning (R-KY)Conrad Burns (R-MT)Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)Kent Conrad (D-ND)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Michael Crapo (R-ID)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Kay Hutchison (R-TX)
Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
Trent Lott (R-MS)Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)George Voinovich (R-OH)
Via Atrios, Chris Geidner and Americablog are trying to figure out which of these non-sponsors were actively against the resolution. Any Senator who ends up not being a sponsor of a resolution like this should be ashamed of themselves.
Update 6/15: Several more Senators have now co-sponsored: Bond, Bunning, Burns, Chambliss, Conrad, Murkowski, and Voinovich.. Their names have been stricken out above. However, Chris Geidner has called all of the Senators’ offices, and has been told by the offices of Sens. Alexander, Bennett, Cornyn, Grassley, Gregg, and Shelby that they support the resolution.
Update 6/17: Crapo, Grassley, and Hatch have now co-sponsored.
Profiles in courage Read More »
Via Deepen the Mystery, a photo essay from Time magazine about a Muslim high school right here in Illinois. Once they pass sixth grade, boys and girls play separately, and must wear the school uniform.
Remember the Miller Lite catfight ads? Two attractive and impossibly buxom young women are enjoying lunch and enter into the venerable “Tastes Great”/”Less Filling” argument. Except that, unlike John Madden and Bob Uecker, the women are soon tumbling into a fountain and ripping each others’ clothes off, as the camera scans over their bodies. We then cut to two guys inside a bar, saying stuff like “Yeah, that would be a great ad! I would definitely buy whatever they were selling!” We then pan to the two women sitting next to them, also very attractive but not artificially enhanced, who are looking at their companions with undisguised contempt.
I liked those ads. They were clever and funny, and succeeded in having it both ways — appealing to cheesecake instincts while parodying them at the same time. And unmistakably commenting on the cluelessness of guys in general, who would blithely ignore the gorgeous real women sitting next to them in order to indulge in an artificially-enhanced fantasy.
However, things aren’t so simple. The attitudes that the ads were parodying really do exist. We breathe a cultural atmosphere in which women are often put into the role of objects to be manipulated for the sexual gratification of men, to the detriment of their status as equal persons. The battle to overcome these attitudes has been fought by feminists for generations, but is a long way from being won. To a lot of people, this kind of “soft” issue is unimportant, and detracts from the “hard” issues (e.g. equal pay for equal work) that women should be fighting for. But this soft/hard distinction isn’t nearly so clear-cut as we might be tempted to believe. The reasons why women don’t get equal pay for equal work ultimately come down to how men and women are perceived by the people in power who set the salaries, and these perceptions are manifestly shaped by the cultural messages that are beamed at us from every direction. Fighting to spread women’s suffrage through the world and to preserve the right to an abortion is undoubtedly important, but so is the battle to use inclusive language or to allow women to keep their names when they get married. Ideas matter. Some of my friends have joked that the Larry Summers flap was the best thing that ever happened to women in science, since it jolted universities into taking the problem seriously, but that’s just wrong — thousands of female high-school and college students have now heard that the President of Harvard thinks they don’t have the mental capacities to be scientists, and it will take years to undo that damage. To change the world, you have to change how people think about it.
I don’t believe that the Miller Lite ads are the best target for a feminist critique; we are surrounded by images of objectified women’s sexuality being deployed to sell products or ideas, without any ironic intent whatsoever, and I don’t think that much damage is done by this kind of over-the-top parody. Nevertheless, I am certainly sympathetic to people who feel otherwise. I take very seriously the possibility that actual women might know better than I do how it feels to be bombarded by this kind of imagery on a daily basis. So, for example, if I started playing the ad on my website and I received complaints from people who were offended, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it down. It’s just not such a big deal, much more a matter of simple politeness than an esoteric point of feminist theory. If I’m serving lamb chops at a dinner party, and I learn that one my guests is a vegetarian, I would find something else to serve them, regardless of whether I agreed with their ethical reasons for not eating meat.
Fast-forward to the present day. To plug the reality TV series “The Real Gilligan’s Island,” TBS has made it’s own catfight ad, featuring impossibly buxom avatars of Mary Ann and Ginger engaging in a pie fight (left). On every level, this ad isn’t nearly as good as the Miller Lite ads; it’s not very well produced, nor is there any ironic framing story. Basically an uninspired effort.
But someone working for the ad agency had two strokes of genius — first, advertise for the ad itself, in a sort of meta-campaign (this is actually becoming pretty common, so not too much genius there). But second and more importantly, carry out the meta-campaign via blog ads on liberal websites like Daily Kos. I am presuming this was genius rather than just dumb luck, but it was startlingly effective in stirring up controversy, which undoubtedly got the ad much more attention than it would otherwise have received. Some people were amused by the ad, but others complained that it was demeaning to women. On a website purportedly devoted to championing liberal ideals of equality for all, perhaps it isn’t perfectly appropriate to feature an ad that treats women like objects.
Again, I don’t personally feel that an ad like this is the most effective target for our approbation. You don’t have to look very hard on conservative websites to find similar ads that use women’s bodies to sell stuff without any trace of irony, such as the ad on the right that you can find at Power Line. But once again, I’m also sympathetic. The standards are different, as they should be, for our rivals than they are for our friends. If a substantial fraction of the people I claim to be fighting for are made uncomfortable by an ad like that, it wouldn’t seem to be that hard a decision just to remove it, and perhaps begin a discussion about the principles involved. No matter how committed we may be, we always have something to learn.
This is not the course that Kos chose to take. Here is his response to the flap.
Whatever. Feel free to be offended. I find such humorless, knee-jerk reactions, to be tedious at best, sanctimonious and arrogant at worst. I don’t care for such sanctimony from Joe Lieberman, I don’t care for it from anyone else. Some people find such content offensive. Some people find it arousing. Some people find it funny. To each his or her own.
But I am not Lieberman. I won’t sit there and judge pop culture and act as gatekeeper to what I think is “appropriate”, and what isn’t.
And I certainly won’t let the sanctimonious women’s studies set play that role on this site. Feel free to be offended. Feel free to claim that I’m somehow abandoning “progressive principles” by running the ad. It’s a free country. Feel free to storm off in a huff. Other deserving bloggers could use the patronage.
Me, I’ll focus on the important shit.
This comment falls somewhat short of perfectly sympathetic and open-minded. Indeed, it seems really dumb, which is what I don’t get. Kos is a professional political consultant. Is this the kind of advice he gives his clients? That when some of their constituents complain about something that is important to them, they should be told to feel free to storm off?
The ad itself generated a tiny amount of grumbling, but Kos’s response set off a firestorm, as it should have. See comments at Shakespeare’s Sister (who has been singled out as the reason why Democrats can’t win), Feministe, Pandagon, Bitch, PhD, Echidne of the Snakes, Creek Running North, Big Brass Blog, and Media Girl, as well as about 10,000 other places. There is also an interesting analysis of the comments at Kos by Sarah at Sampo, and some folks have started an entire new blog, Women Kossaks, to discuss these issues.
There are two things going on in Kos’s response, both of which are unfortunate. One is that he obviously just doesn’t think that women’s feelings about these issues are all that important. It is always the case that sub-groups of large political movements will complain about being taken for granted, but this is a pretty clear example of where it’s really true. Kos himself would obviously disagree; his attitude is that women’s interests are best served by getting Democrats into power, and that goal is not helped by getting distracted by pie fights. He has a series of posts up (one, two, three) in which he tries to elaborate on the “core values” of the Democratic party — as distinguished from those single-issue “special interests” that threaten to obscure the more important goals. This is by no means a crazy attitude, in fact there is a lot of truth to it. But Kos’s stubborn tone-deafness about women’s issues reveals an underlying cluelessness — he doesn’t come close to appreciating how important some of these issues are to women (who comprise, after all, well over half of Democratic voters), and how important they should therefore be to Democrats.
In a perfect world, where men and women were actually treated equally, something like the TBS ad would be completely harmless. The non-perfect world in which we actually live is a different story. (One indication of the fact that the world has not achieved perfect gender equity is the paucity of ads featuring oil-wrestling matches between hunky men in Speedos. Not, I expect, that such imagery would be very attractive to many people of either sex.) We can argue about the particular details, but it is by no means crazy to suggest that overcoming images like those in the pie fight is a crucial step in leveling the playing field between men and women — which is, everyone would agree, the important shit.
The other unfortunate thing, which others have commented on, is the underlying anti-intellectual tone of the whole discussion, as exemplified by the “women’s studies set” crack (for which he later semi-apologized). There is some feeling of uneasy co-existence between the “activist” and “academic” branches of modern liberalism, and these “soft” feminist issues are one of the points of major discomfort. People who are in the trenches working hard to advance progressive causes don’t like to hear some intellectual telling them that even they are not quite as liberal and egalitarian as they would like to think. (It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how this kind of macho defensiveness aligns with stereotypical male/female attitudes.) And, goodness knows, people sitting in ivory towers thinking about cultural hegemony might not be the best guide to practical action.
But that’s exactly the point — both “sides” of the academic/activist split have a lot to learn from each other. I remember a lecture by Cornel West, where he chastised some of his liberal white friends who were convinced that they had personally overcome any hint of racism — “I still am discovering racist attitudes lurking in my own thoughts, so I know that my white brothers have a way to go themselves.” The problem was never really the stupid pie fight ad, it was the idea that complaining about the ad was somehow petty and illegitimate. It’s great when men are committed to greater equality for women, but frustrating when they are convinced that they know all the answers and end up sounding patronizing and clueless, rather than sincerely listening to what actual women have to say. (Okay, that’s a completely trite observation that applies to any group speaking about any other group. But “Patronizing and Clueless” would make a great name for a band.)
Thanks to Shakespeare’s Sister for nudging me and others to talk about this. Go wish her a happy anniversary!
The important shit Read More »
We all know that Fafblog! is one of the funniest sites you can find on the internets, and in a somewhat darker vein Girls Are Pretty is extremely amusing. But if you’re looking for sure-fire guaranteed entertainment, it’s hard to beat Intelligent Design the Future, the new creationist website. It’s always good for a laugh, especially when they start talking about physics.
A recent post finds contributor Paul Nelson rubbing his hands together in undisguised glee — the physicists are talking about design!
Teapots today…cells tomorrow?
Paul NelsonThat sound you hear is Jerry Coyne’s head exploding. A few weeks after he organized an all-star team of evolutionary biologists and Nobel laureates to slap down design in Nature, that journal goes and publishes an essay by the cosmologist George Ellis, arguing the following:
I have to admit that I was a little worried upon reading this. George Ellis is a respected cosmologist, and co-author with Stephen Hawking of one of the best books on general relativity you can find, but he has been known to skate along the ragged edges of, shall we say, overly enthusiastic speculation. (Well, so have I.) And he is himself religious, indeed a Templeton Prize winner. (Well, so is Freeman Dyson — nobody’s perfect.)
Here is the quote from Ellis’s essay:
Our environment is dominated by objects that embody the outcomes of intentional design (buildings, books, computers, teaspoons). Today’s physics has nothing to say about the intentionality that has resulted in the existence of such objects, even though this intentionality is clearly causally effective.
A simple statement of fact: there is no physics theory that explains the nature of, or even the existence of, football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The human mind is physically based, but there is no hope whatever of predicting the behavior it controls from the underlying physical laws. Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics ‘theory of everything’, this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose, and so would provide an incomplete description of the real world around us.
Well, okay. Ellis is talking about design, but in the context of things that we know perfectly well are designed — football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The fact that teapots are indeed designed is not worthy of media attention. Ellis’s point in the essay is simply the old chestnut that reductionistic laws of physics are of little help if we want to understand many of the complex phenomena that we see in the macroscopic world — even if every particle in your car is happily obeying the rules of the Standard Model, being a well-trained particle physicist won’t help you when you muffler dies (as mine did yesterday). Read the essay for yourself; there’s nothing in there about cells or higher purpose.
So how does Nelson take anything hopeful from Ellis? Let’s see what he says.
Irreducible higher-level causation? From there it’s a day’s walk down an English country lane to current hypotheses of intelligent design. More resources here for the hard work of assembling a robust theory of design.
Aha. Nelson turns Ellis’s essay to his advantage via the venerable technique of “making shit up.” The notion of “irreducible” complexity is much beloved by creationists; it’s an advanced version of the standard argumentative fallacy of “if I can’t see how it would happen, it must be impossible.” Michael Behe uses the example of a mousetrap to illustrate a mechanism that would be useless if you removed any one of its component parts, and is therefore irreducibly complex. One problem with this notion is that nobody knows what it means, since no sensible definition of “irreducible” has ever been given. And of course, you can patiently explain to the creationists how mousetraps are not irreducibly complex, but they are strangely unmoved.
So it would be strange to find a real scientist talk about “irreducible higher-level causation.” But then you look at Ellis’s essay and — he doesn’t! The word “irreducible” doesn’t appear anywhere in the article. Nelson kind of insinuated it into the text. And then it’s “a day’s walk down an English country lane to current hypotheses of intelligent design.” The day’s walk appears to take you from “teapots are clearly designed” to “cells are clearly designed.” That’s quite a long walk! I encourage Mr. Nelson and his colleagues to start walking, and report back to us when they reach their destination.
Crackpots today… brain cells tomorrow? Read More »
There was an excellent discussion about blogging on today’s edition of Odyssey, the daily talk show hosted by Gretchen Helfrich on Chicago Public Radio. (Audio of the program is here.) The guests were Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber and Eugene Volokh of the eponymous Conspiracy. Host and guests were all smart enough to cut quickly through the equally bad caricatures of blogging-as-personal-diary and blogging-as-replacement-for-journalism that seem to be so prevalent out there in the complement of the blogosphere. They spoke eruditely about the uses of distributed communication networks, and elucidated the really useful purposes to which blogs can be put, including as sources of specialized knowledge and as alternative filters to an overwhelming stream of news items. (See also Eszter’s comments.) Worth a listen.
What wasn’t mentioned was the hidden expertise of the Odyssey crew: senior producer Josh Andrews recently started his own blog, The American Sector, and Gretchen was briefly a guest-blogger right here at Preposterous. No wonder they were able to uncover the deep truths of blogging so expeditiously.
Blogging on Odyssey Read More »