Compare-me-do:
I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.
--Barack Obama, Address to the Turkish Parliament, 2009
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.
--Joel Barlow, Article 11 of The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797
If the second quote is written out in full, however, you have to include the following sentence, that forms the second half of article 11, which goes thusly:
and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The history, she burns!
-Ben
I'm sure that I'm by no means the first to raise this similarity, in fact, I expect it was probably intended, so I'm not going to bother to editorialize on what it might signify, as I'm sure other, more articulate, people have done so already.
Showing posts with label Politik. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politik. Show all posts
Monday, April 06, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Edumacationalism
I generally try to avoid commenting on matters of education, because I don't like to spill information in public that I've picked up in private conversations with friends and relatives who are teachers. In this case, however, I'm willing to make an exception. Partly because this example of government educational bullshit is particularly heinous, and partly because this is all information out there in the public eye, if you know where you look.
The following piece of fine, high quality education sector bullshit came to my attention this evening and I thought it needed sharing. What you are about to read is copied verbatim, I've not added any mistakes of my own.
Building on the successful Communicating Matters training program in [The borough I live in] a multi-disciplinary team will work with twenty settings to support and Early Language Lead Practitioner (ELLP) from each setting and facilitate networks so that good practice is cascaded and fully embedded across the authority.
It's to do with a government initiative---these are usually stupid ideas thrown up by department of education think-tanks and declared to be mandatory until the next gimmick comes along---that has been dumped on a local school. I'm not knowledgable when it comes to educational psychology, so I can't make an informed judgement of the program in question but, as someone who spends most of their day writing and editing, that paragraph offends me. It's filled with buzz words, meaningless jargon, and it's just generally badly written.
I'm sure that these programs are conceived in good faith, and most of them are based on sound research, but they're usually foisted on already overworked teachers and take money away from schools that could be spending it on something more concretely useful. On top of that, they're always fluffed out and peppered with management-speak to the point of incomprehensibility by the time they reach teachers. This means that they're unlikely to win the enthusiasm of teachers, even if there is a valid concept under all the crap.
I found an advert for a "Full-Time Primary Strategy Consultant" to assist with the program described above in another city---this would be someone who would earn equal if not more pay than a full-time teacher---which i think it worth quoting also, even if only for the further funny jargon.
A successful candidate must be able to:
a)support schools and settings in improving young children's language and communication skills , with particular emphasis on practical ways of improving practitioners' skills in supporting early language acquisition and development,
b)support schools and settings in developing the quality of provision to ensure all children access a language rich environment, raising expectations and engaging all children particularly the most disadvantaged
c)facilitate effective coaching arrangements in schools and settings and engage in the modelling of good practice in those schools and settings being supported;
d)Facilitate the development of clusters and networks, both within and between schools and settings so that good practice is cascaded and fully embedded across the authority;
e)promote social inclusion and help schools and settings to meet the needs of different groups of children, such as boys and girls, children from minority ethnic communities, children with SEN, gifted and talented children, transient children, children from travelling communities, looked after children and children learning English as an additional language;
f)support the planning and delivery of agreed central, network or school/setting based INSET, provide appropriate high quality advice and guidance to schools and settings, offer advice on relevant resources and communicate with schools and settings via agreed media;
g)participate in agreed cross-service initiatives in order to promote children's early language acquisition and development
I wish that I could say that this sort of crap was the preserve of one side of the political spectrum or the other, but it seems to be a pretty universal shade of bullshit. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and policemen are subject to this sort of thing day-in day-out all year round. They have to be proactive, and dynamic!
I'm glad I'm not a public servant.
-Ben
The following piece of fine, high quality education sector bullshit came to my attention this evening and I thought it needed sharing. What you are about to read is copied verbatim, I've not added any mistakes of my own.
Building on the successful Communicating Matters training program in [The borough I live in] a multi-disciplinary team will work with twenty settings to support and Early Language Lead Practitioner (ELLP) from each setting and facilitate networks so that good practice is cascaded and fully embedded across the authority.
It's to do with a government initiative---these are usually stupid ideas thrown up by department of education think-tanks and declared to be mandatory until the next gimmick comes along---that has been dumped on a local school. I'm not knowledgable when it comes to educational psychology, so I can't make an informed judgement of the program in question but, as someone who spends most of their day writing and editing, that paragraph offends me. It's filled with buzz words, meaningless jargon, and it's just generally badly written.
I'm sure that these programs are conceived in good faith, and most of them are based on sound research, but they're usually foisted on already overworked teachers and take money away from schools that could be spending it on something more concretely useful. On top of that, they're always fluffed out and peppered with management-speak to the point of incomprehensibility by the time they reach teachers. This means that they're unlikely to win the enthusiasm of teachers, even if there is a valid concept under all the crap.
I found an advert for a "Full-Time Primary Strategy Consultant" to assist with the program described above in another city---this would be someone who would earn equal if not more pay than a full-time teacher---which i think it worth quoting also, even if only for the further funny jargon.
A successful candidate must be able to:
a)support schools and settings in improving young children's language and communication skills , with particular emphasis on practical ways of improving practitioners' skills in supporting early language acquisition and development,
b)support schools and settings in developing the quality of provision to ensure all children access a language rich environment, raising expectations and engaging all children particularly the most disadvantaged
c)facilitate effective coaching arrangements in schools and settings and engage in the modelling of good practice in those schools and settings being supported;
d)Facilitate the development of clusters and networks, both within and between schools and settings so that good practice is cascaded and fully embedded across the authority;
e)promote social inclusion and help schools and settings to meet the needs of different groups of children, such as boys and girls, children from minority ethnic communities, children with SEN, gifted and talented children, transient children, children from travelling communities, looked after children and children learning English as an additional language;
f)support the planning and delivery of agreed central, network or school/setting based INSET, provide appropriate high quality advice and guidance to schools and settings, offer advice on relevant resources and communicate with schools and settings via agreed media;
g)participate in agreed cross-service initiatives in order to promote children's early language acquisition and development
I wish that I could say that this sort of crap was the preserve of one side of the political spectrum or the other, but it seems to be a pretty universal shade of bullshit. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and policemen are subject to this sort of thing day-in day-out all year round. They have to be proactive, and dynamic!
I'm glad I'm not a public servant.
-Ben
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Folk
I've just gotten back from seeing Martin Carthy play at my local folk club. He's probably not a well known name to most, but to a select few, the man's a big deal. I was right at the front, in a venue that holds no more than 100 people, so I could hear his guitar playing and singing more clearly from the man himself than I could from the PA system.
He finished with this song -- which namechecks Shooters Hill (which is where I grew up, and about a mile from where I'm currently sitting) in the context of its former fame as a hangout/execution place of highwaymen.
Given what I've been working on, and what I've been talking about with my other half of late, I couldn't help but sit there and ponder the presentation of gender roles and sexuality in traditional folk music. Folk music is a form of cultural expression which has always existed largely out of the reach of censorship and authority. As such, the views expressed in these songs are arguably a more accurate reflection of social attitudes and behaviors than the forms of expression that were permitted in printed books and authorized plays.
It would be a stretch to far, I feel, to claim that the actions described in folk songs were ever the social norm, but they are examples of narratives which have been passed on from singer to singer for generations, which implies that the audiences liked them enough for them to stay on singers' repertoires. The events described in these songs therefore could be said to illustrate what attitudes the audiences of the time had on a number of subjects, from war, to casual sex, to domestic violence, to abortion.
Unsurprisingly, the songs written by those who were traditionally the poor buggers standing on the front-line with halberds or muskets don't have a particularly rosy view of war. Interestingly it is almost never depicted from the point of view of those who were sent off to the battlefield, but from the perspectives of the women left behind (or who chose not to be left behind). War, rather than something noble, is something that takes the martial aspirations of easily led young men and turns young men into corpses, children into orphans, and wives into widows.
Similarly, the delicate social niceties of Jane Austen's courtships are absent from from the lives of common people in folk music. Love and lust dictate who ends up with who, unless a meddling party gets stabby (which does happen a lot). People are fucking in fields, barns, the homes of sleeping parents, and the marital beds of neglectful absent husbands. Women who terminate pregnancies are treated with sympathy, abusive husbands get their comeuppance, and rapists rot away and die, punished by a vengeful god.
One particularly interesting song (which is crying out for some seriously pretentious literary analysis) involves a woman who, after enduring her drunken, abusive husband for as long as she can, stitches him--bedsheets, clothes and all-- into the bed while he sleeps off another bender. When he wakes, she beats seven shades of shit out of him with a frying pan, a cooking pot, and a rolling pin, then tells him that he ever hurts her again, she'll make sure he doesn't wake up the next morning. I think there's definitely something to be said about the use of implements traditionally associated with the subjugation of women to brain a shithead, but it's late and I can't be bothered to give it much thought right now.
There is one factor, however, that makes me rather loath to embrace the apparent consensus of these songs as evidence of a matriarchal counterculture in pre-modern england. The sort of people who sing folk music are, as a general rule, a bunch of stinky lefties (not that I have anything against stinky lefties, I'm probably one myself). I think this is probably due to the link between folk music and communism in the 1950s -- singers like Ewan McColl believed that this proletarian music would inspire working-class solidarity and lay the foundations for revolution. This is relevant because there are literally thousands of traditional folk songs out there, collected by people like Cecil Sharp and Francis James Child, so what we hear are the songs that modern singers choose to sing. I don't think that it's a major factor -- the songs are genuine, after all -- but I think that you could probably find songs to support the argument that just about any political ideology was the traditional mindset of the british people if you looked hard enough.
I expect it's already been done, but I would have thought that a comprehensive analysis of attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality in folk songs would be an interesting portrait of the prevailing social attitudes in different times and different regions.
Anyway. I'm knackered, and I should have gone to sleep a long time ago.
-Ben
He finished with this song -- which namechecks Shooters Hill (which is where I grew up, and about a mile from where I'm currently sitting) in the context of its former fame as a hangout/execution place of highwaymen.
Given what I've been working on, and what I've been talking about with my other half of late, I couldn't help but sit there and ponder the presentation of gender roles and sexuality in traditional folk music. Folk music is a form of cultural expression which has always existed largely out of the reach of censorship and authority. As such, the views expressed in these songs are arguably a more accurate reflection of social attitudes and behaviors than the forms of expression that were permitted in printed books and authorized plays.
It would be a stretch to far, I feel, to claim that the actions described in folk songs were ever the social norm, but they are examples of narratives which have been passed on from singer to singer for generations, which implies that the audiences liked them enough for them to stay on singers' repertoires. The events described in these songs therefore could be said to illustrate what attitudes the audiences of the time had on a number of subjects, from war, to casual sex, to domestic violence, to abortion.
Unsurprisingly, the songs written by those who were traditionally the poor buggers standing on the front-line with halberds or muskets don't have a particularly rosy view of war. Interestingly it is almost never depicted from the point of view of those who were sent off to the battlefield, but from the perspectives of the women left behind (or who chose not to be left behind). War, rather than something noble, is something that takes the martial aspirations of easily led young men and turns young men into corpses, children into orphans, and wives into widows.
Similarly, the delicate social niceties of Jane Austen's courtships are absent from from the lives of common people in folk music. Love and lust dictate who ends up with who, unless a meddling party gets stabby (which does happen a lot). People are fucking in fields, barns, the homes of sleeping parents, and the marital beds of neglectful absent husbands. Women who terminate pregnancies are treated with sympathy, abusive husbands get their comeuppance, and rapists rot away and die, punished by a vengeful god.
One particularly interesting song (which is crying out for some seriously pretentious literary analysis) involves a woman who, after enduring her drunken, abusive husband for as long as she can, stitches him--bedsheets, clothes and all-- into the bed while he sleeps off another bender. When he wakes, she beats seven shades of shit out of him with a frying pan, a cooking pot, and a rolling pin, then tells him that he ever hurts her again, she'll make sure he doesn't wake up the next morning. I think there's definitely something to be said about the use of implements traditionally associated with the subjugation of women to brain a shithead, but it's late and I can't be bothered to give it much thought right now.
There is one factor, however, that makes me rather loath to embrace the apparent consensus of these songs as evidence of a matriarchal counterculture in pre-modern england. The sort of people who sing folk music are, as a general rule, a bunch of stinky lefties (not that I have anything against stinky lefties, I'm probably one myself). I think this is probably due to the link between folk music and communism in the 1950s -- singers like Ewan McColl believed that this proletarian music would inspire working-class solidarity and lay the foundations for revolution. This is relevant because there are literally thousands of traditional folk songs out there, collected by people like Cecil Sharp and Francis James Child, so what we hear are the songs that modern singers choose to sing. I don't think that it's a major factor -- the songs are genuine, after all -- but I think that you could probably find songs to support the argument that just about any political ideology was the traditional mindset of the british people if you looked hard enough.
I expect it's already been done, but I would have thought that a comprehensive analysis of attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality in folk songs would be an interesting portrait of the prevailing social attitudes in different times and different regions.
Anyway. I'm knackered, and I should have gone to sleep a long time ago.
-Ben
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Science
This is a rather interesting study.
I notice that the authors themselves were extremely reluctant to speculate even slightly on the nature of the link -- preferring the good old standby 'Further research is needed' which can mean anything from "we have no idea what this means" to "we wouldn't touch this argument with a barge pole". I suspect that it's the latter in this case. Thanks to the internet, of course, we have no shortage of editorializing from both sides of the science vs. the jesus debate. It's going to be difficult for either side to get much mileage out of this one though, seeing as you can turn the conclusion upside down and it still makes sense, if you see what I mean. The same result can be read either as "religious folk fight harder, and love life -- heathens just give up because they're weak and feeble without jesus power" or as "Godless folk do not fear death, and go out calmly -- whilst religious people's certainty in the shiny hereafter falls down in the face of the big sleep".
Most of the reports in the American media seem to be favoring the former. See Most Devout Most Likely to Fight Death to the End, Religious Likely to Prolong Life, Study Finds and the church-newsletter stylings of Patients with Terminal Cancer Turning to Religion.
-Ben
I notice that the authors themselves were extremely reluctant to speculate even slightly on the nature of the link -- preferring the good old standby 'Further research is needed' which can mean anything from "we have no idea what this means" to "we wouldn't touch this argument with a barge pole". I suspect that it's the latter in this case. Thanks to the internet, of course, we have no shortage of editorializing from both sides of the science vs. the jesus debate. It's going to be difficult for either side to get much mileage out of this one though, seeing as you can turn the conclusion upside down and it still makes sense, if you see what I mean. The same result can be read either as "religious folk fight harder, and love life -- heathens just give up because they're weak and feeble without jesus power" or as "Godless folk do not fear death, and go out calmly -- whilst religious people's certainty in the shiny hereafter falls down in the face of the big sleep".
Most of the reports in the American media seem to be favoring the former. See Most Devout Most Likely to Fight Death to the End, Religious Likely to Prolong Life, Study Finds and the church-newsletter stylings of Patients with Terminal Cancer Turning to Religion.
-Ben
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Homo-Pomo
In recent months I've spent a lot of time reading and writing about the study of human sexual behavior. In the course of my research I have encountered two things in great abundance. The first is statistics, the second is arguments about sexual morality.
There's a huge amount that I want to say on these two things, and most importantly on how these two things are often intertwined, but I can't seem to get my thoughts to form into a straight line. I don't have much experience writing to persuade. What little ability I had with persuasive and argumentative language has been eroded by the style of writing I've had to adapt to at work. I can write to explain reasonably well though, so I'll try and put my thoughts into that shape and see if I have any more success expressing myself than with the 2000 words of badly composed argument that I've already written.
Research projects into the subject of human sexuality often struggle to obtain funding (One leading academic had her funding cut after a scientifically ignorant senator mocked her research as worthless government expenditure) and face difficulties obtaining information from a large and representative sample. This means that there haven't been a whole lot of rigorous, large scale studies into general human sexual behavior done in the western world (and buggerall anywhere else). You hear about the findings of sex research in the media all the time, but any experience with the field---or any serious examination of the claims of these survey results---invariably show you that at best, they are based on misinterpretations of rigorous research, and at worst are nothing more than publicity stunts for the respectable commercial fringes of the sex industry.
My recent rediscovery of the awesomeness of science (something I'll write about in more detail at some point) means that I've been throwing myself into the research for this project with rather a lot of enthusiasm. Checking methodology used to obtain figures quoted by writers, analysing existing research, and generally poring over pages and pages of numerical data. It's not exciting, but I do find it interesting, especially when I notice some trend, relevant to my work, that the authors didn't mention in their summary.
I'm currently working on an article which discusses the field of sex research, and the problems associated with it. This means that I've been buried in the numbers rather deeper than usual of late. I've been getting really frustrated with the fierce ongoing debate in the US over the morality of homosexuality - or any other behavior that isn't married couples silently screwing with the lights off. The intrusion of ideological debates into this field makes it very hard to objectively assess the merits of any piece of research. If the findings of a study support one side's agenda then they ring-fence it, and brand anyone who criticises it (not matter how legitimate their criticisms) a godless liberal scumbag, or a reactionary bigot (according to their preference).
The thing that gets on my nerves the most about this situation is that there isn't any sensible reason for these statistics to be such a battleground issue. What causes the most controversy are the figures on the prevalence of homosexuality in the population at large. On the one hand, you have gay rights groups pointing to findings like those of the Kinsey reports (which stated that around 10 percent of men are exclusively homosexual) and saying “look, lots of people are gay, it’s natural, so stop persecuting us” and on the other hand you have the jesus-gang pointing to statistics like the 1993 Guttenmacher institute study (which estimated that only 1-2 percent of adults were exclusively homosexual) and saying “see, hardly anyone does it -- it’s unnatural and therefore wrong.”
There are of course the other Christians who are in a state of denial about the idea of sex research, who believe that if nobody ever enquires about it then 'sinful' behavior sort of doesn't happen. Like a strange 'schrodinger's bedroom' scenario. Those people are a significant minority, but they aren't really relevant to this rant.
This seems to me to be one of the rare ethical debates where the most common arguments on both sides are really fucking stupid. Natural does not mean good, plenty of evil things are natural; similarly unnatural does not mean bad, as there are plenty of good things that aren't natural in the least. Both sides seem to be arguing morals without actually ever debating why the issues in question are right or wrong.
This is a phenomenon I have observed before. I rediscovered a book the other day, called "Sexual Revolutions in Early America" which I recall reading, in part, during my degree. The book essentially takes the same dumb argument over what is natural and what isn't into the field of history, arguing that colonial America was just as sexually open and varied as modern America and therefore (with the exception of some pious ramblings about STDs and prostitution) it's all good.
The defining characteristic of this debate seems to be an unwillingness to make any kind of value judgement based on a rational assessment of the benefits or damages that this tolerance of sexual minorities might have. I expect this from religious groups, as they get their opinions on the subject from ancient texts, but it's annoying coming from those who are aware that the enlightenment took place.
Many of the liberal activists seem to be operating within the distinctly morally relativistic fields of post-modernist thought, in which concepts of good and evil are social constructs, and therefore unpleasant restrictions of natural human behavior.
I've never understood post-modernist critical theory, it seems to me to be what Wolfgang Pauli wonderfully described as "not even wrong". The complete rejection of objectivity and the concept of objective reality undermines any attempt to prove or disprove anything. If the enlightenment has taught us anything, it is that spending ages thinking about ideas that can't be proven either way is a huge waste of everyone's time.
I can't help but think that if liberals dropped the post-modernist stuff, and just argued from pragmatic, humanitarian principles they'd achieve a great deal more in the advancement of gay rights, and scientifically minded people would be able to get on with the serious business of trying to figure out what people like to do with no clothes on without being interfered with.
-Ben
There's a huge amount that I want to say on these two things, and most importantly on how these two things are often intertwined, but I can't seem to get my thoughts to form into a straight line. I don't have much experience writing to persuade. What little ability I had with persuasive and argumentative language has been eroded by the style of writing I've had to adapt to at work. I can write to explain reasonably well though, so I'll try and put my thoughts into that shape and see if I have any more success expressing myself than with the 2000 words of badly composed argument that I've already written.
Research projects into the subject of human sexuality often struggle to obtain funding (One leading academic had her funding cut after a scientifically ignorant senator mocked her research as worthless government expenditure) and face difficulties obtaining information from a large and representative sample. This means that there haven't been a whole lot of rigorous, large scale studies into general human sexual behavior done in the western world (and buggerall anywhere else). You hear about the findings of sex research in the media all the time, but any experience with the field---or any serious examination of the claims of these survey results---invariably show you that at best, they are based on misinterpretations of rigorous research, and at worst are nothing more than publicity stunts for the respectable commercial fringes of the sex industry.
My recent rediscovery of the awesomeness of science (something I'll write about in more detail at some point) means that I've been throwing myself into the research for this project with rather a lot of enthusiasm. Checking methodology used to obtain figures quoted by writers, analysing existing research, and generally poring over pages and pages of numerical data. It's not exciting, but I do find it interesting, especially when I notice some trend, relevant to my work, that the authors didn't mention in their summary.
I'm currently working on an article which discusses the field of sex research, and the problems associated with it. This means that I've been buried in the numbers rather deeper than usual of late. I've been getting really frustrated with the fierce ongoing debate in the US over the morality of homosexuality - or any other behavior that isn't married couples silently screwing with the lights off. The intrusion of ideological debates into this field makes it very hard to objectively assess the merits of any piece of research. If the findings of a study support one side's agenda then they ring-fence it, and brand anyone who criticises it (not matter how legitimate their criticisms) a godless liberal scumbag, or a reactionary bigot (according to their preference).
The thing that gets on my nerves the most about this situation is that there isn't any sensible reason for these statistics to be such a battleground issue. What causes the most controversy are the figures on the prevalence of homosexuality in the population at large. On the one hand, you have gay rights groups pointing to findings like those of the Kinsey reports (which stated that around 10 percent of men are exclusively homosexual) and saying “look, lots of people are gay, it’s natural, so stop persecuting us” and on the other hand you have the jesus-gang pointing to statistics like the 1993 Guttenmacher institute study (which estimated that only 1-2 percent of adults were exclusively homosexual) and saying “see, hardly anyone does it -- it’s unnatural and therefore wrong.”
There are of course the other Christians who are in a state of denial about the idea of sex research, who believe that if nobody ever enquires about it then 'sinful' behavior sort of doesn't happen. Like a strange 'schrodinger's bedroom' scenario. Those people are a significant minority, but they aren't really relevant to this rant.
This seems to me to be one of the rare ethical debates where the most common arguments on both sides are really fucking stupid. Natural does not mean good, plenty of evil things are natural; similarly unnatural does not mean bad, as there are plenty of good things that aren't natural in the least. Both sides seem to be arguing morals without actually ever debating why the issues in question are right or wrong.
This is a phenomenon I have observed before. I rediscovered a book the other day, called "Sexual Revolutions in Early America" which I recall reading, in part, during my degree. The book essentially takes the same dumb argument over what is natural and what isn't into the field of history, arguing that colonial America was just as sexually open and varied as modern America and therefore (with the exception of some pious ramblings about STDs and prostitution) it's all good.
The defining characteristic of this debate seems to be an unwillingness to make any kind of value judgement based on a rational assessment of the benefits or damages that this tolerance of sexual minorities might have. I expect this from religious groups, as they get their opinions on the subject from ancient texts, but it's annoying coming from those who are aware that the enlightenment took place.
Many of the liberal activists seem to be operating within the distinctly morally relativistic fields of post-modernist thought, in which concepts of good and evil are social constructs, and therefore unpleasant restrictions of natural human behavior.
I've never understood post-modernist critical theory, it seems to me to be what Wolfgang Pauli wonderfully described as "not even wrong". The complete rejection of objectivity and the concept of objective reality undermines any attempt to prove or disprove anything. If the enlightenment has taught us anything, it is that spending ages thinking about ideas that can't be proven either way is a huge waste of everyone's time.
I can't help but think that if liberals dropped the post-modernist stuff, and just argued from pragmatic, humanitarian principles they'd achieve a great deal more in the advancement of gay rights, and scientifically minded people would be able to get on with the serious business of trying to figure out what people like to do with no clothes on without being interfered with.
-Ben
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Pope-tacular
Read this. It's only a short little news piece, also covered on the Beeb (with a less infuriating headline).
I'm pretty used to Catholicism-flavored madness---such as the recent case in Italy in which prominent Catholics decided that it was unethical to switch off the life-support of a woman who had been brain-dead for a few years because she 'could still have children'---but this case is really something else. I mean, come on, a 9 year old girl---who was raped---is carrying twins that she doesn't want and that will probably kill her a long time before they could be delivered, and the local priests think that it's evil to terminate the pregnancy?
I mean, ugh.. Even if you discount the mental trauma of unwanted childbirth at nine years old, just the quantifiable medical considerations are enough to make opposing the idea the act of a crazy person.
---
The other thing about the nbc article, after the initial shock of the content, is the headline. I mean come on, 'alleged'? She's only nine years old for fuck's sake! Are they suggesting that a nine year old girl was soliciting sex from her stepfather?
This makes me so many different flavors of angry that it makes me go cross eyed.
-Ben
I'm pretty used to Catholicism-flavored madness---such as the recent case in Italy in which prominent Catholics decided that it was unethical to switch off the life-support of a woman who had been brain-dead for a few years because she 'could still have children'---but this case is really something else. I mean, come on, a 9 year old girl---who was raped---is carrying twins that she doesn't want and that will probably kill her a long time before they could be delivered, and the local priests think that it's evil to terminate the pregnancy?
I mean, ugh.. Even if you discount the mental trauma of unwanted childbirth at nine years old, just the quantifiable medical considerations are enough to make opposing the idea the act of a crazy person.
---
The other thing about the nbc article, after the initial shock of the content, is the headline. I mean come on, 'alleged'? She's only nine years old for fuck's sake! Are they suggesting that a nine year old girl was soliciting sex from her stepfather?
This makes me so many different flavors of angry that it makes me go cross eyed.
-Ben
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Am I stoned?
Or can I hear more music?
It's much too hipstertacular for me, I know, but I do rather like the Mae Shi. Even if their songs seem to be imbued with the sort of peculiar christian cosmology that you can only get through the serious overuse of psychedelics.
I've just finished writing a 1,500-word rambling blog post which, after proofreading, I've decided will never see the light of day; at least, not in its current form. It's much too far into the realms of shop, and without the things I don't want to say, I think that it's rather toothless and stupid sounding.
I was inspired to write it by this article which got me all riled up and cranky. It's made me more determined than ever to check every statistic, no matter how many times I've heard it before (or how plausible it sounds to me) and to pick my words with great care when I have to summarize someone else's research. Mostly it's just made me paranoid about my own ignorance, and what grevious misrepresentations I may have perpetrated myself.
This article is very interesting, and is quite similar to the sort of things i've been doing myself recently. It's amazing how many 'accepted' facts and statistics disappear in a puff of bullshit-smelling smoke if you look at them closely enough, and follow them home.
-Ben
Pointless fact: I always spell the word 'definite' wrong. I know exactly how it is supposed to be spelled, but for some unfathomable reason my fingers always write 'definate'
It's much too hipstertacular for me, I know, but I do rather like the Mae Shi. Even if their songs seem to be imbued with the sort of peculiar christian cosmology that you can only get through the serious overuse of psychedelics.I've just finished writing a 1,500-word rambling blog post which, after proofreading, I've decided will never see the light of day; at least, not in its current form. It's much too far into the realms of shop, and without the things I don't want to say, I think that it's rather toothless and stupid sounding.
I was inspired to write it by this article which got me all riled up and cranky. It's made me more determined than ever to check every statistic, no matter how many times I've heard it before (or how plausible it sounds to me) and to pick my words with great care when I have to summarize someone else's research. Mostly it's just made me paranoid about my own ignorance, and what grevious misrepresentations I may have perpetrated myself.
This article is very interesting, and is quite similar to the sort of things i've been doing myself recently. It's amazing how many 'accepted' facts and statistics disappear in a puff of bullshit-smelling smoke if you look at them closely enough, and follow them home.
-Ben
Pointless fact: I always spell the word 'definite' wrong. I know exactly how it is supposed to be spelled, but for some unfathomable reason my fingers always write 'definate'
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Misinformed Ramblings
I'm writing this in the Ubuntu text editor, having (mostly) gone all open source. It's not been the most smooth process, as I rather lack the technical chops to get it to go perfectly, but now that it works it's mostly good. I've not been very bloggy recently, for no decent reason. I'll try and rectify this.
Today i've been doing a fair amount of research into research -- more specifically into sex research, which is the most fun kind of research. You can't go wandering around in that subject area without at least hearing the name Alfred Kinsey, the first person to do a large scale survey of people who professed to be 'normal' in their social and sexual leanings. For good measure I feel like I should say the word research a few more times, as it just hasn't come up quite often enough in this paragraph.
Any google search into Mr Kinsey will return much the same sort of results as a search for a certain Mr Darwin. The Jeebus does not like him, no no no, does not like him at all.
I should write a little context I feel, at this point, seeing as I can pull all the facts off the top of my head (strange job, I learn too many things). His first major publication Sexual behavior in the Human Male came out in 1948, and caused a bit of a shock-horror reaction. He asked a wide range of men, from convicted felons to graduate students, how, essentially, they liked to get their naughty on -- their favored steps in the horizontal monster mash, if you will. This survey is best known now for its very high estimate of the proportion of men who were primarily homosexual (about one in ten) which does somewhat exceed the ratios that more recent surveys have returned (this is most likely due to A: the fact that there were quite a few giggolos and prisoners in his survey, and B: because it was performed just after the second world war, where, amongst other things, a lot of guys had to get pretty damn friendly with no women about). What is more interesting to me is the sheer amount of things that he concluded that were considered shocking, like the statistic that 92 percent of men masturbate (which I still find shocking, but for the opposite reason) or that 40 percent of men liked to have sex with the lights on. He caused even more shock and horror a few years later when he wrote a companion book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which reported that women rather liked sex, 62 percent of them said they masturbated, and 55 percent of them had responded erotically to being bitten. It made monocles drop into cups of tea across the land.
He died in 1956, but the Kinsey institute carry on his work to this day, and have a very good website, if you're ever bored and not at work (or at work, if your job is like mine).
The thing I find interesting is the way that, like Darwin, his publications and personal life are scrutinized by Christians to this day. When you look at this, it seems a little illogical. both the study of human sexuality and evolutionary biology have progressed a long way since the work that kick-started the respective fields. Yet the attacks are made on Kinsey, and not on those doing similar research today.
I was pondering this on the way home from work this evening, and it seems to me that this is emblematic of a complete incompatibility of thought between religious types and science-y peoples. Scientific scholarship is about gathering evidence from the world around you. Religious scholarship is about divining meaning through exegesis, by pulling new ideas from ancient texts. It seems to me that this different perspective is what causes the strange attacks on figures like Darwin and Kinsey. When someone used to religious scholarship looks at the field of evolutionary biology, or sex research, they see the misguided followers of a false prophet's blasphemous revelation. To them, the most logical way of making this field go away is to discredit the founding text. What they fail to grasp is that science isn't exegesis, discrediting Kinsey isn't going to make sex researchers stop, because what they're doing is the study of people, not the study of kinsey's findings about people.
The thing I find most odd about the religious reaction to Kinsey is the underlying suggestion that none of this sort of thing went on before he wrote about it.
-Ben
Today i've been doing a fair amount of research into research -- more specifically into sex research, which is the most fun kind of research. You can't go wandering around in that subject area without at least hearing the name Alfred Kinsey, the first person to do a large scale survey of people who professed to be 'normal' in their social and sexual leanings. For good measure I feel like I should say the word research a few more times, as it just hasn't come up quite often enough in this paragraph.
Any google search into Mr Kinsey will return much the same sort of results as a search for a certain Mr Darwin. The Jeebus does not like him, no no no, does not like him at all.
I should write a little context I feel, at this point, seeing as I can pull all the facts off the top of my head (strange job, I learn too many things). His first major publication Sexual behavior in the Human Male came out in 1948, and caused a bit of a shock-horror reaction. He asked a wide range of men, from convicted felons to graduate students, how, essentially, they liked to get their naughty on -- their favored steps in the horizontal monster mash, if you will. This survey is best known now for its very high estimate of the proportion of men who were primarily homosexual (about one in ten) which does somewhat exceed the ratios that more recent surveys have returned (this is most likely due to A: the fact that there were quite a few giggolos and prisoners in his survey, and B: because it was performed just after the second world war, where, amongst other things, a lot of guys had to get pretty damn friendly with no women about). What is more interesting to me is the sheer amount of things that he concluded that were considered shocking, like the statistic that 92 percent of men masturbate (which I still find shocking, but for the opposite reason) or that 40 percent of men liked to have sex with the lights on. He caused even more shock and horror a few years later when he wrote a companion book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which reported that women rather liked sex, 62 percent of them said they masturbated, and 55 percent of them had responded erotically to being bitten. It made monocles drop into cups of tea across the land.
He died in 1956, but the Kinsey institute carry on his work to this day, and have a very good website, if you're ever bored and not at work (or at work, if your job is like mine).
The thing I find interesting is the way that, like Darwin, his publications and personal life are scrutinized by Christians to this day. When you look at this, it seems a little illogical. both the study of human sexuality and evolutionary biology have progressed a long way since the work that kick-started the respective fields. Yet the attacks are made on Kinsey, and not on those doing similar research today.
I was pondering this on the way home from work this evening, and it seems to me that this is emblematic of a complete incompatibility of thought between religious types and science-y peoples. Scientific scholarship is about gathering evidence from the world around you. Religious scholarship is about divining meaning through exegesis, by pulling new ideas from ancient texts. It seems to me that this different perspective is what causes the strange attacks on figures like Darwin and Kinsey. When someone used to religious scholarship looks at the field of evolutionary biology, or sex research, they see the misguided followers of a false prophet's blasphemous revelation. To them, the most logical way of making this field go away is to discredit the founding text. What they fail to grasp is that science isn't exegesis, discrediting Kinsey isn't going to make sex researchers stop, because what they're doing is the study of people, not the study of kinsey's findings about people.
The thing I find most odd about the religious reaction to Kinsey is the underlying suggestion that none of this sort of thing went on before he wrote about it.
-Ben
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Fraternities
I came across this when doing some research the other day. It's hardly a shocking finding, but interesting for its thoroughness. I give you this interesting little paper --
Fraternity membership, the display of degrading sexual images of women, and rape myth acceptance
I think the same is probably true of a lot of university sports teams over here. Well, judging from how they act in public, and the songs they sing when they're drunk -- I've never been in their rooms.
-Ben
Fraternity membership, the display of degrading sexual images of women, and rape myth acceptance
I think the same is probably true of a lot of university sports teams over here. Well, judging from how they act in public, and the songs they sing when they're drunk -- I've never been in their rooms.
-Ben
Friday, November 07, 2008
They Call Me Mister President
I'm still happy about the US election result, I'm not sure whether it will translate into any sort of improvement in the world -- but a lot of people are certain it will, and I think that confidence probably has considerable power on its own. Sorry about the rather inappropriate In the Heat of the Night reference, although the contrast between then and now is fascinating. I was surprised that none of the english papers used it as a headline. It was nice to see the headlines in the paper on wednesday, things like "One Giant Leap for Mankind", "GOBAMA!" and so on -- a nice change from four years ago when one major national paper in the UK ran with "How can 58 million people be so dumb?". The Obama campaign flickr page has some interesting shots from election night.
In other news, Field Music are awesome. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I'm a bit slow on the uptake and not very hip.
-Ben
In other news, Field Music are awesome. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I'm a bit slow on the uptake and not very hip.
-Ben
Monday, October 27, 2008
"That's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that"
I’m watching a BBC documentary about the collapse (and alleged demolition) of World Trade Center tower 7. Conspiracy theories like these are always fascinating examples of the many different biases which people bring to the analysis of evidence.
[I was going to write more on this stuff, and I might at some point, but I’m tired now.]
Firstly there is always the way that most people are far more willing to take didactic statements of truth from figures of authority than they are willing to assess evidence on their own. This creates big problems for people trying to debunk conspiracy theories, because they are often started, or prominently backed up, by people with seemingly solid credentials. What is most effective is when a person with an apparently informed background (in the case of the WTC7 conspiracies he’s an architect*) states—without giving any evidence to support his claim—that the scenario he suggests is ‘obvious’ and that ‘anyone can see it’. I’m sure there’s a name for this effect in the study of rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is, either way it is very effective -- it makes people who go along with his arguments feel superior; everyone else, the subconscious logic goes, are idiotic and easily led. The statement that I thought was particularly interesting in this documentary is when the 911 truthman says ‘even a child can see that that isn’t a natural collapse’
Which is just dumb. It’s like saying ‘any child can tell that lightning is caused by fighting sky monsters’ because you think that meteorologists are a sinister cabal who don’t want anyone to learn how they ‘really’ predict the weather. Hypotheses are not given credibility on a first-come-first-serve basis, they have to make sense, and be possible. Generally underpinning all of these things is the anti-intellectualism that seems to be becoming increasingly common in American society in particular. The fact that those who support the official line are world leading authorities on the subject of demolition and structural collapse is seen as irrelevant. Just as the fact that Sarah Palin doesn't seem to know the first thing about the job she's running for, or the sort of issues she'd be expected to deal with, is seen as irrelevant by many.
Even if you disregard the fact that rigging a building for demolition involves tearing out internal walls, drilling holes in columns, and laying miles and miles of cables everywhere (which is hard to do in a busy office building without anyone noticing), this conspiracy theory is no more possible than any of the other unorthodox theories that have surfaced over the years. The reason for this is fairly simple: with each successive counter to their arguments conspiracy theorists add more people to the list of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. What this amounts to, in effect, is that these people are accusing thousands of people of being accessories to mass murder. A list that includes all of the structural engineers that testified at the enquiry, the FDNY and NYPD witnesses who testified that they heard no demolition explosions, as well as thousands of ordinary men and women in the area at the time.
When people come up with these theories they generally envisage them as being masterminded by some devilish incarnation of ‘the man’ and don’t seem to realise what it is that they are, in reality, suggesting. Even if you accept the idea that thousands of people who pledged to help their fellow citizens, who have risked their lives in the course of that vocation, lied and conspired to kill thousands of innocent people, there is an insoluble problem with all this: people are shit at keeping secrets.
Just think, Nixon couldn’t keep a break-in at an office in the Watergate building secret – and that only involved a handful of people. Do they really think that of the thousands who would have to be involved in a scheme like this, none of them would sell their stories, or have a crisis of conscience?
I've always felt that Hanlon's Razor is one of the best principles to live by, or, in the words of Sir Bernard Ingham, "cock-up before conspiracy".
-Ben
*This is a irrelevant anecdotal slur, but I’ve heard my share of ‘dumb architect’ stories: structural engineers like to tell stories of the many architects they have dealt with who displayed ignorance of construction methods, structural tolerances, and even really basic physics.
[I was going to write more on this stuff, and I might at some point, but I’m tired now.]
Firstly there is always the way that most people are far more willing to take didactic statements of truth from figures of authority than they are willing to assess evidence on their own. This creates big problems for people trying to debunk conspiracy theories, because they are often started, or prominently backed up, by people with seemingly solid credentials. What is most effective is when a person with an apparently informed background (in the case of the WTC7 conspiracies he’s an architect*) states—without giving any evidence to support his claim—that the scenario he suggests is ‘obvious’ and that ‘anyone can see it’. I’m sure there’s a name for this effect in the study of rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is, either way it is very effective -- it makes people who go along with his arguments feel superior; everyone else, the subconscious logic goes, are idiotic and easily led. The statement that I thought was particularly interesting in this documentary is when the 911 truthman says ‘even a child can see that that isn’t a natural collapse’
Which is just dumb. It’s like saying ‘any child can tell that lightning is caused by fighting sky monsters’ because you think that meteorologists are a sinister cabal who don’t want anyone to learn how they ‘really’ predict the weather. Hypotheses are not given credibility on a first-come-first-serve basis, they have to make sense, and be possible. Generally underpinning all of these things is the anti-intellectualism that seems to be becoming increasingly common in American society in particular. The fact that those who support the official line are world leading authorities on the subject of demolition and structural collapse is seen as irrelevant. Just as the fact that Sarah Palin doesn't seem to know the first thing about the job she's running for, or the sort of issues she'd be expected to deal with, is seen as irrelevant by many.
Even if you disregard the fact that rigging a building for demolition involves tearing out internal walls, drilling holes in columns, and laying miles and miles of cables everywhere (which is hard to do in a busy office building without anyone noticing), this conspiracy theory is no more possible than any of the other unorthodox theories that have surfaced over the years. The reason for this is fairly simple: with each successive counter to their arguments conspiracy theorists add more people to the list of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. What this amounts to, in effect, is that these people are accusing thousands of people of being accessories to mass murder. A list that includes all of the structural engineers that testified at the enquiry, the FDNY and NYPD witnesses who testified that they heard no demolition explosions, as well as thousands of ordinary men and women in the area at the time.
When people come up with these theories they generally envisage them as being masterminded by some devilish incarnation of ‘the man’ and don’t seem to realise what it is that they are, in reality, suggesting. Even if you accept the idea that thousands of people who pledged to help their fellow citizens, who have risked their lives in the course of that vocation, lied and conspired to kill thousands of innocent people, there is an insoluble problem with all this: people are shit at keeping secrets.
Just think, Nixon couldn’t keep a break-in at an office in the Watergate building secret – and that only involved a handful of people. Do they really think that of the thousands who would have to be involved in a scheme like this, none of them would sell their stories, or have a crisis of conscience?
I've always felt that Hanlon's Razor is one of the best principles to live by, or, in the words of Sir Bernard Ingham, "cock-up before conspiracy".
-Ben
*This is a irrelevant anecdotal slur, but I’ve heard my share of ‘dumb architect’ stories: structural engineers like to tell stories of the many architects they have dealt with who displayed ignorance of construction methods, structural tolerances, and even really basic physics.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Buh?
I came across this caption when looking through a book at work. I feel it is necessary to point out that this book isn't one of ours, and I don't think it's in print any more. I was reading the chapter on the chinese economy when I saw this:
Below: An industrial complex at Anshan in Manchuria. Like most industrial installations in this part of china it was begun in the late 1930s by the japanese and symbolises china's continuing debt to the period of occupation.
Now I'm no expert on the Japanese occupation of China, but I've never heard any Chinese officials talking about how grateful they are for what the Japanese did there. Generally historians just focus on the horrifying war crimes and ignore the, er, valuable industrial development I suppose. That or this writer really liked Japan.
-Ben
Below: An industrial complex at Anshan in Manchuria. Like most industrial installations in this part of china it was begun in the late 1930s by the japanese and symbolises china's continuing debt to the period of occupation.
Now I'm no expert on the Japanese occupation of China, but I've never heard any Chinese officials talking about how grateful they are for what the Japanese did there. Generally historians just focus on the horrifying war crimes and ignore the, er, valuable industrial development I suppose. That or this writer really liked Japan.
-Ben
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
PETA
This is interesting. I have always found it odd the way that some animal rights organisations express their desire for humanitarian treatment of animals through campaigns that show a sickening disregard for the humanity of anyone other than themselves. The campaign linked there is a good example, they disapprove of the well being and feelings of animals being compromised in the name of some grand cause (medical research) but have no compunction with heaping even more stigma and distress on autistic children and their families to further their own cause.
Incidentally, since reading Bad Science, I've not been able to take statements like this on face value. Whilst I don't doubt this is a good thing, it took me ages to read through all the meta analysis abstracts to check the blogger's assertions that PETA's claims were wrong, which is a pain. There has been almost no credible research on this subject, and the results of that were inconclusive at best (the most scientifically rigorous of the studies only had 4 participants, which renders it pretty meaningless).
As a thoroughly uninteresting little side note, it's the association with that sort of crap that stopped me from ever describing myself as a 'liberal' on facebook.
-Ben
Incidentally, since reading Bad Science, I've not been able to take statements like this on face value. Whilst I don't doubt this is a good thing, it took me ages to read through all the meta analysis abstracts to check the blogger's assertions that PETA's claims were wrong, which is a pain. There has been almost no credible research on this subject, and the results of that were inconclusive at best (the most scientifically rigorous of the studies only had 4 participants, which renders it pretty meaningless).
As a thoroughly uninteresting little side note, it's the association with that sort of crap that stopped me from ever describing myself as a 'liberal' on facebook.
-Ben
Monday, October 06, 2008
Hmm
Some serious political analysis here. A valuble work I think.
Oh, and this adage is brilliant. (it's not what you think from a quick glance at the URL)
-Ben
Oh, and this adage is brilliant. (it's not what you think from a quick glance at the URL)
-Ben
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Antichrist
Ah, I love the Ship of Fools. The other day they had a look at the state of religious political debate in the US and found it, er, rather odd.
I think this might explain why there's such a high chance of rapture right now (although, to be honest, I've never seen the rapture-o-meter drop below 70%)
-Ben
I think this might explain why there's such a high chance of rapture right now (although, to be honest, I've never seen the rapture-o-meter drop below 70%)
-Ben
Monday, September 22, 2008
The West
This is shop related, but not shop. I just thought I'd add to my collection of 'great shitheads from history' (some mentioned towards the end of this post) with the following character.
Without further ado, I give you Colonel John Milton Chivington - Methodist minister, Abolitionist, and mass-murdering war criminal. Only read that if you think you have a strong stomach.
I came across an article on the Sand Creek Massacre when reading up on Native American history (I know that no-one outside of textbooks ever uses the term, but hey, I'm a middle class white liberal--I can't resist over-sensitive PC terminology). After I read it, I was so disgusted I spent the next half an hour struggling to keep my lunch down, and so angry that I couldn't concentrate on anything for hours. Which really, is a shamefully mild reaction to what I read.
At least I also learned of one person to add to the good people list, Captain Silas Soule. I know it's not considered intelligent to see people in terms of good or bad, and in general I don't. But I believe there are exceptions, and I'll cling to the romantic hope that there is such a thing as a heroic person, even if they only manage to be heroic for a while. When you read the accounts of the massacre you see the horrifying malleability of normal people. A person with a position of authority can just say the word and otherwise normal people will commit atrocities that you wouldn't believe even the lowest, most monstrous person to be capable of. Conversely, Silas Soule refuses to fight and, for the men he leads, the spell is broken and they see what the others are doing for what it is.
On a lighter note, have a read of this article. Hahaha, sigh... mormons.
-Ben
Without further ado, I give you Colonel John Milton Chivington - Methodist minister, Abolitionist, and mass-murdering war criminal. Only read that if you think you have a strong stomach.
I came across an article on the Sand Creek Massacre when reading up on Native American history (I know that no-one outside of textbooks ever uses the term, but hey, I'm a middle class white liberal--I can't resist over-sensitive PC terminology). After I read it, I was so disgusted I spent the next half an hour struggling to keep my lunch down, and so angry that I couldn't concentrate on anything for hours. Which really, is a shamefully mild reaction to what I read.
At least I also learned of one person to add to the good people list, Captain Silas Soule. I know it's not considered intelligent to see people in terms of good or bad, and in general I don't. But I believe there are exceptions, and I'll cling to the romantic hope that there is such a thing as a heroic person, even if they only manage to be heroic for a while. When you read the accounts of the massacre you see the horrifying malleability of normal people. A person with a position of authority can just say the word and otherwise normal people will commit atrocities that you wouldn't believe even the lowest, most monstrous person to be capable of. Conversely, Silas Soule refuses to fight and, for the men he leads, the spell is broken and they see what the others are doing for what it is.
On a lighter note, have a read of this article. Hahaha, sigh... mormons.
-Ben
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Misc
In general I'm a pretty squeamish person. I'm not generally one to fearlessly expose me to stuff that I don't like, whether it's people, ideologies, or music. For some reason though, this doesn't extent to every area of my life. Because, whilst I abhor the rantings of bigots and idiots, I always find there to be something strangely fascinating about them when I encounter these rantings in written form.
In the past my compulsion to read the views of idiots has led me to read page after page of moronic ranting on the 'have your say' section of the BBC website, even, on the worst days, to deliberately subject myself to the comments underneath youtube videos. At the moment though, it takes a slightly (but not greatly) more sane form. I've been reading a lot of reviews on Amazon-US recently, for reasons to do with work, and I've found myself gravitating towards the one star reviews.
I've found that regardless of whether they are saying things I agree with or not, the negative ones always seem more passionate than the positive. I relish it when I find a book with 10 reviews and an average customer rating of 2 stars.
Today though, I started to go that little bit further. I'd find reviewers whose output appeared to be particularly hateful or stupid, then I'd go to their profile page and read all the reviews they'd written. Sometimes this led to amusing little snippets of life, such as the woman who wrote a disparaging review of a self-help book on erectile dysfunction, but then a glowing positive review of a vibrator a few weeks later (yes, Amazon sell pretty much anything). Other times though it provides you with a fascinating character study.
Take, for example, this person - whose reviews display a charming mixture of strongly conservative views, and hints of just about every flavour of bigotry you can name. All coupled with a tendency to make things up, exaggerate, and launch off-topic personal attacks. I'm pretty sure that the books he writes positive reviews of are ones that he's actually read, but I'm not sure whether his vast number of reviews of books that he finds disgusting indicate that he's good at creative reviewing, or that he's a masochist.
I'm assuming it's a he. It seems like a fair thing to assume, when you read the reviews.
---
On an entirely unrelated note, Man Man are rather good. Certainly the creepiest use of xylophone I'd heard in a long time. And "It Overtakes Me" by the Flaming Lips has one of the coolest bass riffs I've heard in a while (cool partly for the riff itself, and partly for the crunchy and delicious bass sound). The video there is a little weird, but the recording is sound.
-Ben
In the past my compulsion to read the views of idiots has led me to read page after page of moronic ranting on the 'have your say' section of the BBC website, even, on the worst days, to deliberately subject myself to the comments underneath youtube videos. At the moment though, it takes a slightly (but not greatly) more sane form. I've been reading a lot of reviews on Amazon-US recently, for reasons to do with work, and I've found myself gravitating towards the one star reviews.
I've found that regardless of whether they are saying things I agree with or not, the negative ones always seem more passionate than the positive. I relish it when I find a book with 10 reviews and an average customer rating of 2 stars.
Today though, I started to go that little bit further. I'd find reviewers whose output appeared to be particularly hateful or stupid, then I'd go to their profile page and read all the reviews they'd written. Sometimes this led to amusing little snippets of life, such as the woman who wrote a disparaging review of a self-help book on erectile dysfunction, but then a glowing positive review of a vibrator a few weeks later (yes, Amazon sell pretty much anything). Other times though it provides you with a fascinating character study.
Take, for example, this person - whose reviews display a charming mixture of strongly conservative views, and hints of just about every flavour of bigotry you can name. All coupled with a tendency to make things up, exaggerate, and launch off-topic personal attacks. I'm pretty sure that the books he writes positive reviews of are ones that he's actually read, but I'm not sure whether his vast number of reviews of books that he finds disgusting indicate that he's good at creative reviewing, or that he's a masochist.
I'm assuming it's a he. It seems like a fair thing to assume, when you read the reviews.
---
On an entirely unrelated note, Man Man are rather good. Certainly the creepiest use of xylophone I'd heard in a long time. And "It Overtakes Me" by the Flaming Lips has one of the coolest bass riffs I've heard in a while (cool partly for the riff itself, and partly for the crunchy and delicious bass sound). The video there is a little weird, but the recording is sound.
-Ben
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Musicalness
Anna Ternheim makes pleasing noises, she's another one of those ethereal yet catchy singer-songwriters that seem to make up a significant proportion of the Swedish export economy these days.
Also, this tour lineup actually made me squeal with glee - Future of the left and Ted Leo, joy! - but alas, in order to see it, I would have to emigrate or hide in someone's cupboard for a month.
One other thing. Not musical; shop, I'm afraid.
I was reading a lot of stuff about the American reproductive law controversy, and I was looking through lists of bestselling sex education books that actually boast that they contain no anatomical diagrams or safe sex advice. Between that, and a load of Christian advice books which all seemed to be based around the idea that women only ever have sex because men pressure them into it, I was seething at my desk for most of the morning. The safe-sex thing I can sort of understand the logic behind, although I don't agree with it, but what possible advantage is leaving out the anatomical diagrams going to have?
My dad's suggestion was "well, I suppose if you don't know where the vagina is, it would make sex rather difficult... Perhaps it's a sort of abstinence thing"
-Ben
Monday, July 14, 2008
Jeebus
I'm generally a pretty liberal 'believe whatever you want' sort of geezer, but there are times when I am left rather baffled. My work involves quite a lot of reading up on the religious attitudes and perspectives to various aspects of human sexuality and reproduction and some of them are really quite disturbing.
Take, for example, the old testament view on menstruation - Dig Leviticus 20:18, which says sex with a woman who's menstruating is all evil and nasty, which is valid enough, I suppose (although I'm not sure why you'd want to punish people for it) but then there's the rather more unpleasant sentiments in Leviticus 15:19-24 which essentially says that any man who goes near a woman who is menstruating has whatever the religious equivalent of cooties/lurgi is, and has to go and sit in the corner of the playground until his friends think he's clean again. Now I know that Leviticus is sort of like the dusty attic of Judeo-Christian religions, where a strange elderly relative sits and denounces everything, but seeing as people take some parts of it very seriously indeed, it worries me what else they're going to take as, if you'll excuse the pun, gospel.
The stuff I read, that is completely in earnest, means that when I come across something like this on one of my searches I'm honestly not sure whether it's a joke or not (it is). Which of course wrongfooted me, so that when I read this I thought that I was reading The Onion, but no. Sadly not.
-Ben
Take, for example, the old testament view on menstruation - Dig Leviticus 20:18, which says sex with a woman who's menstruating is all evil and nasty, which is valid enough, I suppose (although I'm not sure why you'd want to punish people for it) but then there's the rather more unpleasant sentiments in Leviticus 15:19-24 which essentially says that any man who goes near a woman who is menstruating has whatever the religious equivalent of cooties/lurgi is, and has to go and sit in the corner of the playground until his friends think he's clean again. Now I know that Leviticus is sort of like the dusty attic of Judeo-Christian religions, where a strange elderly relative sits and denounces everything, but seeing as people take some parts of it very seriously indeed, it worries me what else they're going to take as, if you'll excuse the pun, gospel.
The stuff I read, that is completely in earnest, means that when I come across something like this on one of my searches I'm honestly not sure whether it's a joke or not (it is). Which of course wrongfooted me, so that when I read this I thought that I was reading The Onion, but no. Sadly not.
-Ben
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Erk
Another vaguely work related post this. In my defence, I am writing about sex all day, so work related doesn't necessarily mean dull. Although it often does, I have to admit - even sex becomes a dull subject after a while.
Today's macabre but interesting little factoid:
The most common cause of death among pregnant women in the United States is murder*.
I'm not sure whether that means that America has really excellent prenatal care programs - that make the rates of illness comparatively insignificant, or that it has serious problems with violence against women.
-Ben
*well, it is in Maryland, and a few other states, where in depth studies have been done over the last few years. In the majority of cases the killer was the significant other.
Today's macabre but interesting little factoid:
The most common cause of death among pregnant women in the United States is murder*.
I'm not sure whether that means that America has really excellent prenatal care programs - that make the rates of illness comparatively insignificant, or that it has serious problems with violence against women.
-Ben
*well, it is in Maryland, and a few other states, where in depth studies have been done over the last few years. In the majority of cases the killer was the significant other.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)