True Equality

Sports fan politics - “Refudiate”

What is sports fan politics? It’s where you pretend to care about something that you wouldn’t care about if someone from a political party you support had said/done it. I got the term from Ed Brayton on this podcast which deals with the book “mistakes were made” (which is excellent and should be read by all).

Here is a good example of sports fan politics:

Gathered from our referrers page, here are some reactions to Sarah Palin’s now-famous “refudiate” post on Twitter.

Many people (but by no means all) seem to be focusing on Palin’s neologism, and missing the real point — the bigotry and hatred her statements on the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” endorse.

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Ben Smith: Sunday reading: Refudiate

The New Yorker: Meme Watch: ShakesPalin

The Atlantic Wire: Palin Demands Muslims ‘Refudiate’ NYC Mosque, Sparking Criticism, Mockery

Language Log: Refudiate?

Bob Cesca: Refudiate

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/36778_Refudiation_Round-Up

“Refudiate” seems to be a combination of “refute” and “repudiate”. It seems to be the kind of brain fart that I would make on a daily, nay, hourly basis.

I’ve made silly typos and I’ve garbled words. In my “problems with feminism” video I pronounce Simone de Beauvoir’s last name as “boo-vee-ey”. Oops.

It doesn’t matter. It’s inconsequential crap. If someone writes something that is basically incomprehensible then I can understand making a fuss about it. It’s like the people who say “you expect to take me seriously” when I make a typo in a blog post pr essay transcript. The idea that you discount the argument of a person based upon a mistaken work or typo is self evidently stupid as they will not do so when they see it in the writings of a person they like. It’s something that happens only when you don’t like the person or the ideas (and therefore the person) and the brain seeks to reduce dissonance by settling on whatever reason it can to dismiss those ideas or that person. This is a psychological theory of the mind known as “cognitive dissonance” and it' is a very important theory.

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15 sexy scientists? Prepare to wring hands

One of the most things about male feminists is what and-wringing, cringing pussies they can be sometimes.

Here is a list, with photos, of 15 sexy scientists. It has a little excuse for some obvious bias in the choices:

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The worst possible way to handle this is to search the internet for photos of women scientists and make superficial decisions about who the male eye would find sexy. There's a process of judgment that went on behind the scenes, where many women scientists had to have been rejected because they were insufficiently 'hot', and then many of the women dragged into the spotlight had their "scientist" qualifications completely ignored for their literally biological qualifications. It's a reiteration of the same inappropriate judgmental attitude that pretty much every woman scientist suffers through.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/i_have_been_objectified.php

Good grief. He’s complaining that not enough shrift is given to scientific qualifications for a list  called “15 sexy scientists”. Read that title slowly again Myers.

Then there’s the usual yammering about “turning these women into objects” on the comment thread of the post he is referring to (and a lot of good rebuttals too). I can’t help but think that a lot of what these people don’t like about lists like this, is what amounts to a basic railing about the basic fact that looks are more important to women then they are to men. That’s like, get over it and stop being so offended by reality.

NASA to outreach to the Muslim world: Atheist/Skeptic blogs silent

This isn’t exactly new, a lot of you might already know about this story: Obama's New Approach to Joint Space Exploration (original story). Below is a quote from an MSNBC article.

Bolden raised eyebrows in the space community and outrage among conservative pundits by telling Al-Jazeera television recently President Barack Obama had instructed him to work for better outreach with the Muslim world.

He said Obama told him one of his top priorities was to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38212800/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Charles Krauthammer is scathing on this:

I didn’t touch the original story. However, what is noteworthy is that the skeptic/atheist blogs I most regularly visit haven’t mentioned this to my knowing. Take the two main ones on my start-up menu, pharyngula and badastronomy:

muslim nasa site:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

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Does truth matter?

In the ongoing tradition of replies that deserve their own blog post. This one is a follow-up to the “Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer” thread.

Emotion, to me, is my starting point; it is also an important element of the way I communicate.

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I also think that truth is just about anything anybody else wants it to be. ‘Truth’ is a word that is available to me in sea of many other words.

This reminds me of when, discussing God with religious people, if a person says that god is a faith issue for them then there is no point arguing anymore because you have boiled it down the fundamental difference between that person’s view of the world and yours. This is similar to you and I.

Truth is subjective.. Your emotions are your guide.. That is a view I can neither understand nor condone.

Truth is not whatever we want it to be. I believe there is a standard of truth that transcends our emotions and perceptions. That is why I go through efforts to clarify what I am talking about, in this instance that the claims that Ada Lovelace was “the first programmer” are false. You don’t get to answer “yes” or “no” depending on whatever you feel you want to, there is only one answer. Whatever you want to define as a program, if you make the statement that Ada was the first to write it, then the fact that Babbage wrote it for her nullifies the idea that she was the first making the answer a “no”. Plain and simple. The question of whether Babbage was the first is separate, and “giving her the benefit of the doubt” is wishful delusion.

Living on emotions is a bad idea. Should the anti-Semite live on his or her hate? Does the racial lies they tell about Jews, which are truly believed by themselves, be the “starting point” for them? Do my protestations over the claim that that Jews slaughter non-Jews in order to use their blood for knead matzes for Passover [1] get legitimately pushed aside against claims that “emotions are my starting point” or does the truth matter?

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Jonah Goldberg: See You Next Tyranny Day!

Excellent article from Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his mega-best-selling book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, China banned plastic bags a few years ago. “Bam! Just like that — 1.3 billion people, theoretically, will stop using thin plastic bags,” he gushed. “Millions of barrels of petroleum will be saved, and mountains of garbage avoided.”

China’s got us beat, suggests Friedman, because its leaders aren’t hung up on democracy, checks and balances, or any of the other dusty old impediments found in the American system. Friedman has proclaimed his envy for China’s authoritarian system countless times. It’s why he titled one of the chapters in his book “China for a Day.” The idea — he calls it his “fantasy” — is that if we could just be China for a day, the experts could impose by diktat what they cannot win through democratic debate.

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Such arguments are as old as they are dangerous. And they are arrogant beyond description. People like Friedman automatically assume that their preferred policies are so obviously right, so objectively enlightened, that there’s no need to debate them or vote on them.

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Such arrogance is dangerous. The literature on the unintended consequences of policies crafted by experts is at least as old as the field of economics. Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century economist, noted all that separated the good economist from the bad is the ability to appreciate the possibility of the unforeseen. Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek demonstrated that healthy economies couldn’t be controlled by experts, because the experts will always have a “knowledge problem.” They can never know all of the variables and never fully predict how their theories will play out in reality.

This is Iran: Iranian Woman Sentenced To Stoning After Being Lashed

This is Iran:

Amnesty said she received flogging of 99 lashes as per her sentence but was subsequently accused of "adultery while being married" in September 2006 during the trial of a man accused of murdering her husband.

Mostafai said his client knew the man who "killed her husband and because she was at home when the murder took place, she was accused as accomplice."

"But after her kids pardoned her in the case of murder, she now stands accused of adultery with that man."

Mostafai added that such cases involving women in Iran arise due to difficulties in getting divorces with husbands despite "having troubled marriages."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hsH_Nwq_L045KhDsWEhGeDExJ6_A

This is the UN:

Iran Wins Membership to the U.N Commission on the Status of Women

Women arrested and imprisoned for having suntans? Check. Women stoned to death for adultery? Check. Random persecution, detainment, violent arrest, and imprisonment of women's rights activists and mourning mothers? Check. Women blamed for causing earthquakes? Check. Use of makeup illegal because it makes women dishonorable? Check!

Sounds like the Islamic Republic of Iran is all set for membership to the U.N Commission on the Status of Women! Welcome, Iran, and thank you for helping to set the bar for the status of women around the world. It's exhilarating that the U.N and its member states have so clearly sent the message that women belong under the control of authoritarian governments, under the cover of dress codes and the watch of morality police, and in prison or the grave if they don't obey their male controllers.

http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/iran_wins_membership_to_the_un_commission_on_the_status_of_women

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Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us

An amazing piece of writing.

You can help with an exciting new personal project

Hi all. I’ve not made a video in ages, that is pretty obvious. Apart from life disruptions, I have been working on a project that has been absorbing a lot of my time. I want my first return video to be about this project so please be patient.

You can help me with it. What issues would you include under the rubric of MRA / Anti-feminist? Obviously there would be paternity fraud, false rape allegations, circumcision, parental alienation, etc. The current list I have is listed below. If you can think of some other obvious issues that I’ve missed then please let me know. Also, of you have a different idea about the master-child categorisation then let me know about that too. I’ve been saying this for ages but I should be back soon.

LAW AND POLITICS

• Anti male law proposals
• Quotas for women
• Positive discrimination
• Different standards for men
• Feminism and the left
• Feminism and the right
• Differences in sentencing for men
• Conscription to the military

SOCIALISATION & RELIGION

• Chivalry
• Man bashing
• Portrayal of men in the media
• Portrayal of women in the media
• The attempted socialisation of children
• Matriarchal societies
• Patriarchy societies
• Treatment of men in history
• Treatment of women in history
• Abuse of women in religion
• Women under Islam
• Men and women under religion

EDUCATION

• Feminist indoctrination
• Anti-male discrimination
• Positive discrimination
• Quotas for women
• Women's studies courses
• Educational achievement gap
• Difference in learning habits
• Sex education

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Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer

I have received a response to my argument about Ada Lovelace being the “The most overrated figure in the history of computing” (first video result for Google searches of “ada lovelace” – booh yeah!"). This blog post is a counter-response.

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A lot of your argument seems to revolve around making the case that Ada Lovelace (also known as Augusta Ada King) was a talented and intelligent woman. I agree on this, especially when you consider the limitations of her time.

However, none of this matters. All that matters is whether the massive accreditation that is given to her as the “first programmer” is true, and I contend that it is not. Your argument was essentially one of admiration, an admiration that a woman in a society that did not offer women the opportunities that ours does. I understand the sentiment but such emotion can also cloud one’s own judgement. When people become emotionally invested in an idea then they lose objectivity on it. Ada has been described as a “prophet” [1]. You can buy T-shirts entitled “Heroine: Ada Lovelace” [2]. One does not have to search very far to find articles describing with glee that the first programmer was a woman [3][4][5]. Frankly, I feel that the promotion of Ada Lovelace has more to do with political correctness that objective fact.

Some of the descriptions of Ada pass from “creative” to “egregious” take for example the following paragraph:

Computers have had a massive influence our lives over the last 60 years, but they were actually first invented nearly 200 years ago. And one of the pioneers was a female mathematician called Ada Lovelace, who created one of the first computer programs and understood something of the enormous potential of computers.

[6] http://plus.maths.org/issue34/features/ada/index.html

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The Princess and the Frog. Racist too, apparently

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

“THE Princess and the Frog” does not open nationwide until December, but the buzz is already breathless: For the first time in Walt Disney animation history, the fairest of them all is black.

Who cares. Judge me not by the colour of my skin yada yada yada.. I only say that, because I’m a racist though. The modern disease is to judge everything through the lens of race. yeah baby! That’s not racist thought. Paying constant attention to, and deference to race isn't in any way race-ism, do you disagree? Racist. Moving on.

After viewing some photographs of merchandise tied to the movie, which is still unfinished, Black Voices, a Web site on AOL dedicated to African-American culture, faulted the prince’s relatively light skin colour. Prince Naveen hails from the fictional land of Maldonia and is voiced by a Brazilian actor; Disney says that he is not white.

“Disney obviously doesn’t think a black man is worthy of the title of prince,” Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. “His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking their head in befuddlement and even rage.”

Sweet Jebus. This world is filled with insufferable jackasses and busybodies with nothing better to waste their time on (ahem). I swear. The issue is not this victim movement or that victim movement. It’s the mentality of the human victim complex and groupthink. These people are invested in a victim worldview. They are happy in being unhappy.

Of course, armchair critics have also been complaining about the princess. Disney originally called her Maddy (short for Madeleine). Too much like Mammy and thus racist. A rumour surfaced on the Internet that an early script called for her to be a chambermaid to a white woman, a historically correct profession. Too much like slavery.

And wait: We finally get a black princess and she spends the majority of her time on screen as a frog?

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