Markers by the flag to explain the white supremacy

A Florida county says hell no we’re not getting rid of the pro-slavery flag; it’s our history, dude.

Marion County, Fla. officials took down the Confederate flag that flies at the county government complex last week, temporarily replacing it with a flag bearing the county seal, News 13 reported. The County Commission unanimously approved a move to fly the flag again days later, saying members would meet with historians to discuss placing markers by the flag to “explain its historical significance.”

I can tell you its historical significance. I majored in history at an actual university, so I know. Its historical significance is that it stands for the confederation of southern states that seceded from the US in order to retain the institution of slavery. It’s a pro-slavery flag. It’s a white supremacist flag. That’s its historical significance.

One Confederate flag supporter told the station: “We live in America, and the last time I checked it was a democracy. So, here in Marion County, which has, what, 300,000 people, how can one man decide to take it off a flagpole?”

It’s a constitutional democracy. I say that as a history major, so you can take it to the bank.

Less shooting, more reading

Malala Yousafzai was at an education summit in Oslo yesterday.

“If the world leaders decide to take one week and a day off from war and weapons, we can put every child in school,” Yousafzai told the Oslo Summit on Education for Development on Tuesday. “Books are a better investment in our future than bullets. Books, not bullets, will pave the path towards peace and prosperity.”

Yousafzai echoed the sentiment in a post on her Malala Fund Blog, urging people to use social media to advance her message of peace and education. “Post a photo of yourself holding up your favorite book now and share why YOU choose #booksnotbullets – and why world leaders should, too,” she wrote.

The activist got the ball rolling on the hashtag with a post on Instagram, featuring a picture of her holding a copy of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Yousafzai wrote she chose the book “because the book reveals the courage and strength of a young girl living under war and conflict. It inspires me to believe that every child deserves the right to dream, the right to learn and the right to live in peace.”

I don’t have a single favorite book (by which I mean I have many, not that I have zero favorites). I’ll have to think about which one to brandish.

Ozymandias in Orlando

Oh gosh, it’s almost as bad as having an honorary professorship withdrawn. Disney is removing a statue of Bill Cosby from one of its parks.

Disney will remove a statue of Bill Cosby from its Hollywood Studios theme park, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday, following revelations through court documents that support multiple allegations that the veteran comedian drugged multiple women before sexually assaulting them.

The bust of Cosby, located alongside representations of celebrities like Lucille Ball and Oprah Winfrey in Disney’s Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame Plaza, will be taken down after the park shuts at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Are there cries of “witch hunt” and “lynch mob” yet? Are there open letters and petitions beseeching Disney to put it back? Has Richard Dawkins added his name?

Several companies and businesses are now trying to distance themselves from Cosby, following the release of documents showing that he admitted, during a sworn testimony in 2005, to buying Quaalude, a powerful sedative, with the intention of giving it to women before having sex with them.

Before raping them, that is.

Guest post: No jobs available today, sweeties

Originally a comment by iknlast on The endless supply of mother-in-law jokes.

I had a job about 15 years ago where sexist jokes were routinely e-mailed around the office, an office divided into (male) engineers and (female) clerical, with a handful of us (mostly female) in hard-to-define positions at the bottom of the echelon of professional positions, doing work that was essentially clerical, but with a “specialist” title that made it look like their highly educated, well skilled people were actually being utilized properly. The first day I was there, my e-mail was graced with a visual joke about a woman-only parking lot. It was a junkyard. [Read more…]

Shifting

Janet Stemwedel did a Storify. Several of the sequences in it are ones that I RTd two or three days ago, wishing I could collect them all without having to go to the trouble of figuring out Storify.

While predictable, it is still frustrating that what started as a discussion of Tim Hunt, his comments to a luncheon of women scientists in Seoul, and what kind of impact those comments (whether intended as a joke or not) have on the climate for women in science, shifted into a discussion of whether those who pointed out the problem with his comments are claiming that he is a terrible human being who ought to be purged from the scientific community, whether the science journalists who reported the comments are lying liars who are just jealous and/or joyless harpies who delight in taking good men down.

In other words the subject got thoroughly changed. It would be nice if we could just talk about the way derogatory “humor” aka hostile jokes about subordinates contribute to a climate that is alienating to the subordinates who are the objects of the jokes, without having the subject changed, but we never seem to be able to. Noticing derogatory jokes is considered a high crime worthy of having the subject changed and changed and changed until all the parts fall off.

So, read that Storify.

The endless supply of mother-in-law jokes

Susan Brownmiller wrote a memoir of the women’s movement that was published in 1999.

At the beginning of the prologue…

Imagine a world – or summon it back into memory – in which the Help Wanted columns were divided into Male for the jobs with a future, and Female for the dead-end positions; …; when psychiatrists routinely located the cause of an unsatisfactory sex life in the frigid, castrating, ballbreaking female partner, when abortion was an illegal, back-alley procedure, when rape was the woman’s fault, when no one dared talk about the battery that went on behind closed doors, or could file a complaint about sexual harassment. And remember the hostile humor that reinforced the times: the endless supply of mother-in-law jokes, the farmer’s daughter, the little old lady in tennis shoes, the bored receptionist filing her nails, the dumb blond stenographer perched on her boss’s lap, the lecherous tycoon chasing his buxom secretary around the desk.

1999; long before Mad Men.

But my point is – sexist jokes are not not-sexist because they’re jokes. On the contrary. There’s always been hostile sexist humor. Jokes can be sexist. Jokes about distracting, emotional women addressed by an important man to a group of women colleagues are, indeed, sexist. Hostile humor is hostile humor.

The university backs away

According to Jessica Smith Cross at Metro Canada, the woo teacher is no longer on the staff at the University of Toronto and the course has been dropped.

Beth Landau-Halpern, a homeopath, came under fire last year when the source materials for her course on alternative medicine at U of T Scarborough were made public. They included YouTube links and other non-academic sources.

Landau-Halpern was cleared by an internal investigation and continued to teach her course this spring.

A spokesperson for the university confirmed on Monday that Landau-Halpern’s course will not be offered this summer or next year, and she is no longer on staff.

Now about that course in Magical Engineering…

Mr Cosby had fashioned himself as a moral guide

The New York Times is reporting the Cosby story.

The entertainer Bill Cosby testified 10 years ago that he had obtained Quaaludes in the 1970s to give to young women with whom he wanted to have sex, according to a court document unsealed on Monday.

That must be the wording of the court document, since all the outlets are reporting it that way, but damn it’s bad wording. You don’t “have sex with” someone you just sedated! Having sex with is, obviously, mutual – that’s what “with” means. He wanted to fuck them, not “have sex with” them. He wanted to rape them. If he’d wanted to have sex with them, he wouldn’t have sedated them.

It was an acknowledgment, the first to become public and in Mr. Cosby’s own words, that he viewed powerful, sedating drugs as a part of his sexual encounters with women.

[Read more…]

The course is taught by a homeopath

Apparently the University of Toronto thinks it’s fine to teach medical woo at a university, not as a meta subject but just plain as a subject. Jen Gunter is not amused.

Earlier this year, two groups of academics at the University of Toronto wrote letters of concern to the President of the University to protest an Alternative health course that fostered distrust of vaccines, cited Andrew Wakefield, and completely mis-applied Quantum Mechanics to explain a bevy of bizarre health claims. This week, the school finally addressed their claims; and the university’s response is both wholly inadequate and totally baffling.

The course, Alternative Health: Practice and Theory is taught by Beth Landau-Halpern, a homeopath. During week 9 of her curriculum, she addresses: “Vaccination — The King of Controversy.”

No medical, nursing, or basic biology/immunology textbooks or articles are referenced in the required reading, nor is any information from Health Canada or the World Health Organization. Instead, the required reading and additional information for the students includes Andrew Wakefield (who lost his medical license for falsifying data in a now beyond-infamous retracted study) and anti-vaccine propaganda sites.

[Read more…]

His real subject

Because of a stupid time-wasting SIWOTI argument I’m having with a tedious prolix humorless commenter in an earlier thread about Howard Jacobson’s reactionary rant about Tim Hunt in the Independent, I want to make clear how strongly Jacobson did imply that Hunt was “hounded out of a job.”

He starts with three paragraphs riffing on personal grooming with a specific focus on nose hair, claiming to be deeply concerned with it himself in contrast to other sorts of people who are not so concerned.

We shouldn’t be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. The day I don’t attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of his appearance, someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal. I will have retreated into myself, to that place where eccentricity and maybe even madness reside. Science, perhaps.

He’s joking, of course. Novelists aren’t generally considered worldly and respectable in contrast to those zany scientists. [Read more…]