All my Canadian friends are chattering about James Lunney right now, a member of parliament who resigned from his party because people were making fun of his deeply held and cherished beliefs…like his views on evolution.
The SPLC has identified eight active Hate Groups in Minnesota. This is so un-Minnesotan: we’re only supposed to have Passive Aggressive Groups here. In case you want to know who to avoid on your trip to the Mall of America or the Spam Museum, here’s the abbreviated list:
It’s an interesting discussion, focusing on the famous The Spandrels Of San Marco paper, but also talking generally about SJ Gould’s ego (it was big and ambitious), and how to properly do an evolutionary research program.
Good. I am tired of it, and I studiously avoided all the nonsense on the web yesterday. With one exception. I thought this one bit of humor was nice. I’ll allow it.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
One of Kent Hovind’s buddies has recorded a long phone call with the guy in jail. It’s exactly what would wind him up: he was asked to critique the Hovind wikipedia page, so it was an excuse to talk about himself for an hour. Here’s the whooooole thing.
Jon Ronson has written a book about public shaming (confession: I have not read it yet, but I have read Ronson’s other books and enjoyed them greatly), So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
This video explaining why so many Americans are circumcised is funny…but it’s also accurate.
Redundant posts are redundant
Except when they aren’t.
Here your gender-workshop-taskmistress Crip Dyke encourages you to revisit the douchegabbery of the Minnesota Child Protection League. PZ did an excellent job of illuminating just that in “Two steps forward, one step back” in December of last year, and the discussion on that thread when it was current included a great many useful comments.
I want, however, not to merely rehash criticisms of MCPL (criticisms well-deserved and well-made the first time around) but to use that example to talk a bit about what “centering” and “marginalized” really mean. In the post on the need for transfeminist critiques of other feminisms, I focussed on Katha Pollit and identified places where, quite frankly, I think she employed some bad thinking to construct some bad feminism. I suggested that marginalization had something to do with this bad thinking on Pollit’s part. Here you can learn more about exactly what marginalization has to do with it …and the extent of my criticism of Pollit, rather than merely Pollit’s column.
I didn’t pick Pollit because her work is low hanging fruit. She has written excellently on many topics. She clearly has the writing chops to be clear about the distinctions between political theorizing and political rhetoric. Yet the only reasonable inference is that she was, in fact, talking about rhetoric when she was using the phrase “political analysis”. She also has the analytical skills to make the distinction between gendered terms like the French pronouns ils and elles, and gender neutral words like people. Yet here, too, she fell down.
So what is the problem with this Katha Pollit person anyway? The problem is the same as one in our community: the inability to think like you’re not. [Read more…]
Yes, he does. I’ve had to put it below the fold just in case it might blister my readers’ eyeballs.
