^do sol le te ↵

andrewfm: Whenever anyone suggests I reject utilitarianism because it’s too demanding, or...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:19:01 -0500

Whenever anyone suggests I reject utilitarianism because it’s too demanding, or criticizes me for believing in it when I don’t maximize the good all the time, I wonder what kind of world we’d live in if we all gave up our moral ideals whenever we failed to live up to them.

Linda Martín Alcoff - “Philosophy’s Civil...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:24:12 -0500

Linda Martín Alcoff - “Philosophy’s Civil Wars”

Alcoff raises the question of the moral and political stakes of philosophy’s current internal divisiveness, as well as its relation to the professions’ “demographic challenges.” She challenges the widely held belief that the professions’ dominance by white males has no bearing on its content. Other disciplines, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities, have addressed their demographic shortcomings and made significant headway. The question is: what is holding philosophy back? Alcoff suggests it is the profession’s self-understanding as an enterprise that is aimed above all at truth, where the pursuit of truth is understood to be exempt from the quotidian concerns of sociology. She offers two counterexamples from within philosophy itself that provide other ways to think about truth: from contemporary philosophers of science, and from the tradition of Latin American philosophy. These traditions contextualize the processes within which we arrive at truth. Philosophy’s civil wars will no doubt continue, but Alcoff hopes the true stakes of these wars will become more apparent.

fuckyeahfeminists: thefeministpress: myphoria: Check out the...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:27:05 -0500

fuckyeahfeminists:

thefeministpress:

myphoria:

Check out the contrast between these search results. Not a single “loser”, “easy”, “desperate”, “stupid”, “scum” or similar insult in the search results for fathers.

Why, society, are single fathers so often seen with sympathy and admiration, yet single mothers are painted as a washed-up, disgusting strain on the system?

We need feminism because of realities like this.

This makes me sad. Another reminder of the misogynist society we live in.

pushing hoops with sticks: The 'we' referred to here is admittedly very small, thank goodness.

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 03:50:46 -0500

pushing hoops with sticks: The 'we' referred to here is admittedly very small, thank goodness.:

pushinghoopswithsticks:

The greater number of platforms for self-documentation we’re offered the more we dramatize our lives. The mundane insists on becoming poignant, the routine, tragic. (Remember fml dot com?) Together we broadcast the things that happen to us and feel good about feeling bad, because the problems we journal are of humble magnitude and comic bad luck, gentle on the conscience. Social anxiety and depression become character depth, ineptitude becomes a narrative arc. The inhabitants of cosmic real estate might find us contemptible or endearing. As our narcissism (if that’s what we’re calling it) grows, our self awareness reaches new heights. And we grow dully queasy but uncertain of why, like “fish trying to notice water”. And we mistake our comfortable lives as vessels of deep truths and vainly scavenge for the wisdom that every song and movie promised we’d find by now. Coming up empty ended we lacquer the experiences in an HD patina made for television, trying wallow in the cinema of our everyday and languishing at the stubbornly uncinematic quality of our existence. We end up writing silly poetry and shows about just us but we title them “Everyone.” We are Truman and the camera men and the dedicated audience. Good morning, and in case I don’t see you, follow me on twitter.

More or less skewered by the first half of this.

To Hell with Good Intentions by Ivan Illich

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 03:02:37 -0500

To Hell with Good Intentions by Ivan Illich:

pushinghoopswithsticks:

An address by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968.

dvdp: 130616

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:20:03 -0500

dvdp:

130616

"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:35:37 -0500

“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God.
It fell, and broke into pieces.
Everybody took a piece of it,
and they looked at it and thought they had the Truth.”

- Rumi (via thelittlephilosopher)

"The cornerstone of liberal democracy is the notion that free speech allows us to create a..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:20:23 -0500

“The cornerstone of liberal democracy is the notion that free speech allows us to create a marketplace of ideas, from which we can use the political process to collectively choose the society we want. Most critiques of this system tend to focus on the ways in which this marketplace of ideas isn’t totally free, such as the ways in which some actors have substantially more influence over what information is distributed than others.

The more fundamental problem, however, is that living in an existing social structure creates a specific set of desires and motivations in a way that merely talking about other social structures never can. The world we live in influences not just what we think, but how we think, in a way that a discourse about other ideas isn’t able to. Any teenager can tell you that life’s most meaningful experiences aren’t the ones you necessarily desired, but the ones that actually transformed your very sense of what you desire.

We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible. This is why same sex relationships, in violation of sodomy laws, were a necessary precondition for the legalization of same sex marriage. This is also why those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.”

- [Moxie Marlinspike]

Malcolm Harris is a goddamn master troll

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:31:25 -0500

Malcolm Harris is a goddamn master troll

INEQUALITY AND NEW YORK’S SUBWAY

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:26:26 -0500

INEQUALITY AND NEW YORK’S SUBWAY:

New York City has a problem with income inequality. And it’s getting worse—the top of the spectrum is gaining and the bottom is losing. Along individual subway lines, earnings range from poverty to considerable wealth. The interactive infographic here charts these shifts, using data on median household income, from the U.S. Census Bureau, for census tracts with subway stations.

Photo

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:34:25 -0500

"The idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:32:26 -0500

“The idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false.”

-
Because we still live largely segregated lives, such networking fosters categorical inequality: whites help other whites, especially when unemployment is high. Although people from every background may try to help their own, whites are more likely to hold the sorts of jobs that are protected from market competition, that pay a living wage and that have the potential to teach skills and allow for job training and advancement. So, just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.

[Nancy DiTomaso, “How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment”]

It’s been a beautiful relationship, but I finally decided...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:30:12 -0500

It’s been a beautiful relationship, but I finally decided to stop following my dear friend qhan today.

girljanitor: think-progress: Even 50 years after the Equal Pay...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 03:13:18 -0500

girljanitor:

think-progress:

Even 50 years after the Equal Pay Act.

white women are earning 77 cents for every dollar a white man earns. the actual breakdown goes a bit more like this:

white women make more than Black AND Hispanic men

Black and Hispanic women make less than all aforementioned categories

whoops your intersectionality here you dropped it

girljanitor: ghostdaddotcx: Self reblogging to add a thing I...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:51:28 -0500

girljanitor:

ghostdaddotcx:

Self reblogging to add a thing I found:

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/

The account @Anti_Racism_Dog didn’t last long. Twitter suspended it quickly, a fate reserved only for the most aggressive, abusive and hateful users. What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it.

For the short time it lasted, it was amazing to watch how people reacted to @Anti_Racism_Dog. The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. They demand to be engaged in debate (‘Tell me how what I said was racist!’) or appeal to objective definitions (‘The dictionary says racist means X, therefore nothing I said was racist’), but @Anti_Racism_Dog just barks.

@Anti_Racism_Dog inverted the usual balance of energy in online dialogs about race. Precisely because the dominant global discourse is white-supremacist, it is rhetorically easier to make a racist argument than an anti-racist one. Look at almost any comment thread or discussion board about race and you can see anti-racists working laboriously to be convincing and to play on their opponents’ ‘logical’ turf, and racists repeating the same simple lines they were taught (‘I didn’t own slaves’, ‘I’m just stating the facts’, ‘The Irish were persecuted too’, etc.) ‘Trolling’ as a certain kind of internet harassment is tied to time: the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do. It’s the most micro of micro-politics, an interpersonal tug of war for the only thing that matters. But have you ever played tug of war with a dog?

A true troll doesn’t have a position to protect because to establish one would leave it vulnerable to attack, and playing defence takes time. @Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering.

The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online.

THIS ARTICLE HAS TEETH

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:47:09 -0500

““I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.””

- Stephen Jay Gould (via tabularasae)

bare-life: Undocumented People, Allies Block Intersection...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:58:26 -0500

bare-life:

Undocumented People, Allies Block Intersection During President’s Los Angeles Fundraiser Calling for Stop to Deportations

"Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think things together that appear..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:51:51 -0500

“Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think things together that appear to be separate and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.”

- [Angela Davis, University of Chicago, May 2013]

pretty much perfect

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:05:54 -0500

pretty much perfect

malefeminists: In case you missed it (ICYMI): Megyn Kelly takes...

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:23:00 -0500

malefeminists:

In case you missed it (ICYMI): Megyn Kelly takes down Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs for attacking working women. Fox News is still largely a theater channel, not a news one, but this is still fun to see, at least. (via Think Progress)

Awesome. Anyone have links to some of the studies she cites?

EDIT: Here’s the 2010 APA meta-analysis of maternal employment Kelly mentions.

This meta-analysis of 69 studies (1,483 effect sizes) used random effects models to examine maternal employment during infancy/early childhood in relation to 2 major domains of child functioning: achievement and behavior problems. Analyses of studies that spanned 5 decades indicated that, with a few exceptions, early employment was not significantly associated with later achievement or internalizing/externalizing behaviors. The exceptions were for teacher ratings of achievement and internalizing behaviors: Employment was associated with higher achievement and fewer internalizing behaviors. Substantial heterogeneity among the effect sizes prompted examination of moderators. Sample-level moderator analyses pointed to the importance of socioeconomic and contextual variables, with early employment most beneficial when families were challenged by single parenthood or welfare status. Maternal employment during Years 2 and 3 was associated with higher achievement. Some moderator analyses indicated negative effects of employment for middle-class and 2-parent families and for very early employment (child’s first year). Associations also differed depending on whether effect sizes were adjusted for contextual variables. Only 1 study-level moderator (sex of first author) was significant after adjusting for other moderators. The small effect size and primarily nonsignificant results for main effects of early maternal employment should allay concerns about mothers working when children are young. However, negative findings associated with employment during the child’s first year are compatible with calls for more generous maternal leave policies. Results highlight the importance of social context for identifying under which conditions and for which subgroups early maternal employment is associated with positive or negative child outcomes.