Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion

~ Clarissa

Getting (and keeping) girls interested in science and math.

“Women’s intuition” and patriarchal veil-making.

A Purim giveaway organized by a fellow blogger.

“Don’t you miss the good old days, back when abortions in the USA happened about as often as they do nowadays, but thousands of women died every year?” Why isn’t anybody hearing people who make this important and obvious point?

“”All can agree that rape is a horrific act of violence that no one should ever undergo. But abortion after a rape robs an innocent victim of a very beautiful life.”” I had to read this statement five times before I finally managed to deduce who is supposed to be having this beautiful life in this kind of a situation. It’s scary that so many certifiable people are roaming the streets.

And this is how real Conservatives see Santorum: “Santorum increasingly brags about his working class roots.This is a terminological inexactitude. Working men and women are decent hard-working, law-abiding individuals. Rick Santorum  was born in the gutter, lives in the gutter, and is most likely to die in the gutter.” Didn’t I tell you that true Conservatives were very angry at the religious fanatics that are making the entire Conservative movement look bad?

Danny has written a great post on the Friend Zone.

In case you worship Canada as the place where crazed fanatics who despise women and abhor progress do not exist, read this unhinged set of ramblings documenting a fit of hysteria from a Canadian hater of freedom, life, and love. The moral of the story: the points of view manifested in the post are evidence of psychopathology that has nothing whatsoever to do with where the unhealthy person in question lives.

For those who loved the photos of baby turtles last week, here are more photos! My love of turtles borders on pathological.

And this is the street where I spent my youth, being studious and responsible. Or, to be more precise, boozing and partying. The bar on the second floor (where you can see people see on the balcony) is my favorite cigar and martini bar that makes 100 different martinis. I miss home, people.

How to survive jury duty while autistic.

“Many public choice schoilars – myself included – view many voters as being rationally ignorant – there is a negative return to becoming well-informed about political elections.. A few of my more sceptical colleagues at George Mason University – Bryan Caplan* foremost among them –  argue that many voters are rationally irrational and vote as though they are  simply stupid.”

A great post on the TMI. I agree completely that pulling a TMI on a person is a passive-aggressive method of manipulation.

I will not be writing on the Koran burning in Afghanistan but here is a good and detailed post on the subject instead.

Reflections on EcoNuttery. It’s sad to see essentially good causes overrun by fanaticism.

A great comic strip on personhood. I dislike comics passionately, but this one is good.

The 2012 Oscars and the Bechdel Test.

Approval Rate for GOP Among Women Takes Nosedive. We do have the right to vote these days, Messrs. Romney and Santorum. Maybe it’s a good idea to keep that in mind. Or not, because you have lost this election already.

What a talented blogger this is: “Organics were good. Walking was good. Cloth diapers were good. Doing things the way they had been done for hundreds of years was good. Conventionally grown food, driving, disposable diapers, industrialization, was all bad. The framework served several purposes: it served as a secular moral code, and it allowed me to feel good about myself when I adhered to it. . . And it wasn’t because I was anti-science exactly. It was that I needed my heuristic to work. Because how else would I know how to live?” The entire post is fantastic. I highly recommend.

A really brilliant takedown of Rush Limbaugh’s recent outpouring of hatefulness: “As for you, Limbaugh, you are society’s intellectual garbage can.  Nothing but shit spews from that anus that you call a mouth.  Nothing you have ever said is of any societal worth, and I hope you end up alone and miserable.  Of course, you never will.  There is no shortage of conservative idiots to listen to your stupidity.  They don’t believe in birth control, after all, and so they are producing large hordes of offspring who are just as slack-jawed and stupid as their parents.” I really like this passionate and direct style of writing.

Finally, a good, informative post on rape, consent and disability.

A great deconstruction of Libertarian arguments. Insightful and funny.

And what did I tell you? Reasonable Conservatives are horrified at what their party has been turned into by crazy folks.

And the post of the week is definitely the following: “The Supreme Court did not grant women the right to an abortion. Nor did any of the other men in various parliaments and legislatures around the world. Abortion is. It always has been, and always will be. It is as much a fact of life as menstruation, masturbation, and sex. . . Men have not “given” it to us, nor can they take it away.”

P.S. The link encyclopedia looks a lot better and is easier to use in this new template, don’t you think?

Published by Clarissa

12 thoughts on “Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion”

  3. To humanities professors: what would you do if you applied for a grant that required that you employ a student research assistant for 300 hours during the summer (you don’t pay for the assistant, but you are required to employ him/her). What kind of tasks would you assign the student (it has to be related to your research)? I’ve had great suggestions, but would always like to hear more: http://spanishteachingissues.blogspot.com/2012/03/question-to-humanities-professors.html

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  6. Thanks, Clarissa! I’m honored to have been included this week 🙂 Also, I love the Sunday encyclopedia – I’m constantly adding blogs you’ve highlighted to my google reader – thanks for having such a great round-up 🙂

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  8. I got interested in this article:

    The Republic of Babel


    “The Republic of Babel” is about the US need to develop a language of discourse. He writes that the language of the Founders, the most secular language that existed in that era, worked, but that since then secularism has developed into a more complete worldview:

    Today, secularism is part of many people’s individual identity. And so, demanding that other people express themselves in secular terms in public can mean that I want them to adopt my tribal identity and abandon their own.
    …
    Second, all sides need to examine themselves for tribalism — secularists most of all, perhaps, because many of us are unaware of the possibility of secular tribalism. We may need to construct a meta-secular language that purges the tribalism out of secularism. Religious people need to keep asking what is really essential to their religion and what is simply a tradition that has become a comfortable habit and a source of tribal identity.

    What does he mean by a meta-secular language exactly? May be you’ll post about it? The topic and what this language may be.

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      1. I understand he means not Esperanto or Russian, but concepts. What I have difficulty is seeing exactly how to “purge tribalism out of secularism”. I hoped to get an example how f.e. have pro-right for abortion argument in this meta-secular language vs usual secular language (?).

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  9. This sounds frightening, if he is right:
    http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/03/05/the-real-meaning-of-obama%e2%80%99s-new-policy-war-is-inevitable/

    Wanted to ask your opinion on Iran getting nukes.

    Indeed, according to Obama, Israel must attack Iran at that point. After all, if Obama says Israel cannot live with an Iranian nuclear capability how can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be less concerned about Israeli security than the president? And how can Obama then ignore what he said would be completely unacceptable for U.S. interests by not backing such an attack or even participating in it?
    …
    Many will applaud this. I don’t. In my opinion, it would be better to set the bar at Israel’s freedom of action if it ever determined that there was a threat of nuclear attack from Iran. After all, such a framework would make war or a nuclear conflict less likely whereas the principle of attacking at the point where Iran might have weapons at all makes war and a possible nuclear conflict later on far more likely.

    Yet Obama has explicitly rejected containment, which in this context makes it clear that there can be no scenario in which Iran has nuclear weapons but their use is deterred by early-warning stations, the threat of American or Israeli attack, and defensive measures.

    In addition, Obama escaped past apparent commitments by invoking the national interest as making it preferable for the United States not to do something. But now he has defined destroying Iran’s nuclear capability as a basic U.S. interest. He has left himself no way out.

    By the way, has Obama considered Russia’s warning that it will defend Iran in his new policy? With Vladimir Putin back in power will this contribute to a U.S.-Russia confrontation?

    And did Obama consult any U.S. allies or Congress on this policy? What happened to his much-advertised multilateralism? And this is from the man who savaged his predecessor over Iraq, when Bush did have a UN and a congressional resolution basically authorizing the use of force?
    …
    And consider this: The Iranian government would now be perfectly justified in regarding any Israeli attack as an attack also by the United States. Obama has thrown away any possibility of distancing the United States from an Israeli operation or any credible deniability of responsibility. The Tehran government would be far more likely to attack American institutions, personnel, and shipping after an Israeli attack.

    We are now on the road to war. That’s what is important, not whether Obama gained votes or whether he is sincere or at precisely what second U.S. policymakers decide Iran has met the conditions for getting bombed.

    This is huge and it is an unprecedented U.S. position that can be summarized as follows: Iran gets nukes. Boom!

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    1. What can I say other than that the US is the ONLY country in the world that has used the nuclear weapons on people. On actual human beings. Civilians. Small children. Babies. Old people. Disabled people. As a result, the US has lost the moral right to have any opinion on the subject. Based on past experiences, the greatest danger to the world lies in the possession of nuclear weapons by a country who has already used them and never even changed its official story about how that was a good idea.

      The only reasonable position is either everybody should have the nuclear weapons or nobody. I’d prefer that nobody have them but that, obviously, is not happening.

      (NotaBene: I get extremely angry when people start defending the nuclear holocaust the US unleashed on Japan. Anybody who tries to defend or explain away this horror on my blog does that at their own peril.)

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