The truly shocking crap written in the most recent textbook on gender studies.
A very important and enlightening article on heroin overdose. Hat tip to Bob Basil on whose blog I found it.
If people choose to use Facebook because they don’t want the bother of looking for their own readership, shouldn’t they accept the platform’s rules?
A beautiful post from my favorite food blogger.
Among all the things about Ivanka Trump one can criticize, people pick on her having a good vocabulary? Really?
I found the interview interesting:
Rabbi Yisrael Lau: Is there anything left of the Jewish state?
As he marks his 80th birthday, Israel’s former chief rabbi is officially retiring after 56 years of activity, including two terms as the Tel Aviv city rabbi. In a special interview, he talks about the Shabbat wars in his city, the Pride Parade, the religionization of the IDF and his memories from Buchenwald, which follow him wherever he goes.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4979585,00.html
I was frightened by the quoted below part. You are writing about globalization, liquid capital and so on, but I don’t see how all these will prevent Israel strongly going in the direction described by the Rav during my lifetime. I would love to see another huge wave from FSU, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem likely.
QUOTE
At the same time, the Israeli youth is shifting to the right and moving closer to religion. Will my grandchildren have to cover their heads?
“Society is moving in a more religious direction, because religious families have more children. It’s a natural process, and it might have happened faster it if were not for the waves of immigration from the Soviet Union, and it will keep happening if there is no massive aliyah from the United States.
“As for your grandchildren, I don’t think they will have to. I would like to believe that they would want to, that it would be the atmosphere. I see a strong desire to learn among secular youth. It isn’t translated into a religious lifestyle, into becoming religious, but it is translated into a desire to know more. I feel it everywhere. It’s not an awakening campaign organized by the Military Rabbinate. It’s coming from the bottom.
“It’s affected by the political situation too. When the coalition is based on foundations of so many Knesset members, from the Bayit Yehudi party, from Shas, from United Torah Judaism, and they assume positions like in the Education Ministry, it has an effect. It penetrates.”
So will we end up living in a halachic state?
“I don’t see it in the horizon, but I would like to ease your fears: You won’t have to go into a bomb shelter when it happens. In the meantime, I am more concerned about the influence of foreign cultures.”
LikeLike
The truly shocking crap written in the most recent textbook on gender studies.
Even in context it does not improve. It doesn’t even make sense. Men are not budgies or infants who forget that women are there if you shroud them in black. Bleagh.
LikeLike
It’s like they are purposefully trying to slaughter an already moribund field.
LikeLike
On a completely different topic, I was Harry Potter fan and J.K. Rowling’s words to Harvard graduates resonated with me:
\ You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/06/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
You may not be interested in fantasy but since you’re interested in Russia, even Russian speakers who have never read Rowling’s HP books will be amused or / and saddened by Russian version of HP – “Дети против волшебников” неизвестного ‘греческого’ автора. You once said many popular English children books were stupid (forcing your sister to change the story), try beating new patriotic-religious Russian version!
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/675136
LikeLike
In the new gender studies textbook, there’s also a section entitled “The Manly Art of Pregnancy.”
LikeLike
May be now rape victims will have an easier time in court:
\ a new study from the Karolinksa Institutet and the Stockholm South General Hospital in Sweden has confirmed this – according to the research, the majority of rape victims find themselves involuntarily unable to move, which “blocks” physical resistance.
It’s called “tonic immobility” – described as “an involuntary, temporary state of motor inhibition in response to situations involving intense fear” – and could be a game-changer when it comes to how rape victims are treated in hospitals and court.
“The courts may be inclined to dismiss the notion of rape [if] the victim didn’t appear to resist,” study lead author Dr. Anna Möller told Broadly.
“Instead, what might be interpreted as passive consent is very likely to represent normal and expected biological reactions to an overwhelming threat.”
LikeLike
The problem is, if a person doesn’t resist or refuse sex, how is the other person to know that the sex is not wanted?
LikeLike
Perhaps one should not attempt to have sex with someone who is not enthusiastic about it?
LikeLike
There are all kinds of sexual personae. Some are rah-rah, let’s do it, this is fun! Others are quieter, more understated.
LikeLike
Well, I guess sexuality that is so quite and understated that one cannot be sure if one wants sex or not will be eventually weeded out by non-natural selection… “Non-natural” here is not synonymous to “bad” or “good”, just affected by non purely biological factors, such as legal issues.
LikeLike
I don’t think it should be illegal to be a crappy mind-reader. I often find it hard to process non-verbal cues and I don’t think this is something that should be criminalized.
LikeLike
I do not know where the border is… On one hand I do not want to criminalize poor mind-readers either, on the other hand – why can’t people use verbal communication, if in doubt??? I do not want to criticize anybody’s personal preferences here, but perhaps if for someone using verbal communication turns him or her off sexually, it is first and foremost the psychological problem of this someone, not the problem of the legal system?
LikeLike
What if they are not in doubt, though? It’s definitely a psychological issue to believe you are so irresistible that nobody can avoid wanting to have sex with you, but is it a crime? Should psychological deviation from a very culturally-mediated norm be criminalized?
And more importantly to me and my personal obsessions, is the state’s willingness to mediate emotions and interpersonal relationships and private foibles a way to compensate for not doing much else aside from that? The state “protects” students from emotional damage caused by careless remarks yet does nothi ng to alleviate their debt burden, for instance. It’s exactly what I described in my last post.
LikeLike
Well, there is an obvious difference between murder 1 and manslaughter, but manslaughter is still a crime. I also do not think it is right to let the alleged perpetrator decide that his or her actions were in the realm of the private emotional life that should not be regulated by the state. Regardless of what state does or does not do with student debt. And in general lumping completely unrelated social problems together and making solving one of them conditional on solving another is not a good idea, IMHO.
What if it’s not a perpetrator but simply a person who didn’t read the non-verbal cues well enough? Or didn’t manage to please a year after the sex, like the Mattress guy or the Montana fellow? What good was,served by persecuting them? Why did it all happen? We can look at each case in isolation but for how long?
LikeLike
\ The problem is, if a person doesn’t resist or refuse sex, how is the other person to know that the sex is not wanted?
While discussing this research and its implications, the focus is not on questions like “how can I know whether she likes me or not, if she smiled at me once?” We are talking about rapists who know extremely well what they are doing. Would any normal person really not notice that one’s partner is frozen from fear and revulsion?
In today’s American reality, police may have difficulties believing victims who didn’t fight their attackers. I am not talking about the difficulties of proving in court, but about believing such cases of ‘real rape’ exist at all.
Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Missouri, feels free to claim it is “really rare” when pregnancy results from rape since “If it is a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.”
The ignorance about reactions to rape is huge, and I hope this research will disseminate the knowledge and help rape victims find more support in American society.
LikeLike
We are not talking about rapists but of people who might be accused of rape. There’s an immense difference. Look at the Mattress Lady. She claimed a year after the fact that she was frozen from fear and revulsion. Yet in the meanwhile, she kept sending lovey texts to the guy for months after. How was he supposed to figure it out when she herself didn’t? And mind you, I think he’s a total jerk for sleeping with somebody who was clearly in live with him and took the sex to mean something much more. But there’s a difference between being a jerk and being a criminal.
LikeLike
By the way, there are much more egregious cases than the Matress Lady, they just weren’t as publicized.
LikeLike
We started from el’s example of people that are paralyzed by fear (or maybe the mechanism of this response is different, the main point is that they are effectively paralyzed) and therefore incapable of providing feedback on whether they want to have sex or not. We were not talking about fucking people who smiled a bit too much or a bit too little. Or about “mattress girl”. We were talking about people who did not indicate their consent. Mattress girl was invoked by you, and I find this argument questionable. Bringing up an extreme example and generalizing from it…
And I used construct “alleged perpetrator” anyway. See, I could be falsely accused of stealing, embezzling government money, or extorting bribes or sexual favors from students in exchange for grades. Fortunately such false allegations never happened, but they may, some day. I wish it would be enough to just give my word that I did not do it, and it would all go away immediately. But this is unrealistic. Because some people really do those bad things and then lie about not doing them. Thus, such allegations have to be investigated. That’s why we have legal system. Detectives, courts of law, etc. Why should rape allegations be treated any differently?
LikeLike
Other than through the powers of mind-reading, I don’t know how a reasonable person cam be expected to gauge these tenuous emotional states before or after. I believe that all these discussions about minds changed in the process and frozennesses trivialize a serious crime for no good purpose.
Right now, there are not enough detectives and courts to treat existing cases here in the US. In Canada, things are clearly not much better. Clearly, nobody will run around trying to investigate frozennesses. No, this will only be used to create intolerable environments on campuses and workplaces where anybody can be accused years after the fact and be castigated. Like in that case in Montana, where a woman literally hounded a guy for sex and there is plentiful evidence of that and then a year later realized she’d been raped by him. Who do you think lost in that case?
What’s the use of all This? What’s the great public good sought?
LikeLike
\ What if they are not in doubt, though? It’s definitely a psychological issue to believe you are so irresistible that nobody can avoid wanting to have sex with you, but is it a crime? Should psychological deviation from a very culturally-mediated norm be criminalized?
I read in the research on sexual assault and rape on US college campuses that “research suggests 90% of rapes at colleges are perpetrated by 3% of college men — indicating a real issue of repeat offenders.”
Those men are criminals who are very good at pretending to be innocent lambs who believed they were irresistible and so on. It is not unique to rape: every criminal is glad to hide under the cover of ignorance and supposed good intentions.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, the research on the subject is often deeply flawed, starting with the famous study that “proved” 25% of female students were victims of rape. The reality, however, was that it demonstrated nothing of the kind. It was all invented.
LikeLike
N.B. Rauner is canceling 911 service and in an Ohio town, opioid overdosers will pay for the first couple of calls via community service. The third overdose call will not be answered, and they will be allowed to die.
LikeLike
Good news from Israel:
Lesbian spouses to be recognized as parents from birth
An Israeli court rules that the wife of a child’s biological mother will now be considered as their child’s parent, right from the day of the baby’s birth, avoiding months of uncertainty.
…
The ruling does not include gay men raising children, as it ruled on spouses of biological mothers, but it is presumed that it paves the way for making similar rulings in such cases.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4982859,00.html
AND
Hebrew University ranked 11 in world math ranking
The Jerusalem university made a significant jump in the Shanghai Ranking, after being ranked 51-75 in mathematics last year; Weizmann Institute ranked 10 in computer sciences and 50 in chemistry.
…
Among the first 100 in math are other Israeli academic institutions, including the Technion, Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4982595,00.html
LikeLike
If somebody is interested in Palestinians, a very interesting article is here:
‘Carrot, not stick’: Israel encourages its curriculum in east Jerusalem schools
Israel offers incentives to adopt its curriculum; officials acknowledge gaps between east and west Jerusalem; many east Jerusalem schools badly need funding; ‘Palestine, Israel—I don’t care. I just want to go to university.’
…
Young Palestinian Faris Abu-Mayyaleh will soon find out how he did in his final high school exams, in which he answered questions about Israel’s founding fathers and the history of Zionism.
…
The aim, it says, is to help young Palestinians gain the qualifications they need to find work in Israel more easily. It also offers Israel a chance to steer some Palestinians away from a curriculum it says is rife with anti-Semitism and incitement.
It is a loaded issue for principals, parents and pupils. Many Palestinian schools badly need funding, but embracing the Israeli education program—including subjects such as Israeli civics and history—is seen by many Palestinians as tantamount to adopting the historical narrative of the enemy.
Only 10 of the city’s public Palestinian schools have so far agreed to the change on offer since last year, and only about 5,000 of the 110,000 Palestinian pupils of east Jerusalem’s 185 public and private establishments study the Israeli program.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4983000,00.html
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment