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kushnerha

If Philosophy Won't Diversify, Let's Call It What It Really Is - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.
  • Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice.
  • While a few philosophy departments have made their curriculums more diverse, and while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.
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  • Many philosophers and many departments simply ignore arguments for greater diversity; others respond with arguments for Eurocentrism that we and many others have refuted elsewhere. The profession as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric.
  • Instead, we ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness. We therefore suggest that any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American Philosophy.”
  • We see no justification for resisting this minor rebranding (though we welcome opposing views in the comments section to this article), particularly for those who endorse, implicitly or explicitly, this Eurocentric orientation.
  • Some of our colleagues defend this orientation on the grounds that non-European philosophy belongs only in “area studies” departments, like Asian Studies, African Studies or Latin American Studies. We ask that those who hold this view be consistent, and locate their own departments in “area studies” as well, in this case, Anglo-European Philosophical Studies.
  • Others might argue against renaming on the grounds that it is unfair to single out philosophy: We do not have departments of Euro-American Mathematics or Physics. This is nothing but shabby sophistry. Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.
  • Of course, we believe that renaming departments would not be nearly as valuable as actually broadening the philosophical curriculum and retaining the name “philosophy.” Philosophy as a discipline has a serious diversity problem, with women and minorities underrepresented at all levels among students and faculty, even while the percentage of these groups increases among college students. Part of the problem is the perception that philosophy departments are nothing but temples to the achievement of males of European descent. Our recommendation is straightforward: Those who are comfortable with that perception should confirm it in good faith and defend it honestly; if they cannot do so, we urge them to diversify their faculty and their curriculum.
  • This is not to disparage the value of the works in the contemporary philosophical canon: Clearly, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with philosophy written by males of European descent; but philosophy has always become richer as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.
  • We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the “Bhagavad Gita” as they do the “Republic,” that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Kwazi Wiredu (1931- ), Lame Deer (1903-1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.
  • For demographic, political and historical reasons, the change to a more multicultural conception of philosophy in the United States seems inevitable. Heed the Stoic adage: “The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not.”
Javier E

Martha C. Nussbaum and David V. Johnson: The New Religious Intolerance - 2 views

  • you analyze fear as the emotion principally responsible for religious intolerance. You label fear the “narcissistic emotion.” But why think that the logic of fear—erring on the side of caution (“better to be safe than sorry”)—is narcissism rather than just good common sense, especially in an era of global terrorism and instability? MN: Biological and psychological research on fear shows that it is in some respects more primitive than other emotions, involving parts of the brain that do not deal in reflection and balancing. It also focuses narrowly on the person’s own survival, which is useful in evolutionary terms, but not so useful if one wants a good society. These tendencies to narrowness can be augmented, as I show in my book, through rhetorical manipulation. Fear is a major source of the denial of equal respect to others. Fear is sometimes appropriate, of course, and I give numerous examples of this. But its tendencies toward narrowness make it easily manipulable by false information and rhetorical hype.
  • DJ: In comparing fear and empathy, you say that empathy “has its own narcissism.” Do all emotions have their own forms of narcissism, and if so, why call fear "a narcissistic emotion"? MN: What I meant by my remarks about empathy is that empathy typically functions within a small circle, and is activated by vivid narratives, as Daniel Batson’s wonderful research has shown. So it is uneven and partial. But it is not primarily self-focused, as fear is. As John Stuart Mill said, fear tells us what we need to protect against for ourselves, and empathy helps us extend that protection to others.
  • MN: I think it’s OK to teach religious texts as literature, but better to teach them as history and social reality as part of learning what other people in one’s society believe and take seriously. I urge that all young people should get a rich and non-stereotypical understanding of all the major world religions. In the process, of course, the teacher must be aware of the multiplicity of interpretations and sects within each religion
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  • DJ: Of the basic values of French liberalism—liberty, equality, and fraternity—the last, fraternity, always seems to get short shrift. Your book, by contrast, argues that religious tolerance and liberalism in general can only flourish if people cultivate active respect, civility, and civic friendship with their fellow citizens. If this is so crucial, why do traditional liberals fail to make it more central to their program?
  • MN: I think liberals associate the cultivation of public emotion with fascism and other illiberal ideologies. But if they study history more closely they will find many instances in which emotions are deliberately cultivated in the service of liberal ideals. My next book, Political Emotions, will study all of this in great detail. Any political principles that ask people to go beyond their own self-interest for the sake of justice requires the cultivation of emotion.
  • we should confront sexism by argument and persuasion, and that to render all practices that objectify women illegal would be both too difficult (who would judge?) and too tyrannical.
  • critics of the burqa typically look at the practices of others and find sexism and “objectification” of women there, while failing to look at the practices of the dominant culture, which are certainly suffused with sexism and objectification. I was one of the feminist philosophers who wrote about objectification as a fundamental problem, and what we were talking about was the portrayal of women as commodities for male use and control in violent pornography, in a great deal of our media culture, and in other cultural practices, such as plastic surgery. I would say that this type of objectification is not on the retreat but may even be growing. Go to a high school dance—even at a high-brow school such as the John Dewey Laboratory School on our campus [at the University of Chicago]—and you will see highly individual and intelligent teenage girls marketing themselves for male consumption in indistinguishable microskirts, prior to engaging in a form of group dancing that mimes sex, and effaces their individuality. (Boys wear regular and not particularly sexy clothing.)
  • Lots of bad things are and will remain legal: unkindness, emotional blackmail, selfishness. And though I think the culture of pornographic objectification does great damage to personal relations, I don’t think that legal bans are the answer.
  • In the history of philosophy this was well understood, and figures as diverse as [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau, [Johann Gottfried von] Herder, [Giuseppe] Mazzini, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls had a lot to say about the issue. In Mill’s case, he set about solving the problem posed by the confluence of liberalism and emotion: how can a society that cultivates emotion to support its political principles also preserve enough space for dissent, critique, and experimentation? My own proposal in the forthcoming book follows the lead of Mill—and, in India, of Rabindranath Tagore—and tries to show how a public culture of emotions, supporting the stability of good political principles, can also be liberal and protective of dissent. Some of the historical figures I study in this regard are Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Nehru.
  • the Palin reaction was a whole lot better than the standard reaction in Europe, which is that we should just ban things that we fear. It is really unbelievable, having just lectured on this topic here in Germany: my views, which are pretty mainstream in America, are found “extreme” and even “offensive” in Germany, and all sorts of quite refined people think that Islam poses a unique problem and that the law should be dragged in to protect the culture.
  • The problem with these Europeans is that they don’t want to ban platform shoes or spike heels either; they just want to ban practices of others which they have never tried to understand.
Duncan H

Money and Morals - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
  • some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
  • To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.
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  • Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.
  • But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.
  • Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
  • For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
  • So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals.
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    What do you think about the points Krugman makes in response to Murry's article?
julia rhodes

Brain Connectivity Study Reveals Striking Differences Between Men and Women - 0 views

  • In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.
  • “These maps show us a stark difference--and complementarity--in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Verma.
  • In the study, the researchers found that females displayed greater connectivity in the supratentorial region, which contains the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, between the left and right hemispheres. Males, on the other hand, displayed greater connectivity within each hemisphere. 
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  • the opposite prevailed in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control,
  • The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side.
  • Females outperformed males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests.
julia rhodes

Male and Female Brains Wired Differently | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • women seem to be wired more for socialization and memory while men appear geared toward perception and coordinated action.
  • The female brain appears to have increased connection between neurons in the right and left hemispheres of the brain,
  • he cortices in female brains were more connected between right and left hemispheres, an arrangement that facilitates emotional processing and the ability to infer others’ intentions in social interactions
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  • These physiological differences, which didn’t appear in stark contrast in those under 14, could possibly give rise to behavioral differences between the sexes
Javier E

Learning to Love Criticism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • two differences between workplace performance reviews given to men and women. Across 248 reviews from 28 companies, managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality criticism, such as comments that the woman was “abrasive,” “judgmental” or “strident.” Only 2 percent of men’s critical reviews included negative personality comments.
  • The study speaks to the impossible tightrope women must walk to do their jobs competently and to make tough decisions while simultaneously coming across as nice to everyone, all the time
  • If a woman wants to do substantive work of any kind, she’s going to be criticized — with comments not just about her work but also about herself. She must develop a way of experiencing criticism that allows her to persevere in the face of it.
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  • I’ve found that the fundamental shift for women happens when we internalize the fact that all substantive work brings both praise and criticism.
  • Criticism stings for all of us, but women have been socialized to not rock the boat, to be, above all else, likable. By the time a girl reaches adolescence, she’ll most likely have watched hundreds of films, television shows and advertisements in which a woman’s destiny is determined not by her own choices but by how she is perceived by others. In those hundreds of stories, we get the message: What other people think and say about us matters, a lot.
  • Being likable, or at least acceptable to stronger, more powerful others, was one of our primary available survival strategies. For many women around the world, this is still the reality, but all women inherit the psychological legacy of that history. Disapproval, criticism and the withdrawal of others’ approval can feel so petrifying for us at times — life-threatening even — because for millenniums, it was.
  • We need to retrain our minds to expect and accept this.There are a number of effective ways to do this.
  • A woman can identify another woman whose response to criticism she admires. In challenging situations, she can imagine how the admired woman might respond
  • Women can also benefit from interpreting feedback as providing information about the preferences and point of view of the person giving the feedback, rather than information about themselves.
Javier E

Technology's Man Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind. Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away.
  • Among the women who join the field, 56 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School.
  • A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.
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  • “I’ve been a programmer for 13 years, and I’ve always been one of the only women and queer people in the room. I’ve been harassed, I’ve had people make suggestive comments to me, I’ve had people basically dismiss my expertise. I’ve gotten rape and death threats just for speaking out about this stuff.”
  • “We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google.“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.”
  • once programming gained prestige, women were pushed out. Over the decades, the share of women in computing has continued to decline. In 2012, just 18 percent of computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
  • Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in 2022, yet United States universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them, the N.C.W.I.T. estimates.
  • Twenty percent of software developers are women, according to the Labor Department, and fewer than 6 percent of engineers are black or Hispanic. Comparatively, 56 percent of people in business and financial-operations jobs are women, as are 36 percent of physicians and surgeons and one-third of lawyers.
  • an engineer at Pinterest has collected data from people at 133 start-ups and found that an average of 12 percent of the engineers are women.
  • “It makes a hostile environment for me,” she said. “But I don’t want to raise my hand and call negative attention toward myself, and become the woman who is the problem — ‘that woman.’ In start-up culture they protect their own tribe, so by putting my hand up, I’m saying I’m an ‘other,’ I shouldn’t be there, so for me that’s an economic threat.”
  • “Many women have come to me and said they basically have had to hide on the Net now,” said Mr. Weinstein, who works on issues of identity and anonymity online. “They use male names, they don’t put their real photos up, because they are immediately targeted and harassed.”
  • “It’s a boys’ club, and you have to try to get into it, and they’re trying as hard as they can to prove you can’t,” said Ephrat Bitton, the director of algorithms at FutureAdvisor, an online investment start-up that she says has a better culture because almost half the engineers are women.
  • Writing code is a high-pressure job with little room for error, as are many jobs. But coding can be stressful in a different way, women interviewed for this article said, because code reviews — peer reviews to spot mistakes in software — can quickly devolve.
  • “Code reviews are brutal — ‘Mine is better than yours, I see flaws in yours’ — and they should be, for the creation of good software,” said Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and author. “I think when you add a drop of women into it, it just exacerbates the problem, because here’s a kind of foreigner.”
  • But some women argue that these kinds of initiatives are unhelpful.“My general issue with the coverage of women in tech is that women in the technology press are talked about in the context of being women, and men are talked about in the context of being in technology,” said a technical woman who would speak only on condition of anonymity because she did not want to be part of an article about women in tech.
johnsonma23

Women Describe Their Struggles With Gender Roles in Military - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “My male counterparts were deemed competent and capable until they proved otherwise, where on the other hand it was often assumed that I was incompetent until I proved I was not.”
  • Because we are female, a lot of respect slips through the cracks and we are treated as though we aren’t worth as much as a male
  • “I learned to blend in with the guys. I changed the way I talk and eliminated many so-called feminine characteristics so as not to draw attention to myself.
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  • “At one point, my supervisor was so concerned that he suggested that I wear my belt backward so that a rapist would have more difficulty pulling down my pants.
Javier E

Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it.
  • Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.”
  • the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.
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  • Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.
  • The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below.
  • I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.
  • In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.
  • This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.
  • Ben.Lynch Augusta, Georgia 1 day ago I've followed Mr. Coates for sometime now and tend to agree with his viewpoints. As a white southern male who works in our segregated education systems, it took years for me to actually apprehend my day to day interactions with black children in poverty. For the longest time, I simply couldn't understand the behaviors I saw, the reactions, and at first I reacted with contempt, but then I began to understand little by little. I don't think I can express it to anyone here, let alone Mr. Brooks, but it is something that one only appears to get by letting it sink into your bones day after day, hour after hour. The conditions are terrible and promise to remain so for the rest of my career. My students know, even if they lack the rhetorical chops to express it, that the game is rigged, that what we sell, meaning America at large, to make ourselves feel better, to feel just, is demonstrably a false bill of goods that does nothing to solve the actual problems of their life. These students are so used to being crushed that they can't even begin to articulate that they are being crushed because it's simply how it is. Some suppose Mr. Coates is overly dour, overly negative, but he provides a necessary contrapuntal to those who assume that the arc of the universe inevitably bends toward justice. Struggle can and often does end in defeat. The wicked often sleep as well as the just and sometimes better. The sins of the fathers remain fixed around the necks of the sons and daughters.
Javier E

Why Disruptors Are Always White Guys -- NYMag - 0 views

  • There are three pernicious and interrelated phenomena at work here. First, founders are disproportionately white dudes. Second, white dudes are disproportionately encouraged to become founders. Third, white dudes are disproportionately recognized as founders.
  • Ultimately, this phenomenon can lead to the erasure of women and minorities in leadership roles from the picture
  • The research is broad and deep on the “glass walls” that keep women from becoming entrepreneurs, or the profound discrimination that many people of color face when starting their own businesses. Investors like a pitch coming from a man better than coming from a woman — even when the pitch is the same. Minority-owned firms get rejected for loans at twice the rate of white-owned firms, and often pay higher interest rates when they get them, too. 
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  • There’s a single discriminatory phenomenon underpinning all three of these issues, sometimes called “think manager, think male.”
  • . “Probably the single most important hurdle for women in management in all industrialized countries is the persistent stereotype that associates management with being male,” one study reads
  • Other studies find distinctly similar stereotypes related to people of color and leadership.
  • In today’s media economy, we’re facing the “think entrepreneur, think white dude” problem.
  • it need not be so. As a very preliminary step, if publications insisted on putting women and minorities on their stupid, arbitrary lists, it would elevate those entrepreneurs and founders. It might help break down the deep stereotypes that help to discourage women and minorities from becoming entrepreneurs in the first place.
qkirkpatrick

Parents of teen accused of ISIS support: 'He was brainwashed' - CNN.com - 0 views

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    A 19 year old male says 'he was brainwashed' by ISIS to join their cause.
jlessner

Straight Talk for White Men - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • SUPERMARKET shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
  • Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
  • Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
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  • When I wrote a series last year, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” the reaction from white men was often indignant: It’s an equal playing field now! Get off our case!
  • Yet the evidence is overwhelming that unconscious bias remains widespread in ways that systematically benefit both whites and men. So white men get a double dividend, a payoff from both racial and gender biases.
  • male professors are disproportionately likely to be described as a “star” or “genius.” Female professors are disproportionately described as “nasty,” “ugly,” “bossy” or “disorganized.”
  • When students were taking the class from someone they believed to be male, they rated the teacher more highly. The very same teacher, when believed to be female, was rated significantly lower.
  • The study found that a résumé with a name like Emily or Greg received 50 percent more callbacks than the same résumé with a name like Lakisha or Jamal. Having a white-sounding name was as beneficial as eight years’ work experience.
  • Then there was the study in which researchers asked professors to evaluate the summary of a supposed applicant for a post as laboratory manager, but, in some cases, the applicant was named John and in others Jennifer. Everything else was the same.“John” was rated an average of 4.0 on a 7-point scale for competence, “Jennifer” a 3.3. When asked to propose an annual starting salary for the applicant, the professors suggested on average a salary for “John” almost $4,000 higher than for “Jennifer.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
  • While we don’t notice systematic unfairness, we do observe specific efforts to redress it — such as affirmative action, which often strikes white men as profoundly unjust. Thus a majority of white Americans surveyed in a 2011 study said that there is now more racism against whites than against blacks.
Emilio Ergueta

Nietzsche on Love | Issue 104 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

  • What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose.
  • Even during these times, between physical suffering and intense periods of writing, he pursued the company of learned women. Moreover, Nietzsche grew up in a family of women, turned to women for friendship, and witnessed his friends courtin
  • By calling our attention to the base, vulgar and selfish qualities of (heterosexual) erotic or sexual love, Nietzsche aims to strip love of its privileged status and demonstrate that what we conceive to be its opposites, such as egoism and greed, are in many instances inextricably bound up in the experience of love.
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  • In doing so, Nietzsche disassociates love from its other-worldly Christian-Platonic heritage, and so asserts his ethical claims concerning the value of the Earth over the other-worldly, and the truth of the body over the sacred.
  • Nietzsche speaks critically about the possessive or tyrannical qualities of masculine love alongside its fictionalising tendencies, stating that the natural functions of a woman’s body disgust men because they prevent him having complete access to her as a possession; they also encroach upon the conceptual perfection of love. He writes, “‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.”
  • He proposes that love is close to greed and the lust for possession. Love is an instinctual force related to our biological and cultural drives, and as such, cannot be considered a moral good (GS 363).
  • Nietzsche pointedly distinguishes masculine from feminine love by the notions of devotion and fidelity. Whereas women want to surrender completely to love, to approach it as a faith, “to be taken and accepted as a possession” (363), Nietzsche claims male love hinges upon the possessive thirst to acquire more from the lover, and states that men who are inclined towards complete devotion are “not men.”
  • In other words, the experiences of both greed and love are the same drive or instinct, but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named ‘greed’ or ‘love’: satisfied people who feel their possessions (their lover for example) threatened by others will name other’s instinct for gain greed or avarice, whereas those who are still searching out something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on that instinct and call it ‘love’.
  • In order to be successful in love, he counsels women to “simulate a lack of love” and to enact the roles that men find attractive. Nietzsche finds love comedic because it does not consist in some attempt to know the other deeply, but rather in the confirmation of male fantasies in which women perform their constructed gender roles.
  • Nietzsche’s writings on love have not surprisingly been influential on many feminist reflections on sex/gender. Although he is not making moralising claims about how one should love, his discussion of the difficult impact erotic and romantic relationships have on women, as well as his commentary on the ironies both sexes face in love, force his readers of both sexes to examine the roles that they play in love. It is difficult when reading him not to question one’s own performances in romantic relationships.
Javier E

Opinion | Speaking as a White Male … - The New York Times - 0 views

  • If you go back to the intellectuals of the 1950s, you get the impression that they thought individuals could very much determine their own beliefs.
  • Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink.
  • We don’t think this way anymore, and in fact thinking this way can get you into trouble. I guess the first step was the rise of perspectivism
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  • This is the belief, often traced back to Nietzsche, that what you believe is determined by where you stand: Our opinions are not guided by objective truth, because there is no such thing; they are guided by our own spot in society.
  • Then came Michel Foucault and critical race theorists and the rest, and the argument that society is structured by elites to preserve their privilege.
  • Now we are at a place where it is commonly assumed that your perceptions are something that come to you through your group, through your demographic identity.
  • What does that mean? After you’ve stated your group identity, what is the therefore that follows?
  • We’ve shifted from an emphasis on individual judgment toward a greater emphasis on collective experience.
  • Under what circumstances should we embrace the idea that collective identity shapes our thinking? Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?
  • On the one hand, the drive to bring in formerly marginalized groups has obviously been one of the great achievements of our era
  • Wider inclusion has vastly improved public debate
  • other times, group identity seems irrelevant to many issues
  • And there are other times when collective thinking seems positively corrupting. Why are people’s views of global warming, genetically modified foods and other scientific issues strongly determined by political label? That seems ridiculous.
  • Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers. Our political system is based on the idea that persuasion and deliberation lead to compromise and toward truth. The basis of human dignity is our capacity to make up our own minds
  • One of the things I’ve learned in a lifetime in journalism is that people are always more unpredictable than their categories.
  • the notion that group membership determines opinion undermines all that.
  • If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud.
  • The epistemological foundation of our system is in surprisingly radical flux.
Javier E

The Triumph of Obama's Long Game - 0 views

  • Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.
  • This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.
  • And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube
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  • We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track).
  • Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule.
  • We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”
  • I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.
  • But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.
  • the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all.
  • It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?
  • Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well.
  • Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?
  • Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy.
  • Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity.
  • the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.
  • The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. There’s a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And there’s a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism.
  • You can’t assault the core identity of most people’s lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”
  • One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?
  • And yet it’s apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. I’m referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year — with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate — which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. It’s a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans.
  • it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And they’re not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it!
  • I’m not in favor of boycotting Israel when we don’t boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal?
  • Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. You’ve never heard of this bill, and I hadn’t either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesn’t want the attention — writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled.
  • pointing out this special interest’s distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. It’s simply a defense of our democratic way of life.
sissij

Gloria Steinem: Women Have 'Chick Flicks.' What About Men? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the flight attendant read the choices aloud, a young man across the aisle said, “I don’t watch chick flicks!”
  • I wasn’t challenging his preference, but I did question the logic of his term.
  • especially if it had been written by women.
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  • Think about it: If “Anna Karenina" had been by Leah Tolstoy, or “The Scarlet Letter” by Nancy Hawthorne or “A Doll’s House” by Henrietta Ibsen — if “The Invisible Man” had been “The Invisible Woman” — would they have been hailed as classics?
  • Indeed, as long as men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women are not taken seriously when writing about ourselves, much less about men and public affairs
  • His “chick flick” label might help him avoid certain movies, but shouldn’t he have a label to guide him toward movies he actually liked?
  • Bias is, as always, unfair to everyone.
  •  
    I think this is gender stereotyping. People tend to make the assumption that women are more limited than men because they appear so emotional and irrational. However, in brain science, there is no real difference between male and female. The logic fallacies and flaws in reasoning stay true for everybody, not a specific gender. We also tends to label things to simplify. However, there are always exceptions to labels, as we learned in science. Labeling may filter out some really good stuff just based on our imprecise impression. -Sissi (3/4/2017)
tonycheng6

Anti-ageing effects of protein restriction unpacked - 0 views

  • The idea that dietary restriction can be used as a tool to increase lifespan has been a centrepiece of ageing research for decades. But the mechanisms by which dietary restriction might act, and the specific nutritional components involved, remain unclear.
  • Both dietary protein restriction (which results in low levels of leucine and other BCAAs) and inhibition of mTOR can extend lifespan in animals
  • Flies that carry a mutation in this residue have lower mTOR activity than do controls. They are also longer-lived, and are protected against the negative lifespan-shortening effects of a high-protein diet.
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  • In contrast to a previous study6, they observed a robust lifespan extension in male mice fed a BCAA-restricted diet throughout life, equal to the benefits of dietary protein restriction.
  • Interestingly, female mice showed no lifespan extension from BCAA or dietary protein restriction, and if BCAA restriction was started during middle age, the benefits on males were greatly reduced. Thus, both studies collectively point to mTOR as a primary mediator of the benefits associated with BCAA restriction (Fig. 1).
  • A clear picture is emerging of how specific amino acids are sensed by sestrin to regulate mTOR signalling and autophagy and so preserve the function of intestinal stem cells during ageing.
  • Genetic background is crucial in the response to dietary restriction, with an identical low-calorie regimen increasing lifespan in some mouse strains but shortening it in others
  • There is also evidence that dietary restriction initiated later in life might have reduced benefits in rodents and, in some cases, result in premature death
  • Taken together, these observations suggest that although protein- and BCAA-restricted diets are a powerful research tool for exploring the fundamental mechanisms of ageing, it is premature to recommend adoption by the general population.
knudsenlu

The Brutal Math of Gender Inequality in Hollywood - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Lady Bird won the award for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, but its writer and director Greta Gerwig was curiously not nominated for Best Director. That category’s five nominees were all male. In fact, only one woman has ever won a Golden Globe for directing: Barbra Streisand, in 1984, for Yentl. At the time, Gerwig was six months old, and her film’s lead actress had not yet been born. Hollywood remains an industry where women are more likely to be celebrated for speaking out in front of a camera than for holding one.
  • Finally, actresses are vulnerable, not only because men dominate powerful occupations, but also because women are cast to portray the very quality of vulnerability
  • Altogether, these surveys and studies suggest something quite simple: The ratio of women in an industry (like film) or in an occupation within that industry (like directing) shapes how women are treated. While more than 80 percent of women say they have been harassed at work, they are 50 percent more likely to say so in male-dominated industries.
johnsonel7

She's Crazy | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Psychological research comparing women and men on measures of anger find that they are more alike than different. Men and women are equally likely to experience anger and the intensity of their anger is remarkably similar. Regardless of gender, we get angry when frustrated, criticized, betrayed, rejected, or disrespected. When someone behaves immorally or unethically it can also lead to our anger and outrage.
  • But anger is “gendered.” It’s perceived through gendered (and racial) lenses. While most emotion is identified as feminine, anger is considered more of a masculine emotion. Anger and its expression are contrary to traditional beliefs about women’s essential “nature” as compassionate, passive, and other-centered. Meanwhile, anger and its expression as aggression and violence, is viewed as naturally male, and masculine. “Boys will be boys,” so many people say.
  • Only the women candidates responded with an apology, and both apologized for their occasional anger. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren, “I will ask for forgiveness. I know that sometimes I get really worked up. And sometimes I get a little hot. I don’t really mean to.” Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “Well, I’d ask for forgiveness, any time any of you get mad at me. I can be blunt, but I am doing this because I think it is so important to pick the right candidates here.”
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  • Their apologies likely reflect an awareness that anger and assertiveness are generally more acceptable for men than they are for women, and that they must be careful not to appear “too emotional” as this is sometimes used to justify the exclusion of women from political leadership roles.
  • Expressing anger can help you influence others and can help you make change or get your way. But this seems to be truer if you’re a man, especially a white man.
  • expressions of anger detracted from the credibility and influence of women and African Americans relative to White males. The authors suggest that angry women and angry African Americans are perceived as “emotional” and this is used to discredit them, and consequently their social influence is reduced. 
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