The next Chicagoland Skepchick party will take place this Saturday night, May 17th at 8:30 p.m.
Brought to you by Elyse at Skepchick:
Galway Arms
2442 N Clark St
Chicago, IL…
Why:
Because it’s May. Because Skepchick loves you. Because it’s an excuse to drink beer.
You know you want to come.
Hope to see you there!
(Actually, I hope to see me there, too. Curse this cold and cough I have!)
Today is this semester's last final exam, and this is the last big push of the semester, so I'm going to be mired in work for most of the day…but once I level the administrative mountain, I've got some new squid science to share. Until then, you'll just have to chew over some of the usual American lunacy for a while.
Obama is gearing up to drape himself with Christian trappings. This will not make me happy. I'm planning to vote for him, but if he turns into yet another Christianist airhead, I will not be campaigning for him.
The reason Obama can't lose my vote but can lose my enthusiasm is that the Republicans are just plain evil. Rumsfeld was saying the country needed another terrorist attack to keep the Democrats out of office? What a monster.
David Brooks thinks "science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other", and that the future belongs to a fusion of science and Buddhism. David Brooks knows nothing of science. How did this twit get a gig at the NY Times?
UC Berkeley is going to court this week over their Understanding Evolution web site (that's an excellent resource, by the way, especially if you're just trying to get up to speed on the science). At issue is the fact that the site dares to point out that some religions contradict the evidence, and other religions try to avoid conflict with science; that is interpreted to be a sectarian endorsement of certain religions over others. This is where separation of church and state becomes insane: when you are not allowed to point out obvious idiocies because they are protected religious beliefs. Here's the offending section: I think it's pretty namby-pamby and bends over backwards to give deference to superstitious nonsense, but some people are apparently irate over a simple, accurate truth statement: "some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science". They do, but a university isn't allowed to say so?
Now I unplug myself from the intertubes for a few hours and focus, focus, focus on a pile of stuff most of you will never see.
Read the comments on this post...Today is this semester's last final exam, and this is the last big push of the semester, so I'm going to be mired in work for most of the day…but once I level the administrative mountain, I've got some new squid science to share. Until then, you'll just have to chew over some of the usual American lunacy for a while.
Obama is gearing up to drape himself with Christian trappings. This will not make me happy. I'm planning to vote for him, but if he turns into yet another Christianist airhead, I will not be campaigning for him.
The reason Obama can't lose my vote but can lose my enthusiasm is that the Republicans are just plain evil. Rumsfeld was saying the country needed another terrorist attack to keep the Democrats out of office? What a monster.
David Brooks thinks "science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other", and that the future belongs to a fusion of science and Buddhism. David Brooks knows nothing of science. How did this twit get a gig at the NY Times?
UC Berkeley is going to court this week over their Understanding Evolution web site (that's an excellent resource, by the way, especially if you're just trying to get up to speed on the science). At issue is the fact that the site dares to point out that some religions contradict the evidence, and other religions try to avoid conflict with science; that is interpreted to be a sectarian endorsement of certain religions over others. This is where separation of church and state becomes insane: when you are not allowed to point out obvious idiocies because they are protected religious beliefs. Here's the offending section: I think it's pretty namby-pamby and bends over backwards to give deference to superstitious nonsense, but some people are apparently irate over a simple, accurate truth statement: "some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science". They do, but a university isn't allowed to say so?
Now I unplug myself from the intertubes for a few hours and focus, focus, focus on a pile of stuff most of you will never see.
Read the comments on this post...Steven Novella commented today on the C-51 case at the US-based Science-Based Medicine blog.
Novella concludes, “this episode serves to expose the outrageous hypocrisy of the purveyors of unscientific or unproven treatments who are happy to be champions of consumer protection when it suits their needs, and then the next moment to decry consumer protection laws as fascist while transforming themselves into paragons of free-market virtue. Their ideological flexibility is impressive.”
There is nothing in Bill C-51 that changes the regulatory status of natural health products from over-the-counter (as they are now) to prescription. Under Bill C-51, Canadians will continue to have access to natural health products that are safe, effective and of high quality.
Natural health products will continue to be regulated in the same way under the Natural Health Products Regulations, which have been in force since January 1, 2004. See this link, it explains everything and more about what this bill is really about.
Please pass this on so that the misinformation stops.
I just got a copy of the promotional flyer for my Seattle visit, so here it is.
PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates
Paul "PZ" Myers is persona non grata at the Discovery Institute. He was recently booted out of a screening of the film "Expelled"--an irony certainly not lost on him. And now the evolutionary biologist and rabble-rouser blogger is coming to Seattle for one night only. He'll be talking about the evolution of creationism and other oxymoronic topics with the same zeal and wit that have made him one of the fittest survivors on the science blog circuit.
Join the Northwest Science Writers Association and the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy for a conversation with PZ Myers. He'll answer your questions and take us inside his popular blog, Pharyngula. He's been called a "godless liberal" and his blog posts have been described as "random biological ejaculations." And that's just what he says. Others have attacked him for his stout devotion to evolution and probably for being funnier than those he offends.
NSWA and FoSEP present…
PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates
Pacific Science Center, Laser Dome
Monday, June 2, 2008
7 - 9 p.m.
FREE to the publicTell your friends. Bring your questions.
Whoa. There's an expectation that I'll be funny? Uh-oh. The pressure is on.
At least those expectations are offset by the fact that I'm going to be speaking in a laser dome, which is very cool. I hope I have full access to all of the controls; hecklers beware, you could be reduced to a small heap of smoking ash.
Read the comments on this post...Last month's post on the morality of abortion generated - as one might have expected - a wide variety of impassioned responses. Happily, the debate remained mostly civil, which is a rarity when it comes to this issue and one that's entirely due to the thoughtful, rational commenters here at Daylight Atheism.
There were several issues I didn't get into in that post, since I wanted to focus on the core issue of whether and under what circumstances obtaining an abortion can be judged a moral or immoral act. Some of those other issues were explored in the comments in that thread. But there are a few others that didn't come up, and in this post I want to write some more about them.
One of the most remarkable facts about the abortion debate is that the groups which say they want to stop abortion are overlooking one of the most effective ways to achieve this. Namely, most groups which oppose abortion also oppose comprehensive sex education and the distribution of contraception, two measures which have proven to be highly effective at reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore the number of abortions. If the conservatives' goal was to prevent abortion to the greatest extent possible, why wouldn't they be all in favor of these measures? Why wouldn't they be eager participants in the effort to make contraception as widely available as possible?
If anything, we find the opposite. Most religious groups which oppose abortion are also against contraception. They oppose the teaching of responsible sexual practice in schools, favoring abstinence-only programs which have been repeatedly shown to be ineffective. They favor putting as many obstacles and roadblocks as possible in the way of men and women who want to use contraception; some of them want to ban it altogether. In short, they favor the policies that are certain to lead to a greater number of unwanted pregnancies - which means a greater number of abortions - not to mention a greater number of STDs, unmarried mothers, and all the other ills that come with that.
A related, astonishing phenomenon is the surprising number of self-avowed pro-lifers who come in for abortions themselves. In some cases, women who go in to a clinic for an abortion one day are back the next day to picket that same clinic. Many of them insist that they are "different" from the other women in the waiting room with them, that their case is somehow special and justifies an exception.
One morning, a woman who had been a regular "sidewalk counselor" went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. "I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!" she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to "murder their babies."
And a similar story from Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith, in which Barker relates a conversation with a Catholic attorney:
"Well, I was raised to respect the sanctity of life," he said, "and I will always vote with my church."
...He looked at me for a moment, and in hushed tones said, "But you know what? I don't know what I would do if my fourteen-year-old-daughter got pregnant."
"You would get her a quick, quiet abortion and worry about the morality later," I offered. With a guilty grin, he nodded his head in agreement. "You have the money and you have the contacts," I continued, "but if you keep voting wrong you may not have the option." He didn't know what to say, the big hypocrite.
These bizarre-seeming actions, I believe, fall cleanly into place when one understands the mission of the anti-choice movement through the correct lens. Any large political movement will have a diversity of opinion among its members, and I have no doubt that some people oppose abortion because they genuinely (though mistakenly, in my view) believe that a human life exists from the moment of conception. But among the politically organized wing of the religious anti-choice movement, I believe there is one primary, overriding motive - and it is not concern for the fetus' life, but desire to control and oversee the woman's.
Subjugating women's bodies to the state has always been part and parcel of every theocratic movement. It's an outgrowth of the misogynistic belief common to nearly every major world religion that women are inferior to men and must be controlled by them. This spirit of bigotry is why the Catholic church does not permit women to be clergy and why the Southern Baptist Convention expects wives to pledge to obey their husbands. It's why Islamic mullahs forbid the education of women and allow men to marry multiple wives, but never wives to marry multiple husbands. It's why Orthodox Jews pray to God every day to express their gratitude for not being born female, and why Mormon women are taught that they can only reach Heaven if they're married so that their husbands can pull them through.
Naturally, the members of this movement tend to grant exemptions to the principle of female inferiority on a case-by-case basis - for themselves and for their loved ones, as necessary - which explains why they don't oppose abortion for themselves or for their daughters. It's only those other women, those untrustworthy outsiders, who need to be controlled for their own good. In these people's minds, enforced pregnancy is an appropriate punishment for women who choose to have sex in unapproved ways. This neatly explains opposition to contraception and abortion alike: in their minds, both these are things are ways for sinful women to avoid the natural and deserved consequences of immoral sex.
Today I got to be a tourist in Beijing. I walked the two or three miles from the hotel to Tiananmen Square, toured the Forbidden City, and explored the backstreets and alleyways. I took a couple of hundred photos, but I don’t have the bandwidth to upload them all yet. This teaser will have to do.
Around 2 pm, I wound up at a Starbucks near Ritan Park, and found that they had free WiFi. I turned on my iPhone, and was amused to discover that although Google Maps refused to show me a street-level map of Beijing, the satellite image view worked perfectly, and pinpointed my location within 10 metres!
When I told friends about this, they teased me about going to Starbucks. This is unfair: I have been sampling plenty of local cuisine. Starbucks was a move of desperation: the first place I’d seen to sit down and have a cold drink in about 30 minutes of pounding the pavement.
Yesterday I went out to dinner with two Amazon colleagues, and we had Shark’s Fin Soup. Yes, I know it’s environmentally irresponsible - but on the other hand it was one of the few items on the English version of the menu (hand-written in a school exercise book!) that we could identify. That and the eel stir-fried with mushrooms. And various dishes including the word “testicles”… (It was a strange evening all around: we wound up as the only customers in a quaint bar called “The Buffalo”, drinking weak cocktails and listening to an atrocious singer mangling Carpenters’ songs.)
On Tuesday I went to a fast food place near the office for lunch; it was decorated with pictures of Jackie Chan,and looked innocuous. I picked what I thought looked safe, and emerged 20 minutes later certain only of the identity of two elements of the meal: rice, and mushrooms. All of the other 5 or 6 ingredients were completely unknown to me, by appearance or taste. The next day I went with a colleague to a huge underground food court, and I just said “I’ll have what you’re having.” There was fried rice, and a hard boiled egg, but after that I’m hazy…..
Hotel breakfast is either dim sum (individual items unidentified) or stuff that looks like ham and eggs but doesn’t taste like either.
I’m having a great time!
OK, here are a couple of buses, just for Susan:
{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}
I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, at least the elaborate ones surrounding September 11 or the Moon hoax. A number of things go against these types of conspiracies:
That being said.
The more I look at Mercy, at Teen Challenge, at the Assemblies of God, the more I begin to see a pattern emerging. I don't perceive it as an organised "conspiracy" but more a "movement".
A loose coalition of organisations that feed off one another, offer mutual support etc. but that aren't connected "legally or financially". So that when one is found to be abusing teenagers the rest don't have to cut ties because no official ties exist.
They do appear to be there to offer mutual support, open doors, arrange meetings with the right people, nudge-nudge,wink-wink. I believe they even have training courses on this, labelled "Cultivating and Enhancing a Culture of Collegiality"
All this makes it very hard to investigate, pin down and stop their "infiltration" into positions of power and influence.
Case in point:
Teen Challenge Queensland
As mentioned in a previous post this organisation goes to great lengths to distance itself from any other Teen challenge group in a legal and financial sense. But then proudly displays the history of:
History
The first Teen Challenge Centre was founded in New York, USA, in 1958 by Rev. David Wilkerson. The story of that successful work with drug dependent youth is told in the multi-million best seller "The Cross and the Switchblade" and in numerous other books and films which followed.
In 1970, through Rev. Ian Alcorn (Director-General of LifeLine), finance was made available to send Rev. Charles Ringma overseas for training. Charles Ringma, a former Dutch Reformed Minister, was at that time involved in street outreach to the homeless, drug users and prostitutes. He studied the drug problem in England and Europe and spent four months in the following Teen Challenge Centres in the USA - Philadelphia, New York, Long Beach, Rehresburg, Hartrisburg, Los Angeles and San Francisco. On his return from the USA in September 1971, the first few months were spent in conducting meetings in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
Teen Challenge Australia began in Brisbane in 1971 when a centre was established by Rev. Ringma. He continued to be involved in youth centres in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. His dedication and devotion linked with his genuine ability endeared him to all. He gave of himself to this work.
[source]
and links to an American site which is the global contact point for the program. This site lists a directory of all teen challenge groups including those embroiled in controversy.
It begs the question why?
Its my assertion that you trade off the name but make sure there are no legal financial connections so that you can mitigate any damage, effectively having your cake and eating it too. Feeding off the good will of people who see christians generically or homogeneously as good people by virtue of the label christian.
Oh I don't doubt you have saved some but I am sure you have got your fair share of converts, which is really what this is all about - feeding people into the ACC movement.
It’s not only my birthday today… it’s the one-year anniversary of the death of Jerry Falwell. Today is a day for cake.
You know, I thought it was only sodding Ruth Ostrow who wrote columns with outright garbage like this, back in 2005:
Previously horrified by the possibility, I’m now softening to the idea of ID being taught in Australian schools. Not as a substitute for science but as profound ideology alongside it. In this age of chronic materialism, science has failed to give us the reverence for Nature that she deserves.
There’s an arrogance in us that needs to be tempered. ID may well inspire a gratitude and humility that are not currently part of our psyche. And if that leads to children of tomorrow acting with more respect for the environment, in using science to protect not destroy our planet and our climate, then even this whale-hugging libertine may back the Christians on this one.
Finished with the bucket? Just you wait.
@#*&^@#(&^@# Salon Life in an ‘advice column’: The Atheist and the Creationist - Can’t They Just Get Along?
Question: I have a good friend of 15 years. I’m an atheist; he’s a devout Christian who has expressed his doubts about God to me many, many times over the years. …Now he has been asked by his church’s school (where he is an active participant) to teach “young earth” creationism. Moreover, they want him to teach this in science class as the predominant theory of life on earth…. He seems to really want my input on this, but I’m having a very difficult time quelling my revulsion and nausea that this has even come up as a topic in our friendship.
Answer: Would a true scientist experience revulsion and nausea at the scenes of our culture that you describe? Would a true scientist observe the teaching of mythology to children and label it child abuse? Would a true scientist refuse friendship with another person because that person engaged in the teaching of these strange and wondrous mythologies to children?
Uh…why not in the science classroom?
Link. Link. Link. Link. Link. Link. Link. Link, oh and beautifully said by Evolution Blog:
ID’s scientific claims are rejected because they are wrong, in precisely the same sense that it is wrong to say that 1+1=3. ID claims are wrong independent of whether evolution in its modern form is substantially correct. If tomorrow a stunning discovery is made that shows common descent to be a lot of nonsense, it will still be true that William Dembski’s probability calculations are meaningless. It will still be true that his use of the No Free Lunch theorems is not legitimate. It will still be true that “irreducibly complex” biological systems can evolve via a variety of well-understood mechanisms.
Just so we are clear, ID isn’t science, and it is just a transparent attempt to conceal an especially blinkered sort of religious faith beneath the clothing of science. That, however, is not the primary reason that scientists reject ID. Nor should it be. If there were any merit to the charges the ID folks make, their lack of conformity to some definition of science would hardly be the big news.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming. Go get into Tangled Bank, it’s now up and it kicks the arse of bloody Salon Life - thanks The Beagle Project!
A couple of the leaders of the atheist blogsphere got into a dispute recently over the death of pastor Paul Jones.
It started with PZ Myers posting the blog entry, How Sad in which he wrote:
Paul Jones has died. I didn't know him, or even know about him, until his obituary was sent to me, but it's an utterly tragic life story. He was an ordained Baptist minister — there's a waste of a life right there — and his death was ironic and futile.
Hemant Mehta (a.k.a. Friendly Atheist) did not approve. In a post titled, How Sad, Indeed. He wrote:
Believing in God is not as bad as using God's name to advance your own political agenda. That doesn't mean belief in God is correct. But it doesn't imply a complete waste of time. We could all name plenty of religious people (current and historical) who have done wonderful things in the name of their God. It's petty to dismiss those good works because they were done in the name of a God we don’t believe in.
Fortunately, I have a theory of value that is perfectly applicable to these types of questions from which I can derive who (and to what degree) each writer is correct.
In fact, both writers are correct in their own way.
Imagine that there is a nurse who has decided to care for the health and well-being of an isolated community. However, she has come to believe (by whatever mechanisms allow people to believe in absurdities) that arsenic is a cure-all. She arrives with a lifetime supply of arsenic pills. Whenever somebody in the village expresses some discomfort or shows signs of any illness, she provides them with a little arsenic. Those who get better (as some of them certainly will – arsenic in small doses is not fatal but its effects are cumulative) then praise the nurse and the power of her medicine.
However, at the age of 52, this nurse has a tragic accident that takes her life.
This nurse has wasted her life. She has actually done worse than wasted her life. Let’s assume that there is an afterlife in which she learns the truth – that she really was poisoning the villagers and making them slowly sicker over time. If she truly cared about the welfare of the villagers, then this would be a tragic and heartbreaking discovery. She herself would come to the conclusion that, for the sake of those she cared about and, in her ignorance, were suffering harm at her hands, it would have been better for her to have died sooner – or to never have lived at all.
It does not matter that the villagers honored her and praised her, that they remembered her as a compassionate person always willing to come to the aid of those who were sick. It does not matter that she herself thought that she was doing something good. What matters is the fact that she was, in fact, doing harm.
This is the measure of a life.
We can argue that prayer, unlike arsenic, is not poisonous. It does no harm. Yet, ‘having no effect’ is not the same as 'doing no harm.' It matters whether the person is left better or worse off than she would have otherwise been.
We can imagine the villagers being given sugar pills instead of arsenic, generating a genuine placebo effect and giving them the (false) sense that they are actually being cared for. Willing to give the sugar pills a try, they put off seeking real medical care, allowing diseases to develop longer than they would have if this nurse had not given them false beliefs about its effectiveness. A few faithful might even watch their children die of diseases that could have been easily treated. In this case, even without poisoning the villagers, our nurse still made them worse off than they would have otherwise been.
She still would have reason to weep if, after death, she discovers the truth of her actions.
The obituary for Jones also said that he:
always found a way to provide for churches and charities as well as individuals in need.
Does this provide a way saving his life from having been a life without meaning?
Well, it depends in part on what type of charities he gave his aid to and the type of help he gave to people in need.
If he had limited his help to prayer then we are still left with a case like that of the nurse giving away arsenic pills (or placebos, as the case may be). It is the case of a person who produced no real-world good and may have done real-world harm.
However, even if he contributed to genuine charities – charities that did real-world good, we have two questions that we need to ask about the nature of these contributions to measure the value of his life.
First, what motivated these donations to charities?
The relevant test here would involve determining the answer to the question, "Would Jones have contributed to these charities if he did not believe that a God existed?"
If Jones was truly interested in the welfare of others then he would have cared about their welfare even in the absence of a God. He would not have been willing to abandon them to their own fates, watching them suffer with indifference, simply because no God existed to pat him on the head for his good deeds or threaten him with hell for his evil deeds. A person who responds only to these types of rewards and punishes cares nothing about other people – he cares only about his own welfare, and his concern for others only comes as a pretense.
However, if he would have been touched by the suffering of others even in the belief that no God existed – if he had genuine concern for their welfare of a form that did not depend on heavenly rewards or punishments – then he would have spent his life producing real-world good for real-world people in service to real-world people, not in service to am imaginary deity.
However, if the belief that no God exists would have turned him away from charitable work, we may assume that he real motivation was to please God or to buy a ticket to heaven, but that he cared nothing about the people around him. A person must be utterly lacking in compassion to stand around and do nothing while others suffer in a universe where no God exists.
This person, who spent his life serving God or avoiding hell, but who actually cared nothing about the people around him, has, indeed, wasted his life. The good he has provided was, at best, a fortunate side-effect of his actions – but was not a part of his intention or among his goals. He is like the person who, tripping over a shovel as he walks down the sidewalk, happens to crash into a child and knock him out of the way of an oncoming train. He deserves no credit for his actions – no praise – precisely because he did not desire the good that came from his actions. Not if, in the absence of the shovel, he would have watched the child get run over by the train with complete indifference.
Second, what were the opportunity costs of this devotion to charity?
Let us assume that, through a person's charitable activities, he raises $50 for religious efforts that do no real-world good (e.g., missionaries, churches, putting up billboards that say, "Why do atheists hate America?"), funding legislation to ban abortion or constitutional amendments to exclude homosexual unions from the definition of marriage), and $50 to charities that do real-world good (feed the hungry, treat the sick, provide shelter for the homeless, conduct research into any of a number of diseases, clean up the environment).
However, in the absence of his efforts, people would have otherwise contributed $75 to the latter set of charities.
In this case, the true effect of this person's efforts is to drain worthwhile charities of $25 that they would have otherwise gotten. This is not a person to be praised for the $50 that he gave to worthwhile charities that do real-world good, or the $100 in charitable donations that he actually made possible. This is a person who made the world worse off than it would have otherwise been, by costing charities that do real-world good $25 that they would have otherwise had.
In this case, we are talking about a life that was actually spent preventing good from being done more than it was a life spent doing good.
Finally, let us look at a more favorable case – one in which charities that do real-world good would have normally received $25. However, because of Jones’ hard efforts they received $50 instead. We would still have to weigh this gain against contributions that do real-world harm.
Many of the examples that I gave above are not contributions to waste-of-effort but harmless activities. They are contributions to activities that do real-world harm. If he spent effort promoting prayer or the teaching of creationism in the nation's schools, blocking homosexual marriage, fighting to outlaw early term abortions, and supporting the destructive policies of President George Bush because of these beliefs, these harms must be weighed against any good that might have come from the effect is efforts may have had in getting more money to charities producing real-world benefits.
It is true that the obituary does not actually give us enough information to decide which category Jones actually belongs in. The most important part of his life might well have been in giving real-world care to his friends and family. In fact, I would be willing to bet good money that Jones genuinely cared for his friends and his family and even strangers in ways that he would have continued to care for them even if no God existed. He would have still sought after their welfare. He might not have been all that political, and his contribution to the evils of religion we have seen over the past eight years in particular might have been minimal.
If this is the case, his life was not at all wasted. If this is the case, then he took care of the people he cared about and did little harm to outweigh the direct good that came from his actions. We may even call him a good man.
Or he may have been like our nurse, handing out poison and preventing the people he thought he was helping from getting real-world help that would have mitigated their real-world problems.
We simply do not know.
Are you guys Christians in a band or a Christian band?
I'm not sure what the difference is between five Christians playing in a band and a Christian band. If you truly believe something, then it should affect every area of your life. All five of us are Christians. I believe that change should start with me first, and as a result, our lyrics do not come across very "preachy." Many of our songs are about life, struggles, mistakes, relationships and other issues that don't fit entirely in the spiritual category. However, all of these topics are written about through my perspective as a christian.
How can you be a Christian band and go on tour with bands who represent themselves as evil, satan worshipers?
We hope to intelligently represent a faith that has been very misrepresented in the entertainment industry. There isn't much diversity of thought within metal music and I believe it is important for people to understand opposing views before drawing conclusions. I hope other bands and their fans have an open mind and respect for what we are saying, so it's fair for them to expect the same from us. If truth is the basis of our belief, then the questions other bands/fans have are an important way to understanding what/why we believe. Most of the bands we tour with would never hear a well represented explanation of Christianity if we just stayed home.
"I'm not really good at math," said Cami, 18, who was on hand for Tuesday's Senate vote. "I feel like I'm being penalized for something I'm not good at."Ohmygod, like it's totally not fair to not give me a diploma just because I didn't like learn anything! Sheesh! How does this Scottsdale princess expect to get through life if she can't even count the change in her designer purse when she goes to the mall?
I mentioned how I started to watch this show back in March.
Since then, there’s been a couple of great blog breakdowns on the show that you can find; I personally relate to LucyVee of ‘Write Here, Write Now‘ who says:
As far as I was concerned, it was OBVIOUS Sam Tyler was in a coma; not only did the phones give it away I thought, I was raised on an 80s/90s diet of Thomas Covenant, Labyrinth, Quantum Leap etc where people would enter other worlds thanks to accidents, invitations from goblin kings, time portals and so it goes on.
My own blog entry on the show prompted the following comment in the comment box (I love you readers, have I mentioned that? Unless, of course, you try to pimp your books or spam with links and then you can just go get puppet-cancer):
what I’m not enjoying is the way she dresses- yes it is very 80s but no self-respecting female police officer would have been seen dead dressed like that- this was the time when female officers were trying to prove they were as good - if not better than, male officers - none of the ones I know would have gone around dressed as a tart, showing her bra strap off and wearing that much makeup- that was not the way to get taken seriously back then.
Thanks “Psychodiva”! Now that I’ve finished the whole lot, I’ve got a few theories about how the show justifies the dress-sense and the style.
Uh, it doesn’t justify it very well. Darn.
After reading some work on portrayals of women, such as that reported on Jezebel; which draws on young women, hyper-sexualization and dress-sense in a few research papers, it does concern me somewhat (although the show is clearly not targeted at children). One site I mentioned in a previous blogpost is Commercial Free Childhood, which recently have a campaign against Abercrombie & Fitch:
Thongs for 10-year-olds that say “eye candy.” Shirts with slogans like “Who needs brains when you have these?” and “Do I make you look fat?”. Ads touting group sex to sell clothing to teens and preteens. When it comes to sexualizing children, Abercrombie & Fitch is among the worst corporate offenders.
I’m also reminded of the ongoing efforts to address cat-calling, with surveys like the one done by Rutgers University in 2006 and 2007 of 550 women - who ranged in age from 15 to 64 in the international online component and from 18 to 24 in the Rutgers survey of women from central New Jersey - that were ‘asked about their experiences with street harassment and how it “encourages women to look at themselves as body parts instead of as full, whole, intelligent human beings” and can cause women to fear for their safety’.
In addition, Emily May of hollabackNYC.blogspot.com says “I think sites like ours can help women see that they’re not alone, that it happens to women in all walks of life by men in all walks of life, and that it’s not okay.”
DI Alex Drake doesn’t need to dress the way she does, in much the same way no child should need to dress in an overtly sexualized way to be ‘cool’. In the first episode, it she’s thrown together a few items from the original ‘tart’ costume that she wore whilst undercover, as her options are limited: she finds the wardrobe in her borrowed flat is full of men’s shirts. In the ‘present time’, she’s without a dash of make-up and in a professional suit for the few scenes we see her in, before she gets shot.
Alex then asks Shaz to ‘get me a change of clothes; I’d like to get out of red before Chris DeBurgh writes a song about me’. Is Shaz then responsible for buying the range of white silk parachute jumpsuits, Flashdance-inspired off-the-shoulder numbers, tight jeans and white-leather jacket? She’s certainly never out of high heels for much of the series, although I struggle to remember an episode where she’s ever running after a suspect as opposed to just watching the male cast pursue suspects or riding shotgun in the car.
Essentially from the first episode on, she indeed dresses in a fairly revealing fashion - or at least more suited to going to a disco than investigating crimes. I would probably argue that bra-straps showing is what you would kind of expect to happen if you’re wearing an off-the-shoulder shirt… but no. You wouldn’t expect that style when in a professional office situation and certainly not in the police-force, even in the 1980s.
I would argue that what other weak justification there could be for her adopting such dress-sense (or better, a wry playing up to the role that the time and situation appears to have for her) is due to Alex Drake’s refusal to accept what is happening to her. Why should she take it seriously? Why shouldn’t she dress in an ironic, fun or aggressively and overtly sexualized way? It’s not real!
“A subconscious construct sustained by severe cranial trauma…. this is a full-sensory hallucination… no, no, this happened to him, it can’t happen to me. The mind, fashions conduits to the real world… I need to know if I’m in hospital, I need to know if Molly knows where I am… I’m unconscious and I need reviving.”
In short, she doesn’t take it at all seriously much of the time - ‘stop wiggling your fingers every time you say my name‘, snarls Gene, as she turns him into a construct complete with quote marks. ‘I must constantly analyze… where does that leave me?’ she asks, as she ends up writing DEAD on the whiteboard.
Therefore perhaps she fights against the sexism and prejudice by laughing at it, dismissing its power over her and focusing her main efforts on solving why she is there, rather than the image she is forced into? Maybe when faced with the coffee-room full of James Bond and ‘tennis girl scratching‘ posters, perhaps she feels directing her efforts towards getting home to the year 2000 is going to have more success than reversing the laddish culture?
Interesting to note the comment it makes about the logical extension of feminism in Episode Four, where charmingly dopey Chris, when faced by ‘wimmins-libbers’ is argued into being so pro-feminist that he can’t even buy Shaz a chocolate bar because ‘I’d be patronizing you… what I’d be saying by getting it for you is that you’re not able to get your own independent chocolate. You’re a woman!’
Alex, like Sam in Life On Mars, stands aside wincing as the ‘boys’ punch suspects after a high-speed chase in Episode Three - ‘just because I’m stuck here, doesn’t mean I have to like it‘. Yet unlike Sam, the violence doesn’t give her the same nightmares. She just continually returns to her parents, to the unsolved mystery and the ghastly Bowie-esque Pierrot’s shouting. During that same episode, she makes a firm statement about gender prejudice during a rape investigation:
Alex: They say it’s difficult for rape victims to be believed - I wonder why? … It’s not about sex, it’s about control, power and revenge.
Gene: Maybe tell me about it some other time, when I’m in a coma, when I’m dead??
So, uh, sometimes she takes it seriously and sometimes not? Confused…
Alex’s upper-class accent, vocabulary and education never escapes a snide comment - ‘Is this la-di-da posh bollocks meant to impress me?’, often contrasting her implicitly to the placidly cheerful Shaz Granger, who practically melts into the background when compared to Alex’s flashy ensemble and assertive interpretations of crime scenarios.
All of this boils down to my saying - sure. Alex Drake’s character is indeed professional, articulate, intelligent, witting and confident enough to take on even the most misogynistic stock characters that appear in the show… but the costuming is a distraction. It really is. And makes for mixed messages.
I did note how when she gets smashed and has a one-night stand, that it leads Gene to be disappointed in her; how that indicates that she’s lost some self-respect by taking on the attitude that ‘this 80s time-period isn’t real’. I did wince at how she brusquely allowed ‘her arse to get stamped’ even with the ‘up-yours-this-means-nothing’ attitude to the tradition (although her mother’s appearance makes a great point about even taking it on your own terms doesn’t make it any more acceptable).
I also liked the point made by the conclusion of the series that sexual freedom has ramifications in terms of endangering trust and love for both women and men - and those related to them. How far do you push it before someone snaps and says ‘this hurts me when you selfishly think of your own desires first - and now I’ll choose the ultimate selfishness in return’? If you haven’t seen the show for yourself, I’ll leave that as the closest I’ll get to a spoiler!
But as ‘Psychodiva’ says at the start - no, professional women don’t need to dress like that to prove anything. To choose to dress like that is distracting and dilutes the overall message about respecting the person underneath.
I also have a concern about how it appears to lead to other women being judged as ‘why not you too if you are a woman in the same league‘ or ‘you are less deserving of our attention because you don’t dress like that‘. Is it hurting other women’s chances of being taken seriously unless they ‘get with the tartchick look’?
I’ll continue to watch out for Season Two, although I know that ‘What Not To Wear‘ is a modern show and Trinny and Suzannah won’t turn up to tell Alex that being powerful and confident doesn’t require such costumes!
By the way, the ‘Write Here, Write Now‘ blog has a nice little interview by one of the ATA writers, Mark Greig:
Who would win in a fight, Alex Drake or Sam Tyler?
Alex. Not only is she smarter, she’d smack Sam senseless whilst he was still discussing what the rules of engagement should be, and does Gene really have to be the referee?
Keep fighting, Alex.
It’s a challenge encountered by non-believers frequently. Believers think that the existence of their god is the default reality. Anyone suggesting otherwise had better explain themselves.
They fail to appreciate that we were all born atheists. To credit their intellectual honesty in at least this case, I’ve never heard a believer even try to say that we are born with an inherent belief in a particular god. They believe the newborn has a relationship with god, but it’s a one-way relationship. God supposedly knows the baby, but there’s no indication the baby is aware of god. So I can conclude that babies are born Tabula Rasa, with no concept of gods.
I’m at a loss to imagine how anyone can present positive proof of a thing’s nonexistence. How could I prove that Superman doesn’t exist, the unicorn, leprechauns? I’m pretty much stuck with if a god behaves the way its followers say it does, then it would have to have left physical evidence, having interacted in a physical way with humans in the past. The lack of evidence and lack of modern day contact would lead to a conclusion that either a god had existed but died, left town, whatever or that it never existed in the first place.
I don’t feel any more inclined to defend my non-belief to believers than I do my nonpartisan position to Dems, Repubs and Libs. I’m not making a positive claim, I’m not asking them to believe anything, not an alternative religion or anything else. All I’m asking them to do is examine their beliefs critically and, if they are to have a faith, have a faith that can withstand rigorous skepticism. I’m asking them to actually think about what they believe. I’m demanding nothing more of them than to use their god given brain. For that I don’t have to prove a thing.
Winning converts to atheism has no purpose. It provides no benefit to other atheists, it offers no reward, it isn’t celebrated. I do like socializing with atheists more than mixed groups or an all-believer group. I am often in mixed and all-believer groups. They don’t scare me and I’m not overly impressed with them. But when I’m around other atheists, just like when I’m around other geeks, other animal lovers (nothing kinky, mind you) or other gays/bi’s, then I’m totally relaxed and find the conversations far more stimulating. Note that every group I consider myself a part of does no proselytizing, doesn’t recruit and firmly believes that one is either born an animal lover, geek, gay and/or atheist (we’re all born atheists) or one is not. And no one is likely to wake up one morning to find themselves magically transformed into one. They’re expressions of our genetic profile. I can’t yet alter the genetic profile of others. That’s why I can’t even think about trying to convert others to atheism.
Theists, on the other hand…
