iknklast made this very important point in a comment:

When I was in Texas, the divide between the money spent on educating minorities and educating the white citizens was notable. I had students of color in my classroom who struggled to keep up because they had less preparation. This fed into the preconception of people who assumed they were not as smart. Because they had less opportunity earlier in life, they came to college with less preparation, therefore they typically did worse (especially at first) than white students. Ergo, they were less capable by nature.

…

Sometimes it required a little extra work on my part when teaching a student from a poorer school, usually a person of color, and for a lot of people, that proved their prejudice. It never occurred to them that this was the work that had been done with the other students earlier on in life, and being three steps behind everyone else meant it was an amazing feat when the students finished even.

A few minutes after I read that comment, I opened this article by Roberto A Ferdman at Wonkblog at the Washington Post, and read:

Wealthy parents aren’t just able to send their kids to top pre-schools—they can also purchase the latest learning technology and ensure their children experience as many museums, concerts and other cultural experiences as possible. Low-income parents, on the other hand, don’t have that opportunity. Instead, they’re often left to face the reality of sending their kids to schools without having had the chance to provide an edifying experience at home.

That might sound foreboding if not hyperbolic, but it’s a serious and widespread problem in the United States, where poor kids enter school already a year behind the kids of wealthier parents. That deficit is among the largest in the developed world, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to narrow later in life.

Especially in a country that, collectively, frankly doesn’t give a fuck that poor people are held back by poverty, and in fact think it serves them right for being poor.

This is one of the key takeaways from a new book about how United States is failing its children. The book, called Too Many Children Left Behind, is written by Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, a long-time researcher of poverty and inequality. And it will force almost anyone to reflect on the impact of unchecked inequality on children.

Waldfogel says the massive achievement gap in the United States is a blemish for a country that aspires to be the greatest in the world. In her book, she shows that achievement gap is pronounced to a startling degree in the first years of life.

And then it’s made even worse by people like Scalia who conclude that poor people are just stupider than rich people.

Ferdman and Waldfogel had a conversation about the issue.

How serious is the achievement gap between poorer and wealthier children in the United States?

It’s pretty frightening.

We find that for both reading and math, the children whose parents had low levels of education—meaning they only got a high school education or less—are lagging behind the children of more educated parents by a full standard deviation at school entry. A standard deviation is huge—it’s a big gap; it’s at least an entire year of development.

By comparison, in the other countries we looked at, the gap was closer to half a standard deviation. So the gap is substantially and significantly larger in the United States.

Wow. And we’re talking about kids who are only four years old. So four years in to life they are already a full year behind?

Yes, it’s terrible.

And we do a crap job of catching them up, and we’re an outlier in both of those ways – the bad start and the bad finish.

The United States is somewhat exceptional in this regard. Can you talk a little about how the size and shape of the achievement gap in this country is distinctive?

Where the United States really stood out was in having significantly more inequality at school entry and at the end of school compared to peer countries we found around the world—those are Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. For most of the things we looked at, the U.K. was in second place behind the U.S. in terms of the level of inequality. Australia and Canada really stand out as having much more equality of outcomes among kids than the United States. And this is carried through as kids go to school. The achievement gap grows as kids go to school in the U.S., but it doesn’t really elsewhere.

And…what’s more important? Apart from climate change and continuing to have a planet that can sustain life? What’s more important than doing everything possible to give everyone an equal chance in life?

Jedidah C. Isler sets Scalia and Roberts straight on some things.

The truly damaging part of Chief Justice Roberts’s question is the tacit implication that black students must justify their presence at all.

Black students’ responsibility in the classroom is not to serve as “seasoning” to the academic soup. They do not function primarily to enrich the learning experience of white students. Black students come to the physics classroom for the same reason white students do; they love physics and want to know more. Do we require that white students justify their presence in the classroom? Do we need them to bring something other than their interest?

No, we don’t, and you know what that does? It frees up white students to learn and do physics. (The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to people from other categories that are expected to justify their presence in the classroom.)

By suggesting, and sadly litigating, that diversity — and more important, inclusion and equal opportunity — aren’t paramount to the production of new scientific information, we wrongly imply that the most important part of scientific discovery is in the classroom.

The purpose of the classroom is to build a tool kit and to understand what we know in the hopes of uncovering something that we don’t. It’s the door through which we create new physicists. Closing that door to students of color unless they can justify their presence is closing the door to the kinds of creativity that can be shown only after a student has mastered basic skills.

A physics class should interrogate and transfer the canon of scientific knowledge. Those students will go on to consider the many unanswered questions at the frontiers of what is known about the universe.

If we limit the physics classroom to white students, or students whose presence in a classroom we leave unquestioned, we also limit the production of new information about the world — and whose perspective that world will reflect. If that’s the case, then we all lose.

So let’s don’t do that.

Peace talks. Paris. The table. See the table.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Notice anything?

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was in Paris on Monday for a ministerial meeting with his counterparts from France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, and Turkey to discuss possible solutions to the ongoing crisis in Syria. Take a good look at the photo above. Noticeably absent are … you guessed it … women. Sure, there are a few in the room, but not one woman is seated at the table in a position of power — because not one of the above countries has a woman foreign minister. Such an abject lack of gender parity at high-stakes talks like these is shameful.

It’s shameful the same way it’s shameful there are no women in the hierarchy of the Catholic church. The crisis in Syria affects women, to put it mildly, yet there is not one woman taking part in that discussion.

In a 2012 report on women’s participation in peace negotiations, U.N. Women observed that a “limited but reasonably representative sample of 31 major peace processes between 1992 and 2011 reveals that only four percent of signatories, 2.4 percent of chief mediators, 3.7 percent of witnesses and 9 per cent of negotiators are women.”

The report adds that “the underrepresentation of women at the peace table is much more marked than in other public decision-making roles, where women are still underrepresented but where the gap has been steadily narrowing. This includes the roles that typically dominate peace talks: politician, lawyer, diplomat and member of a party to armed conflict. Women’s structural exclusion from peace talks has significant consequences for the extent to which issues of concern to them — such as violence against women or women’s citizenship rights — are addressed.”

Women aren’t just bystanders. Women aren’t passengers or baggage. Women aren’t Roombas or Siris. Women are real people, just as men are real people. Women should be included in these discussions.

From last month at the Huffington Post blog – The Troubling Erasure of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed.

When we think about breastfeeding, the image that comes to mind — the one pushed on us by society, medical professionals and the media alike — is that of a mother nursing her newborn baby. Brochures, websites and PSAs promote the picture of a woman lovingly looking at her child as the baby suckles at her breast. The language accompanying this imagery is inevitably gendered, specific to cisgender women who are nursing a baby that they themselves gave birth to.

Isn’t that awful? Women are always shoving themselves forward that way, hogging the mic, taking up all the slots, erasing everyone else. Imagine women pretending breastfeeding is something women do. Slags.

For a long time, no one has questioned that language. But in recent years, as acceptance of genders outside the binary grows, our understanding of many things that have long gone unchallenged have needed to shift. There has been a push for gender-neutral language when talking about reproductive justice, from abortion to pregnancy.

Yeah! Because what better way is there to overturn women’s relegation to second-class status than to stop talking about the reproductive realities that are the source of that second-class status? Godalmighty can we please finally stop talking about women? By the way did you know that for every word a man says, a woman says seven hundred million words? Fact.

Despite acknowledgment by many in birthing communities that pregnancy is not limited to women, the language used by most people still hasn’t changed. Jasper Moon, a genderqueer parent who prefers to be called “ren” by their child (short for “parent”), notes that when they hear the term “nursing mother,” they know “that obviously doesn’t apply to me.”

The term “mother” is itself problematic. As J. Kathleen (Jake) Marcus, an attorney in Philadelphia who specializes in parenting and gender legal issues, notes, “Kids are nursed by people who are not their mothers all the time.” While this is less common in Western culture, people have been nursing their friends’ and family members’ kids throughout history.

Yes: wet nurses. They were women though. It wasn’t men who did it. It wasn’t “people”; it was women. Trans people shouldn’t be erased, but neither should women.

Don’t miss Rebecca Solnit’s magnificent essay on Lolita and female characters in literature and reading while female, Men Explain Lolita to Me.

The rest of us get used to the transgendering and cross-racializing of our identities as we invest in protagonists like Ishmael or Dirty Harry or Holden Caulfield. But straight white men don’t, so much. I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn’t need to be aware and, often, isn’t. Which is a form of loss in its own way.

Straight white men don’t, so much, because Ishmael and Dirty Harry and Holden Caulfield can stand in for them to some extent. The rest of us don’t have that. Whole movies are about men only; most movies are like that. It’s unpleasantly clear that many men imagine the world as populated by men. They’re men to want to fuck women, to be sure, but that doesn’t make the women real people who matter.

There’s a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and comic books and movies exist in abundance and cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Boring Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.

The men with the stunted imaginations and defective ability to notice the world around them are doing their fellow men no favors by portraying the world as populated almost exclusively by men.

I sort of kicked the hornets’ nest the other day, by expressing feminist opinions about books. It all came down to Lolita. “Some of my favorite novels are disparaged in a fairly shallow way. To read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov,” one commenter informed me, which made me wonder if there’s a book called Reading Lolita in Patriarchy.

…

You can read Nabokov’s relationship to his character in many ways. Vera Nabokov, the author’s wife, wrote, “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along…” And the women who read Nabokov’s novel in repressive Iran, says Azar Nafisi of Reading Lolita in Tehran, identified too: “Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such she becomes a double victim—not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.”

When I wrote the essay that provoked such splenetic responses, I was trying to articulate that there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes not only books that don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view, but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do.

Dilbert comic Scott Adams wrote last month that we live in a matriarchy because, “access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.” Meaning that you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which if we say it without any gender pronouns sounds completely reasonable.

It also means that Scott Adams too is thinking of the world as populated by men. He’s thinking of the point of view, the receptor for his remark, is male. By “access to sex” he means “a penis’s access to a vagina.” Women don’t “control access to sex” across the board, or for women or for gay men – women “control access” to themselves. Scott Adams sees women’s expectation of being able to say no to sex as strictly controlling access to sex in general – which betrays an incredibly stunted ability to realize that people not like him exist.

But if you assume that sex with a female body is a right that heterosexual men have, then women are just these crazy illegitimate gatekeepers always trying to get in between you and your rights. Which means you have failed to recognize that women are people, and perhaps that comes from the books and movies you have—and haven’t—been exposed to, as well as the direct inculcation of the people and systems around you.

Yep. That’s why culture matters, and that’s why we get to say what’s wrong with it.

Investigative journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong just published a long piece about how police caught a serial rapist (and how one of his victims was not only disbelieved for years but was bullied into saying she lied and then prosecuted for lying). The rapist told them, “Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia.” Culture shapes us. Miller and Armstrong’s grim and gripping essay, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” bears witness to both the impact of popular culture and of women’s stories being discounted and discredited.

Oh look there, she picked out exactly the passage I picked out. We’re passage-noticing buddies! But yeah: that stuff matters.

But “to read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov” said one of my volunteer instructors. I thought that was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and another nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn’t thought of that yet. It is, and it’s also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps. And then another nice liberal man came along and said, “You don’t seem to understand the basic truth of art. I wouldn’t care if a novel was about a bunch of women running around castrating men. If it was great writing, I’d want to read it. Probably more than once.” Of course there is no such body of literature, and if the nice liberal man who made that statement had been assigned book after book full of castration scenes, maybe even celebrations of castration, it might have made an impact on him.

It’s the same failure to notice. There is no such body of literature, but there is a massive body of literature of rape, and that’s not just some random fact.

I had never said that we shouldn’t read Lolita. I’ve read it more than once. I joked that there should be a list of books no woman should read, because quite a few lionized books are rather nasty about my gender, but I’d also said “of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.” And then I’d had fun throwing out some opinions about books and writers. But I was serious about this. You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.

It’s worth being serious about this.

Glosswitch has a fiendishly brilliant post about the old sexism and the new.

Back in the olden days, sexism was so straightforward, even a person with a uterus could understand it. It was the belief that men were superior to women — more intelligent, more important, more human — and while it affected different groups of women in different ways, feminists were in a position to identify who benefited from it and who was harmed. Of course, nowadays we can see that this was a very simplistic way of understanding gender-based oppression.

So dreadfully crude, isn’t it? Probably, as she says, because women thought of it. But now we have a better kind.

These days sexism is different. It isn’t about the appropriation of female sexual, domestic and reproductive labour or anything so crude. These days we’ve realised that the people who do this unpaid work are privileged enough to want to do it, freeing us up to focus on the more important task of validating everyone else’s sense of self.

Women’s sense of self doesn’t need validating, you see, probably because women are so busy doing the unpaid work they don’t bother to have a sense of self.

That also means women are out of touch, so they still think some things are sexist.

Porn is one area where they make this mistake, stupidly assuming that men getting off on women being abused could be in some way related to men getting off on women being abused. Drag is another. There are proper, long, thinky explanations as to why porn and drag subvert the very systems that those with an old-style understanding of sexism think they reinforce. Haven’t read said explanations? Then simply take your gut reaction and assume the direct opposite.

Take pantomime dames, for instance. Yes, a grown man calling on all of the misogynist stereotypes of the older woman — vain, bitchy, sex-starved, deluded — and playing them for laughs might look bad. But to think it actually is bad would just be too obvious. You don’t want to look like one of those stupid women who still bases her feminism on things that she feels are wrong.

Oh god no. No no no no no, never. It’s only nonbinary and genderqueer and trans people who really understand gender. The problem with drag and pantomime dames has nothing to do with women – what a silly idea! It’s all about transphobia and erasure and mocking people’s sacred identities.

“That looks a bit … off,” you might say, whereupon some young non-binary type, playing his — sorry, their — get out of male free card for all it’s worth, will ask you whether you’ve read up on the long, colourful history of drag as resistance to gendered norms. Because believe them, they totally have, back when you were too busy washing underpants and cooking fish fingers and all the other crappy, boring things women like you do because you’re lucky enough to have no inner life.

Just read the whole thing.

The end of that terrible story:

After O’Leary was linked to Marie’s rape, Lynnwood Police Chief Steven Jensen requested an outside review of how his department had handled the investigation. In a report not previously made public, Sgt. Gregg Rinta, a sex crimes supervisor with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, wrote that what happened was “nothing short of the victim being coerced into admitting that she lied about the rape.”

That Marie recanted wasn’t surprising, Rinta wrote, given the “bullying” and “hounding” she was subjected to. The detectives elevated “minor inconsistencies” — common among victims — into discrepancies, while ignoring strong evidence the crime had occurred. As for threatening jail and a possible withdrawal of housing assistance if Marie failed a polygraph: “These statements are coercive, cruel, and unbelievably unprofessional,” Rinta wrote. “I can’t imagine ANY justification for making these statements.”

Jensen also ordered an internal review, which was similarly damning. Mason’s judgment was unduly swayed by [Marie’s foster mother] Peggy’s phone call. The detectives’ second interview with Marie was “designed to elicit a confession of false reporting.” The false reporting charge arose from a “self-imposed rush.”

Despite the reviews’ tough language, no one in the Lynnwood Police Department was disciplined.

The perp raped five women after Marie was bullied into recanting. Violent rapes; stranger rapes; the stuff of nightmares. He had a knife; he tied them up; he took pictures; he made threats.

In 2008, Marie’s case was one of four labeled unfounded by the Lynnwood police, according to statistics reported to the FBI. In the five years from 2008 to 2012, the department determined that 10 of 47 rapes reported to Lynnwood police were unfounded — 21.3 percent. That’s five times the national average of 4.3 percent for agencies covering similar-sized populations during that same period. Rider said his agency has become more cautious about labeling a case unfounded since Marie. “I would venture to say we investigate our cases a lot more vigorously than many departments do,” he said. “Now, we’re extra careful that we get the right closure on it.”

Better late than never, I guess.

Two and a half years after Marie was branded a liar, Lynnwood police found her, south of Seattle, and told her the news: Her rapist had been arrested in Colorado. They gave her an envelope with information on counseling for rape victims. They said her record would be expunged. And they handed her $500, a refund of her court costs. Marie broke down, experiencing, all at once, shock, relief and anger.

She sued, and Lynnwood settled for $150,000. Not much.

Marie left the state, got a commercial driver’s license and took a job as a long-haul trucker. She married, and in October she and her husband had their second child. She asked that her current location not be disclosed.

Before leaving Washington to restart her life, Marie made an appointment to visit the Lynnwood police station. She went to a conference room and waited. Rittgarn had already left the department, but Mason came in, looking “like a lost little puppy,” Marie says. “He was rubbing his head and literally looked like he was ashamed about what they had done.” He told Marie he was sorry — “deeply sorry,” Marie says. To Marie, he seemed sincere.

Recently, Marie was asked if she had considered not reporting the rape.

“No,” she said. She wanted to be honest. She wanted to remember everything she could. She wanted to help the police.

“So nobody else would get hurt,” she said. “They’d be out there searching for this person who had done this to me.”

Instead five more women got hurt.

People are talking about this story today – Pro Publica’s long report on a teenage girl in Lynwood, Washington (a suburb just north of Seattle) who reported being raped, was doubted by her foster parents and then by the cops, and ended up with being charged with the crime of false reporting. Spoiler: she wasn’t lying.

In the part late in the story that narrates how the rape happened, there’s this bit that brought me up short:

He had a term for what he was about to do: “rape theater.” Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia. Where do you go when you’re 5 and already thinking about handcuffs? he would ask himself. He was only 8 the first time he broke into a home. It was such a rush. He had broken into more than a dozen homes since.

Uh. Aren’t we always told that violent movies don’t inspire real life violence? I’ve never believed that, but aren’t we always told it?

Sarah Tuttle explains to Justice Roberts what unique perspective a minority student brings to a physics class.

I am a white woman about to start a faculty position in astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle. Justice John Roberts wants to know why I would care who was in my class. Although I find it baffling that a man who leads the court of a country built in an attempt to honor and value those disparate experiences and backgrounds doesn’t understand the strength of that diversity, I will do him the service I do for all of my students. I will assume that his intentions are good and explain to him why his question is easy to answer, if only he spent any time thinking about it.

Her explanation is a thing of beauty. Read it all; here’s just a taste:

I care who is in my class because I’m training revolutionaries. Revolutions come not from walking down the well trodden path, but from finding new paths. How does that happen? The act of physics is an act of rigorous creativity. Our creativity flows not from the set of equations we drape over the top, but from our personal experiences and knowledge of what comes before. New ways of thinking come from daydreaming, and pushing the limits of what we think we understand. If I am not putting those tools of knowledge into a broad range of hands, I’m failing our next generation.

She asks herself why are her classes so white.

John Roberts doesn’t want us to ask these questions because the underlying reason is ugly and exposes the systemic racism that is institutionalized at the deepest levels of our society. The laws that John Roberts and his colleagues nominally clarify and protect are created to keep Justices Roberts, Scalia, and their ilk of mediocre white men at the helm of our country. This is particularly ironic because our Justice seems to require minority students to justify their existence in any classroom they might wish to join. Since when is access to education something that must be earned through demonstrated greatness? For those of us that are white, seats at the table have always been available for the mediocre.

That’s one good definition of privilege: seats at the table for the mediocre.

H/t Jen

Another one: a worked-up panic about anti-depressants and autism. David Auerbach reports at Slate:

The alarm has been sounded: Antidepressants cause autism! Or so one could easily think based on a new study in JAMA Pediatrics. Four researchers in Quebec conclude that “the use of antidepressants, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [SSRIs], during the second and/or third trimester increases the risk of [autism spectrum disorder] in children.” In a ResearchGate interview, study senior author and perinatal pharmacoepidemiologist Anick Bérard of the Université de Montréal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre firmly advocated avoiding antidepressant use during pregnancy: “Depression needs to be treated during pregnancy but with something other than antidepressants in the majority of cases. The risk/benefit ratio is clearly leaning towards no use.”

Risk to whom and benefit to whom? Depression can be a very serious health problem; it can be fatal.

…other researchers have stressed a note of caution about the new antidepressant study and its methods. Yet even these dissenting voices do not, I think, go far enough.

Study co-author Bérard, it turns out, has been criticized by a federal judge for cherry-picking results to link antidepressants to birth defects. The press should treat such studies with skepticism rather than leading with their findings. Sober pieces in Science, Wired, and NPR rightly questioned whether the study was significant and whether Bérard’s advocacy for stopping antidepressant usage during pregnancy was justified. In particular, Emily Underwood in Science wisely led off by writing “Many epidemiologists and psychiatrists say the study, published today in JAMA Pediatrics, is flawed and will cause unnecessary panic,” which is the most important point to make about this study. But too many journalists failed to make this point, and with autism research, such credulity is downright dangerous.

So we’re not rid of the Duggars after all. They’re back, in the form of two of the daughters who show us what it’s like being raised as a breeding cow by fanatical Christians.

I spotted it while channel-surfing and watched a few minutes. (I can’t take them for very long – the hostage smiles freak me out.) It’s horrifying watching one very young woman, pregnant for the first time, talk to her slightly older sister who has already given birth, her “nervousness” about what childbirth is going to be like. It’s horrifying because we know she was raised to do exactly this, so it’s not a matter of a very young woman who is keen to have a baby for her own reasons and based on her own feelings, it’s a matter of her Christian Duty. It’s also horrifying because we know she’s expected to keep doing it as many times as she possibly can. It’s horrifying because the Duggars are Quiverfull.

The Washington Post reports on the “what about that Josh guy now, huh?” aspect.

Now, “Jill & Jessa: Counting On” was a fairly brutal emotional look into what his siblings have gone through since Josh’s “wrongdoings” went public, as they talked about feeling betrayed by their brother. In between updates about Jill’s missionary work and Jessa’s pregnancy, the special interviewed eight Duggar siblings, as producers asked them to describe the last four months. On-screen text helpfully popped up to remind viewers: “Several months ago, a police report was released containing allegations that, as a minor, Josh inappropriately touched five people.”

The Duggar kids all followed the same script in their responses: They couldn’t believe that (a) the police report was released and (b) the media was so interested in events that happened in Josh’s past so long ago. Jessa and Jill, who already sat for an interview with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, described how (as two of Josh’s victims) they had already forgiven him and moved on.

“So the police report was released to the world. And I know that wasn’t right,” Jill, 24, said. “We had to work through it because as a victim, you’ve already worked through that — you’ve already dealt with it and you’ve already moved on. And you don’t want that rubbed in your face all the time and for everybody else to see.”

She said, on tv.

A Saudi millionaire has been acquitted of raping a teenage girl; he claimed he accidentally tripped and fell on her. Could happen to anyone, couldn’t it. So tragically easy to do.

Updating to add: this was in Southwark Crown Court, in London.

Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on an 18 year-old-girl who had slept on his sofa in his Maida Vale flat after a night out drinking.

The businessman had already had sex with the teenager’s 24-year-old friend, whom he already knew, in the bedroom and said his penis might have been poking out of his underwear when he fell on the teen.

The young woman said she had woken up in the early hours of the morning, with Mr Abdulaziz on top of her, forcing himself inside her.

But no: he was on top of her, but he wasn’t forcing himself inside her, it’s just that his penis was poking out of his underpants and it just happened to fall up inside her vagina. We all know how easily that can happen, right? We can all see the mechanics of it with no problem at all? A man trips and falls on top of a woman and whoops! there’s his penis accidentally fallen up her vagina. Half the people on earth are a result of how easy that is.

His semen and DNA was found inside the young woman, but he said it was possible he had semen on his hands from having sex with the 24-year-old earlier.

And his hands also accidentally fell up her when he fell on her. That too is so absurdly easy it’s amazing anyone ever brings a rape case at all.

Originally a comment by quixote on Guest post: The HPV vaccine saves lives.

Studies of how people process weapons-grade BS in the news show that once the nonsense is presented it soaks in. Any subsequent correction simply does not cancel out the initial BS in enough people.

That last is important. The feeling is always, “Oh, but that doesn’t apply to me.” Which can be true. But if it does apply to 60% or 40% or even 20% in the case of immunization BS, then we still have a problem.

Which has a deeply disturbing implication. Grimes is doing essential work trying to set the record straight. But the only real solution is to prevent total BS from being spouted in the first place. That means our current free speech model, where more speech is the solution for lies, does not work.

The evidence that it doesn’t is all around us by now. So we’re going to have to figure out how to filter total lies out of the media (including blogs?? Facebook??? Twitter????) without destroying free speech. And if we don’t figure it out, the whole point of free speech, which is enabling truth to be heard, will be lost.

The Goldsmiths Student Union has “concluded” its “investigation” of the ASH event where some men in the front row tried to disrupt Maryam’s talk. Here’s what they have to say about that:

We have now concluded our investigation into the events that took place at the ASH event on 20^th November. [That must be a typo for 30th November]

Goldsmiths SU will be taking the following actions:

(i)  We will arrange meetings with the Islamic and Atheist, Secularist and Humanist societies individually and identify actions that will be taken by each society. This may be followed by disciplinary action against individual society members and/or a society.

(ii)  We will review our external speaker procedure and safe space policy in line with best practice from other institutions . 

(iii)  We will arrange a meeting with all our societies to brief them on the reviewed procedure, including our safe space policy.  No society will be able to proceed with an external speaker event unless this briefing has been attended.

(iv)  We will ensure that there is a comprehensive and compulsory annual training session for clubs and societies who wish to invite external speakers to events delivered as part of the training programme that takes place at the start of the year.

 

Equality, diversity and respect for others within the Goldsmiths community are core values at Goldsmiths SU and it’s important that all of our Societies and Sports Clubs adhere to these values.

The Times has reported on Maryam’s encounter with Goldsmiths ISOC.

Maryam Namazie, a feminist who fled the Iranian regime and campaigns against Islamic extremism, was speaking on “apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of Isis” at Goldsmiths, University of London, when the talk was interrupted by protesters who switched off her projector and accused her of violating their “safe space”. The secularist, who said it was wrong for Bangladeshi bloggers to be hacked to death, or for Afghan women to be stoned, in the name of religion, said she was staggered when the Feminist and LGBTQ societies posted statements of solidarity with the Islamic Society, denouncing her as an Islamophobe.

She said: “I don’t expect any apology from Islamists – fascists don’t apologise — but I do expect it from those who feign to be defenders of women’s rights and gay rights. It’s a complete betrayal.”

Oh Goldsmiths feminist society. Oh Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ society. Repent. Apologize.

A sad story of identity and misunderstanding.

I’ve always known I was working class, even before I had the words to articulate it. Aged three, I used to call my dinner “tea”. My father, a high court judge, hated it but I kept on doing it all the same. I’ve no idea how I just knew the word “tea” was working class for “dinner”. I guess it’s something that was just in me.

Back in the 1980s no one ever discussed working-class children who’d been falsely assigned middle-class status at birth. It was as though we didn’t exist. Because of this I’d retreat into a fantasy world where I’d been swapped at birth and Den and Angie off Eastenders were my real mum and dad. I couldn’t talk to my parents about this. My mother, a bus conductor’s daughter and the youngest of six children, was always telling me how lucky I was with my holidays abroad and ballet lessons. I don’t think she meant to hurt me; it was just her identified-poor-at-birth privilege that made her such an evil bitch.

Mothers are all like that. Women old enough to be mothers, whether they are or not, are all like that. They get worse every year – exponentially worse. Scary bad.

There’s a word for people like me: überpoor (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; your ignorance just means you’re a privileged bigot). Basically, it describes the state of being poor while enduring the added oppression that comes with having money and a middle-class background. The queer poverty theorist J’amie Olivier came up with it in his brilliant work Whipping Chav. If you’ve not read it, please do. It explains so much about how poor people are not oppressed due to having no money but due to “poorphobia”: a widespread antipathy towards dog racing, Lambrini and the Waitrose Essentials range. Hardest hit by this are the überpoor: people who have been wrongly assigned middle- or upper-class status but are in fact poor. For centuries, such people have simply been invisible. No one has wanted to talk about us and our needs.

Thankfully, the release of Park Life in the mid-1990s came as something of a tipping point for überpoor people. Damon Albarn’s affected mockney accent finally proved to the world that yes, we did exist. To paraphrase Paris Lees on Conchita Wurst, Damon wasn’t middle-class or a millionaire pop star or any of these restrictive categories: he was just Damon, showing what it means to break through all the barriers! Obviously there was some opposition to such an image of liberation. Vile bigots such as Jarvis Cocker started releasing überpoorphobic anthems such as Common People, erasing our lived experience by claiming we merely thought “that poor is cool”. I always felt the NUS should have no-platformed Pulp due to that line about how we would “never understand how it means to live [our lives] with no meaning or control”.

You know who’s the worst that way? Socialists. Überpoor excluding radical socialists, aka ÜERs. ÜERs are always going on and on about literal poverty and class oppression and inequality, which excludes the überpoor who are already the most marginalized people ever.

My hope is that eventually, more and more assigned-poor-at-birth people are able to recognise how privileged they are, welcome us into their communities and hand over all their lager and pool tables. So many APAB prople think it’s enough just not to mind if I rent a flat above a shop, cut my hair and get a job, but this implies being überpoor isn’t in fact more valid and painful than simply being poor. It’s essential that these poor people put us first given that we bear the double burden of not just being überpoor but of having lots of money while being überpoor and hence being mis-classed (it never ceases to amaze me, by contrast, how welcoming the rich are to the überrich, allowing them to adopt plummy accents while continuing to do all the former’s domestic work).

Down with the ÜERs.