Natasha Fatah and Nahayat Tizhoosh produced a story for the CBC on the failure of the Gulf states to accept any refugees at all.
https://youtu.be/WYQwdF6SBXE
The ministry does not sponsor Arab children who lost their parents in conflicts
Sep 4th, 2015 3:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Ministry of Social Affairs has banned Saudi families from adopting Syrian or other foreign children.
“The ministry does not sponsor Arab children who lost their parents in conflicts, such as in Syria and Iraq. There are global humanitarian organizations that deal with these cases,” said Latifah Al-Tamimi, director of social supervision at the ministry in the Eastern Province.
So their god hates children, too. No surprise there.
Bloomberg reports that refugees from Syria feel more welcome in Europe than in the Gulf states.
Searching for a new home, Yassir Batal says Germany and its unfamiliar voices and customs are more enticing for his wife and five children than the wealthy Arab states whose culture, religion and language they share.
Like so many other Syrians who have escaped civil war, the 36-year-old has ruled out heading south through Jordan to Saudi Arabia or beyond. They wouldn’t be welcomed the same way, he said.
“In Europe, I can get treatment for my polio, educate my children, have shelter and live an honorable life,” said Batal, as he left a United Nations office in Beirut, the city that’s been the crossroads for more than a million refugees since the violence started in March 2011. “Gulf countries have closed their doors in the face of Syrians.”
What happened to the ummah?
“I’m most indignant over the Arab countries who are rolling in money and who only take very few refugees,” Danish Finance Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said in an interview this week at his office in Copenhagen. “Countries like Saudi Arabia. It’s completely scandalous.”
Well all those beheadings aren’t free, you know.
Tariq Al Shammari, a Saudi who heads the Council of Gulf International Relations lobby group, dismissed the criticism as “nonsense” and unfair.
“The Europeans turned a blind eye to what was happening in Syria until the crisis reached their shores,” Al Shammari said by telephone from Manama, Bahrain’s capital. “They just want to lay the blame on someone else.”
Because it’s the Europeans’ responsibility but not the Saudis’? Why? Who made that rule?
Outside the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Mahmoud Abbas, the artist, said he was driven to draw the cartoon by news of Syrians who were found decomposing in a truck abandoned on the highway connecting Budapest and Vienna last week.
Mahmoud Abbas
“If our Arab heritage hasn’t moved us toward the people closest to us, then it’s a disaster,” he said.
God hates people.
Surely flies will go to the dish
Sep 4th, 2015 2:23 pm | By Ophelia BensonWhatever problem it is you want to address…just blame it on women. It makes everything so much simpler. The Malay Mail Online reports on an example of that simplification process:
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 4 — A Friday sermon by Federal Territories’ Islamic authorities today blamed women who do not cover their “aurat,” or intimate body parts, for causing social ills that would affect even those who do.
In its sermon distributed to mosques under its jurisdiction, the Federal Territories Islamic Department (Jawi) also compared uncovered women to uncovered dishes, which it said are bound to frequented by flies, making them unappetising.
Women’s filthy intimate body parts cause all the problems, plus, they draw flies and are just plain disgusting.
“Let us think, what will happen if a dish is not covered? Surely flies will go to the dish, subsequently making those who love the dish lose their appetite,” Jawi said.
“Looking at today’s social ills, it is worrying. When women fail to cover their aurat perfectly, it will open the door to vices,” the sermon added.
“The exploitation of women will prosper. Illicit sex will invite calamities. Life will no longer be peaceful. Safety will be worthless. Even those who take care of their aurat will be victims. Those who reveal their aurat, sins await them.”
It’s women, I tell you, women women women.
According to contemporary Muslim teachings, Muslim women’s “aurat” towards unrelated men is their whole body except their faces and both palms.
Elbows? Biceps? The middle of the back? Shins? Everything but the face and palms? That’s some powerful magic.
Except it’s not, it’s just a way to batter and smash women down into even more submission, which is still never enough. It’s just not possible to hate and stifle women so thoroughly that they become no longer an issue and the sermons can talk about something else. God damn women! What is wrong with them?! Why do they have to be so bad?
There was no mention in the sermon about the obligation of men to also cover their aurat, although Friday prayers are attended almost exclusively by Muslim men in Malaysia.
Of course not. It’s the women who are so disgusting and fly-blown, not the men.
I wonder how many women got beaten up in Kuala Lumpur today.
No small hooray for the pope
Sep 4th, 2015 9:34 am | By Ophelia BensonKate Smurthwaite has some thoughts on the pope’s “pardon” for abortions.
As I am the official representative of womb-operators (as well as being a comedian I’m also the Media Spokesperson for Abortion Rights UK – you’d be amazed how much overlap the roles have) every journalist and radio presenter has been tripping over themselves to ask me if I’m PLEASED. One even went so far as to ask whether I couldn’t manage a ‘small hooray’.
But any transitory modicum of elation I might have felt at the news that his Holiness has taken one tiny step away from the misogynist medieval attitude that my uterus is any of his damn business is more than swamped by the fury I’m feeling that anyone is still listening to the guy.
Right? The news media treat him with such tender care, such affection, such solemnity – but why? He’s not the boss of all of us. He’d like to be, but he’s not. He’s not, strictly speaking, the boss of anyone except the church hierarchy. He’s just a guy in fancy robes who’s at the top a particular church ladder, that’s all. There are a lot of Catholics, but they’re all free to ignore him if they decide to. He has no power over them.
He has as no democratic mandate. The Pope is ‘elected’ by a bunch of cardinals who in turn are appointed by the Pope. They’re not exactly a diverse bunch.
He doesn’t represent Catholics, thousands of whom have abortions every year and carry on calling themselves Catholics afterwards. Some have even organized to form a campaign group called Catholics For Choice.
He certainly doesn’t represent women. Everyone is entitled to a view on any subject they want, but seriously. Has he, or any of his cardinals, ever woken up and thought ‘still no period… oh shit, I really hope this isn’t… come on… start you stupid thing…’?
No, because for them it’s always someone else who does the baby-having. They make the rules, those inferior other people carry them out.
The only mandate he has is that, as several enthusiastic journalists couldn’t wait to advise me, ‘He’s God’s representative on earth.’
Draconian laws, the vast majority of them initially catapulted into force by the political influence of his predecessors, mean that every year over 20 million women have unsafe illegal abortions and thousands of them die. I’m sorry, but in 2015 I need a better justification for that than ‘He’s God’s representative on earth’.
Journalists told her that? Oy. No he’s not “God’s representative on earth” – because we don’t have any reliable knowledge that there is such a god, because even if we did we wouldn’t know how to contact it, because we have no reason at all to think any pope or any other human is that unavailable god’s “representative.” There’s no link between those four words and any kind of evidence or line of transmission.
And if there were we could still disobey it.
We are watching Syria die
Sep 3rd, 2015 5:52 pm | By Ophelia BensonTerry Glavin in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday:
“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”
There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare – the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples – among Syrian Canadians there is also an unquenchable sorrow.
…
But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the western countries, the civil society groups – it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”
Drowning in the sea: a little boy in a red t-shirt and shorts, found face-down in the surf. The boy was among 11 corpses that washed up on a Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this way in the Mediterranean already this year.
Nobody is innocent.
…what we are all doing – Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism – is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. And if you can comprehend that, you will know something of the sorrow that afflicts Faisal Alazem and all those other Syrian-Canadians these days.
Huddled on the ground before a man in a turban
Sep 3rd, 2015 5:11 pm | By Ophelia BensonHeather Barr at Human Rights Watch reports:
It’s a scene we associate with the Taliban. A woman covered head to toe in a flowing veil, huddled on the ground before a man in a turban. His right arm is raised, in motion, holding a lash, a second away from bringing it down on her. An audience of men – only men – sit in a circle around them. They have chairs – a nod to their comfort while they watch what may be intended as a cautionary lesson, or spectacle.
This is not the Taliban. This photo emerged on September 1, and reportedly shows the lashing of a woman named Zarmina, 22, who was arrested with a man named Ahmad, 21, several weeks ago in Afghanistan’s Ghor province. The two were accused of zina, or sex outside of marriage, which under Afghan law is a crime carrying a sentence of 5 to 15 years in prison. The two were sentenced to 100 lashes each by a court – not a Taliban tribunal, not a convening of elders, but a formal court of law…
The men watching do look very relaxed and comfortable, as if at a pleasant afternoon concert.
Sex between two consenting adults should never be a crime. But even more horrifyingly, a conviction for zina in Afghanistan is often based on the shakiest of evidence. When I interviewed dozens of women and girls imprisoned for zina and reviewed their cases, I learned that judges hand down harsh sentences based on women having left the home without permission, having been alone in the presence of a man who is not a relative, on malicious statements from angry and abusive husbands and fathers, and on abusive “virginity exams” – vaginal examinations that are medically meaningless.
Well, maybe, but where there’s smoke there’s fire, you know.
Wonders of creation
Sep 3rd, 2015 4:59 pm | By Ophelia BensonHistory of Astronomy @hist_astro 5 hours ago
Lunar eclipse (khusuf) in Turkish version of “Wonders of Creation” by al-Qazwini, 1717 copy @walters_museum.
The categories are equal in their relational existence
Sep 3rd, 2015 1:46 pm | By Ophelia BensonLori Watson, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at the University of San Diego, asks: What is a “woman” anyway?
Radical feminism has theorized “woman.” One of its more salient contributions for this context is showing that what it means to be a woman is not an absolute; it’s relative.
The category “woman” and the category “man,” the groups “women” and “men,” are relational. One does not socially exist without the other. For all the vexing about nature, social categorization is what is being dealt with here. Men without women don’t exist as socially defined. Women without men don’t exist as such either. The categories are equal in their relational existence. Unfortunately, such equality doesn’t extend to their social substance, although we are working on it.
The categories are relational.
No doubt women who have been socialized to femininity since birth on the basis of their sex organs do have a relationship to womanness that is in some important sense particular. But so, too, do white women, Black women, Latina women, Asian women, lesbian women, poor and working class women, differently abled women, even if it is not based exclusively on their sex organs. In other words, even if one commonality among all these groups is socialization to and subjection to femininity on the basis of sex organs at birth, that does not exhaust their relation to the category woman. Femininity varies along other hierarchies. Sojourner Truth reminds of this in her “Ain’t I a woman?”[5]
Moreover, gender nonconforming persons, whether trans identified or not, are typically confronted with the hierarchy of gender in often violent and torturous ways. Socialization to masculinity is itself about socially demonstrating one’s ability to dominate. Fail at it, and what are you? A pussy. A fag. In short, a girl, a woman, someone who allows “them”selves to be penetrated, dominated.
And you get called that. You can see and hear men doing that without even going outside; you can just watch all those macho reality shows on the Discover channel.
Now return to our observation that gender is a relational category. Where do trans women stand in relation to men? (For that is the question, not how do trans woman stand solely in relation to women, as is often treated as the only question.) The radical feminist analysis revealed that femininity under conditions of male domination entails widespread forms of discrimination including sexual access for men to women on men’s terms, often with impunity, including often with force. How do trans women stand in relation to these forms of male power? Trans women are often socially marginalized, locked out of employment opportunities for gendered reasons, excluded from housing opportunities, lack basic protections for physical safety and bodily integrity, aggressed against for their perceived gender transgression, raped in order to be taught the meaning of womanhood and for who knows what other “reasons,” forced to sell their bodies for sex for sustenance, and murdered for asserting their right to exist. That starts to sound a lot like being a woman in this world to me.
In other words it’s being someone’s “bitch.”
Concentrated animal feeding operations
Sep 3rd, 2015 12:04 pm | By Ophelia BensonBecause people talked about this on the Oliver Sacks – Temple Grandin thread: a website about CAFOs.
In the United States and other parts of the world, livestock production is becoming increasingly dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In a CAFO, animals are crammed by the thousands or tens of thousands, often unable to breathe fresh air, see the light of day, walk outside, peck at a plants or insects, scratch the earth, or eat a blade of grass.
Over 50 billion food animals are raised and slaughtered every year (not including massive quantities of farmed fish). Grazing and growing feed for livestock now occupy 70 percent of all agricultural land and 30 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet. If present trends continue, meat production is predicted to double between the turn of the 21st century and 2050. Yet already, the Earth is being overwhelmed by food animals that consume massive quantities of energy and resources, whose wastes foul waterways and farmlands, and when eaten excessively, degrade our health.
Nature as Industry: The Merciless World of the CAFO
The CAFO is the ultimate expression of the industrialization of nature. If all of us knew more about the realities of modern industrial animal food production, however, one would hope that we would apply the collective brakes on this dietary, environmental, and ethical madness.
“The principle of confinement in so-called animal science is derived from the industrial version of efficiency. The designers of animal factories appear to have had in mind the example of concentration camps or prisons, the aim of which is to house and feed the greatest numbers in the smallest space at the least expense of money, labor, and attention. To subject innocent creatures to such treatment has long been recognized as heartless. Animal factories make an economic virtue of heartlessness toward domestic animals, to which we humans owe instead a large debt of respect and gratitude.”
—Wendell Berry, Stupidity in Concentration
I didn’t know that Grandin supports or defends CAFOs, though I did know she has no issue with raising animals for slaughter. I suppose in current conditions you can’t do the second without doing the first.
Swimming isn’t enough
Sep 3rd, 2015 11:42 am | By Ophelia BensonOh but, Christie Wilcox at Discover reports that the dolphin-assisted birth didn’t happen.
According to the documentary, Dorina did not go through with her watery plans. She went into labor at night, and thus had a natural birth on land. But, she did say she could feel the dolphins ‘sending positive energy’.
Below is my original commentary on the practice of dolphin-assisted births, from 2013. But the tl;dr version: Dolphins are wild animals. Wild animals do not make good midwives.
Because wild animals can get bitey and tossy and killy.
But there’s another quite compelling reason, which is that they’re not trained. Midwifery isn’t just hanging around sympathetically you know – midwives have to do things. Swimming isn’t enough.
Because of their friendly disposition and common occurance in aquariums, we tend to think of dolphins as trustworthy, loving creatures. But let’s get real for a minute here. Dolphins don’t eat sunshine and fart roses. They’re wild animals, and they are known to do some pretty terrible things.
Look at how their treat their women. Male dolphins are aggressive, horny devils. Males will kidnap and gang-rape females with their prehensile penises, using alliances of several males to keep females isolated from the rest of the group. As Miriam Goldstein once explained to Slate, “To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down.” Male dolphins don’t just rape their females — they’ve also been known to assert authority by forcibly mounting other males.
They also get a kick out of beating on and killing other animals. Dolphins will toss, beat, and kill small porpoises or baby sharks for no apparent reason other than they enjoy it, though some have suggested the poor porpoises serve as practice for killing the infants of rival males. That’s right, not only do dolphins kill other animals, they kill baby dolphins using the same brutal tactics. No matter how cute they might appear, dolphins are not cuddly companions; they are real, large, ocean predators with a track record for violence — even when it comes to humans.
See? I told you they get tossy. Imagine the fun they would have with a newborn infant.
Deeply called
Sep 3rd, 2015 11:26 am | By Ophelia BensonApparently this is not something from the Onion.
Dorina Rosin, a “spiritual healer,” plans to give birth in the sea with the aid of dolphins. Among other benefits, Rosin and partner Maika Suneagle believe that their baby will speak dolphin.
Really? They believe that how? If they had a Chinese midwife, would they believe their baby would therefore speak Chinese?
Also, what kind of aid do they think the dolphins will give?
Do they pause to recollect that dolphins are carnivores? Do they know what a carnivore is? Would they consider giving birth on the savanna with the aid of lions?
“In 2011 and 2014 I had the privilege to learn from and with wild and free dolphins and Humpback whales in Hawaii who transformed and healed me in a very profound way,” Rosin wrote. “I felt deeply called to spend two times three months in nature – mostly by myself – and to deeply connect to this magical place of beauty and transformation inside and outside which called me home.”
That sounds fun. The giving birth part, not so much.
CBS Atlanta offers more details.
Spiritual healer Dorina Rosin and her partner Maika Suneagle are appearing in the documentary Extraordinary Births to chronicle the woman’s journey of giving birth in the sea with a dolphin as a midwife, as reported by The Daily Mail. Experts say the plan poses the risk of other local marine life, like a great white shark, showing up in the water.
Ya think? Surely sharks wouldn’t be attracted by all that blood and stuff, would they?
Child experts warn that dolphins in the wild are unpredictable and dangerous and should not be trusted around a pregnant woman or newborns.
See, even child experts know that, and I bet adult experts know it even harder.
He watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned
Sep 3rd, 2015 10:40 am | By Ophelia BensonAylan Kurdi’s father says what happened – the tiny boat flipped in five-foot waves, and his two little boys and their mother drowned over the course of three hours.
The father of Galip and Aylan Kurdi, the young refugee boys from Syria whose drowning off a Turkish beach has touched a global nerve, said Thursday that his family had paid smugglers more than $2,000 for a voyage to a Greek island in a 15-foot boat that was quickly upended by five-foot waves. His wife also drowned.
“The waves were high, the boat started swaying and shaking. We were terrified,” said the father, Abdullah Kurdi, 40, a Syrian Kurd from the town of Kobani near the Turkish border. “I rushed to my kids and wife while the boat was flipping upside down. And in a second we were all drowning in the water.”
…
Choking back emotion as he spoke, Mr. Kurdi described how he had flailed about while trying to find his children as his wife held onto the capsized boat.
“I started pushing them up to the surface so they could breathe,” he said. “I had to shift from one to another. I think we were in the water for three hours trying to survive.”
He watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned, he said, then he pushed the other toward the mother, “so he could at least keep his head up.”
Mr. Kurdi then apologized, saying he could no longer speak, ending the conversation.
He has a sister in Vancouver; she’s been trying to get them safely out for months.
The sister, Teema Kurdi, who moved to Canada about 20 years ago, told The Ottawa Citizen that she had applied for a visa that would have allowed the children and their parents to come as sponsored refugees.
“I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbors who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat,” Ms. Kurdi, a hairdresser who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, told the newspaper. “I was even paying rent for them in Turkey, but it is horrible the way they treat Syrians there.”
Nothing was working, so the family tried the tiny boat.
Activists are sharing the photos of Aylan.
Photographs and video of Aylan’s lifeless body quickly spread across social networks in Turkey and then the rest of the world, posted by outraged observers, rights activists and reporters who suggested that the distressing images needed to be seen and could act as a catalyst for the international community to finally halt the war in Syria.
Among those who shared the images and expressed their dismay were Liz Sly, a Washington Post correspondent covering the war in Syria; Nadim Houry and Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch; David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee; and activists in the Syrian city of Raqqa and living under the rule of Islamic State militants.
Then there were arguments about the ethics of sharing the photo.
There were also disagreements inside newsrooms about whether to publish or even share the images. A number of reporters argued forcefully that it was necessary to confront the public with the human toll of the war in Syria, and the impact of policies that make it difficult for refugees to find asylum in Europe. But many editors were concerned about shocking their readers and wanted to avoid the appearance of trafficking in sensational images for profit.
It’s not a sensational image though. Emotive, but not sensational. There’s a difference.
By the end of the day, there was unusual agreement among the editors of newspapers across the political spectrum in Britain who decided to feature the images on their front pages, along with calls for action from Prime Minister David Cameron.
…
Kim Murphy, the assistant managing editor of The Los Angeles Times for foreign and national news, said there had been a consensus among the paper’s senior editors to show the boy as he was discovered, face down on the beach.
“The image is not offensive, it is not gory, it is not tasteless — it is merely heartbreaking, and stark testimony of an unfolding human tragedy that is playing out in Syria, Turkey and Europe, often unwitnessed,” she said. “We have written stories about hundreds of migrants dead in capsized boats, sweltering trucks, lonely rail lines, but it took a tiny boy on a beach to really bring it home to those readers who may not yet have grasped the magnitude of the migrant crisis.”
But the abbreviation “poly” is already in use
Sep 2nd, 2015 6:19 pm | By Ophelia BensonListen up – you have to stop saying “poly” when you mean “polyamorous.” Aida Manduley says so.
In case you haven’t stumbled upon this (I just heard about it two days ago myself), here’s the scoop—a Polynesian person on Tumblr made the following call to action:
Hey, can any polyamory blogs with a follower count please inform the palagi portion of the community that “poly” is a Polynesian community identifier, and is important to our safe spaces.
Using “polyamory” is cool just like using “polygender” and “Polyromantic” and or Polysexual” is cool. But the abbreviation “poly” is already in use.
Oh well then, that settles it. An abbreviation that’s already in use can never be used by other people for other things.
Being on the receiving end of “stop using a word” or “you’re being oppressive” isn’t an easy pill to swallow. Whenever I get called out for something—most likely ableism since it’s an axis of oppression I don’t personally experience and am still learning a lot about—there’s often a knee-jerk reaction in there. A “don’t tell me what to do” demon on my shoulder who loves getting self-righteous and hates being wrong, whose first line of defense is “it’s not even that big of a deal.”
You can tell what’s coming, though, can’t you. You can hear it far away up the tracks, just the faintest vibration so far – but it’s moving fast. She’s going to tell us that she overcomes all that because she’s such a good and justicey person.
But then I take a breath and realize I’m being ridiculous even if it’snormal.
I’m not being my best self in those moments, and I need to hold compassion for my own feelings but also push past them if they’re not serving my values of kindness and justice.
She’s so justicey she bolds that part. Her values are justice and kindness, unlike those other poopyheads who keep using the word “poly” to not mean Polynesian.
Overall, individuals and communities are perpetually trying to find ways to describe themselves and their lives, and that can be really tough especially if the words are related to identities that are devalued and marginalized. While “labels are for soup-cans” and we’re so much more complex than words could ever describe, language is a powerful thing that helps both reflect and create our world. It helps build communities, express our emotions, and even pass down our histories. It helps us name our struggles, craft banners for solidarity, and connect for change. It makes sense people have a lot of feelings about it!
She’s such a good person. She’s kind of a dull and didactic writer though. “Language is a powerful thing” – you don’t say.
Language is ever-evolving and it’s a beautiful thing when more words can become available, when more ways of understanding our world are accessible. But that doesn’t happen without friction. Sometimes our knee-jerk reactions to new words or identities come from a place of holding onto what we’ve been taught and being uncomfortable with change.
Oh gosh, that’s so wrong of us.
What I mean is that we need to hold space for growth and be willing to move in new directions with our terminology—that regardless of how defensive our initial “Don’t Tell Me What To Do” shoulder-demons might be, we MUST move in a direction of empathy and kindness, particularly to those in marginalized communities with long legacies of experiencing colonialism and other forms of structural oppression.
Like Polynesians, god damn it. Their name starts with poly so that’s their word, you colonialist shoulder-demon shits.
So what we’re talking about here is clarity as well as empathy and willingness to listen.
Whether these Tumblr folks represent a few dozen, a few hundred, or a fewthousand, the questions remain the same: what are we, non-Polynesian “poly” people and our allies, going to do to provide clarity to our language and stand in solidarity with however many Polynesians want this change? More importantly, what does this situation, and the pushback from members of “the polyamorous community,” tell us about language adoption and resistance to change in our communities?
Um…that we’re doing it wrong? That we should apologize and promise never to do it again? That we’re not nice people after all? That we don’t bold things enough?
As someone in the sexuality field AND a polyamorous person with a big tech geek streak, I value useful search terms and disambiguation. Heck, as a super Type A person that drools over nice spreadsheets, regardless of other sexual or racial identities, I think it’s crucial that we make the Internet an easier, more organized place to browse.
Bahahahahahaha, I’m happy for her and her nice spreadsheets identity, but I’m still calling my parrot Polly and she can’t stop me.
When Sacks met Grandin
Sep 2nd, 2015 5:53 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Temple Grandin chapter of An Anthropologist on Mars was originally an article in the New Yorker.
Kanner and Asperger had looked at autism clinically, providing descriptions of such fullness and accuracy that even now, fifty years later, they can hardly be bettered. But it was not until the nineteen-seventies that Beate Hermelin and Neil O’Connor and their colleagues in London, trained in the new discipline of cognitive psychology, focussed on the mental structure of autism in a more systematic way. Their work (and that of Lorna Wing, in particular) suggested that in all autistic individuals there was a core problem, a consistent triad of impairments: impairment of social interaction with others, impairment of verbal and nonverbal communication, and impairment of play and imaginative activities. The appearance of these three together, they felt, was not fortuitous; all were expressive of a single, fundamental developmental disturbance. Autistic people, they felt, had no true concept of, or feeling for, other minds, or even of their own; they had, in the jargon of cognitive psychology, no “theory of mind.” However, this is only one hypothesis among many; no theory, as yet, encompasses the whole range of phenomena to be seen in autism.
The article was published in December 1993; there’s doubtless been a lot more research on autism in those 22 years.
He went to meet Grandin at Colorado State University, where she was an assistant professor in the Animal Sciences Department.
She sat me down with little ceremony, no preliminaries, no social niceties, no small talk about my trip or how I liked Colorado. Her office, crowded with papers, with work done and to do, could have been that of any academic, with photographs of her projects on the wall, and animal knickknacks she had picked up on her travels. She plunged straight into talking of her work, speaking of her early interests in psychology and animal behavior, how they were connected with self-observation and a sense of her own needs as an autistic person, and how this had joined with the visualizing and engineering part of her mind to point her toward the special field she had made her own: the design of farms, feedlots, corrals, slaughterhouses—systems of many sorts for animal management.
She talked rather relentlessly, and after an hour he had to stop hoping she would offer him coffee and just say he needed some.
There was no “I’m sorry, I should have offered you some before,” no intermediacy, no social junction. Instead, she immediately took me to a coffeepot that was kept brewing in the secretaries’ office upstairs. She introduced me to the secretaries in a somewhat brusque manner, giving me the feeling, once again, of someone who had learned, roughly, “how to behave” in such situations without having much personal perception of how other people felt—the nuances, the social subtleties involved.
Later they had dinner, then went for a walk.
What, I wondered as we walked through the horsetails, of Temple’s cosmogony? How did she respond to myths, or to dramas? How much did they carry meaning for her? I asked her about the Greek myths. She said that she had read many of them as a child, and that she thought of Icarus in particular—how he had flown too near the sun and his wings had melted and he had plummeted to his death. “I understand Nemesis and Hubris,” she said. But the loves of the gods, I ascertained, left her unmoved—and puzzled. It was similar with Shakespeare’s plays. She was bewildered, she said, by Romeo and Juliet (“I never knew what they were up to”), and with “Hamlet” she got lost with the back-and-forth of the play. Though she ascribed these problems to “sequencing difficulties,” they seemed to arise from her failure to empathize with the characters, to follow the intricate play of motive and intention. She said that she could understand “simple, strong, universal” emotions but was stumped by more complex emotions and the games people play. “Much of the time,” she said, “I feel like an anthropologist on Mars.”
That put her at a disadvantage with people, but over the years she built up what she calls a library of experience, which helps her be less vulnerable to cheaters.
In one plant she had designed, she said, there had been repeated breakdowns of the machinery, but these occurred only when a particular man, John, was in the room. She “correlated” these incidents and inferred at last that John must be sabotaging the equipment. “I had to learn to be suspicious, I had to learn it cognitively. I could put two and two together, but I couldn’t see the jealous look on his face.” Such incidents have not been uncommon in her life: “It bends some people out of shape that this autistic weirdo can come in and design all the equipment. They want the equipment, but it galls them that they can’t do it themselves, but that Tom”—an engineering colleague—“and I can, that we’ve got hundred-thousand-dollar Sun workstations in our heads.” In her ingenuousness and gullibility, Temple was at first a target for all sorts of tricks and exploitations; this sort of innocence or guilelessness, arising not from moral virtue but from failure to understand dissembling and pretense (“the dirty devices of the world,” in Traherne’s phrase), is almost universal among the autistic.
Whereas we “normal” people know all about dissembling, as victims and as perps. Do it to them before they do it to you.
Then he gets to the part about how her autism enables her to understand animals.
…we drove out to the university’s experimental farm, where Temple does much of her basic field work. I had earlier thought there might be a separation, even a gulf, between the personal—and, so to speak, private—realm of her autism and the public realm of her professional expertise. But it was becoming increasingly clear to me that they were hardly separated at all; for her, the personal and the professional, the inward and the outward, were completely fused.
“Cattle are disturbed by the same sorts of sounds as autistic people—high-pitched sounds, air hissing, or sudden loud noises; they cannot adapt to these,” Temple told me. “But they are not bothered by low-pitched, rumbling noises. They are disturbed by high visual contrasts, shadows or sudden movements. A light touch will make them pull away, a firm touch calms them. The way I would pull away from being touched is the way a wild cow will pull away—getting me used to being touched is very similar to taming a wild cow.” It was precisely her sense of the common ground (in terms of basic sensations and feelings) between animals and people that allowed her to show such sensitivity to animals, and to insist so forcefully on their humane management.
One more passage:
I was struck by the enormous difference, the gulf, between Temple’s immediate, intuitive recognition of animal moods and signs and her extraordinary difficulties understanding human beings, their codes and signals, the way they conducted themselves. One could not say that she was devoid of feeling or had a fundamental lack of sympathy. On the contrary, her sense of animals’ moods and feelings was so strong that these almost took possession of her, overwhelmed her at times. She feels she can have sympathy for what is physical or physiological—for an animal’s pain or terror—but lacks empathy for people’s states of mind and perspectives. When she was younger, she was hardly able to interpret even the simplest expressions of emotion; she learned to “decode” them later, without necessarily feeling them.
That’s only about halfway through. It’s a magnificent article.
Three memories of Oliver Sacks
Sep 2nd, 2015 5:14 pm | By Ophelia BensonWired got some scientists to talk about what Oliver Sacks had meant to them.
Temple Grandin is the first.
A few weeks ago, I read an editorial he wrote about the Sabbath. He was originally brought up as an Orthodox Jew, but he decided to go another route, and at the end of the article he writes, “What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?” I just burst into tears in front of the computer reading that. I was crying so much I couldn’t even print it out. I sent him this card just before he died:
I started crying at the end of the article when you said, “What if A and B and C had been different?” If that had happened our paths probably would have never crossed. You have made a big difference in my life. Your life has been worthwhile, and you helped many people doing things to enlighten and help others to understand the meaning of life.
If Oliver had decided to stay an Orthodox Jew, his whole life of writing would have never happened. He just gave people so much insight into how the brain works. He just added so much to the literature of how the mind works, especially when the mind is a so-called not normal mind. He really got inside these minds. He got inside my mind.
As told to Sarah Zhang.
Daniel J Levitin, a neuroscientist and writer:
Oliver taught all of us about the power and joy that come from being curious. Oliver was curious about a great many things: absolute pitch, insects, hallucinations, mind-altering experiences (either drug- or injury-induced), perceptual disorders, and theater are just a few. He loved Mozart, 3-D viewscopes, the chemical elements, swimming, and ferns.
…
Like Freud, Oliver wrote compelling accounts of his patients. But in Oliver’s hands, these accounts became literature. He created the genre of medical case studies as popular literature, opening the door for the many lay books about the brain that have followed. But no other writer brings his sense of the literary, the comic and the tragic, and his sense of humanity to scientific writing.
As I saw him do on so many other occasions, he left all my students in that room ten years ago feeling as though they had done him a favor, for he had learned so much that was new to him. Oliver has now left this room and has done all of us an enormous favor by igniting our curiosity and showing us that science and compassion, rationalism and love, can feed one another.
Bradley Voytek, cognitive scientist:
The fact that I, a practicing neuroscientist, can openly admit to giving a shit about the human side of neuroscience without fearing “outing” myself as a soft thinker is in no small part due to artistry of Dr. Sacks’ blend of scientific rationality and human empathy. That’s an incredibly difficult line to walk when you’re faced with the existential reality that the very thing that makes us who we are can be changed in some way—for example by neurological trauma or injury—and can therefore change basic aspects of our perception and personality.
Dr. Sacks, through sheer force of compassion, reminded us, as a scientific field, that the very thing that makes neuroscience most frightening—its ability to expose our humanness as being tied to our physical self—is also why it’s so important for us to pursue it.
You become so afraid of the world out there
Sep 2nd, 2015 3:39 pm | By Ophelia Bensonhttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/threeyearold-ultraorthodox-jewish-children-told-the-nonjews-are-evil-in-worksheet-produced-by-school-10481682.html
British three-year-olds have been told “the non-Jews” are “evil” in a Kindergarten worksheet handed out at ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in north London, it can be revealed.
Documents seen by The Independent show children are taught about the horrors of the Holocaust when they are still in kindergarten at the Beis Rochel boys’ school in north London.
A whistle-blower, who wished to remain anonymous, has shown The Independent a worksheet given to boys aged three and four at the school…
The document refers to Nazis only as “goyim” – a term for non-Jews some people argue is offensive.
The issue isn’t so much that it’s “offensive,” I would think, but that it implies that all non-Jews are genocidal fascists.
Emily Green, who used to teach at the same Beis Rochel girls’ secondary school, now chairs the Gesher EU organisation which supports ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to leave the community.
“It’s not uncommon to be taught non-Jewish people are evil in ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools. It is part of the prayers, teaching, their whole ethos,” she said.
Describing it as a form of “indoctrination”, Ms Green added: “Psychologically, you become so afraid of the world out there after being taught how dangerous and bad and evil non-Jews are, that it makes it harder to leave.”
That sounds like the Amish…like Quiverfull and other drastic Christian cults…like Islamism…Like the FLDS…It sounds like all theocratic cults. They all teach their members that the entire world outside the cult is evil and demonic, and that makes it much harder to leave.
Independently translated from Yiddish for The Independent, the worksheet’s first question reads: “What have the evil goyim (non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads: “Burned them.”
Another question asks: “What did the goyim want to do with all the Jews?” – to which the answer, according to the worksheet, is: “Kill them.”.
“It doesn’t explicitly refer to the Holocaust,” the source said. “It’s a document that teaches very young children to be very afraid and treat non-Jews very suspiciously because of what they did to us in the past.”
It’s just sick.
For an evening of solidarity
Sep 2nd, 2015 11:31 am | By Ophelia BensonA PEN event in Brooklyn September 16 –
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Free and open to the public.
As the fight for freedom of speech in Bangladesh continues, artists of Bangladeshi origin take the stage to commemorate the voices of four recently slain bloggers, and protest the threat looming over more than 70 other Bangladeshi intellectuals, many of whom are in hiding. Join them at Roulette for an evening of solidarity, live music, and readings to condemn the assassinations of Avijit Roy, Oyasiqur Babu, Ananta Bijoy Das, and Niloy Neel, and to celebrate writing. Featuring Farah Mehreen Ahmad, Abeer Y. Hoque, Majib Hoque, Tanwi Nandini Islam, Javed Jahangir, and Anik Khan. The evening will also feature a statement from Karin Deutsch Karlekar, Director of Free Expression Programs at PEN America.
This is an official Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event, co-presented with Roulette and PEN American Center.
Farah Mehreen Ahmad is a Brooklyn-based Bangladeshi writer, researcher and translator. Her work has appeared in The Daily Star, New Age, Forum magazine, Eclectica, Popular Anthropology Magazine, etc. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Some of her work can be found at http://farahmehreen.wordpress.com.
Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She is the author of the linked story collection, The Lovers and the Leavers (HarperCollins India 2015), and a coffee table book, The Long Way Home (Ogro Bangladesh, 2013). Her memoir, Olive Witch, is forthcoming from HarperCollins India (2016). She is a Fulbright Scholar and NEA Literature Fellow, and her writing and photography have been published inGuernica, ZYZZYVA, 580 Split, The Daily Star, and Wasafiri, among others. She has degrees from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. See more at olivewitch.com.
Majib Hoque is a Queens based Bangladeshi American playwright, actor, and director. He is an anchor for Bangla TV, and belongs to Bohubachan Theatre Group, which has had both local and off Broadway performances.
Tanwi Nandini Islam is the author of the novel Bright Lines. She is a writer, multimedia artist, and founder of Hi Wildflower Botanica, a handcrafted natural perfume and skincare line. Her writing has appeared on Elle.com, Fashionista.com, and Billboard.com, and in the Feminist Wire, Open City, and Hyphen magazine. A graduate of Vassar College and Brooklyn College’s MFA program, she lives in Brooklyn. You can visit her website at www.tanwinandini.com.
Javed Jahangir’s fiction has been published in HIMAL magazine, Smokelong Journal, LOST Magazine (picked by Peter Orner), LUMINA Literary Journal (Sarah Lawrence College), Bengal Lights Literary Journal, The Daily Star, Bangladesh and others. He is a founding member of Beyondthemargins.com, a website of daily literary essays. He was on the 2011 panel of judges for the RISCA (Rhode Island State Council Arts) Fiction Fellowship award. He has contributed to, and been editor-in-chief for The Grub Street Writers’ 10 year Anthology, and has been a reader for the Harvard Review. His novel Ghost Alley was published by Bengal Foundation 2014.
Born in Dhaka, Anik Khan immigrated to the United States with his family at an early age and settled in Queens, NY where he describes his low-income building as a true melting pot of different ethnicities sharing the same daily struggles. Despite his neighborhood’s rough exterior, he found beauty and inspiration in the spirited hustle in his neighbors. Today, his music reflects the cultures that surrounded him throughout his upbringing. He raps from a first generation perspective but speaks to a worldwide audience—a true representation of hip-hop’s universal appeal. www.anikkhanmusic.com
If I were in Brooklyn I would so go to that. I would go to it if I were in the Bronx.
While sweeping up the feathers
Sep 2nd, 2015 11:04 am | By Ophelia BensonVATICAN CITY—Hurrying outside after hearing a disturbingly loud thud against the side of the church, Pope Francis was reportedly left to clean up the remains of a dead angel Monday that flew straight into one of the Sistine Chapel’s windows. “It’s really sad; it seems like one of these guys crashes into a window at least once a week,” said the pontiff, who appeared visibly distressed while sweeping up the feathers scattered around the angel’s lifeless body.
They should put pieces of tape on the windows, or tint them, or do something so that the poor angels don’t think they’re apertures in the walls.
At press time, the Bishop of Rome was attempting to scrape off an angel splattered on the windshield of the Popemobile.
Nothing they can do about that – the windshield has to be clear.
A marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage
Sep 2nd, 2015 10:15 am | By Ophelia BensonThe job of Rowan County clerk is not one you take seeking celebrity. It mostly involves shuffling paper: maintaining voter registration rolls, overseeing elections, issuing license plates, filing reports on the goings-on in the small northeastern Kentucky county of roughly 23,000. The elections for the position are uneventful and remarkably civil — the local Morehead News published just one story about the most recent campaign, remarking on how unusual it was for the job to be contested.
It’s absurd that it even is an elective position; it should be a civil service job, filled on the basis of qualifications.
“My words can never express the appreciation,” she said of the constituents who voted for her, “but I promise to each and every one that I will be the very best working clerk that I can be and will be a good steward of their tax dollars and follow the statutes of this office to the letter.”
Whoops no she didn’t mean that! She totally takes it back lol!
Davis’s defiance of a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples has put her in an unbidden spotlight and at odds with that Election Day promise. She faces official misconduct charges and a hearing to determine whether she is in contempt of court.
On account of how she’s refusing to do a part of her job. It’s her job, and she’s refusing to do it.
Since June, when the Supreme Court ruled that gay couples have a constitutional right to wed, Davis has asked to be excused from issuing marriage licenses to anyone on the grounds that licensing a same-sex marriage would violate her religious beliefs.
Those aren’t really her religious beliefs, they’re just her ugly prejudices, dressed up as “religious beliefs.”
In doing so, the longtime public servant has evoked the anger of couples who say it’s their right to be married in their home county by the clerk whose salary comes from their tax dollars.
“I pay your salary,” David Moore insisted Tuesday, leaning over Davis’s desk after she refused to issue a license to him and his partner, David Ermold. “I pay you to discriminate against me right now, that’s what I’m paying for.”
…
Davis isn’t the only clerk to reject the Supreme Court’s ruling, but she is certainly the most notorious. That’s in part because of a now viral video that Moore and Ermold filmed in July during their first attempt to obtain a marriage license in Rowan County.
But Davis is also the most outspoken of the holdout clerks — she has issued a statement explaining her stance on the issue and is being represented by the public interest law firm Liberty Counsel, which provides free legal assistance for “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life and the family,” according to its Web site. The Southern Poverty Law Center has called the firm an “anti-LGBT hate group.”
Let’s check out that statement she made.
I have worked in the Rowan County Clerk’s office for 27 years as a Deputy Clerk and was honored to be elected as the Clerk in November 2014, and took office in January 2015. I love my job and the people of Rowan County. I have never lived any place other than Rowan County. Some people have said I should resign, but I have done my job well. This year we are on track to generate a surplus for the county of 1.5 million dollars.
In addition to my desire to serve the people of Rowan County, I owe my life to Jesus Christ who loves me and gave His life for me. Following the death of my godly mother-in-law over four years ago, I went to church to fulfill her dying wish. There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God.
I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision.
“God’s definition of marriage”? What’s that exactly? Where did God write down a definition of marriage? Does it square with all those men married to multiple women? In the bible?
For me it is a decision of obedience. I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God’s Word. It is a matter of religious liberty, which is protected under the First Amendment, the Kentucky Constitution, and in the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Our history is filled with accommodations for people’s religious freedom and conscience. I want to continue to perform my duties, but I also am requesting what our Founders envisioned – that conscience and religious freedom would be protected. That is all I am asking.
“All” she is asking is to be allowed to refuse to do a part of her job, because of an imaginary “definition of marriage” from god itself. That’s asking too much.
