G(o)rrrr

I don’t know what it says about me that my mind immediately flashed to Outlaws of Gor et al.

“Because, presumably, there are no women who could make relevant intellectual contributions to such a conversation. WTF”

Let’s see; 4 bits, that’s 16 different permutations, assuming half of the participants are women, and the participants for each talk were chosen entirely on non-gender basis.

A quick look at the program confirms there were on the order of 50 talks. So, purely by random chance, you’d expect 3-4 of the talks to have had all male participants, and a like number all female.

Admittely, this is a rather crude analysis, but I think you get the point.

Let’s see; 4 bits, that’s 16 different permutations, assuming half of the participants are women, and the participants for each talk were chosen entirely on non-gender basis.

On what basis are you making the latter assumption, precisely?

A quick look at the program confirms there were on the order of 50 talks. So, purely by random chance, you’d expect 3-4 of the talks to have had all male participants, and a like number all female.

I know you can square this circle if you try, big guy.

Phil, I am not saying that nothing funky happened. I’m just saying that a first order analysis says that, using not entirely crazy assumptions, you should have expected several all male, and several all female, panels at an event that big. And so, the existance of such a panel, by itself, says nothing at all profound.

Perhaps what I’m missing is an unstated, “But you should prevent that from happening, even innocently!” I think that’s the sort of thing that should be stated. The relentless determination that women should always be included is not the same thing as non-discrimination. It’s practically an opposite sort of thing.

Brett, your focus on calculating the likelihood of all-male panels occurring complete by chance may have blinded you to a salient detail that Eszter included: the title of the panel discussion was “Behavioural Economics: A new idea of MAN.” Given the total numb of words in the English language and the total in the title, why don’t you distract yourself with figuring the likelihood of arriving at that particular sequence.

Given the slogan on the T-shirts, why would you assume the all-male panel was random? They pretty much give the heads-up on how the organizers think.

“…as clueless as many academic contexts can be in the US as well, I just cannot imagine an academic institution in the US hosting an event like this and ending up with such a case.”

I couldn’t see even the most misogynist elements of US academia not knowing that this was a dead cert for a shitstorm.

Is this a German cultural thing? There’s not neccesarily the identity politics there is in the US. Parts of Eastern Europe are just monumentally fucked up in their treatment of women. You get a revanchist macho culture which combined with poverty leads to a massive sex trade and enormous sexualisation of women. I can imagine German tech would just the place that’s insulated enough from American liberal academia and exposed enough to a massively sexualised culture to allow this the two to collide.

Ouch, that is extremely embarrassing. Having attended this and past GORs, I think this wouldn’t have occured at a purely academic conference, in constrast one closely tied the ad industry, like GOR. I think that is a strong contributing factor, more than Germany being particularly sexist.

Having said that, both the tshirts and the idiotic panel title seem like good reasons to reconsider reviewing for the conference, particularly if it leads to generalizations about sexism in Germany like those voiced above.

I wonder do the GORillas really drag their knuckles, or only metaphorically?

I began to suspect that the shirts were performance art, once I read, “…our decisions are to a much lesser degree made consciously than we thought…” in the document that Bert linked @21. (I was trying to understand what Bert is getting at in that post, BTW.)

Speaking of performance art, Brett posted:

… given that the women got complimentary shirts, and the men insulting ones, I’d assume that any bias was running the other way.

Brett is lucky that Dian Fossey is not here to call him to account for this slur.

He is also lucky that homo sapiens is still the primate-in-control of this planet.

Just in case, Brett, you might want to befriend more orangutans.

@ 21, 25 and 26
I remain confused. Bert’s link doesn’t take you to the whole programme, but even if you look through the whole programme, there is only one panel session with multiple speakers, and the session that Eszter is presenting in does have a male speaker – so, no answers here.

Brett @ 12 has actually illustrated part of the problem though:
“Your focus on feminist outrage may have blinded you to a salient detail: In English, “Man” can mean just human beings.”

Obviously at this conference, there are some men, like Brett, who have time travelled from the 1950s and therefore missed the whole debate about patriarchy and gendered language.

Joking aside, this is ridiculous, including the stupid t-shirts. If there is anything I can meaningfully do to support Eszter in opposing this nonsense, happy to do it. (Possibly as a researcher in public health in Australia, there may not be much I can do, but the thought is there).

Also can CT tell Brett to stop deliberately trying to offend women and people of colour (because in fact it’s clear he does it deliberately)

Brett is sort of right about man – I think originally it was not especially gendered and gendered terms were wife-man which turned into woman, and I think maybe males were husband-man or something similar. But since males then decided to bogart the word man for themselves, I guess we are not now particularly obliged to accept ‘man’ is a gender neutral term for all persons.

In the US I’ve never seen gendered promotional T-shirts. I’ve sometimes seen T-shirts available in different cuts for men and women, but what was printed on the shirt was the same, whether clever or not.

More generally T-shirts given out as promotions are the cheap generic unisex kind, while the ones worn by the people working the booths are the much nicer polo shirt type with usually a more tasteful design.

While one may still encounter “booth bunnies”, they usually are not dressed differently than the real sales staff and are best distinguished by their inability to answer questions about the product. (I guess it depends what industry you’re in though.)

bert @ 34
“You’ve cleared this up, as I suggested you might.”
As my children used to say, who died and made you king?

I really don’t get what you’re saying but it sounds like you’re complaining about something. So just maybe to save Eszter some time (after she has specifically taken the time to clear this up already), maybe I can add a bit of info.

In the programme the person who presents is underlined. There are often multiple authors of presentations, but usually only one presenter.

In most conferences there is a mix of invited speakers and people who have applied to present through a submission process. In this conference I assume most presenters in the simultaneous programme have applied to present, while the keynote speakers and in this case the members of the panel Eszter is talking about have been invited by the conference organisers. That’s a crucial difference.

The sexism Eszter is noting appears to be particularly:
the t-shirts
the name of the panel session which has not caught up with ‘non-gendered language’ – eg using ‘human being’ when you mean human being, rather than ‘man’ – which is recommended if not mandated in many educational institutions (at least here in Australia)
the fact that all speakers on the invited panel are male

That’s quite enough to be going in with, I’d say.

Eszter that would be great. My Monash email contact is available on my blog (linked to my name as I guess you know). Will look forward to it.

I am ashamed that a comment pool this well-read would not have suggested “Gormenghast” as an alternative. That everyone here immediately associates the Gor- prefix with John Norman’s works instead of Mervyn Peake’s says something, methinks…:)

And, we should think of other useful and potentially sexist T-shirt possibilities:

GORgon
GORmand
GORdita
GORmless

I think the first and last choices would be equally offensive, regardless of the gender wearing it, and this would solve the problem, gorblimy!

Bert I’m worried you’ve lost the plot here. That’s a public page that Eszter linked to. Are you thinking the CT commentariat are going to descend en masse on the program committee for the conference and start publicly shaming them via Twitter, or threatening them, or what? Because I think it’s unlikely. But I am curious to know, because I still don’t get it, what is it that you are upset about? Is it really feminism you object to?

Ronson’s book has plenty of incidents. None of them exactly match, but a related example would be this one. A sequence of events you’d think unlikely had it not actually happened.
Val, in repeatedly saying you don’t understand what the issue is, you’ve answered your question about feminism yourself.

Clearly they needed a visit from Gort!

It would be interesting to know if “GORgeous” and “GORilla” were assigned, or whether the conference provided t-shirts with either, and volunteers neatly sorted themselves into the gender bins.

Let’s cut to the chase with Bert. He will never get it since he’s really here to semi-politely insult and demean others and their beliefs. He’s angry and it’s all feminists fault. And his obsessively posting on this website shows his desperate need for control of something/anything in his life. The words “sad troll” comes to mind.

re gender balance in academic conferences, I believe it’s been pointed out before but 3/4 CT posters are male (and they probably produce quite a lot more than 3/4 of posts) and the webinars seem to regularly have all-male panels (it looks like of the last five, two were all male and the other three had only one woman on each)

Tall and tan and young and lovely,
Gorilla of Ipanema went walking…

Charles R @ 50
I’m actually not a fan of the passive voice either Charles. In this case I’m just being a bit vague because I’m not really sure and I haven’t got time to research it. If you’re interested, maybe you could do it?

One doesn’t normally look to Brett Bellmore for working definitions of feminism, but I have to admit I was impressed by:

The relentless determination that women should always be included.

Here are some guidelines from university of Melbourne https://hr.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/87501/Watch_Your_Language.pdf

It’s earnest, no doubt some here might not like it, but language that includes rather than excludes is a good thing. (Especially for feminists who have a relentless determination that women should always be included).

The committee might be interested in something like this Eszter? Especially the bits explaining about masculine pronouns and why you shouldn’t use them to mean ‘people’.

Charles R, I’ve done that much, but if you want any more, you have to find it for yourself :)

Given my own experiences on various sides of bureaucracies both state and private, I say the “diverse and disparate and contradictory” practices of any bureaucracy are the point, especially when we’re talking about recommendations and the not-yet-mandated.

But I am grateful for the link and the admission that your reasoning here was to use vagueness to obscure your ignorance, which is usually why people resort to the passive voice when speaking in the moral mode (eg., “Women are victimized” as opposed to figuring out who’s doing the victimizing). It’s not often people just admit with some amount of humility something like that.

I figured, since you referenced your own region, you were speaking about things you witnessed or saw or experienced yourself, and that’s the sort of in-the-streets experience I find helpful. What bureaucracies codify into regulated behaviors tells me only so much about how it looks to live there. And usually then, it’s going to tell me—again, speaking from experiences—something about how deep people have to go to be themselves.

Of course I have first hand experience. Twit.

dr. ngo @ 57

Yeah, it was pretty wonderful.

[CT] webinars seem to regularly have all-male panels (it looks like of the last five, two were all male and the other three had only one woman on each)

Okay, I just checked this quickly. Of the first five listed two, Scialabba and Graeber, were exclusively male events, Teles was all male apart from Kimberley Morgan, Stross was all male apart from Maria Farrell, Spufford appears to have been the most gender balanced (4 out of 21 posts were by women).

Related question: how many of CT’s staff or guest posters have been black or from other minority ethnic groups?

(NB. I’m not accusing anyone of racism or sexism, or implying Eszter’s complaint against GOR isn’t valid.)

I should be asleep, but you have to look at this
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/05/just-for-fun/

I just chanced upon it via Feminist Philosophers – serendipity!

“Belle, why do you let HSC comment here? Rilly tho y? I am totes serious. Srsly y u do this to us?”

Lynne,

I should also like to take advantage of this opportunity to express my support and love for Mr. Dugin’s idea of a vast global antiliberal alliance, and my fervent wish that he is successful.

geo, where is this question coming from? What is the context?

And his global anti liberal alliance, which makes me feel like my life has a new purpose.

Is Hector doing performance art now?

Anyway, I wanted to say something about geo’s bit about “qualified women”, because I find that rhetoric really problematic. I know it more from the debates surrounding affirmative action than specifically wrt to feminism. But if you do look at the debates surrounding affirmative action and esp. right “critiques” of the same, it’s always all about “more qualified” and hence more deserving white people losing out to brown and black people who are getting “in” just because they are brown or black. To which the first thing to say is: motherfucking white people have been getting shit just by virtue of being white for a couple of centuries now (at least), and if one or two non-white people here or there derive some small advantage from being non-white, it’s hardy going to change the basic power imbalances in society (which, again, overwhelmingly favor white people). At least partly because representation itself counts. It doesn’t count for everything and sometimes it may not count for much, but it definitely counts for something.

This is getting kind of long, and is kind of off-topic. But my point is that I would be extremely surprised if similar dynamics weren’t at play with respect to gender as with respect to race, etc. (I was going to say something about problems in definitions and perceptions of “qualified”, but that’s well-trodden territory and others can probably cover it better.)

Lynne @76: The second definition — “the relentless determination that qualified women should never be excluded” — is the anti-discrimination definition of feminism (and anti-racism), which is inarguable. I would say anyone who accepts it — even Brett — is entitled to call him/herself a feminist or anti-racist.

The first definition — “the relentless determination that women [or minorities] always be included” — is (or could be, which is why I asked) a broader definition, implying affirmative action, which is a large and complex topic that feminists and anti-racists may well have different views about. My own view is that special efforts should be made 1) to find qualified members of historically disadvantaged groups and smooth their way; and 2) to equalize resources available to members (especially young members) of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, eg, by providing universal, free, high-quality education and medical care, relentlessly promoting full employment, and reducing wealth and income inequality. This, I would suggest to js @80, is the best way to “change the power imbalances in society” — better than emphasizing numerical parity (ie, quotas). The strongest case I know of for this point of view is The Case Against Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels.

“Is Hector doing performance art now?”

No, just expressing my point of view here since I wasn’t able to coment on the Dugin thread.

geo, I accept your distinction. As I recall, the Brett quote was emphatically not sympathetic to feminism, but I gather you are less concerned with the quote than you are with the issue of achieving equality and how it is to be done.

I have qualms about affirmative action. It certainly can’t succeed without the supports you describe, and I fear it leaves minorities open to the whispered verdict that they wouldn’t have the job if they weren’t brown or female. On the other hand, the playing field is so ridiculously uneven that it may help. As the mother of two white sons, one of whom has applied for a government job (the government practises affirmative action) I am hoping hard that in this hiring no one’s sex or colour weighs in the decision; not his, not his competitors’.

js, there is a tension between what works for people today and what will work to make a better society for their and our children. I would love us to aim for both, as I imagine you would. I really liked your comment upthread about, basically, so what if a few brown or black people, or women, get a job because of affirmative action because it’s so darned easy to lose sight of the forest here, which is as you said that this has worked just peachy for white men.

if you do look at the debates surrounding affirmative action and esp. right “critiques” of the same, it’s always all about “more qualified” and hence more deserving white people losing out to brown and black people who are getting “in” just because they are brown or black

Yup, and in this connection see:

“it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit”

MPA Victoria,

I’m sorry for antagonizing you and other commenters in the past, and for unnecessarily personalizing disagreement. I know I have been guilty of that, please accept by apology.

Having said that, I will not be around to debate the point. I consider it outrageous that Crytandra was banned, especially on the grounds that his opinions might hurt the feelings of someone’s unnamed ‘indigenous coworkers’. A blog that values hurt feelings over truth, evidence and virtue is not where I choose to spend my time. I am leaving Crooked Timber again, this time in solidarity with Ze Kraggash, Crytandra, and Alexander Dugin, herald of the new anti liberal age.

More to the point, has Alexander Dugin ?

The T-shirts were stupid and offensive.

Abut the panels, I think it should be recognized that a consensus has not been reached within academia on how to best deal with the issue of gender imbalance. My impression is that English-speaking academia is more prone (on average) to favor actual direct corrective action to change a panel if the selection process yielded an imbalanced first choice compared for instance to the (continental) european culture, and that this difference does not entirely reduce to sexism. Different political cultures do produce different outcomes in that respect.

For that matter, as a good by-product of my own political culture, I was initially uneasy about direct action in that respect and rather satisfied with the usual “we looked for the most qualified without caring (or sometimes knowing) about the genders and that’s what we got” explanation (as in the DGOF board members message above). However, a stream of pretty convincing actual experiments (on professors evaluation, on CV evaluation, etc…) have changed my mind in the past years (and consequently put me slightly at odd with most of my colleagues, and again I don’t think this can be brushed off at them being sexist). An unresolved question (for me) is how far corrective action should go and how to weight priorities (what if your panel is gender-balanced but all the speakers come from the same country? would that be a problem?)

Sorry, the first three lines @96 are a quote.

Geo @ 76 and 83
I don’t know if you read Brett’s original comments, but I think it probably confuses the issue to take as a definition of feminism something that he said as an attack on feminism. Js used it as a joke (it was funny) and I took it up, but I don’t think it’s a good starting point for serious discussion.

Other than that, what Z said @ 97.

Better, he argues, to directly attack that inequality — which is the main obstacle to a decent life for disadvantaged groups of every race and gender — than to change the racial/sexual make-up of elites.

Personally, I think this is a false dichotomy. Poverty might be the ‘main obstacle’ for poor blacks and poor women but there are other important injustices specifically caused by their race and gender. My own feeling is changing the racial and gender make-up of elites does nothing to change the nature of capitalism, which can run perfectly smoothly, or perhaps even more smoothly, with women and brown people in charge, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t progressive.

Oh my very sincere apologies to dr ngo! So clever.

I scrolled really quickly back through the thread trying to find it and obviously didn’t look closely enough.

I guess it didn’t –

http://slackwire.blogspot.com/2011/06/some-should-do-one-others-other.html

Really great series of comments by Val, geo, js and Lynne. Thank you all.

geo,

I haven’t read Michaels’ book. I have some thoughts about the general idea—basically, class and race are so deeply complicated and intertwined in the US that “let’s focus on class and not race” is I think a non-starter (in the US, other places may be different)—but I’m going to leave that aside because this anyway takes us away from your original point about “qualified women”, which I was reacting to and which I still find deeply problematic.

First, if you accept and advocate for class-based affirmative action, this already gives up on the idea of just accept (all and?) only qualified applicants, in whatever context, because any kind of affirmative action, whether gender-, race-, or class-based, or whatever else, cuts against a purely “merit-based” system, which is what a focus on “qualifications” leads us toward.

Second, as engels notes, the idea that (under current conditions) what you get in the absence of affirmative action is a merit-based system is a complete sham. I mean: (traditional) affirmative action, oh no! injustice against more qualified candidates; legacy admissions? Oh yay! come on right in! This is part of what I meant when I said that white people—and indeed, white men—get a whole lot of things just by virtue of being white in the normal course of things. I mean, one way to put this (I’m not the first to think this up) is that the normal course of things is affirmative action for white men. So, while we go about creating a society that has more egalitarian basic institutions, a bit of pull in the other direction can be can only be salutary.

This is all probably stuff you agree with. To get back to the thing I’ve really been wanting to say, let’s go back to this:

What is the difference,if any, between “the relentless determination that women should always be included” and “the relentless determination that qualified women should never be excluded”

The thing is: the first is clearly better than the second. (1) The second, taken literally, is actually unsatisfiable because in almost any given situation, there are going to be too many qualified candidates—excluding some is pretty much a given, and who gets excluded is (under the best circumstances) going to be a matter of luck or other random factors. Which is another reason that too much focus on merit (and only merit!) is misplaced. (2) More importantly, we all know about implicit biases and how they color perception, etc. Given these, focusing on selecting the “best qualified” or whatever will almost inevitably favor already overrepresented groups at the expense of underrepresented ones.

So, I think the relentless determination that women should always be included is indeed what we should aim for. If those evaluating the candidates are fair-minded, the women included are almost certainly going to be qualified anyway (and if the evaluators are not fair-minded, we’re fucked either way).

engels @91

Can’t say I’ve read every word of the thread, but in looking through it I saw engels’ quote from what turns out to be a Sept 2014 piece in The New Republic by Steven Pinker. The fuller passage from the engels took the sentence is as follows:

At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit. At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence” (prompting the woman next to me to mutter, “Like the Unabomer” [typo in original; should read “Unabomber”]). The rest are selected “holistically,” based also on participation in athletics, the arts, charity, activism, travel, and, we inferred (Not in front of the children!), race, donations, and legacy status (since anything can be hidden behind the holistic fig leaf).

Couple of things about this:

First, virtually every ‘selective’ college or univ. in the U.S. takes what Pinker calls here a “holistic” approach to admissions. If they didn’t take something like this approach, there would, for one thing, be no affirmative action of any kind (race-based or class-based) at all. What Pinker apparently wants is to admit an entire college class on the basis of test scores (and maybe grades), period. (I’m inferring this from the title and subtitle of the article.) That’s a profoundly bad idea, IMO.

Second, it’s sad (if not terribly surprising) that, according to Pinker, new Harvard faculty members are told at their orientation that “Harvard wants to train future leaders,” since that’s either meaningless rhetoric (indulged in these days by all universities) or it’s code for “we want to turn out Senators and captains of industry etc,” which is not what the goal of institutions in their undergrad programs should be. Nor should it especially be to train future academics. Rather it should be the turning out of (at least minimally) educated citizens.

Anyway, Pinker should stick to writing his bloated tomes about language and the mind and teaching psychology, which he presumably knows something about, and keep his opinions about how college admissions should be reformed to himself. Admissions might well need reform, but not in what (I take to be) Pinker’s preferred direction.

Oh, I forgot Alexander Lukashenko. Unquestionably the leader of the world’s best run state, though not my personal favourite (I prefer the Castro brothers).

Just want to join Lynne and Ben in saying how weak I find the non-apology apology by the organizing committee. The whole “I’m sorry your [tender] feelings were hurt” routine is really quite bad–why not just say “we realize the shirts were in bad taste”? What does “we understand why some people could be offended” even mean?

If you want to apologize, say you made a mistake and specify how you’ll avoid making similar mistakes in the future: Are you considering requiring sponsors to get approval at least for highly visible products identified with your conference? Are you going to instruct program chairs/evaluators to watch for gendered language in panel titles and abstract? Maybe even actively engage with specialists on gender (and/or other underrepresented groups) and technology on program design and language? These people Are you going to try to actively recruit a diverse set of participants, or are you just going to rely on the claim that “only the content of their work and ideas matters” and let structural barriers do the rest to keep your tech conference male dominated? etc. etc.

Addressing gender issues in a male-dominated field isn’t easy. People are going to make mistakes (I certainly have), and that’s OK. But it’s OK only if they’re willing to learn from their mistakes if they’re pointed out.

js@111: Yes, I agree that there’s no justification for legacy preferences. I agree too that in most situations there are going to be too many (or anyway more than enough) qualified candidates. And I also agree that among equally qualified candidates (or approximately equal, since in most cases there’s no way to measure precisely), there are good reasons to prefer women, gays, and minorities. My only reservation about the first definition (“relentless determination that women should always be included”) is that, where relevant quality/merit/qualifications are clearly unequal, that fact should, in general, govern decisions, even if the result is numerical disparity.

We may disagree, though, on whether “let’s focus on class and not race” is necessarily a non-starter. To put it crudely: I think Michaels may well be right that to address the often desperate situation of tens of millions of poor (and even struggling middle-class) women and blacks might justifiably seem to some (even if not all) people more urgent than to address the undeniable grievances of millions of comparatively economically secure women and blacks, and that the best way to do that is to emphasize policies that help all poor and middle-class people. Again, that doesn’t mean neglecting discrimination. It means what used to be called in the sixties “an interracial movement of the poor”; now perhaps better called “expropriation of the .1 percent.”

Charles R – adding to the above
Our original discussion was about whether Australian universities have guidelines or mandatory policies on inclusive or non-gendered language. I was a bit vague about because I wasn’t sure. That is not a moral claim, it is a claim about facts, or reality, or evidence, whatever you want to call it. There is no shame for me in saying ‘I think they have something like this but I’m not sure’ and there is no way I was trying to cover up my ignorance. I was trying not to be too definite because I didn’t want to mislead. Ok so far?

It is quite possible that when you read that, you had some though along the lines of ‘here is some feminist who wants organisations to have compulsory inclusive language policies on the basis of some unfounded moral claim about women being victimised, for which she can’t provide evidence’. That’s a big leap, but you may have thought it, and I can’t stop you. But when you put stuff like that out on the Internet, it’s a different story, because you are impugning my intelligence and integrity. Can you see that?

There are thousands, possibly millions, of men on the Internet, who do think feminists are by definition stupid (or at best misguided) and dishonest. But that doesn’t make it true.

Someone else can explain why saying you’re’gender-blind’ (like ‘colour-blind’) isn’t really a defence against sexism. I’ve said enough for now.

geo @98

“Michaels’ The Case Against Diversity is a left-wing critique of affirmative action, or rather, an argument for class-based affirmative action. He claims that current diversity policies mainly result in economically privileged minority members enjoying greater access to elite institutions …. Better, he argues, to directly attack that inequality — which is the main obstacle to a decent life for disadvantaged groups of every race and gender — than to change the racial/sexual make-up of elites.”

In Australia higher education equity access procedures do already include socio-economic criteria well as criteria for race, gender, disability, location etc.

I think that economic inequality is only one type of inequality, so focusing on that alone is not quite enough.

Also economic inequality has been difficult to “attack” as you put it. The mode of increasing economic growth as a rising tide lifts all boats has led to just as much inequality as ever and too much unsustainable production/consumption.

Even if people don’t care much about biodiversity losses from this, this unsustainability will cause more inter-generational inequality. It was quite displeasing to read Jonathan Franzen in last week’s New Yorker asserting how he himself is emulating Saint Francis* by traveling by plane to see bird conservation efforts in South America and how he thinks it is cruelly puritanical to suggest mitigating climate change is the proper thing to do for people and birds and how it is also oh so boring of people not to embrace this historical period where he may sublimely imagine and anticipate his own death coinciding with the death of the Earth itself (this hyperbole is Jonathan Franzen’s not my own)

Robert Manne (politics professor and public intellectual for non-Australians) wrote a critical response to Franzen’s essay, making the point that while Jonathan Franzen says doing anything himself to reduce his personal ghg emissions would only make the very slightest bit of difference so he may as well do as he please and everyone else may as well do as they please and anyone who says otherwise is a terrible spoil sport — we don’t make this illogical argument about racism claiming that racism can only be solved by the state so individual efforts to not discriminate on the basis of race are pointless, and as the state will never agree to or be able to solve racism we should therefore give up hope of ending racism and everyone should jolly well be allowed to enjoy being just as racist as they want.

Manne also posed that perhaps Franzen’s ideas are representative of liberal Americans generally as he wrote it so frankly and publicly without any shame — but I think this is not necessarily true because I remember the other year when Franzen wrote about how Edith Wharton was awfully ugly and how one time he threw coins on the ground just to see poor old women painfully bend to pick them up, and most people seemed to think these things were not representative of liberal America but only representative of Jonathan Franzen being somewhat of an arsehole

Anyway, if continual growth is liberalism’s only way of trying to decrease inequality, then liberalism is a failed philosophy unless it can be modified to adequately respond to present problems.

There was an article on our public broadcaster’s internet site on post-liberalism a while ago, the argument running that as liberalism as an ideology is very much bound up with both creating wealth/property and relatedly with maintaining inequality (eg. John Locke, James Madison, and lately Tyler Cowen) rather than try to defend liberalism there might be “a better possibility that is, at this point, still difficult to imagine. What I want to try to outline are reasons why we should actively hope for an end to liberalism, and seek a fourth sailing – after antiquity, after Christendom, after liberalism – into a post-liberal future…. It is now the task… to begin to envision an alternative future to the one to which we now seem destined, which will focus especially on beginning to put together what liberalism has put asunder.”

So if we are looking to decrease inequality now, it should be in the context of needing to address over-consumption as well — and maybe in a post-liberal (but not Stalinist) outlook poverty and wealth are both equally problematic.

I think an outlook that problematises wealth as well as poverty is also potentially better for addressing other inequalities relating to race and gender etc. as groups previously excluded from liberalism’s apex can — rather than being expected to aspire to reach that apex — participate in making other norms that do not have that legacy of exclusion, and are not predicated on the less equal status of others. I hope that makes sense, it is a bit ramble-y.

* Franzen demonstrates a poor knowledge of Saint Francis since the Saint is well known for being very strict about living a life of poverty, and he never encouraged plane trips to see bird conservation far away when people can just see bird conservation in their local areas . If someone was absolutely set on seeing bird conservation efforts far away, I’ve no doubt Saint Francis would recommend a long contemplative pilgrimage by foot — maybe even barefoot to build character. Possibly the New Yorker could commission a follow up “Jonathan Franzen walks barefoot all the way to South America as a more representative emulation of Saint Francis” essay

Ronan,

What adam.smith said. Can you really not see the difference between “we’re sorry this happened because we recognize it’s bad so we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again” versus “we’re sorry this happened because you threw a snit” ?

The latter, besides being incredibly immature, means that the systemic issue doesn’t get addressed. “We’re so sorry this awful thing happened that we will take no steps to ensure something like it doesn’t happen in the future”, which is an adequate restatement of the board’s position, is both condescending *and* harmful. Sexism will continue to be part of the cultural dynamics underpinning that event until the board recognizes it as a problem serious enough to take preemptive action to stop.

The problem, Abbe Faria, is that *the shirts are offered to begin with*. It re-enforces the idea that women, specifically, are to have “looking attractive” as an essential group trait, and the only intellectual problem to grapple with is why you can’t see that’s a bad thing.

but beyond that, I think you’re overstating the extent to which the apology didnt apologise. I think their explanation for the gender imbalance made sense and their apology for the shirts was fine (ie they apologised for the offense and said it wouldnt happen again)
The apology, the rejection of the apology, the apology for the apology and so on until everyone tires themselves out, is really one of the more odd aspects of contemporary life.

where relevant quality/merit/qualifications are clearly unequal, that fact should, in general, govern decisions, even if the result is numerical disparity

I agree that courses and jobs should be offered only to people who are qualified to do them but it’s not obvious to me that when there is an over-supply of applicants whose qualifications meet or exceed the requirements, they should be offered to those with the highest level of attainment (but I do agree with your post #108, that it’s hard to get enthused about Carly Fiorina, Tim Cook, et al)

If its a country culture thing, its an US one. The extend of gender role differentiation increases from the Czech Republic eastwards. Germany is pretty much only considered a place with tradtional gender roles by people from one country. Now that might be bec. the US is more advanced in that regard than any other country, or it might be because Americans are misinterpreting some things. You can guess which version i personally give more explanatory power.

@113, @130 — Indeed, if one of the primary functions of the higher levels of the education industry is to maintain the state’s class system (the people you will read about it Newsweek — or your holovid implant), why not just cut to the chase? ‘Qualify’ can have many meanings.

Ok I get what you’re saying and take the point, and regretted my last comment after I’d posted as it read back overly hostile (and a bit incoherent)

I…regretted my last comment after I’d posted

I’m afraid that’s just not good enough. Deeply felt remorse is what I was looking for…

I do think there’s an interesting question about when it’s appropriate to go public with ccomplaints, and oftentimes it definitely isn’t. Twitter etc has made it much easier for people who are doubtless already twats to act like twats in this respect, some of them seem to do it almost as hobby – I assume an increasing share of our GDP is devoted to dealing with them through the largely pointless exercises Ronan mentions. (Fwiw I don’t think the OP did anything wrong by blogging this.)

Val: THANK YOU FOR DOING YEOPERSON’S WORK IN THIS THREAD! Seriously excellent work; it makes me want to post on my own blog.

Charles R.: you are being a condescending, sexist twit. “I’ve been reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged all at the same time, and the usual everything else. [I bed you don’t even own a TV–ed] It’ll make for an interesting paper, but all three of them brilliantly address the sort of social pressures of organization and control…” I can quite honestly say I would rather be stripped naked, had a bunch of fire ants killed on me and their “death to the ant-murderer pheromone” mixed with honey and smeared all up in every crack of my body, and then get staked out over a huge fire-ant nest in the middle of the damn summer, inland somewhere like Statesboro, GA, 104F on a humid day, than read that fucking paper. No contest. If confronted with the alternatives I would shout “fire ant mound” before you got to the word “Shrugged.” And I invite everyone in the CT commentariat to join me with bowed heads in a minute of silence to show we stand in solidarity with the poor bastard who ever has to read this paper.

oldster: ummmmm, sorry? I maybe absolutely, definitely made a bad call there and was wrong. Hector is capable of being polite and even charming when he wishes (I know this seems impossible, but really, he is). He begged successfully for a chance to return and then, as soon as it was granted, jumped on a table in the next available thread, pulled his pants down around his ankles, and immediately took a steaming crap right in front of God and everyone. When it was closed up he just moved on to start shitting in other threads, and we were like, “OK, we screwed that up.” My ‘pro-troll/sympathetic towards people who have mental problems biases’ made me put my hand up for “eh, let’s give him a shot.” I dun goofed. I think he’s re-banned already now; if not, he will be.

Abbe Faria: “It was volunteers choosing to wear a free t-shirt and offending the feminist neo-puritan tendency. The organizers are understandably relcutant [sic] to condemn people – particularly young women – for their dress choices.” I appreciate your concern about people judging young women based on what they wear, rather than who they are, or what they think. Also, have I ever told you that FUCK YOU? No? I’ve been meaning to. Sorry it took me this long to get around to it.

re: gender balance in academic conferences, I believe it’s been pointed out before but 3/4 CT posters are male (and they probably produce quite a lot more than 3/4 of posts)
One of the reasons the male posters write so much more is that the sexist blowback from posting is so stupid huge. Jesus Christ read this thread?! Do you think Eszter’s reading it and thinking “gonna do that again tomorrow!” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought of writing things and not done it because I couldn’t get my game face on that day. HAVING SAID THAT you were all awesome recently in our “things that people might not like your liberal/feminist opinions on” thread and the one in which I described getting raped. I was fully assuming I’d have to erase some horrible comments on the latter but you were all lovely and thoughtful.

Separately, the recruitment of authors for the book events is an issue that is on us, and that haven’t succeeded in addressing well so far, though we have made conscious efforts. I would be interested in suggestions for how better to recruit a wider array of authors if anyone has any.

“Also, have I ever told you that FUCK YOU?”

This is an appalling reply.

“This is an appalling reply.”

Is it? Is it, in context? And if so, why do you think she might have made such a reply?

I would imagine (I’m guessing) it is because she is TIRED of hearing stuff like what Abbe Faria said. Tired of having to explain why it is so annoying and wrong and condescending.

Eh OK it’s not fair for front-page posters to tell commenters to fuck off except in extreme cases, so although the Abbé has been trying my patience sorely I apologize for the intemperate remark, and invite readers to substitute some milder condemnation of their own devising. Sorry Abbé Faria.

“and then get staked out over a huge fire-ant nest in the middle of the damn summer, inland somewhere like Statesboro, GA, 104F on a humid day, than read that fucking paper”

People should write poetry instead of papers. Look, a) no one reads poetry, so it’s pretty safe, b) those people who do read it know full well what they’re getting into: it comes with an implicit kind of trigger warning in the form of “this is a poem”, c) if you joy in the feeling of making someone else trudge through your stuff, there’s just no comparison. Poetry beats anything else hands down.

“I apologize if this long post bores or tires. I mean it for understanding.”

Less is more Charles. You stuff is long and hard to read. My comments may be stupid but at least they tend to be short.

Charles it’s possible I misread some of what you were saying, but it’s hard to tell really. Truly what you are saying seems vague.

However, two last points:

1. Inclusive language policies try to make sure that some people aren’t left out, eg get everyone in universities (in the case we are talking about), to speak as if men and women are equal, rather than as if men are default ‘normal’, women are ‘other’.

When you argue against inclusive language, you are not arguing for some vague ‘freedom’ – you are arguing for the specific freedom to discriminate against groups of people.

2 The reason that people may recommend actual ‘gender-blind’ assessment ( where they genuinely don’t know the gender) is because we are aware that gender discrimination exists in many scenarios. This is different from saying that you ‘don’t notice’ the gender of people’s names, because it is people who think they are ‘not noticing’ who are in practice giving the differential results.

People on (eg) biased selection committees don’t say ‘oh look there’s a female name, let’s treat her application badly’ – they say ‘we looked at all the applicants on the basis of merit and happened to prefer men, because they happened to be the best’. Unconscious bias is unconscious.