Monthly Archives: August 2013
My Father, The Greatest, and Of the Greatest Generation
Tribute to Dr David West Keirsey.
Why Haven’t More Muslims Won The Nobel Prize? Ctd
Last week, as the Dish noted, Dawkins caused an uproar by tweeting: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” Isaac Chotiner mounts a defense of Dawkins:
[T]here is something not quite right with many of the responses to Dawkins. The point he was trying to make, I would assume, is that Islam is a religion which holds back intellectual development, and thus the Nobel Prize count is skewed towards non-Muslim countries. This might be a silly argument in point of fact, but it is perfectly acceptable to make these types of claims. Religions are man-made things. People choose to follow a particular faith. It would be one thing to say that the color of one’s skin sets back one’s intellectual development; Dawkins was (I think) trying to say that a belief system human beings choose to…
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MRA Paul Elam: “This world deserves a jerk on the collar and a slap across the face and the flying spittle of rage.”
“Compassion for Boys and Men.” This, the slogan of Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has always struck me as a teensy bit ironic, given that site founder and head angry dude Paul Elam spends much of his time berating other men, and really only seems interested in showing “compassion,” if it can be called that, for those who not only agree with everything he says but also donate money to him.
Recently Mr. Elam ran across a four-year-old video that’s been posted to the Men’s Rights subreddit numerous times in recent days. It shows a young woman assaulting a campus preacher, and knocking him off a platform, after falsely accusing him of groping her. (The woman, a student at Middle Tennessee State University, was arrested and later pled guilty to assault charges, getting a year’s probation, some community service and a fine; the preacher suffered…
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Sri Lanka Struggles to Contain a Growing Epidemic of Child Abuse
War-scarred Sri Lanka is experiencing an alarming scourge of child abuse, and the apparatus for dealing with the problem, UNICEF says, is “grossly inadequate.”
Every day, three to five children are raped in the island nation. Police statistics show the total number of child rapes in 2011 as 1,463; the figure jumped to 1,759 cases in 2012, according to a parliamentary report. Police records also give a total of just over 2,000 sexual offenses against children, besides rape, in 2011; child-molestation cases in 2012 soared to over 5,000, according to parliamentary figures. The total number of all crimes against children — which besides sex crimes include crimes of violence, abduction, trafficking and other offenses — increased by a dramatic 64% between 2011 and 2012.
(MORE:Amid Abuse and Fear, Tamils Continue to Flee Sri Lanka)
Some of the increases can be explained by growing awareness of child rights leading to increased…
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The Roots Of Rape?
There’s plenty to agree with in Frank Bruni’s column today on ameliorating the culture that leads to disparagement of and aggression toward women. In fact, I’d probably endorse most of the proposals he makes. But, unlike Frank, I don’t believe that masculinity is entirely a cultural construct. Here’s how he puts it:
There are times when I find myself darkly wondering if there’s some ineradicable predatory streak in the male subset of our species. Wrong, Chris Kilmartin told me. It’s not DNA we’re up against; it’s movies, manners and a set of mores, magnified in the worlds of the military and sports, that assign different roles and different worth to men and women. Fix that culture and we can keep women a whole lot safer.
But there is a third option between DNA and culture. It’s called testosterone. It’s a very powerful hormone that makes men men (we are all…
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