Pansynthesis

[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]

Stigma Kills: A Concrete Example

Often when bloggers or activists push back against ableist language and stereotypes in the media, especially pop culture, someone will respond with an argument that there are more important disability issues to address and that the topic at hand is mostly irrelevant to disability rights as a whole. [...]

I believe these things matter very much. Perhaps not individually – if I slip and use the word “lame” pejoratively, it does not automatically cause a person with a disability to die instantly. But each individual instance adds up to become a trend, to become a larger understanding and expectation of how things are. And if those understandings and expectations aren’t accurate, it can have dramatically horrific results.

…a lot of our ongoing decisionmaking is done automatically, unconsciously. This is because we are constantly presented with such a vast amount of information that if we stopped to consciously evaluate everything, we’d never be able to do anything at all. When I see an object with keys labeled with letters and laid out in the QWERTY design, I recognize it as a keyboard an assume I use it to manually input written data into a computer or typewriter or phone or other device. This saves me the trouble of figuring out each and every time what this object is, what it is for, how I am supposed to interact with it…

…a stereotype is an unconscious cognitive shortcut – instead of examining an individual person or situation, we apply a stereotype to make assumptions. While a stereotype is usually seen as a negative thing, they serve an important purpose by allowing us to make educated guesses.

…although the specifics fade away, most people are left with vague, unconscious associations. Again, some of these associations are essentially value-neutral, as how I generally associate red with “stop” and green with “go” from traffic lights and signs. But people can also have unconscious associations around more complex and problematic issues, like race, gender, and disability status.

Social psychologists from Harvard developed a computer-based test to measure the existence of implicit associations and stereotypes – the Implicit Association Test (IAT). [...]

…[a stereotype] is an association that exists only for the tiniest of moments until it is extinguished by cognition.

How can those tiny moments, almost too small to measure, even matter? Well, as Chally recently posted about, a Los Angeles police officer shot and killed an unarmed man with [...] autism.

Read My Archives

If you have nothing better to do. This piece on Penis Envy is a pretty nice one even if I say so myself. It's part of that series of posts I wrote in defense of feminism.

Or you might like to read more about how I review studies and their popularizations.

[Links! --L.]

Repentance During The Holy Week of Christianity

What struck me the most was that bit about the 1970's culture in Douthat's piece. I have no idea if data on child molestation prior to the 1970's exists anywhere, but it would be interesting to see if all the molestation in fact started during that lewd decade. Especially given that the famous extreme Catholic, Bill Donohue, used an argument having to do with the zeitgeist of the 1970's, too.

Donohue also argues that the Catholic church is taken to task for something which "everybody did" and that this is unfair. Here's where I disagree, most strongly.

Religious organizations should be held to higher standards than the average person in the street or even the average person holding secular authority.

They tell us that they are speaking on behalf of a divine source, after all. They tell us how we should live our lives, what is wrong and what is right. For all this they get freedom from taxes, lots of kowtowing and respect. Something has to be given in return, and at a minimum that something should be higher ethical standards of personal behavior.

Where the Boyz Are

…the argument that women should sorta gracefully give way to men because ultimately that's better for themselves is very, very common whenever the gender gap in education is discussed. It is a condescending and stupid argument, and whenever it is used I smell a player of the zero-sum game.

Well Past The Limits of Tolerance by Anthony McCarthy

…the news item about the “suicide voyeur” William Melchert-Dinkel, a 47 year old man from St Paul Minnesota, is a compelling example of how bad an intellectual pose can get.

Pretending he was a women half his age,* Dinkel trolled suicide websites (NB) and encouraged people to kill themselves in front of web cams for his sexual gratification. He’s suspected in at least five suicides and was believed to have encouraged as many as a hundred around the world. While pursuing his “suicide fetish (sic)” he worked as a nurse in hospitals and nursing homes.

After years of doing this he was outed by Celia Blay, a 64-year-old woman with few technical skills, who tracked him down when police refused to become involved. The details of the case are pretty awful but even worse is the fact that the criminally degenerate Dinkel will likely get off without prosecution in the United States.

CMS Tool of the Week: WordPress Widgets Wherever You Want Them

If you’ve ever been frustrated by the limitations of pages and posts with the same inflexible sidebar, this plugin is for you. It will help you to build a CMS that is able to accommodate the unique needs of your website, as well as conserve page real estate without having to sacrifice vital information. The Section Widget plugin was the Grand Prize winner of the WordPress Plugin Competition of 2009. This plugin has been created to display widgets on specific pages, posts, categories, etc. and display content generated by plain text html and shortcodes. It includes two different types of widgets – the regular section widget and the tabbed version, which helps you to save space by separate content in jQuery-powered tabs. If you need a more modular layout to your WordPress site, add this plugin for an instant boost in flexibility. Section Widget comes with a remarkable array of controls for displaying your widgets within your theme…

Introducing BuddyPress Daily our latest theme

BuddyPress Daily is a highly flexible theme based around a news layout.

It’s all about giving you options with offering 8 distinctive designs alongside our usual home page layouts and content options.

Alongside that, it’s our first theme that naturally supports front page video posts (see below).

And of course it works perfectly for BuddyPress, WPMU and regular WordPress too.

The Link(s): Tue, Mar 30th, 1pm by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.