Vox Popoli

Pretty Lady brings to our attention a fine female mind held back by The Patriarchy:

Former Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan has plans to sue both students and colleagues

“One female student was a nose-blower,” says Priya Venkatesan, who, until just a few weeks ago, was a professor in Dartmouth’s writing department. A 1990 graduate of the College, Venkatesan spent the better part of her twenties earning a Masters in Genetics and a PhD in Literature. But those were different days. Now, Venkatesan finds her thoughts occupied by that student who “incessantly disrupted class with her nose-blowing.” Or the one who interrupted her lecture on bioethics with “a real evil look that made me feel very uncomfortable.” Or the one who loudly declared that Lyotard was “cheesy.”

I’m only disappointed that Venkatiswhatever wasn’t cited as proof that women CAN TOO do hard science during my little run in with the Electrolites. Although, I suppose it would be difficult to do any Nobel-winning work if the janitor persecuted her by emptying trash cans too loudly. I laughed. I cried. Much better than Cats. No matter how ridiculous you find the equalitarians, they will always manage to exceed even your most cynical estimates. And you know, I suspect that PZ and company won’t be scoffing for long at my assertion of the peril that Title IX poses for academic science:

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth…. Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

All the news you need to know from Down Under:

Attempting to reassure anxious donors, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday outlined a road map she said she will follow to beat Barack Obama in the Ohio and Texas primaries March 4. One donour put up his hand and asked, “So, I’m not supposed to ask how Obama is going to die accidentally am I?”

U.S. Marines in helicopters and Humvees flooded into a Taliban-held town in southern Afghanistan’s most violent province early Tuesday, the first major American operation in the region in years. When asked why they couldn’t just bomb everything from the sky a Marine said they were trying the human touch.

The Bank of England today announced a $100 billion plan to allow banks to swap mortgage-backed securities for Treasury bills. The government said it was prepared to accept bad debt on behalf of the people and said the people were prepared to accept more taxes on behalf of the people.

China has branded the Dalai Lama a ‘wolf in monk’s robes’ and his followers the ‘scum of Buddhism’. It stepped up the rhetoric Tuesday, accusing the Nobel Peace laureate and his supporters of planning suicide attacks. Suicide attacks being defined as ‘protesting China’s soldiers on Tibet’s streets’.

German astronaut Hans Schlegel said he’s feeling great and well enough to make a spacewalk Wednesday, after sitting out the mission’s first outing because of illness. The astronauts knew their German counterpart was sick when he begun laughing at their jokes.

The OC requests reader reviews of a landmark work of science fiction:

I’m starting to collect reader reviews of my Cyberpunk novel. If you’ve read it and want to comment on it or ask some questions about it, please feel free to do so on this thread. If you haven’t read it but think you might want to, you can download a pdf of the manuscript.

It’s been a long time since I read Cyberpunk, so I think I’ll take another crack at it before writing a review. If you haven’t read it yet, give it a whirl; it’s different than you might expect. The OC’s style is apparent, of course, but the novel has nearly as much in common with Orson Scott Card as with William Gibson.

CoComment reports that the truncating comment bug is fixed and deployed. They would like you to test it out, so if you’re feeling repressed, this would be the thread on which you may express yourself to the full. And by full, I mean length, not the full extent of your vulgar vocabulary.

Oh Sweet Sparta! I just realized what this means. WLW is unchained and we still have 9/10ths of Thucydides left!

Or should I say, the soon-to-be Dr. Sam Harris. A few weeks ago I mentioned that I’d exchanged email with Sam; it seems that he finds it somewhat easier to find atheist volunteers for his projects than Christians, or, one can only presume, Nzambi Mpunguists. Naturally, I volunteered the services of the Dread Ilk as a group encompassing a reasonable number of the former, if sadly not so many of the latter. This series of four surveys is part of Sam’s study intended to investigate the nature of various beliefs held by various humans. Since I asserted in TIA that religion has nothing to fear from science and I’m interested to see what sort of results he gets, I encourage everyone here to help him out by taking the following four surveys:

Belief Survey A

Belief Survey B

Belief Survey C

Belief Survey D

Please note that each survey begins with the same basic data page; the different questions won’t appear until you reach the second page. There’s about a hundred questions on each, but they’re much easier than the Thucydides quiz, so no fear. I’m somewhat skeptical that this method will provide particularly meaningful results, let alone prove anything, but there’s only one way to find out. So, please take the quizzes and let’s see what this sociological “science” tells us about the nature of belief.

Since a number of female blogs appear to be wondering where all the real men went, the answer is: anywhere where women who miss “Sex and the City” aren’t. “Spiting their pretty faces” would have applied here, except for the fact that Horseface was downright heinous, Slagantha was old, disease-infested and literally cancerous, the annoying lawyer was an unattractive, unknowing lesbian, and while the prissy WASP did actually have a pretty face, her body was shaped less like a woman’s than a mutated pear with cankles.

A lot of 21-century working women now view men as fun emotional rollercoasters, as a hobby rather than a vocation. To have singleness represented in such a glamorous way was a relief – in more traditional accounts, a single woman of that age is officially on the shelf…. The seventysomething novelist Fay Weldon, who found the series “impossible not to enjoy”, is reluctant to lend messages to the show, but suggests that one might be: “Find ways to enjoy yourself, but give up the hunt for men. It’s just debasing.”

So, traditional marriage is debasing, but lonely cat-collecting while watching civilization slowly devolve into the third world, that’s liberating! But it’s nice to know that women are now officially down with single men treating women as objects for temporary amusement. The amusing thing is that women traditionally viewed strippers as being lower class; in these equalitarian times, being worthy of the pole is the pinnacle of female achievement.

For once, I find myself agreeing with an Ivy League college boy:

“Harvard seniors have every right to demand a Harvard-calibre speaker. Harry Potter – and JK Rowling – is just a flash in the pan.

I rather liked the first three Harry Potter books myself, but then, there are many books I liked that didn’t cause me to be impressed by the writer. And that last one was howlingly bad. Anyhow, a brief perusal of the best-selling books of 100 years ago* should suffice to disabuse anyone who thinks Rowling will still be well-regarded or even read in 100 years, whereas the timeless themes of Lewis’s Narnia novels will still be read and loved in twice that time.

Somehow, I doubt Rowling’s creation has ever inspired a little girl to sigh wistfully and say “Daddy, for our next trip, can we go to Hogwarts?”

Dr. Helen foresees the fate of the universities:

It’s no wonder universities are turning into pink collar ghettos. Men are finding other avenues that are fulfilling and fit in with their lifestyle. With the rise of technology and alternative ways to make a living and live one’s lifestyle, I have no doubt that most men will find what works for them.

If you think the sex ratio is bad now, just wait until I get my next+1 technology gig rolling. Once it’s possible to take college courses on your Xbox 720 or PS/4 for anything you want anytime you want, no guy will ever bother with sitting in a lecture hall at 7 AM again.

There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to how people did on the quiz from section 1.1 to 1.115. I think the ebook readers were under a bit of a handicap, from not knowing precisely where to stop reading to not having handy maps and summary notes at their disposal like the readers of the Landmark edition. If you have any questions about the quiz, feel free to ask them now. I have to admit that I am amazed so many people got the question about the Potidaean rebellion right.

Thucydides makes for fascinating reading because his analysis of the events he describes is so much more sober and incisive than what we see provided by commentators and journalists today. I’m less impressed by his recitation of events, which tends to leap around in both space and time, than by his explanations for how those events came to pass. His ability to cut to the heart of the matter is particularly impressive when one considers that he was an Athenian actively involved in the war, and yet his take on the events leading up to the war tend to read in a manner that could reasonably be taken as pro-Spartan. Can you even imagine Donald Rumsfeld or any of the neocons involved in the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism eventually writing a history of the War on Terror that gives equal time to al-Qaeda and takes the USA to task for its strategic, tactical and moral blunders?

The five lessons I took away from this initial reading were as follows:

1. The Law of Unintended Consequences has always applied to war and intelligent minds tempered by wisdom have long recognized this. Thucydides didn’t write that no plan survives contact with the enemy, he went well beyond it in implying that no plan survives the process of mental buy-in from one’s own side. Unfortunately, these wise and intelligent minds tend to be overruled by the excitable masses, the greedy for glory, and the hungry for wealth and power. From the refusal of the Spartans to heed the advice of King Archidamus to the inability of the Athenians to follow Pericles’s correct strategic vision, we see that the actual execution of the war inevitably departs, sooner rather than later, from the ideas of those theoretically charged with the responsibility of executing it.

2. The establishment of non-imperial empire and constant meddling in the affairs of others appears to be the unavoidable offspring of democracy and power. No one who reads this can fail to recognize and be worried by the many analogies between ancient Athens and modern America, whether it is the comparative wealth, the belief in an inherent superiority of character and system, the conviction that every action is to the benefit of both themselves and others, and the total confidence in their particular military advantages. Just as Athens felt that its primacy was more than justified by its heroic leadership in the trans-Hellenic war against the Persians, Americans believe they can do no wrong on the world stage due to their two wars against the Germans, and, to a lesser extent, the Cold War against the Soviets. And just as Athens badly overestimated the esteem in which they were held by their rebellious allies, the USA overestimates the way it is perceived by the rest of the world. The Delian league in some ways appears to disturbingly foreshadow the Coalition of the Willing.

3. Politics hasn’t changed much in 2,400 years. Neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton could avoid the salient points and offer mulish self-justification any more completely than the Athenian attempt to dissuade Sparta from following their lead and getting involved in the dispute between Corinth and Corcyra. And Themosticles’s successful effort to keep Sparta occupied while the Athenians rebuilt their walls is very remniscent of the European Unionists’ staunch denials of the intended nature of the EU over the decades, denials that were only ever intended to keep the opposition from forming until the necessary political infrastructure had been erected and it was too late to stop it.

4. Being one who grew up reading Plato and Demosthenes courtesy of the Collier’s Junior Classics, I’d long considered myself somewhat of a metaphorical Athenian. Thus, Thucydides comes as a bit of a shock when one realizes that the Spartans, for all their horrific attitude towards raising children for the good of the state, actually tend to come off as wiser, less grasping and more reasonable than those with whom I’ve long identified. It’s clear that the famous discipline of the Spartans served them well in areas beyond the battlefield. It certainly appears to provide some solid historical grounding for my skepticism about democracy and equalitarianism.

5. The arrogance of a naval/aerial power is understandable, but can be misplaced. The history of warfare shows that even huge technological advantages can be overcome in a surprisingly short period of time, especially if the side with the advantage foolishly expends its advantage on matters of strategic insignificance. When reading Thucydides, one finds oneself drawn time and time again to thinking of the long-term strategic positions of the USA and China.