People are CRAZY

How anybody can consider going anywhere the day after Thanksgiving is something I really cannot comprehend. I can barely move; the only reason I'm leaving the house is because my elderly and arthritic cat has claw problems and has to go to the vet.

The aforementioned cat, Princess Amanda; she is some five years my junior and far more crotchety.

I'm not sure why I like the Thanksgiving holiday. I reject pretty much every bit of its mythology; it has a disturbing and shameful history, which I've been aware of for a pretty long time because I never went to a public elementary school and thus got out of the annual lie-fest. My family tends to have one conversation every year about how disturbing the friendly-Pilgrim-Indian myth is and then just not discuss it for the rest of the day.

We also tend to largely ignore the whole thanksgiving aspect, which sounds a bit stupid since the day is called Thanksgiving. However, it just isn't something I buy into. I dislike being forced to thank anyone for anything, and I happen to think that gratitude is a bit pointless without a target. I try to be thankful every day to the people who matter for the things that matter. The rest is circumstance, skill, or luck, and thankfulness seems awfully disingenuous in connection with those things.

I suppose I am thankful for these things: That my family has more than sufficient food, that we are all healthy and close enough together to gather and eat together several times a year, and that we have someplace to go. Not every family this year has those things or opportunities. My uncle told us at dinner about his neighbor's experience; this year, she went out to do some last-minute shopping and ran into a homeless woman and her two children. They had noplace to go; all the shelters are full. My uncle's friend took them home with her and made them dinner. If anything, I'm grateful that there are people in the world that are still trusting and generous enough to do that; it gives me more hope than anything else for this country. Most people are still fundamentally pretty decent; we all want essentially the same things and when we stop to think about it, we realize that and try to be decent to each other. It's what makes life worth living. The nice thing about Thanksgiving is that it is one of those times of year when people feel compelled to stop and think about it, realize what they have, realize that everyone really wants the same things, and stop acting like dicks long enough to be kind to each other.

Maybe if these culturally mandated expressions of generosity didn't exist, we'd be forced to behave ourselves more often on our own. That's one of the nice things about atheism - it frees you up to do just that without a religious calendar telling you when to be a decent human being. In the meantime, I suppose I'll take what I can get, but I have to say I love it when my family doesn't say grace. When you've spent an entire day preparing food, it's a bit infuriating to wait two minutes while everybody folds their hands and pretends that some higher power, as opposed to you, is responsible for it.

Intellectual debate

So basically, I'm trying to hash out a pretty basic question: Should a professor - any professor - be allowed to express personal opinions in a very public forum, regardless of what those views may be?

The reason I'm questioning it is a blog post by a professor at Purdue which purports to present economic reasons why homosexuality is bad. The full post is here, but the shortened version goes something like this: Biblical values, AIDS, prison rape, domestic partner benefits don't reward straight people enough, it's too expensive for the companies. Personally, I think he loses all credibility when he refers to "sodomite degeneracy," but whatever.

The real question is, should he be allowed to express these blatantly anti-gay (and homophobic) views on a blog? It's a pretty public forum.

He doesn't publicly identify himself as a Purdue professor, and I tend to believe that affiliating oneself with an institution does not require you to give up personal opinions. For example, I work for a newspaper, and I still have this blog. We're required by a code of conduct not to affiliate ourselves with student advocating bodies (Purdue Student Government, for example), not to appear as an affiliate at events (for example, one of the "tea party" protests), and not to appear in photos or promotional materials for campus organizations. Basically, we can't make it look in any way as if the paper takes a stance on a certain issue, and as employees, if our presence can be construed as support, we are required not to be present. However, I can still have this blog and I can still express personal opinions, mostly because the things I have opinions on have little or nothing to do with the issues we're covering at the moment. Also, let's face it: Nobody really cares enough about what I think to go "Does that reporter have a blog" and then go try to find it. And the first result for a Google search using the information on the blog does not link back to my job.

This is not the case for Mr. Chapman, the professor in question. It's really easy to find out that he's a Purdue affiliate. A Google search for "Bert Chapman" returns his Purdue profile and a Purdue government documents staff page as the first two results. His blog is named "Conservative Librarian," meaning that those first two Google results, for a professor of library science, can easily be tied to him. If I was a gay student in one of his classes, I would be feeling pretty threatened right now. He uses some hateful language on that blog; "encroaching threat of homosexuality and other aberrant forms of sexual expression," "sodomite degeneracy," and "morally aberrant sexual behavior" all make appearances in the first two paragraphs of the post linked above. None of those statements have anything to do with the economic arguments he claims to be focusing on. Additionally, his misinformation about AIDS - detailed in a comment by an IU student - is disturbing evidence of poor scholarship on his part. If I were a Purdue administrator, I'd be kind of worried about this guy's ability to do his job as a social scientist. Objectivity is clearly not in his nature.

I think the best test is this: Would you express those opinions in a classroom? Is publishing something equivalent to appearing at an event protesting for or against that issue? I admit that the standards for affiliation have been somewhat relaxed for professors, who are notoriously opinionated. I'm starting to understand what conservative students feel when a professor says in class that he or she is a Democrat, or pro-Barack Obama, or even in favor of universal health care. For that reason, I think that professors with personal blogs must make an effort to either tone down views that might 'other' students - for example, they shouldn't refer to homosexuality as "sodomite degeneracy" - or they should go to great lengths to hide their university affiliation unless it somehow bolsters credibility.

This particular example is a toughie, and I admit that I'm having trouble balancing my personal distaste for the man's position and my love of free speech. On the whole, I think the free speech has to win out. However, the fact that the man has power over the academic careers of the people he's bashing in this post - and who he clearly has a very personal distaste for - has to affect the issue too. If he rewrote the post, removing some of the more religion-oriented language, focusing on the aspects of the issue that he claims to be focusing on and adding a disclaimer that his views do not represent those of the university, I wouldn't find it especially controversial - on that front, at any rate. Believing that AIDS is "the gay plague" is still pretty misguided.

Chimpanzees Aren't Pets, People!

Sure, they look cute. You hear that humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genetic material and think, "wow, that would be a unique and awesome pet, right?"

Wrong, wrong, wrong. As proved in a number of recent news stories - such as this one about a chimpanzee hurling rocks at zoo visitors because it was tired of being stared at, this one about a caged chimp escaping and attacking a friend of the owner's, and this one about an abused chimp killing its owner with a well-aimed coconut - chimps don't make good pets.

This is due in very large part to the fact that chimps are mean as hell, especially male chimps. In the wild, they fight all the damn time. When groups meet, they attack and sometimes kill each other, and groups of male chimps will go on hunts for smaller monkeys. Now, granted, all the animals in the incidents listed above were somehow provoked, but chimpanzees are naturally testy. In The Last Great Ape, a Nova episode about bonobos - a far rarer and more peaceful species of chimp, pan paniscus - one researcher talks about the difference between the species in human terms, and chimpanzees are described represent humanity's violent side. (Bonobos, incidentally, are very rare and endangered and should not be kept as pets. I'm also fairly sure it's illegal to do so.)

This is not to say that chimpanzees are any more violent than any other animal that might be kept as a pet. But they are more intelligent, stronger, and more capable of planning ahead by far than most of those other species. Leaving aside the fact that nobody should be keeping these already endangered animals as pets to begin with, very few people are equipped to give them the space and facilities to keep them healthy and happy. It's the cardinal rule of pet ownership - don't keep an animal you aren't prepared to take good care of.

Travis, the chimp that attacked a woman's face, didn't deserve to be shot. He was one victim among many of a society that fails to recognize that great apes, while like us in many ways, are still wild animals and are not appropriate pets.

Awesome Things: The Hyperaware Consciousness

You should all go do this now. I happen to know the guy that founded it - peripherally, but we have met IRL - and he, and it, are pretty much awesome. It's basically a sort of list of questions that you can journal. I'm starting and you should too.

But not online, 'cause some of it's sort of personal and the Internet is forever.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Worst spelling and puns ever? Check. Kenyans? Check. Four hundred babies? Check.

This is pretty much the ultimate ad.

Blast from the Past

Watch these in order. It's much funnier that way. Sorry I couldn't embed the second one.



And now Seth Green's take on it.

In Which I Rant About Classes

Mandatory attendance is the bane of my life.

I have never had a mandatory-attendance class that was actually worth attending. Attendance points are, as far as I can tell, a substitute for actual teaching.

Case in point: My gender studies core requirement class, Gender Across Cultures. First, a disclaimer: Although this is anthropology class, and anthropology is my major, I have a marked antipathy towards gender studies. I think, frankly, that that field of study is a watered-down conglomeration of a number of other fields and really only scratches the surface of the issues it claims to study. Additionally, it nearly always leads to value judgments - such as what political system is 'best for women' - that I believe fundamentally countermand the entire point of anthropology. However, my issues with this class have nothing, or very little, to do with my feelings towards gender studies as a whole. My problem is that this class is almost entirely a waste of my time - a long, early waste of my time.

In Gender Across Cultures, we spend much time discussing and augmenting the readings - a process involving the same three people and sometimes a PowerPoint presentation - and contributing to lists of words on the board. My professor, the head of the department, is almost always absent, called away to various meetings, and this leaves us in the no-doubt capable hands of the TA. The TA is Finnish and talks as if she has a mouthful of marbles. I realize that she is not responsible for this, nor can she help it, but it doesn't help. She invariably attempts to lead class discussions, involving a very unwilling audience and attempting to draw out certain conclusions and follow a specific line of reasoning. This, incidentally, defeats the purpose of a discussion. It also means that she oversimplifies everything and fails to give the gender issues we discuss any context other than, for example, American culture - which varies radically by socioeconomic status, region, race, education, and any number of other factors which definitely are not consistent.

Another problem with the discussion angle to the course is that it is used by the vast majority of the students to fulfill a core requirement. Not only do they not especially want to be there, but most of them don't see why they need to learn anything from the class. This is fairly obvious every time the Finnish TA attempts to draw a contribution out of one of the douchebag males in the class and he repeatedly mumbles something about not knowing. He is clearly unwilling to even try to think about the class and I don't think I'm getting anything out of hearing someone try to get blood out of a stone.

The readings for the class are all right, but not great. For example, we keep reading the name of one woman who supposedly pioneered this field. It might be interesting to see what she wrote, however outdated, because it's going to influence the course of the field. But we never read anything of hers in the class, not even an excerpt from one of her papers.

Now, I understand that for a discussion-based class, you might need to require attendance - especially since nothing discussed is going to appear on the multiple choice tests. But why not change the multiple choice tests to essay tests, thereby making the discussion time and procession of ideas provided the class actually applicable to something? And for that matter, why predicate a 200-level core requirement class so heavily on discussion? That's something more suited to a smaller 300- or 400-level seminar on the subject, taken by students with some actual interest in the subject. Hell, even a once-a-week recitation led by a TA would work better. The entire classroom structure is unsuited to this presentation method; there are more than 70 students in the class. Someone's voice is always going to go unheard.

And yet I still have to attend this class, despite the fact that I get more out of talking to my mom on the phone for an hour or hanging out in my room and reading, because of attendance points. If students aren't motivated to attend the class without coersion, perhaps professors should rethink their teaching methods. I never skip my more interesting classes, or smaller classes, or classes that cover a lot of material, and these very rarely have any kind of attendance policy.