Re: "How You Guys -- that's right, you GUYS -- Can Prevent Rape"

Now, let me say at the start that I understand where the author is coming from. I've more friends than I would like who've been raped, some on a regular basis. I'm very well aware of how it can mess someone up. So please put aside the "oh noes he's attacking the rape victim" shtick.

The author, however, completely does not seem to grok the raper's perspective here. She tries, really, but all it amounts to is a emphatically third-party, analytic, "these things happen from other people" sense. Classifying rapists by motive: anger, power, or sadism. Seriously, wtf - do you think ANYONE reading this is going to say "oh right, I'm a sadist, that's why I'm likely to rape someone; I should stop that"?

The rest of it is equally either preachy (rape is bad! [norly?]) or otherwise unempathic (describing the "false" masculinity of machismo purely on a "my values are better than yours" level).

I have two simple suggestions that might actually work. For males.

1. Make consent, in the form of active participation, emphatically macho, and the lack of it ridiculous.

AKA "If you couldn't make your partner BEG you to fuck them, you're not a real man."

2. Practice (solo or with a partner) backing off from horny mindstate.

This is somewhat of an extension of the tradition Masters & Johnson type technique. Essentially, males more than females (me included) can get very single-minded once in a horny mindstate. With low enough inhibitions, and a lack of expectation / need of partner's active participation, that can lead to rape - i.e. where you just want to have sex, and you literally can't stop thinking about it, things start to cloud up in the drive towards climax.

Practicing getting horny and then just doing something else entirely helps with that, and can make hearing "no" or any variant thereof (e.g. anything that's not "YES PLEASE NOW") a lot easier to take and act on. It also has the major fringe benefit of making for more controllable, longer-lasting, more enjoyable sex for both partners.


FWIW, these are both things that I practice.


Sorry that it's not quite as neo-feminist as the original article, but I think it's a lot more realistic.

And as a side note: why is it that these things are always written by female rape victims, and not male ex-rapists... yet claim to be aimed at helping potential rapists avoid it? This seems utterly ludicrous to me.

http://math.berkeley.edu/index.php?module=announce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=118

"English as a Programming Language"
Wednesday, March 5
"The Axiomatic Derivation of Absolute Lower Bounds"
Friday, March 7

Both are 60 Evans Hall - 4:10pm-5:00pm

http://math.berkeley.edu/index.php?module=calendar&module=calendar&calendar[view]=event&id=2700

John Conway. Later the same day.

Might go. Any of the rest of you interested?

---

Thursday, March 6
10:10am-11:45am
714C University Hall, UCB Campus

So Help Me God: A Social Cognitive Approach to God-Mediated Control
Doug Oman, School of Public Health, UCB

Experiences of divine assistance are one of the primary phenomena of religious and spiritual life. Most early social scientists tended to question or dismiss the truth-value of perceptions of divine assistance. But applying major well-established social scientific theories allows non-reductive approaches to clarifying the functions of perceived assistance from a divinity or other spiritual being. In this paper, we systematically compare and analyze several facets of how assistance from human and divine/spiritual agents is experienced. The approach is concretized using the concept of proxy agency from Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, resulting in a recommended spiritually integral theory of efficacy (SITE) perspective. Implications are discussed for measuring self-efficacy for religious and spiritual activities, for interventions, and for the broader scientific study of religious phenomena.

David Gortner from Church Divinity School of the Pacific (GTU) will respond and present some of his own work.

Directions:

University Hall is on the south-west corner of University and Oxford. To get to 714C you ride the main (north) elevators up to the top (7th) floor and then head to room in the north-east corner of the building by (after stepping off the elevator) turning right, walking about 10 feet, then turning left and walking about 50 feet down the hall.

Map:

http://www.berkeley.edu/map/maps/BC12.html

Hope to see you there.

Mark
--
Mark Graves
Scholar in Residence, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA 94709
mgraves@jstb.edu

http://www.identifont.com/identify.html

Would only be useful in obscure circumstances... but still neat.

http://www.glumbert.com/media/consent

Very amusing video. ??SFW; nothing explicit but plenty of verbal innuendo.

In case you care: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12645655301511999224

ETA: I *thought* this would just be a list of the ones I subscribe to.

Evidently not; it's just the specific items that I highlight. Which is kinda lame, in that I'm most likely not going to bother doing so.

http://pbloco.com/adult_pb.asp (via mackenzie)

Sounds tasty.

Via 4pq1injbok, neat-but-weird:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/tinyimages/

http://icbs.berkeley.edu/news/story.php?rid=26&fh=1

Wed 1-5, Thur 9-5, Fri 9-1. Free, but TANSTAAFL.

Alex and I will be there.

I'll translate whatever cogscily references are made if you want, but I expect it to be fairly accessible and interesting.

So come.

... are hilarious. (And Canadian, like 4pq1injbok, whence the recommendation.)

If you like Weird Al, TMBG, or Tom Lehrer, you must listen.

Incidentally for the eyepatched among ye, it's on a torrent (though several files are lacking and at least one is a very poor rip).

Website, Lyrics

So... I've seen Huckabee in a few debates, and thought that mostly he wasn't talking anything overly weird.

But here's something that is outright fucked up:

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Huckabee_Amend_Constitution_to_meet_Gods_0115.html

SHARE THIS LINK --> http://makeyourlaws.org <-- (it has all of the below & more)

I've been thinking a bit about the current state of politics & laws, and have a few concerns. My government is failing me in various ways, and not addressing issues that I believe to be important.

Traditionally, getting a proposition onto the ballot requires hiring door-to-door people, a multimilliion dollar budget, etc... but this is the age of the internet meme and viral marketing. I suspect that, for a popular idea and with a context to do it, this could be done almost enitrely by volunteers. In California, it requires only 434k votes in 150 days to get an initiative on the ballot, and 695k to get a constitutional amendment. We can do this.

So, to those of you who have an interest in both politics and computers, I hereby request your assistance.

I want to create a website, http://makeyourlaws.org, that allows people to create laws in a truly democratic fashion - that is, through direct vote rather than delegation to representatives.

To summarize, there are three stages and areas of the site:
1. Idea voting a la BillWatch.us
2. Fleshing-out, analysis & review a la wikipedia, Secretary of State / Attorney General, and factcheck.org
3. Signature gathering & proposition submission a la petitiononline.com, except on paper with real legal validity


I have one proposition with universal appeal to start with:

All voting machines used in the state or created by companies doing business in the state must:
a) create a voter-verifiable paper trail
b) be completely open source in every aspect of their design, including blueprints and source code (companies may however retain other copyrights)
c) be publicly audited for security & other concerns, and pass in the version used
d) be accessible to voters with disabilities
e) be secure against all tampering (i.e. if anybody can find and demonstrate an exploit, then it is immediately invalid)

Additionally, companies that knowingly attempt to produce voting machines that have security flaws, back doors, or the like, are subject to heavy penalties.


If you are interested in participating or just think it's a good idea, post a comment here describing how you could contribute, and spread a link to http://makeyourlaws.com far and wide.


Help me put lawmaking back in the hands of ordinary people.

SHARE THIS LINK --> http://makeyourlaws.org <--

Thanks,
Sai Emrys
saizai@makeyourlaws.org

1. Peach and onion milkshake (pics as well as dinner courtesy of funcrunch, whom I had the pleasure of shooting repeatedly ^^; incidentally, that picset has some cute pics of me w/ Ryan)

Not as good as a minion shake, but still good enough to make me wriggle happily. Our waitress was uber sweet. The bartender lady who served it to me was I think scared by my tastes, and declined to have some. Pity.

2. Pizza w/ palm seed, raisins, onion salt, & bacon salt.

Pretty good, actually; probaby one of the better desert pizza concotions I've made to date. The raisins didn't really contribute though; not enough covering to keep them moistened and away from the heat, so they got dry and bland. Palm seed is interesting and will probably become a regular future component of my cooking. Comes in waaaaay too heavy syrup though, had to rinse 'em off. Bacon salt was an excellent combination here.

3. Peaches, palm seed, & yogurt slurry

Simple to make (just uncan and mix), pretty good. Only moderately WTF.


One suggestion I got recently (made I think more as a fear of what I might do than a suggestion, but oh well) was to try yogurt instead of red sauce as a pizza base. Will need to try at some point for a desert pizza.


Haven't been cooking much WTF lately. But not been cooking much lately at all (for definitions of 'cooking' that don't include merely making pasta or grilled cheese). Meh.

It seems that the book was a gift from aliothsan. Many thanks!


Cutting Remarks is primarily about Dr. Schwab's experience in residency at UCSF, through various wards (surgical, pediatric, vascular, etc).

To a certain extent, it reminds me of Heart Failure, though rather than being bitter, Schwab speaks from a highly successful retrospective. In that sense, I see some of what Heart Failure describes - the quasi-abusive social structures, excessive hours, and frequent trauma of patient death, tempered by decades of distance and time to forget the worst.

Schwab's account is enthralling enough that I read it in one sitting; it made me both laugh and cry, often simultaneously or near to it. He manages to find a certain humor even when starkly describing what are clearly memories that have stayed with him through the years as personal failures. His description of surgery itself is quite interesting; jocular, visual, visceral. Even (especially?) when describing what would otherwise be rather squicky aspects of his obvious love, trauma care.

If you read his blog (which is also excellent and well worth reading) you will get a feel for his style; it seems to be native, and not just merely a touchup by some top-notch ghostwriter.

I'm not sure what more I can say about it other than that I recommend it without reservation, and will loan on request.


ETA: As regards personal reaction: I am fairly sure that I do not myself want to go into surgery. Psychiatry or neurology perhaps, but I've already discussed my qualms about medical school compared to a straight Ph.D. I'm still somewhat uncertain about trying for an MSTP (MD + PhD); while I admire what he does - and that he has remained human despite it - I do not think it is for me, and I would likely need to force the MD part to work for my true interests.

But it is, nevertheless, fascinating stuff.


ETA2: You can also hear him read part of it at http://surgeonsblog.mypodcast.com/index.html

Dr. Sidney M Schwab's Cutting Remarks.

All I know is he's got an excellent blog which I've mentioned before. Hopefully the book should be interesting (though I currently have no intention of going into surgery...)

And I have no idea whom it's from. The username 'sucinen' is on the receipt, and while I'm fairly sure I've seen that before, I can't remember any context at all, nor do I see any relevant logs / emails / accounts. A new WP account that doesn't overlap with my edits at all, an inactive OKC account, and that's it.

So, whoever you are, thanks. :) I'll post my thoughts about the book once I've read it.

Use basic HTML view:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=d

Grr on them for not giving that link anywhere unless they think you need it. And grr for immense code obfuscation.

Matt Haupt made a blog: http://makealang.blogspot.com/

I've syndicated it at makealang; you can add it as a friend to watch it.