Pieter Nagel: Swapping Thoughts

One usually associates amnesia with cheesy movie plots, but sometimes it happens in real life.

Benjaman Kyle, as he chooses to call himself, was discovered, naked, sunburnt, and apparently severely beaten up, behind a Burger King in Georgia, USA.

And at that point, around 50 years of age, his life began.

The pseudonym he chose for himself fascinates me. Why the “Benjaman” instead of “Benjamin”? Is there some suble wordplay going on? He’s not Everyman, he’s Benjaman?

But then, even if he had chosen to go by the name “Zorgle Weeblebrodskni” if would consider it fair to let him live under that name, legally. Who knows what deeper meanings a self-chosen name has for someone with no identity otherwise?

Yet, there’s something sad to the name choice as well. Because the banal detail of having been “born” behind a Burger King seems to cling to him. The nurses took to calling him names like “BK Doe” – all plays on Burger King – and when he chose a name for himself, he apparently could not move away from the BK either.

And how’s this for poignancy?

He spends most of his days – when not working odd jobs – searching for himself on the internet and in newspaper articles.

Benjaman, if you Google this: I wish you luck.

Neurology

The photo above is from Natual History Museum’s Darwin – Big idea big exhibition.

I like it. It seems to humanize Darwin more. Maybe it’s because of the pose – or rather, lack of one, compared to the typical stiff an over-posed Eighteenth Centrury portraits. It almost seems as if the photographer interrupted him halfway while doing something, and any moment now he’s going to put his finger down and show us some or other delicate earthworm observation he was busy with.

Hat tip to  Antonio Martínez Ron.

Science

Whether men, or women, we all have our shadow sides. Having shadows you’d rather deny are part of being human, too.

We lie, we steal, we plot against each other, we betray one another, we stab friends in the back. We even beat up and assault enemies, or rape, or murder. The list goes on.

Now, it is almost undeniable that there are some things on the list that men are more guilty of than women. By that token, it’s equally undeniable that there are some things on the list that women are more guilty of than men. Sometimes it makes a difference whether it’s men doing it to men, or women doing it to women, or men and women doing it to each other.

Sometimes it’s easy to make a judgement call which of these are worse than the other: for example, as far as I’m concerned, one single murder outweighs a lifetime of gossip.

But sometimes it’s not that easy. If, for example, some drunk at a bar were to knife me twice and break my arm, would that be worse than if someone were to feign friendship for ten years and during that time systematically destroy my self-worth and independence?

Given all that, I find it extremely unlikely that one could ever stand back and make a final judgement call: yup, men are worse than women, because even though women are more guilty of A, B, and C, men are more guilty of X, Y and Z – and X, Y and Z are undeniably worse than A, B, and C.

I believe very strongly in gender equality.

Therefore, it seems logical to me, that if  men are, for example, physically stronger than women and have the upper hand when it comes to physical violence and intimidation – whether in sexual relationships, friendships, amongst their peers or towards their adversaries – women would tend to tactically resort to other strategies to even the field.

To imply that women are intrinsically incapable of finding other strategies would seem, to me, to be terribly paternalistic – a virtual admission that women are in fact inferior.

To imply that women are intrinsically virtuous and untempted to find other strategies, would seem – well, frankly as far as I’m concerned making women out to be Angels is just as paternalistic and demeaning.

Read more…

Society Gender relations

You know there’s a new dog in town when even the White House now has a blog.

I can’t help but think that this is a crafty response to the Bush White House “lost” email controversy. By applying the  Linus Torvalds theory of backups they can now use the defense: “Your Honour, we didn’t lose our White House correspondence – they’re right there in Google Cache!”.

I can’t help but wonder what the other arms of their Government think of all this. The CIA, for example, now not only needs to be concerned about blowback from their foreign military escepades – they now also need to worry about trackbacks from the nether regions of the blogosphere.

Seriously, though, I can’t help but be fascinated by this. It either represents a level of transparency unheard of under Bush, or it represents a mastery of propaganda that aforementioned dolt could not even conceive of.

Now, the whole world is anxiously awaiting the promised change. What will it look like?

For example, when will the White House Blog enable trackbacks, so that I can drive up my traffic with more silly posts like these?

Or would that bring the CIA to my door?

Politics Humor

Well, I (rightly) got some flak for my previous post Domestic violence: are women guilty more often than we think? That forces me to try and disentangle what I really wanted to say – always a good thing.

Although the particular article that prompted me to write was about domestic abuse, domestic abuse was not the issue I wanted to write about – the article merely tickled other broader concerns that have been gnawing at me for years. This caused me to be much more casual about conflating physical, psychological and other abusive behaviours than I should have been.

Someone with an intense concern about physical abuse would see physical abuse being mentioned, assume my post was all about physical abuse – and naturally so, since we all read our own fears and hopes and issues into the world around us. From that perspective I would seem distressingly dishonest for suggesting that women are physically as violent as men are – and do so by making reference to psychological aggression.

And since my post was jumbled enough to permit that kind of misunderstanding, I apologise.

Read more…

Society Gender relations

Like many, I read ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini, and it gripped me.

The childhood descriptions of the “kite duels” in Afghanistan using kites with ropes that were dipped in glue and then in fine glass fragments – the goal being to slice your opponents’ kite-string in-flight and be the last one remaining – were especially evocative.

Survivor of glassed-string kite

Then Andrew Sullivan spoilt it for me with this post.

You mean the kites hurt hundreds of birds a year?

Nature

(Update: I horribly bungled the point I was trying to make. See here for a revisit)

It is a common stereotype that men are the batterers, and women the victims.

Now, I’ve always found absolutistic either-or thinking fascinating – and dangerous. Even if, for the sake of argument, men were predominantly more violent than women, so that (thumbsuck) 90% of all domestic abuse were perpetrated by men, that would still mean that 1 in 10 victims of domestic abuse would be men,

Now, to my mind, the hypothetical 90% would be an extremely skewed distribution of violence, and as such would be a very generous admission of the premise that men are more violent than women. But even then: 1 in 10 male victims is far from nothing, and surely warrants a few shelters for battered men here, or magazine articles there?

The 90% was made up, of course.

This is where the black or white thinking comes in: it seems to me that even people who would quite freely grant that the notion of “men as batters” is a simplification, and that male victims do exist – even they seem to speak and act as if for all practical purposes male victims of domestic violence are sufficiently few to ignore for practical purposes.

In Woman Comparable to Men in Domestic Violence: Stereotypes and their Consequences on Brainblogger, Robbert Yourrel presents a telling anecdote:

A volunteer who presents about male victims was presenting to a police department. She had 200 law enforcement personnel present. At the end, she got a police officer to volunteer a call to a shelter, posing as a male victim. He called a hotline for a battered womens program and asked about services for men, explaining that he was experiencing violence at the hands of a female. The hotline worker said, “You should be in jail.”

He then cites a  litany  of 22 research papers from 1980 – 2007 that either show a more or less equal victim vs. aggressor distribution between men and women for physical and/or emotional abuse – or show a ration that is significantly less skewed than my hypothetical 90/10 ratio above.

Read more…

Society Gender relations

(Hat tip to Rebecca Skloot)

We’ve become pretty accustomed to guide dogs for the blind. But when I read this New York Times article about other animals used for other handicaps – and a social ‘backlash’ of sorts against them – I wondered how long it actually took us, as a society, to get used to guide dogs in the first place.

Note the patronising 'Things that make you go aahh' slant

One interesting new development mentioned in the article is the use of miniature horses, instead of dogs, as guides to the blind. Apparently some people, in some contexts, find horses to be superior guides. They live longer, so the owner does not have to re-bond with as many guide-animal partners in their lifetime, the horses have a better temperament and don’t go running after cats, dragging their owners along, the horses have near-360° vision and so can keep a better eye on how their owner and obstacles she might bump into, and so forth.

But no denying it, the idea of a guide horse breaks the mould.

And we people like our moulds. In the NYT article, they mention the rising problem of fraudsters taking their pets along into public spaces where pets are not allowed, and then claiming the pets are “service animals” for some unmentioned psychological disorder.

And instead of a common-sense, compassionate approach, people fall back to their boxes.

If the animal is not a dog, nor the owner blind, then – dissonance! Therefore, some moves are afoot disallow all non-dog service animals.

This is not the first time I hear of novel use of service animals. The article mentions, in passing, the use of dogs to “[help] autistic children socialize” (isn’t it amazing, the bias – autistics are always children, when they grow up the disappear, off society’s radar, into a la-la land where they now longer need dogs to help them socialize?).

If read of that in 1995 already from Jim Sinclair (J8, as he is known amongst some – an autistic letter-counting nickname of sorts). He calls them SSigDOGs – Social Signal Dogs and Orientation Guides.  And it goes further than just helping him to ’socialize’. Dogs are more adepts at reading human body language than most autistics are, therefore a good SSigDOGs role is to growl at or shun people who act threateningly or dishonestly towards their autistic master, and to be chummy with trustworthy people. One would presume from that that the autistic owner finds it easier to read the animal’s body language than humans’.

One gets the feeling, from reading Jim’s account, that these kinds of dog fulfill a purpose that is very difficult to grasp if one is not in the shoes of an autistic:

I found that with my dog by my side, my overall awareness and orientation to my surroundings was better. I actually understood more of what I saw and heard when I had the dog to direct my attention to the particular things in the environment that were important for me to attend to.

…

… a dog who responded well to people, distinguished between familiar people and strangers, distinguished between people who just happened to be standing near me and people whose body language indicated they were trying to get my attention–all things that are very difficult for me to do.

…

Isosceles has enabled me to recognize acquaintances when I encounter them, which has made it easier for acquaintances to turn into friends.

…

Several years ago I saw a report about service dogs being trained to help people with Parkinson’s disease break out of motor “freezes,” and I realized that Isosceles had been doing this for me for years.

Precisely how a dog would help one to recognize acquiaintances is a bit murky to me – but since I don’t have the problem I suppose it is not for me to judge the solution. More power to Jim.

I suppose the idea of a grown up autistic not just existing but also functioning, choosing and training and buying a guide dog, acquainting and befriending people shatters some stereotypes.

Which brings us back to people and their boxes, and the following very saddening comment on Rebecca’s blog:

Rebecca
it’s always nice when a sighted journalist tries to enter our world and always makes for some amusing reading. You see my wife has been blind since birth and she uses a guide dog. So let’s look at some of the facts that you seem to have left out your article and I have some questions for you. First of all you fail to tell your readers who was responsible for having the changes made to the ADA [a law that limits the definition of serivce animals to dogs-only - Ed.] . It wasn’t the big bad government it was the guide dog users themselves… We have a hard enough time as it is for business allowing us access to their establishment with a well-trained guide dog. Having ill trained animals pretending to be service animal’s just makes it harder for us to be accepted… how do you train a horse not to defecate or urinate when it wants to? How do you take a horse on an airplane? How do you command a horse to lay down? Horses require iron shoes how are you going to protect delicate floors? How are you going to get a horse to the second level of a building that has no elevator?… You cannot train non-domesticated animals to do the same functions as dogs. And we the disabled community that use service animal’s correction service dogs are sick and tired of people who want their pets to travel with them so they figure that they will fool the general public because people are afraid to confront the disabled. I do believe that the parrot does help the man who has bipolar disorder. And the monkey is a great help to someone who has lost the use of their arms. But should they be for afforded the same rights and privileges that we guide dog users have struggled for over 80 years I think not.

I get the feeling of someone whose become so immersed in one particular world, that of blind people and their guide dogs, that they’ve become blind to the fact that other worlds, other people with other problems, exist. And too blind to notice that the objections are precisely the same kind of objections that were and are still made against guide dogs for the blind: “But what if the dog poops on the street or in the restaurant? How will you ever take a dog into a hospital waiting room?”.

The “I’ve got my rights – now I’ll join the majority in bashing other minorities” syndrome is always a sad sight to see.

Society

I tried watching Faith Like Potatoes on that thing, but it showed Carl Sagan’s Cosmos instead.

Religion Humor

(Hat tip to GrrlScientist)

The Japanese video below shows some astounding transformations by a Southern White-Faced  Scops Owl as it is threatened by owls of other species:

I don’t like the way these zoo-displays of the animal’s behaviour stress out the animal. And the silly soundtrack the Japanese put over the visuals makes it clear that they are pretty alienated from real wildlife other than Pikachu.

But the owl’s control over its own feathers is amazing. If it can tweak its feathers that much just for defensive displays, just imagine how much aerodynamic control it must have.

Nature