So that was one factor.
But another factor that kept me from posting #metoo was that, sure, I have experienced the common female lot of annoyance and pestering and creepy behaviour by men, but I can't really think of any instance in which there were also issues of power dynamics impacting upon my career or avocation. I put this down to good fortune ( Read more... )

Oh, David Mitchell, I normally like and approve of your columns, but this one?
Our forebears’ unquestioning belief in a higher power gave them a confidence that it’s hard not to envy.
Which made me think of pretty much all societies, 'throughout history', where just because there was a belief in a higher power didn't mean that there wasn't massive ( Read more... )

1. You're asked to provide a written description of yourself for an ( Read more... )

It is fairly self-evident that in reading sff the reader is required to accept certain things which are not in conformity with the quotidien world they live in. And that some people find it entirely too much to have to pay this extra sixpence-worth (as EM Forster described it in Aspects of the Novel) of suspension of disbelief.

But I was thinking ( Read more... )

Somewhere in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West has a passage (it's in Volume 1 of the 2 volume edition, of which my copy is mysteriously not where I thought it was, next to Vol 2, so I'm quoting from memory), that women think that one day something will happen after which life will be entirely agreeable, while men think that one day they will ( Read more... )

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but over the last couple of weeks it's felt like open season on atheists had set in even before the Glorious Twelfth.

If it were just Julie Burchill making statements like this:
[T]here is something profoundly immature about atheists. That surly, self-satisfied certainty that insists that one is the first person, ever, to ( Read more... )

Yes, it's Lionel Shriver's Guardian column again today!

This one actually stuns me into making like a codfish, and opening and shutting my mouth gasping for air, lost for words, but I can retrieve enough equilibrium to snark on two examples of Really Slovenly Thinking.

Does any sane thinking person really, really believe this formulation? 'At least ( Read more... )

I've been mulling over this extract from the Winston article on religion and evolution that I posted the other day:
A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport... came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today. He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he ( Read more... )

I have been given much to think by this discussion over in ajhalluk's lj.

I was brought up a very practising Methodist and my family were very involved with the local church (I also went - for reasons of proximity - to a C of E primary school): my grandfather was a local preacher, my grandmother was involved with all sorts of activites like the Women's ( Read more... )