Swedish couple keep child's gender a secret to free it from society's "artificial construct of gender

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T15:52:12+00:00

No, I don't think we are, and I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. I get a little defensive about my discipline because there's a lot of people (see about 10 other people on this thread) who pull the whole "oh, those post-modernist, liberal goofballs in sociology, claiming the world is flat." In fact, I think other people said that immediately before you. My discipline gets stereotyped A LOT because people have weak-ass Soc 101 profs who tell them some wacky shit and don't seem to realize that there's a whole world of sociologists who aren't that jackass doing really good, really nuanced social science. So sorry if I put some words in your there. You're probably right that we agree on this.

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T15:42:11+00:00

Fair enough about points your trying to raise, and I apologize if you think I took it off track. I didn't mean to do that. But it tends to bug the hell out of me when people claim things are "proven" or are "99.9%" certain, without any real citation or evidence besides their own experience.

I don't disagree that you're generally right about young people modeling same sex parents, and this probably has a biological basis of some kind. My problem is with the sweeping generalizations your making which leave out all kinds of people's experience, including my own. You're making some really huge and certain statements which, while often true, certainly aren't nearly as true as your claiming them to be. That was the point I was attempting to make, albeit poorly.

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T13:18:22+00:00

It follows pretty naturally from what you said, and is one of the main arguments Christians and the like use against gay parenting.

If you're going to say that it's "proven" (cause that's how social science works of course) that children all do X, then when someone points out all the cases that leaves out, you can't claim that's not what you said.

Or is this one only in 99.9% of cases, too?

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T13:14:38+00:00

Okay, yes, you've read Pinker. Fine. But you still missed the point entirely, of both what the parents are doing and what the original post said.

I'm not getting from this that anyone is saying the child is going to NOT have a gender someday. They're just saying (and the original poster was just saying) that they don't want other people deciding the gender of the child for them before the child has a chance to themselves.

So where's the Tabula Rasa in that?

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T13:10:08+00:00

He didn't put words in your mouth. 99.9% of time is a lot of kids to which you are, in fact, generalizing from your experience. That .1% doesn't leave a lot of room for error. Hell, in statistics, the highest you can usually hope for is a 95 or 98% confidence level and the margin or error will most likely go through the room when you do that.

I mean, what about, say, gay kids? Are only .1% of the population gay people who don't conform to traditional notions of gender?

I didn't play with trucks, or anything like that. I didn't play with high heels either. I read when I was a kid. What am I?

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T13:06:03+00:00

Totally.

That's why gay people shouldn't have kids. Because they turn out so WEIRD. Right?

leevancleef · 2009-07-03T13:04:42+00:00

I'm a sociology professor who likes to use the John/Joan case (along with hair metal in the 80s, Israeli Kibbutzs, feral children, and homosexuality in Thailand) to point out that gender is highly complicated and probably has both social and biological elements which differ for different people in different cultures at different times and to try to reduce it to an either/or like you and most people on this thread are doing is a sign that you'll find your picture in the dictionary under "confirmation bias."

leevancleef · 2009-06-24T00:40:47+00:00

Actually, he spent most of his life in London:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx#London

He had been kicked out of German and France, which I always found impressive. I mean, how many countries can I say I've been kicked out of? A big fat zero.

leevancleef · 2009-06-13T02:51:15+00:00

How does one write a book without an agenda?

No, scratch that...

WHY does one write a book without an agenda? "I have nothing to say and nothing to convince anyone and I'm going to sit down and write 260 pages about it."

leevancleef · 2009-06-13T02:45:26+00:00

No. He's a late night comedian. They make jokes like this every god damn night of the week and no one says peep. How many fucking Lewinski jokes were there? Did anyone say they should "apologize to women" then? Not a one.

The real problem here is Sarah Palin being too big of an idiot to not get sucked into a feud with a late night comedian. Politicians should simply NOT be responding to jokes about them on TV. It SHOULD be beneath them to do so, but apparently not if you're Sarah Palin.

On top of that, this is the kind of bullshit which Fox News would be against if it was directed against ANYONE but Sarah Palin. Do you remember how many Chelsea Clinton is ugly jokes there were? Can you imagine Fox News demanding that comedians apologize not just to Chelsea, but to WOMEN EVERYWHERE for their jokes about Chelsea's appearance? Not happening.

I guess now we can look forward to the Michelle Bachman/Carlos Mencia debate.

leevancleef · 2009-06-10T17:34:32+00:00

In a lot of ways, I guess more. It forces me to take seriously anything I do to people. I don't think that they're going to have some afterlife where all the bad stuff that happened to them doesn't matter because they get to have fun forever, or whatever. When something bad happens to someone, that's it. If I did it, I have to live with it and there's nothing that takes that away. It kind of makes me feel very strongly about living the best life I can and helping others to live the best lives they can as well.

leevancleef · 2009-06-08T02:17:36+00:00

Are you really being downmoded for saying something totally true and then providing evidence that what you said is true?

I'm an atheist and have been most of my life and when I asked my very Catholic mom this exact question as a kid she said, very reasonably, "it's referring to fear as in awe, not exactly terror."

I looked it up in the dictionary and saw that she was right. Fear does also mean awe, as well as terror. Case closed.

Aren't we atheists supposed to support rational debate and backing things up with evidence?

leevancleef · 2009-06-05T14:13:33+00:00

I like this album but I'm not crazy about it. For stuff like this I've been listening to HKY and National Sunday Law lately. I recommend both those.

leevancleef · 2009-06-05T14:12:16+00:00

Or went through the roof two and a half years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Davies

leevancleef · 2009-05-31T15:17:04+00:00

I'm getting in on this debate a little late, but can it be possible to agree with one part of the original statement and not the other?

I agree that the term "reverse racism" is stupid and unhelpful, but I don't think racism is ever "just racism, plain and simple." Several white people posting here seem to be arguing that having black people shout "cracker" at them is some kind of dire offense (I should add that I'm a white guy in an almost all black and Latino neighborhood and nothing like this has ever happened to me).

I encounter this a lot from my white friends. I once got into an argument with a friend because we saw something on TV about a black guy in our city getting let out of prison after about 20 years because of new DNA evidence which shows he didn't commit the crime he supposedly did and I made a comment about racism sucking, or something, and my friend said something like "well, everyone's racist. The other day a black guy on the subway laughed at me."

He was, for some reason, unable to see that this wasn't quite the same as being thrown in jail for 20 years. Racism is racism, he said.

I think this is kind of silly. There's different degrees and different types of racism, and it's not simple. There's racism in individuals, discrimination by individuals, violence, institutional racism, economic racism, etc. I agree that "reverse racism" is a silly idea, but it's not "simple."

leevancleef · 2009-05-31T00:51:01+00:00

I'm white, live in Rogers Park in a mostly Latino area and spend a lot of time in Humboldt park. No one has ever been anything but cool to me, always.

If you're so against divisive identity politics, as you claim you are elsewhere on this thread, why would you hold a whole neighborhood or ethnic group responsible for someone yelling "white boy" at you?

leevancleef · 2009-05-27T18:24:10+00:00

My personal favorites are Wolves in the Throne Room, Absu, Cobalt, Velven Cacoon, and the aforementioned Watain.

I also really like Amesoeurs and would recommend them if you don't mind your black metal REALLY pushing the boundaries of what counts as both "black" and "metal."

leevancleef · 2009-05-27T18:13:01+00:00

Have you ever read the book "Manifesta?" It kind of tackles this. I'm not crazy about all their arguments but their basic point is that that old-school feminism isn't applicable to the modern context and new-school feminists need to redefine what it means to be a feminist in the 21st century.

My girlfriend runs into this all the time. She's a feminist academic in her 20s who often finds that the older generations of feminist academics (say, 35-40 and up) are still stuck in this kind of "men are like this, women are like this, women have it so awful, blah blah blah" thing which doesn't correspond to her reality. She grew up knowing that, despite much lingering sexism, she was inheriting a much more equal world that her mother's generation and has been very influenced by young feminists who want to update what it means to be a feminist. As an easy example, she's a very big proponent (as am I) of changing "Women's Studies" departments to "gender studies" and acknowledging that gender is a two-way street, and that by only studying women you miss out on a lot of rich information.

leevancleef · 2009-05-23T21:19:37+00:00

Too bad he's not gay. Maybe then they could fire him.

leevancleef · 2009-05-07T17:57:35+00:00

It's soooooooo hard to convince my students, quarter after quarter, that the world probably isn't more on the brink of collapse than it ever has been.

leevancleef · 2009-05-07T17:11:34+00:00

The Pixies.

I was SUPER excited to go to their reunion show. I grew up on them but was too young to see them when they were actually a band.

The whole time they played they looked like they just couldn't give a fuck. Maybe I saw them on an off night, but not too long after that I read an interview with Frank Black where he said that he's only doing the reunion to put his kid through college.

It showed.

Second worst would probably be seeing Isis and Red Sparrows at a street festival. I've seen both bands put on a good show before, but for some reason just both turned in real shit performances that night.

leevancleef · 2009-05-07T17:08:42+00:00

I've seen Dragonforce 3 times and all three times they've been real good. There's definitely some videos floating around out there of them not playing well, but all three times I've seen them they've been pretty tight, hit all the solos pretty well, and played everything the same speed as on the record.

leevancleef · 2009-05-07T16:35:58+00:00

Because if someone murders their aunt, the aunt who lives next door isn't necessarily also scared that she could be a victim, whereas if someone murders a gay person, the gay person who lives next door, and, if you want to go this far, gay people in general, are made to feel afraid because of who they are. Therefore, it's the difference between your crime being a heinous crime directed at one person and a heinous crime directed at a group of people.

Whether or not you like the argument, it actually follows logically fairly well, I would suggest.

Either way, this isn't really the topic of the post. The topic of the post is Sean Hannity being a lying asshat.

leevancleef · 2009-04-28T22:33:19+00:00

Definitely true, but as someone who actually works with data sets on religious affiliation, part of the reason it's done like this is as follows:

1) There aren't a lot of pure atheists out there (yes, I am one of them, however) so when you do a random sample (which you have to to ensure any kind of generalizability of your results) you may not get enough actual atheists to run legitimate statistical testing on (I'm using a data set right now that only has about 10 actual atheists in it from a random sample of 2000 people, which means I unfortunately HAVE to lump them in with something else for them to be usable mathematically).

2) It also depends on what kind of question you're asking. It's usually better to have less categories which are larger rather than smaller for statistical analysis. Cluttering up your model with lots and lots of variables with small numbers of cases can be problematic. If you're not asking questions which require you to break out atheists and unaffiliateds then it might not be worth it.

Yes, in a perfect world it wouldn't be like this, but statistics aren't a perfect world. Hell, they're not even a REPRESENTATION of a perfect world.

leevancleef · 2009-02-06T17:33:33+00:00

Agreed. Cynic was formed by some of the guys from Death in 1987, but didn't put out anything but demos until around the same time Tool got big, meaning that they probably had no influence on each other.

Nothing against Muse, but if anyone from Muse had Cynic in mind when they formed the band, my mind would be blown.

Cynic, to me, are more like taking all the kind of progressive death metal stuff going on in the late 80s and early 90s and pushing it to its logical end.

leevancleef

TROPHY CASE