I'm not sure if it's that whole once-you-start-learning-about-something-you-see-it-everywhere thing, but now that we're on Women and Islamic law in my Islamic law class, it seems that discussions of feminism and Islam are popping up all over my internet radar.

First there was the German (non-Muslim) judge who cited the Koran as a reason for denying a woman's request for a divorce on account of her husband beating her.

Then there was a post on Feministe about Quebec requiring women to remove the niqab (face veil) before voting.

And then this article linked to in feminist by a UK teacher who seems to imply that she can't teach girls who wear the veil.

As a sort of follow up development, I read mozillafs' post about schools in the UK being allowed to ban the veil.

Tags: academia, family, feminism, feminist, islam, law, law school

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/03/academic-haiku-of-week.html

Academics writing haikus to summarize their papers, instead of or complementarily to the traditional abstract.

Tags: academia, poetry

Took this exerpt from Michael Berube's (there should be accents aigus above both those 'e's btw) blog.

* * *

There are two more kinds of confusion behind the attacks on academic
freedom, as well, and I’ll just touch on them briefly for now.

The first is that most critics of universities don’t seem to distinguish between unconscious liberal bias and conscious, articulate liberal convictions.  They take the language of “bias” from critiques of the so-called liberal media, where it is applied to outlets like the New York Times
and CBS News that, in the view of movement conservatives, lend a
leftish slant to the news both deliberately and unwittingly.  But the
language of “bias” is not very well suited to the work of, say, a
researcher who has spent decades investigating American drug policy or
conflicts in the Middle East and who has come to conclusions that
amount to more or less “liberal” critiques of current policies.  Such
conclusions are not “bias”; rather, they are legitimate, well-founded beliefs,
and of course they should be presented—ideally, along with legitimate
competing beliefs—in college classrooms.  Now, notice that I said legitimate
competing beliefs.  We have no obligation to debate whether the
Holocaust happened.  And that’s not a hypothetical matter.  Late last
fall, the philosopher with whom I co-founded the Penn State chapter of
the AAUP, Claire Katz, informed me of a graduate teaching assistant in
philosophy who had just had a very strange encounter with a student. 
The course, which dealt with bioethics, had recently dealt with the
vile history of experiments on unwitting and/or unwilling human
subjects, from the Holocaust to Tuskegee, and the student wanted to
know whether the “other side” would be presented as well.  I hope
you’re asking yourselves, what other side?—because, of course,
to all reasonable and responsible researchers in the field, there is no
“other side”; there is no pro-human experimentation position that needs
to be introduced into classroom discussion to counteract possible
liberal “bias.” We are not in the business of inviting pro-Nazi
spokesmen for Joseph Mengele to our classrooms.  More recently, I was
asked by a member of the Penn State College Republicans whether I
taught “both sides” in my graduate seminar on disability studies.  In
response, I mentioned the debate over what’s called the ethics of selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities,
and briefly sketched out four or five positions on the question.  My
point, of course, was that just as it is a mistake to think that there
are two sides to every question, it is also a mistake—and a pernicious
one, encouraged by Horowitz, Balch, and company—to think that there are
only two sides to every question.  But this is the language with
which some of our students now enter the classroom; it is the language
of cable news and mass-media simulacra of “debate.” There is one side,
and then there is the other side.  That constitutes balance, and
anything else is bias. 

Tags: academia, balance, berube, horowitz, journalism, liberal bias, mass-media, opinion, politics, pwn

Article in the Washington Post describing how the U.S. government buys data from private data companies.

Balkinization has a brief discussion of the implications of this sort of thing. As he puts it:

Personal information by itself can be innocuous but when combined with other information about a person (and about other persons judged to be similar) it can help create a relatively rich profile of a person's activities, preferences and tendencies.

Is this governmental intrusion constitutional?

The 1979 Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland suggests that it is. Smith held that it was not a violation of the 4th Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures for the government to collect information on numbers dialed from a private phone, even without suspicion. The reasoning was based in part on the "fact" that "[a]ll telephone users realize that they must 'convey' phone numbers to the telephone company, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that their calls are completed," and so have no expectation of privacy. Luckily, Congress was sufficiently attentive to privacy concerns to amend the Wiretap Act (albeit 7 years later in 1986) in response to Smith to prohibit warrantless monitoring of phone numbers. This was done with the Electronic Communications Protection Act (ECPA).

There is a temptation to minimise the seriousness of this practice - after all, data mining probably is not really so prevalent. In a rather prescient introduction to her article published Fall 2004 (before the NSA warrantless wiretaps came to light), Susan Freiwald suggested that, just as in the fifties, in fact "the seemingly paranoid view of electronic surveillance was quite sane." There are two big reasons why law enforcement personnel will always be tempted to push at the edges of and often violate the law when it comes to surveillance - safety and reliability (I would add efficiency and cost reduction - you don't have to pay a device by the hour). It is far less dangerous to have a hidden microphone or tap a phone line than to have a person trying to listen in. Similarly, recorded conversations are more reliable than our memory (apparently there are some interesting studies on the astoundingly poor job that people in general do in recalling details, even of important events). The article, titled "Online Surveillance: Remembering the Lessons of the Wiretap Act" although long is quite readable, and published in the Alabama Law Review.

Tags: academia, balkinization, data mining, law, online surveillance, opinion, politics, privacy, supreme court, wiretap act

Shopping

Popped into Goodwill today on the way back from Rainbow Grocery, after having returned three adorable Yogurt St. Benoit ceramic jars that had been doing double duty as mugs (oh, it was almost not worth the $1.25 refund I got per jar). I was looking for pants, specifically jeans, as the only non-ratty pair of pants (besides suit bottoms, which I cannot just wear all the time) I have are khakis and they are showing signs of rattification. Sadly, all the jeans in the mens section were suspiciously women-sized (by that I mean that they were sized in the women's numbers, but also happened to be too small for my gigantic male waistline).

I ended up getting a cute check shortsleeve shirt for $3 and two brightly colored scarves (one a wool-nylon blend and the other made of felt) for $3 each. I washed the wool-nylon one by hand, and am not sure how to wash the felt one (anyone?).

Family

My brother is staying with me at the moment, and we are having our usual brainy-pseudy-deep-bitchy interchanges (gender, race, class, our childhood, television, dance music, drugs, queerness, food, relationships etc.). Watched a documentary on slam poetry today, but I got all poetry-ed out halfway and left to check my email and talk with Rich on the phone. Got a little overexcited about the as-yet-unrented-by-us property in the sunset that I like but that Eli and Ron have reservations about because of the location. It has a garage. We could set up the drums and electric guitar there. It's freestanding meaning we could play music and nobody would mind. SQUEEEE!

Food News

My brother and I have been trying to avoid eating out all week. Success so far except for one slip by me on Tuesday at Emily's house, and one by him last night with an ex-bf (pancakes at midnight). As a result I have been cooking two to three meals a day. It's a pain to do the washing up, but it's great to get my cooking skills back up to par. Made some reasonably successful off the cuff Indian-esque food tonight (cumin-coriander-ginger-tomato lentils, ginger-garlic-shallot-clove-cardamom rice pilaf, and red onion-mustard seed wilted chard w/ sour cream).

Baked my cookies for the cookie swap this weekend. Will not blog what they are here, of course, as that would ruin the surprise. Am excited, however. They look V. Good.

There is an orange vendor at the Tuesday farmer's market at the ferry building who sells fresh squeezed orange juice that is aMAzing. I don't remember the name of the farmer, but he was out front. The juice was sweet, and without that awful astringency and bitterness that I believe comes from just grinding up the orange whole without first removing the pith. You can taste the difference by comparing say, Jamba Juice orange juice, with something that you squeeze at home.

In somewhat tangential-to-food-and-in-fact-not-really-news-but-mere-fanboyishness, I've had a massive crush on Gabriel Roth, who writes Edible Complex in the Guardian, ever since I saw him in the Mission reading a piece from that column (I'd enjoyed it before). He's also in a band, Pony Boy. The photos on their website don't do him justice (he's the bearded one). And plus, he wrote this NYRB-esque review of Harry Potter, Lovely Bones, Six Feet Under and Dead Like Me.

Cat news

Got Beckett to finally be comfortable in my room (it's the last place he was comfortable because I don't like keeping the door open a whole lot because the house often smells weird and I don't like it getting into my room. This meant he either got shut out or, when let in, got all freaked out that he couldn't get out). The trick was to construct a little hidey-hole for him that he'd feel comfortable retreating to when the room got to be too much to handle. I created a cat-hidey-hole/side table in a rather poor-man's-readymade way, without having to spend a dime! This involved cutting a hole in the side of a large Amazon delivery box, placing a folded sheet inside, hanging a towel over the entrance (so as to shut out the world when he's in there), and placing some papers and stuff on top to hold the towel in place. Beckett is purring happily (or perhaps more accurately, emotionally) in my lap as I write this, a demonic red glow in his eyes from the reflected optical mouse light. Ooh, he just got kneady. TMI?

Academic matters

Last exam (Evidence) was on Monday. Now I just need to finish a paper by Tuesday. It's sorta stalled while I hang out with En, but I do intend to work on it over the weekend a bit, and then edit it on Monday.

Tags: academia, family, food, shopping