She was asking for it...
On the subject of rape:
Two students at York University were recently raped in their dorm rooms in Vanier Hall. They were sleeping in their rooms when their attackers entered and sexually molested them.
If told that story with no other information, the general reaction from others is horror.
Add in this little tidbit of information:
The women left their doors unlocked.
All of a sudden, the response is, "Well they really should have locked their doors! It's partly their own fault."
Um, no, it
wasn't partly their own fault. It wasn't ANY of their own fault. Does everyone keep their doors locked at every second of the day and night? I doubt it. What if it was the middle of the day, and one of the women was studying with her door open, as many university students in residence do? And what if her attacker entered the room, shut the door, and proceeded to rape her then? Would it still be her fault, for sitting with the door open?
Getting raped
NEVER a woman's fault. Wearing a short skirt is NOT an invitation for molestation. She was never "asking for it." Changing your mind right before and saying, "No," is a woman's right, too.
Rape is an act of supreme violation of the body, mind, and spirit. It is not okay to put the blame on the victim.
An examination of the Western education system
As most who know me already know, I am in the middle of my third year of an undergraduate degree in science, specializing in astrophysics. As those who know me will also attest, I've always been a bit of a high achiever. Education is something that I take very seriously. I genuinely do enjoy learning; if I didn't, I most certainly wouldn't still be here. Over the years, however, I've come to the conclusion that the current system of education is flawed on some deeply fundamental levels. Mainly, stressing the value of grades rather than actual learning is not at all conducive to actually learning.
In grade school, perhaps, one might say that learning is for its own sake; you do not have to get "good grades" to go on to high school, as it's publically funded and available to all (indeed, it's mandatory until a certain age!). Of course, at the elementary level, nearly no one appreciates learning for its own sake. You're in school because you have to be, and that's the way it is.
By the time you get to high school, those who have realized that they truly want to learn are under an enormous amount of pressure. In order to be eligible to go on to further education, you must first attain good results in high school (and, indeed, for those who cannot otherwise afford to go to university, competitive scholarships are a very tasty dangling carrot). I feel, however, that the actual "learning" aspect is pushed aside in favour of rote memorization and "cramming."
This is exacerbated at the university level. At this point in the game, you really are here because you want to learn the material. However, shouldered with five courses, I find there is very little time to actually sit down and
learn. We are rushed from assignment to assignment, and getting the good grade is the bottom line (because, after all, now that we are in university we want to go on to graduate school, and they, of course, look mostly at marks yet again).
Come time for finals, we are given a mere day to study. Often students have two exams in one day, or exams each a day after another, with no time left in between to study or "shift gears" in the brain. Essentially we must cram enough knowledge into our brains to get a good mark on an exam... but is that really what learning should be about?
I feel that there could be so much more to education than this. I truly do like what I am doing; I find physics to be inherently interesting and beautiful. But I rarely have enough time to sift through my thoughts on the subject matter, to find where my misconceptions lie and to sort them out. Instead, I, as with most others in my program, are rushed, always having to complete an assignment or study for a midterm or finish a project.
It is also incredibly hard on a person's self-esteem (this is worst, I have found, for those who are high achievers). It is difficult, when marking schemes are often arbitrary or unknown, to reconcile getting a 75% when one could have gotten an 80%, or a 90% when one could have gotten 95%, etc. Nothing is ever good enough in this system. High acheivers often pour everything they have into their work; to put in 100% of your effort and get back a grade significantly less than that is often quite defeating.
I don't argue that there is a need for a system of ranking. There seems to be no way around the grading system. However, couple that with the fact that often exams are not fair, that students are bereft of sleep and exercise and proper nutrition, and this is a recipe for disaster (or, at least, a number of very depressed students).
I don't like the system, there's no secret about that. I think it's one of the most unhealthy lifestyles that one can adopt. I still accept that there isn't much of an alternative, but I wish that this was not the case.
Truly, in an ideal world, I would love nothing more than to take a professor, sit him or her down, and say "please teach me everything you know," and then learn for a year or three. To spend quality one-on-one time picking the brain of someone knowledgable in my area of interest would be simply priceless.
I am thankful, in any case, that professors often
do make themselves available for individual consultation. It certainly makes this inevitable process much easier.
In any case, we do what we can, and that just has to be enough, I suppose.
Breaking News! God Foiled by Shocking Plan Involving Latex, Hormones!
I'm always amused by religious folk (Catholics are notorious for this) who claim that contraceptives are somehow morally wrong or fundamentally "evil." This would, of course, be more amusing if the stance didn't ensure that dozens of young kids would end up getting pregnant and (since abortion is
obviously a no-no) having children which could both endanger their lives and effectively wipe out any future that shone promisingly in the distance. Clearly it's better to have an unwanted kid than to prevent said kid from being conceived, right?
The arguments about why contraceptives are a tool of the Devil vary in their hilarity. By far the most absurd one that I've heard is this:
We dont support birth control because we believe marriage and sex are a gift from God, and we need to keep the sanctity of it. Sex is for love and procreation, not just for pleasure as society is today making it. If you want to have sex, you should be ready for a child to come with it. If God wants to make you a parent, he'll do it when he wants to, not when you want to.
- courtesy of the
Abortion Debate livejournal community.
Does anyone else find it funny that god, a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient being, is foiled by a piece of latex or some hormones? I mean, honestly. Some god! This entire argument is shot down by the supposed omnipotence of god. If s/he wants you to get pregnant, then
kablammo!, the condom breaks, or the 0.1% chance that your oral contraceptives fail is brought into play. Or the spermicide doesn't work. Or WHATEVER, really.
This is the god who supposedly stuck an entire baby into a virgin, right? No help from teh SeXx0rZ, even. I mean, that's why it doesn't even seem right to me to say that it'd be impossible for someone who'd had a hysterectomy to conceive (according to this viewpoint, obviously; I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's an actual medical chance that someone sans uterus could get pregnant).
So if god is all-powerful, then where's the concern? There's no reason to be anti-contraceptive! It doesn't make any sense, really; by doing so, these people are pretty much belitting their deity.
The abortion debate isn't one I'm going to touch. I'm pro-choice, no ifs-ands-or-buts. But the contraceptive debate? That's easy - there
is no contraceptive debate.
Abu Ghraib: if you're "sick of the scandal," you haven't fully understood it.
A couple years ago, I ceased most of my interactions with the "daily news" as we know it. No primetime news on TV, no newspapers, and I barely listen to the radio anyways. For a while I shut out the outside world completely. Why? Because I simply couldn't cope with the horrible shit that goes on. Sometimes I would find myself sobbing in front of the television, for people I've never met. And I couldn't keep doing that. Caring so much about the world is also exhausting.
But I realized that living in willful ignorance was much worse. So, to the Internet I go, these days, to seek my news.
And yes, there are days when it hits me, and it hits me hard.
Today is one of them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4718666.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4716280.stm(The images, indeed, are disturbing. But that shouldn't be a deterrent to looking at them.)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article345692.eceSome quotes from the Independent article:
An ACLU lawyer, Amrit Singh, told Dateline: "The photographs have to be released so the public have some idea of what happened at Abu Ghraib. It is for the public to decide on looking at them what needs to be done."
Indeed. And what needs to be done is that people MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE.
This is unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.
We thought the abuse was bad, and now we're being told it's even worse than we had originally been told.
No one, NO ONE, has the right to treat other human beings in such a heinous fashion. I don't give a flying fuck what nationality they are. I don't give a fuck if they're terrorists or not. It is NOT RIGHT to treat people the way these people were treated. Ever.
I can barely put into words how angry and sad and outraged this makes me.
The release of further pictures of torture will make it more difficult for the US to claim that what happened in Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 was isolated and the work of low-level guards acting on their own initiative. Mr Singh said the images were evidence of "systematic and widespread abuse" of prisoners by US soldiers.
The SBS original broadcast contains some photos that are even worse than the ones linked to by BBC. I was very nearly sick to my stomach.
The sentencing of the seven low-ranking guards that have thus far been charged with the Abu Ghraib scandal are merely between three and ten years. TEN years. That's all. For the murder and abuse and torture of these people.
Absolutely disgusting.
No higher ranking officials have been brought to justice. This has to change.
What bothers me, too, is that the original broadcaster of the images, Australia's SBS, claimed that many of the images were "too disturbing to be shown."
These images are disturbing. They sicken me to the very core. They make me ashamed to even call myself part of the human species - to be a part of a species that is capable of such cold-blooded maliciousness. But the world, I think, should be able to see all these images, from the mildest to the most graphic and horrid. Because only then will people be able to confront the truth. It is a truth that people don't WANT to confront, especially those whose government was behind the act.
But the distaste at viewing such images is secondary. What takes primacy is the fact that actual human beings were
forced to endure the acts depicted in the photographs. They didn't just look at them. They starred in them, against their will.
People can be told about torture hither and tither. But it's easy to cast aside words. Pictures, however, are blatant and in-your-face. Pictures convey in a spit-second what words would take paragraphs to do.
And these pictures say a lot.
These pictures say that there were injustices of the most egregious fashion committed at Abu Ghraib.
These pictures say that there is more than one reason for Iraqi resentment towards the troops that are STILL in their country.
These pictures say that it is time for the world to step up and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
And I, for one, agree.
You can watch the original broadcast here:
http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/index.php?page=archive&daysum=2006-02-15
The Brainwashing of a Generation, Part 1: Tuition Fees
I am a university student. I pay $5000 a year to take five credits, cram my brain full of equations and figures, stress myself to the max to get a good grade, etc. The usual university student fare. I also pay $400 a month rent, plus utilities. There's also the general cost of living (groceries, the occasional night out, supplies, etc). And I'm damned priviledged to be able to do so. No matter the government's lip service to how no one should be unable to attend university because of lack of funds, it's simply a reality that the costs of post-secondary education
do keep people out.
The school I go to is nicknamed "The University of Wealthy Ontarians," because of its general conservative, rich-kid reputation. And, you know, I'm coming to see why this is. Aside from the hoardes of girls wearing overly-priced and disturbingly ugly Ugg boots and carrying burdensome Louis Vuitton and Lululemon bags to class, I am also discovering a breed of people I hadn't realized existed: those who don't give a shit about how much money they pay to go to school.
The government announced a while back that the tuition freeze, which has been in place for two years, is going to be lifted next year. The comes on the heels of an announcement that over $7 billion is going to be re-invested into the post-secondary education system. Now tell me, with all this money coming in, why are we going to hike tuition fees? Where, exactly, is this money going? There is no reason for a fee increase.
Ideally, students should be digging their heels into the dirt and going, "heyyyy WAIT A SECOND, no no no, this can't happen." We should be trying to make our voices heard - that we most certainly don't want a tuition fee hike. Instead, our representatives, the Ontario Undergraduate Students Alliance (OUSA) claims that it is impossible to keep tuition fees frozen forever (fine, that's not what we're asking for anyways), and that instead of capping the fees, we should be ensuring that they somehow limit the growth of tuition. This is a group that is supposed to be representing the interests of the undergraduate student body... seems to me that they're doing a pretty shit-tacular job.
So the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) launched a campaign to raise awareness about the tuition fee issue, culminating in a short "referendum" which asked the student body if they supported a tuition increase. The results, published in the Gazette, stated that 94.7% of students are not in favour of a tuition fee hike. This should have been 100%, or closer to it.
There was some "controversy" surrounding the campaign, which was baseless and stupid. The Gazette featured an editorial claiming that the CFS should basically just shut their pie holes, and that everyone already knows students don't want to pay more money, but that we're going to have to anyways, so get over it (this is, of course, very roughly paraphrased). OUSA, the Gazette claims, is the body to which our undergraduate population belongs. Only the Society of Graduate Students (SOGS) is a member of the CFS. Does that make the CFS's claim any less valid? No. In fact, they are doing more for the undergraduate student body than OUSA is.
Several people have informed me that they wouldn't mind an increase in fees, because they are under the impression that the more money they pay, the better quality education they will get. It's funny, because Ontario's universities are consistently ranked top-notch. We're ALREADY getting a damned good education. And they're about to pour $7 billion dollars back into the system. The quality of education is certainly not what is at stake here, but somehow a fair portion of the student body has been brainwashed into believing that everyone would be better off with higher tuition.
I suppose that's all well and good if you can afford it, but the unfortunate truth is that most students
can't. And it's the lower-middle-class demographic that is affected the most - those whose parents make maybe a little too much to get all or any of OSAP will perhaps be forced not to attend post-secondary education due to affordability issues.
Article 26 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that:
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.Continuing to raise the cost of attending post secondary education is unacceptable, especially when there is no immediate need to.
Let's keep education affordable, to everyone.
Guardian Unlimited | Science | Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.htmlWhat has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.
This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to
get any closer.
According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."
I was discussing this with my physics profs, who seemed to get a hearty chuckle out of the idea. One of them said, "It sounds like he's reinvented a great source of energy - combustion!"
The other was skeptical, as this guy, Randell Mills, isn't even a physicist, and none of the people who have reviewed his papers are physicists either. Kinda sketchy. I have to admit, though, that even browsing through some of the technical information, I couldn't make heads or tails of anything. Naturally I'm extremely skeptical of anything that makes such grandiose claims as to disprove all of quantum theory. If this lower energy state for electrons exists, then why aren't the electrons in it naturally? It just doesn't make sense to me. Additionally, it sounds like this guy is positing the existence of multiple energy levels between the "hydrino" state and the accepted ground-state determined by quantum theory... that is to say, any proper fraction is an energy level. Doesn't this leave open the possibly for an infinite series of energy levels? It irks me.
Anyways, time will likely soon tell whether he's "onto something," though I doubt very much that he is. I wouldn't jump on the investment bandwagon anytime soon.
Fell in love with a bad idea...
I have (after holding off for so long) finally decided it was time to get with the "blog generation," and start ruffling my feathers on the internet instead of to my roommates, who far too often have to put up with my exasperated tirades about the idiocy of the world.
So this'll be yet another one of those left leaning, feminist, environmentalist, pro-choice, atheist, scientific-minded, unapologetically opinionated blogs.
Hurrah.
