Thursday 3 May 2012

Of Gods And Women

It's been observed that the vast majority of those finding a woman's control over her body distressing, repulsive, and just WRONG, have their objections rooted in religious doctrine, even if their faith must be camouflauged in cries that Science supports their stances (and no, repeating over and over that it does, does not make it so).

I'd say more, but I would rather leave it to someone with a track record of analyzing and monitoring both authoritarian religion and women's rights.

American Michelle Goldberg, speaking in 2010.


When the women of Canada are being chided as over-reacting to mild, *mild* I tell you! incursions against their legal status in this country, keep Ms Goldberg's observations in mind.

7 comments:

Godel Noodle said...

Does anybody know whether there's a transcript of this somewhere?

Niles said...

You'd like be best off picking up her two books "Kingdom Coming" and "Means of Reproduction". Her talk comes out of both angles.

Godel Noodle said...

I might at some point, but for now I was kinda hoping to read a transcript of the 21-minute lecture rather than a whole 284-page book. Lots of other books competing for my attention, not to mention the Kindle version of the latter is $16.20 (vs a presumably free transcript).

Thanks anyway, though. If the books are exceptionally good, I might read one or both of them at some point, but that's a whole other level of commitment than an article-length talk.

Niles said...

Try the library? Before Ford et al shut their services all down of course.

Godel Noodle said...

The (monetary) price is really the least of my problems.

Like I said, I might read one of the books anyway. The title is ingenious and a couple of customer reviews I read on Amazon made it sound quite fascinating and insightful. So I'll keep it in my "maybe someday" pile.

I just thought the talk would be a nice, self-contained, snack-sized morsel that would get the essential ideas across in minutes instead of hours.

Really, if I had to read a couple of books every time I came across an interesting blog post, I'd have no time for doing anything else.

The video itself is not much help to me because I'm hearing impaired. I rely on subtitles for every movie I watch, and closed captions for all my TV shows.

Niles said...

can you employ something like this to help you?

Dragon Naturally Speaking

Godel Noodle said...

I don't think that works with YouTube videos, does it?

As I understand it, it's speech-recognition software that can be used as sort of a dictaphone system. I'm guessing it's able to be somewhat effective only by virtue of being able to conduct an initial training phase with the user (e.g. "Speak the following list of words clearly so I can get used to the sound of your voice...") as well as asking the user to repeat anything it isn't sure about. Such software would obviously be able to "rewind" video content too, but the sample it would get would be identical (so not much help).

Google has a beta-level automatic closed-caption service installed that can be enabled for many YouTube videos, but it's a LONG way off from being helpful, let alone accurate. It's good for some chuckles at the moment, but not much else. It doesn't appear to be available for that particular video.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. Perhaps someday we'll have better speech-recognition algorithms, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

In the meantime, I'll keep Michelle Goldberg's name in mind. My "maybe someday" pile, despite sounding eye-rollingly noncommittal, *does* actually dwindle over time. I think the last 5 books I read were taken from there.

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