Poking through the comments following this, I rediscovered a quote from an essay by Roger Scruton, first published in the New Criterion, February 2003. He’s talking about the Paris riots of 1968, but readers may spot some connection with the sentiment of this.

That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the barricades with a troupe of theatre people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti. She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist theatre – the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would be begging for mercy…

What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them?

…She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue – by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies – that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.

Related: Rebellion, Foucault’s Suit, Foucault and the Ayatollah, A Romantic Hostility. (h/t, pst314)

Thanks to The Thin Man, here’s the 2007 documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, in which the surviving Apollo crew members recount their remarkable, and at times moving, experiences. There’s previously unseen mission footage, an excellent score by Philip Sheppard, and keep an eye out for Kennedy’s extraordinary speech, about 13:20 in.

The film is also available in six parts here. Related: Freefall, Craters, Astronomical Odds. 

Eye magazine now has a blog. Readers with an interest in graphic design and visual culture should pay a visit. Items there include my review of the Advanced Beauty exhibition. 

If you’ve followed the recent discussion about alleged “male privilege” and the “holding back” of women, this article by John Tierney may be of interest.

You’ll find sweeping assertions of discrimination in academia against female scientists if you read the executive summary of the National Academy of Sciences’ 2006 report, which was issued by a committee led by Donna Shalala. But if you look in the report for evidence of bias, you find studies showing that female graduate students in general (and those without children in particular) are as likely as men to finish their studies, and that they’re as likely to have mentors and assistantship support. According to the report, there were some differences in productivity — male graduate students published more than female students, and tenured male professors published about 8 percent more than female tenured professors — but when men and women were up for tenure, they received it at similar rates.

Tierney’s conclusion is that, contrary to some claims (and some dubious use of statistics), the data in question doesn’t actually demonstrate any widespread bias against women studying for Ph.D.s and faculty jobs. However,

[T]here are obstacles that keep women from wanting to study science in graduate school or pursue a career in academia… I suspect the chief one is the difficulty of balancing their careers with family responsibilities, particularly childrearing.

Which is, of course, a different issue.

What’s interesting is that Tierney still frames the question in terms of women being “underrepresented” in certain professions and areas of study. But this rather begs the question. How do we know that 1:1 gender parity is some natural, default state, from which any deviation must be construed as evidence of bias? On what basis – besides ideology – can we determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female chemists, or mathematicians, or engineers? How can we assume that, were all cultural obstacles miraculously removed, men and women would be roughly equal in number in any given profession? Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined simply by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome.

Surely what matters is that suitably capable and motivated women who wish to become engineers, mathematicians or whatever can compete as fairly as possible? Whether that leads to a roughly 50/50 gender split in any given profession seems entirely beside the point. The gender bias, if any, of an academic department or a business cannot be determined by whether or not it employs an equal number of men and women in positions of comparable status. If there are other dispositional variables to consider, statistically, in who pursues a subject to advanced levels, or other factors regarding the availability of suitable female candidates or their persistence in the field, then a gender parity of employed engineers or mathematicians might just as plausibly indicate an anomaly, or a bias in favour of women. To assume that, magically stripped of all disagreeable influences, the male and female population “should” be perfectly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – an assumption. A prejudice, if you will.

And, following the logic of “representation,” couldn’t we also say that women are “underrepresented” in mining and construction, or in the military? Could similar claims be made regarding the “over-representation” of women in, say, healthcare or primary school teaching, or gay people in the arts?

Related. (h/t, The Thin Man.)

In today’s Guardian, Marcel Berlins ponders burglary, self-defence and being reasonable.

The problem, of course, is what constitutes reasonable force and who gets to decide. If you’re going to judge how others react in such a situation, and judge what is “reasonable,” you should first indulge in some pretty vivid empathy. Imagine you and your partner wake abruptly in the middle of the night. You hear a stranger moving about in the hallway outside your bedroom. Your newborn child is sleeping quietly, for once, in the room across the hall. There’s now an intruder between you and your child and his motives are unclear but certainly not benign. He’s obviously used force to break into your home at a time when you’re most vulnerable. It’s an act of premeditated violation and he may well use force again. Has he made these efforts in order to steal your property or to do you mortal harm? And, if interrupted, will the former involve the latter? What if your child wakes and starts crying?

Is it “reasonable” to assume that the intruder is merely a thief who doesn’t mind terrorising those whose homes he violates and whose property he steals, but isn’t prepared to do actual violence to his victims, even when cornered? And on what is that assumption based? Given the situation, and the fact your heart is pounding, do you really have the time and means to fathom the intruder’s motives and take them into account before acting – and acting without “excess”? Or do you use whatever force possible to disable the intruder before he can even think about harming you or your child? And what if the intruder is bigger and stronger than you? What if he’s armed with a knife or a gun? Are you going to wait to find out, dutifully bearing in mind the likelihood of subsequent legal disputation?

Wouldn’t it be wise to disable him as quickly as possible, by whatever means, rather than risk being at his mercy, along with the rest of your family? Doesn’t that most likely involve using as much force as can be mustered – say, with a decisive blow to the head using one of these – even if that risks the intruder’s death or serious, permanent injury? Is that “excessive or disproportionate” – or is it a basic moral imperative? And if the law doesn’t permit such things, and permit them unequivocally, don’t you have a right to be just a little “disappointed”? Don’t we want a world in which it’s the bad guys that are scared, and scared for very good reasons?