Quickies

Quickies: Bic’s sexist ad, mediums channeling artists, and Catholic bishops call for vaccine boycott

  • Bic pens two apologies for sexist blunder when promoting National Women’s Day – “The firm created a poster (above) advertising its pens – but somehow the line “think like a man” failed to raise alarm bells in the marketing department.” From Donna.
  • Brazil’s mediums channel dead artists. Is it worship or just delusion? – “This all gets into some strange legal ground. There was a case in which the widow of a famous dead author sued a medium for royalties because he was supposedly channeling her dead husband’s spirit and writing new blockbusters.” From Arturo.
  • Would you rather lose your money or your morals? – “This question, what makes someone seem like who they are?, is a fundamental one that philosophers and psychologists have always struggled to answer. Some thinkers have suggested that it’s our bodies that define us, while others argue that it’s our memories.” From Courtney.
  • Catholic bishops in Kenya call for boycott of polio vaccine – “The country’s Conference of Catholic Bishops declared a boycott of the World Health Organization’s vaccination campaign, saying they needed to “test” whether ingredients contain a derivative of estrogen. Dr. Wahome Ngare of the Kenyan Catholic Doctor’s Association alleged that the presence of the female hormone could sterilize children.” From Criticaldragon1177.

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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10 Comments

  1. Not that this excuses anything, but…

    A quick check of Amazon shows that uni-ball, paper mate, and pentel (and probably a billion others) all have pink “for her” pens. Apparently the ability to lay a thin, even line of ink is disrupted by all that lady estrogen, or something.

    Come to think of it, that [em]would[/em] explain the popularity of Lisa Frank when I was in school.

  2. Amanda,

    By the way, bad news. I left a comment over at that article about the Anti Vaxxer Catholic bishops in Kenya and it was deleted. I left another comment over there asking why it was deleted thinking that it might have been the way I worded it. I pointed out that I just was upset about how people are going to lose their lives because of what these bishops are doing over there, and someone wrote a reply to me. They said that the person in charge of moderating the site is anti vaxxer themselves and he tends to delete comments that disagree with his position. His reply to me appears to have been deleted as well along with my other comment. This is NPR that we’re talking about here! You’d think they’d do a better job vetting their moderators.

    If you are anyone else is thinking about posting comments over there, you should be aware of that.

    1. Actually I just double checked and it looks like my second comment wasn’t deleted yet, but it still appears that the reply to it was.

  3. I’ll use any hook that gives me an excuse to talk about the progress of polio eradication.

    It is now over one year since the last reported case of wild polio in Africa (11 Aug 2014 in Somalia.) Unfortunately there has been an outbreak of vaccine derived polio (http://www.polioeradication.org/Portals/0/Document/Polioandprevention/CVDPVFactSheetMarch2015.pdf) causing 10 cases in Africa in the last 6 weeks, mostly in Madagascar.

    Overall we have 36 wild polio and 10 vaccine derived polio cases for the year so far, compared to 138 and 31 at the same time last year – i.e. less than a third of last year’s rate.

    Note that all these numbers are *reported* cases, and sometimes it takes up to 4-6 weeks for a case to get reported, so it is too soon to say Africa has gone a full year without wild polio.

    Also note that polio can bounce back: 2010 had 1352 cases, 2011 had 650, 2012 had 223, 2013 had 416, 2014 had 359 – so where we are this year is where we might have expected 2013 to have been, from the perspective of 2012.

    1. Filias Cupio,

      Its really upsetting that there are people out there who are literally fighting to do something that could end up reversing all the progress that we made.

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