Society

Why Django Girls?

In February and March this year Django Girls will be organizing free Django workshops for women in cities all over the world. As a Python/Django developer and feminist myself, I naturally applied as a coach. What for some may seem like a great initiative, however, is attacked by others as a gross display of hypocrisy and misandrist double-standard. In this article I hope to explain why supporting such events doesn’t imply you hate men or seek to overthrow patriarchy and install a regime of female supremacy.Read More »Why Django Girls?

Gender quotas

The subject of gender quotas was trending in Brazil a few months ago and I wrote about it in Portuguese. Now that the same topic has sprung in Romania, it’s time to write an English version. As should be no surprise, there’s a strong backlash against the idea of quotas and affirmative action in general. The anti-quota arguments are typically the same: that this type of approach is “anti-democratic”, “unjust”, “discriminatory”, “unequal”, etc. Although I agree that this is not an ideal solution, these arguments hardly sustain themselves. It may even be that there are legitimate reasons for us to be skeptical about quotas and affirmative action, but the aforementioned ones are certainly not in this category, and I’ll explain why.

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Why I write in English

This is a question I have been asked a couple of times since I moved to Romania and started writing in English. The answer I give is that now that I’m abroad I’d be excluding too many friends and potential new readers by writing in Portuguese. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

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Why do Brazilians refuse to speak English?

I have always noticed that Brazilians have a certain aversion to English. A certain tendency to switch to Portuguese whenever the majority is Brazilian, a severe reluctance to make a comment directed towards a Brazilian using English, even if the comment is in the context of an English conversation with people from all over the world, etc. Of course, many other nationalities act similarly, but I’ve been living in Romania for a bit over a year now and things are quite different, to the point that it’s really hard to dismiss this attitude as something normal. Though I haven’t had much contact with other Brazilians personally in this period, I still have a lot of contact online, mainly through Facebook, and the more time passes by, the more my impressions are confirmed and even reinforced. And I’m not counting those who don’t know English well, I mean people who speak quite fluently, who have lived abroad, etc. Why is it so?Read More »Why do Brazilians refuse to speak English?

Everyday hate speech in Romania

In Romania it’s common for people to condemn the accent from other regions without any pudency. And many don’t do it jokingly, they really mean it. They call people with accents “peasants” and “rednecks” that destroy the Romanian language and nobody reacts, it’s socially acceptable. Openly complaining about gypsies with strong language is even more common. Some even say they’re a “spoilt race” that is genetically damaged, although these tend to be more extreme than the majority. But even the less extreme ones seem to find it normal when they hear it. They’re used to it, and even if they disagree with the choice of words, they wouldn’t defend gypsies because, after all, all they do is steal, beg and destroy the reputation of Romanians in Western Europe.Read More »Everyday hate speech in Romania

Is freedom of speech really the issue?

Worse than hearing bad arguments from your opposer is hearing bad arguments from people on your side. And of course it shouldn’t surprise anyone that, after a hideous international event, heated outbursts of emotionally charged arguments will pour from the skies like a tropical summer rain from all sides. It has actually come to a point where I wonder if it makes sense at all to even say anybody is on my side. After all, what are the sides? Feeling compelled to take one of supposedly two sides in a complex situation is simplistic and unrealistic in itself. Of course, the Charlie Hebdo attackers were unjustifiably violent and their brutality is not even remotely comparable to any damage the newspaper may possibly have done to society. But does that really make the cartoonists the martyrs many are treating them as? Heroes in the battle to defend our most sacred value: freedom of speech? On the other extreme, is it really the best moment to accuse the cartoonists as Islamophobic racists who had it coming? And most importantly: should we be focusing on them at all?
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Slaves to the DNA?

Since its discovery in the early 20th century, the DNA has become a huge center of attention in biology. It has sparked new interest in the field of genetics, become basic knowledge for the more recent generations, a target of media coverage and even a common element of popular culture. But what do we really know about the DNA? Is our high-school curriculum up-to-date with current research and are educators aware of the implications this sensitive field of knowledge has on how we understand and deal with human differences?

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National Day

On the first day of this month, Romanians celebrated their “National Day”, the day Transylvania united with the rest of the country. According to the state-owned national channel TVR1, it was a day to celebrate Romanian culture and Romanian values such as “faith and family”. There was a lot of patriotic songs, folk music, dancing and nostalgic displays of affection towards Basarabia, a former region of Romania that was taken by the Russians (oh, the Russians…) during the Soviet expansion and is still rather influenced by them, nowadays known as the Republic of Moldova. It was all very positive and peaceful but I must say one thing kept bugging me: there was no mention of Hungarian, Saxon or Gipsy (confusingly also known as Romi or Romani) culture. All significant minorities in terms of number and cultural contributions to music, architecture etc.

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