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April 23, 2007

Virtual Providence in Second Life: demo Wednesday; Web guru at Brown today; Ginsburg's abortion dissent: Equality is crucial...

The monthly Providence Geeks meet Wednesday promises a unique presentation:

Arnell Milhouse -- Providence Geek, President of the Downtown Merchants Association, and Founder of interactive media services company Eyegloo -- will give the first (and an extremely early) public sneak peak of Eyegloo’s ambitious "Virtual Providence" project.

Eyegloo is in the process of recreating all of Downtown Providence within the megapopular online 3D community Second Life (the image to the right shows Arnell’s SL persona in front of the RI Convention Center). Virtual Providence aims to become the first real-world city that has been recreated in a 3D world, where you will be able to visit, walk the streets, and go in an out of actual stores and restaurants....

The casual gathering runs from 5:30-9 p.m. in the storefront of AS220, 115 Empire St.

Bonus tip from the Geeks: Today at 4 p.m. at Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer St., Ethan Zuckerman -- Geekcorps founder, Tripod and Global Voices co-founder and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law -- speaks.

Don't miss Ethan's recent Advice for travelers to Accra, Ghana, where he once lived for a year on a Fulbright, on his blog.

Ginsburg's dissent may yet prevail: The justice argues that equality, not privacy, is crucial in the abortion right.: Interesting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Cass R. Sunstein, who teaches at the University of Chicago Law School.

Equal say:

IN THE LONG RUN, the most important part of the Supreme Court's ruling on "partial-birth" abortions may not be Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion for the majority. It might well be Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent, which attempts, for the first time in the court's history, to justify the right to abortion squarely in terms of women's equality rather than privacy.

...In this week's case, Ginsburg, now the only woman on the court, attempted to re-conceive the foundations of the abortion right, basing it on well-established constitutional principles of equality. Borrowing from her 1985 argument, she said that legal challenges to restrictions on abortion procedures "do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature."

For Ginsburg, this alternative understanding of the right to choose has concrete implications. It means that any restrictions on the abortion right must, at a minimum, protect a woman's health. It also means that no such restriction can be justified on the paternalistic ground that women might turn out to regret their choices or are too fragile to receive all relevant information about medical possibilities. In her view, such paternalistic arguments run afoul of the guarantee of sex equality because they reflect "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited."...

Bizarre detail, from James Ridgeway at Mother Jones (Mass Murderers and Women: What We're Still Not Getting About Virginia Tech):

At Virginia Tech, in September 2005, poet Nikki Giovanni had Cho removed from her class at Virginia Tech after female students complained that he was using his cell phone to take pictures of their legs underneath the desks; some refused to come to class while Cho was there.

The paradox of the paternalism of the Court to which Ginsburg alludes and pervasive violence against women is hardly unique to America, of course.

Related: Nikki Giovanni's speech at Virginia Tech touched a troubled world

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:31 AM | Permalink