Animal-rights activists are the danger to animals

It is possible to have a conscientious opposition to research on animals, and every university has channels by which activists can register their dissent, and by which they can also influence ethical decisions made by institutional animal research review committees. There is a right way and a wrong way to protest. And the wrong way is charge into a lab, disrupt experiments in progress, and “liberate” highly inbred, specialized animals that are dependent on laboratory care for their health and survival. Protesters in Milan chose the wrong way.

Activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan, Italy, at the weekend, releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work.

Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

I don’t even understand the mindset here. Where are you going to release lab animals to? They may require special diets and care, they most likely have been raised in a very specific environment and have no ability to cope with a different place, and they may have genetic diseases that make them completely unable to compete with wild forms. Years ago at the University of Oregon, ALF pulled a stunt like this; they released lab-bred animals along the side of I5. The only animals to benefit in the area were the red-tailed hawks who saw a sudden bounty of terrified white rodents.

And further, scrambling the data for research into human neurological disorders accomplishes nothing other than slowing research. Why? This is nothing but hatred of science.

There’s not much one can do in the face of determined stupidity other than to show a united front. Sign the Call for Solidarity with the scientists in Milan.

Fortunately for Matt Yglesias, Lindsay Beyerstein only leaves him in a metaphorical smoking crater.

A couple of commenters here have persisted in defending Matthew Yglesias’ odious bleat that life is cheaper in Bangladesh because it ought to be because reasons, and that any anger we Westerners might feel about the horrendous loss of life in the recent factory collapse ought more helpfully be directed to buying clothes made in those collapsing sweatshops so that eventually the people making a few hundred dollars a year will have flat screen televisions just like us.

Yglesias is doubling down. In a followup post, he stands by his conclusion that poor countries need to have less stringent workplace safety standards, and adds, as a prelude to accusing his critics of “poisoning the atmosphere,” [see update at end of post]

I’m not really sure what Americans can constructively do to get better enforcement of building codes in Bangladesh

As it turns out, Lindsay Beyerstein has a possible answer:

A group of Bangladeshi and international trade unionists put forward a bold plan to make the garment industry in Bangladesh safer. A surcharge of 10 cents per garment over 5 years would raise $600 million a year, enough to radically transform the infrastructure of the garment industry in Bangladesh. Walmart and the Gap rejected the proposal in 2011.

So that’s pretty handy: All America has to do to make sweatshops in Bangladesh safer is to stop fucking obstructing their being made safer. It’s win-win!

Oh, and a protip to Yglesias: If you persist in discussing the worker safety aspects of US investment in South Asia, you might want to consider not using “poisoning the atmosphere” as a way to tone-troll your critics. We have a 30th Anniversary coming up late next year that will turn that phrase a bit unfortunate.

Updated: in comments, nialscorva correctly points out that I misread Yglesias’ reference to “poisoning the atmosphere.”  My bad. Leaving the post as it was for transparency’s sake.

Steubenville hasn’t learned a thing

The football coach who reportedly joked to his team members about the sexual assault on an unconscious girl, who the team trusted to cover up any problems their behavior might cause, who threatened a reporter and her family if they pursued the case, has had his coaching contract extended another two years.

Symbolic of this unholy marriage of jock culture and rape culture was the revered Big Red football coach Reno Saccoccia who didn’t seem to give a damn that his players could have treated a woman this way. Given Coach Saccoccia’s controversial behavior before and during the trial, which drew national scrutiny, many of us thought he at the very least would be shown the door after three decades of service. We all thought wrong. Today we learned that “Coach Sac”, as he is known, has been granted a two-year contract extension by the Steubenville school board. They made this decision despite the fact that a grand jury is meeting next week to assess whether he and others obstructed justice in the case. Saccoccia was legally required to report the sexual assault as soon as he was aware it took place. The grand jury will determine whether or not he in fact knew and tried to sweep it under the turf.

Two members of his team were convicted of rape and sent off to jail. You know, even if all anyone cared about was his win/loss record, this is not evidence of a good coach.

But maybe they should care about more. Isn’t it peculiar that many atheist and gay teachers are terrified to come out because they know it could cost them their job, yet a coach can facilitate a culture of rape with total impunity?

Snappy one-liners

Ever been in that situation where you see an attractive woman walking down the street, and you’re trying to think of something to shout out, and your mind just goes blank? Here’s a helpful collection of things you could say.

#radfem2013

Are you looking to be baffled this weekend? It’s another twitter war, this time under the hashtag #radfem2013, and it consists of a lot of very angry women who are making very weird claims. “Because every time you tell lesbians transwomen are women, you support corrective rape.” “WTF is up with assholes who insist on telling lesbians to fuck men.” “Because demanding that lesbians suck dick makes you not an ally.” “Transwomen are men: predatory men who demand access to women’s bodies.”

It’s bizarre. It’s feminism+transgender hatred.

The lead bigot is someone named Cathy Brennan, who has a rather deranged blog in which she insists her views are the only rational ones.

Radical Feminism is an Evidence-based philosophy. The Evidence suggests that there is a Class of Humans (Women) made subordinate by and to another Class of Humans (Men). The Evidence suggests that Men want to keep it this way, and employ tactics and establish systems to ensure it stays this way. The Evidence suggests that Men commit a disproportionate amount of Violence against Women (Male Violence).

A favorite tactic of Men’s Rights Activists and Trans Activists used to Silence Women who rely on Evidence to support assertions like Penis=Male, Male Violence against Women is an overwhelming problem and Trans Women are Men is the claim that Radical Feminists aren’t “Rational.”

I can sort of agree with parts of the first paragraph: men as a class (but let’s not expand that to all men as individuals) do those things in our culture. But the second paragraph makes a gigantic irrational leap. They are claiming a freakishly conservative sort of genital essentialism: if you have a penis, you are MAN, through and through, and if you have a vulva, you are WOMAN, entirely and completely. Am I the only one who finds this inconsistent and contradictory coming from a group of lesbians? It seems to me they are already expressing the view that their natural desires are not constrained by the behavioral assignments our culture already imposes by definition of the physical apparatus in our crotches.

Transwomen are women…and an even more oppressed subclass of women than these “radfems” are. Saying that does not in any way tell people that they must have sex with them, any more than saying I’m a cis heterosexual male means I’m required to have sex with all women, or any woman for that matter. No one is telling these radfems that they must carry out any particular sex act with any particular individual or class of individuals, yet they’re acting as if acknowledgment of the humanity and worth of trans individuals is a dictatorial smack in their faces.

They sound a lot like right-wing bigots, actually.


Another facet of this argument: the usual lackwits are making triumphant announcements.

ha ha, Rebecca and PZ have finally discovered the RadFem rad hate group after denying their existence for months.

Wrong. I haven’t denied the existence of a demented feminist fringe: what I have said is that the kooks who are constantly denouncing people like me and Rebecca Watson and Amanda Marcotte as “radical feminists” don’t have the slightest clue. The fact that we clearly oppose the weird radfem agenda of transphobic hatred ought to finally make that clear to them…but give ’em a day. They’ll be back to accusing FtB of being a hive of radical feminists again.


You want to see ugly? Here’s ugly. These kooks really hate trans people.

Occidental College President Jonathan Veitch must resign

Occidental College is a small school in northeastern Los Angeles. It’s got about 2,000 students at any one time. And it’s got a huge sexual assault problem: yesterday, 38 students and alumnae of Occidental filed a Title IX complaint with the Federal Department of Education claiming that the college violated civil rights law in its handling of reports of sexual assaults and rapes — which seem to happen on the Oxy campus with terrifying frequency.

Survivors of rape and sexual assault at Occidental report that administrators threatened them with unpleasant consequences when they enquired about the process of reporting a sexual assault. Survivors were warned that the hearings process was “long and arduous.” One survivor was told she’d be the one switching dorms rather than her assailant. When men were found in the course of college hearings to have indeed committed rapes of their fellow students, they were often merely suspended temporarily — and in at least two cases, those suspensions were lifted on appeal and the rapists “sentenced” to writing book reports instead.

Gloria Allred, who is providing the 38 plaintiffs with representation in their Title IX complaint, reports in the video embedded below that when Occidental President Jonathan Veitch was informed that an accused rapist was on the guest list for a social event at Veitch’s home, he responded by issuing a dis-invitation … to two members of the school’s sexual assault task force.

Here Allred speaks, along with several remarkably brave survivors and supportive faculty member Caroline Heldman, the school’s Politics Department chair.

What’s been the response of Occidental College president Jonathan Veitch to the issue? Browbeating sexual assault survivors in the campus press when they dare suggest he’s sitting with his thumbs up his ass:

I’m dismayed that having agreed to that conversation, a number of well-intentioned people have chosen to cast our motives into doubt; vilify dedicated, hard-working members of Student Affairs; question the sincerity of our response; and actively sought to embarrass the College on the evening news. That is their choice, and there is very little I can do about it. I can say that it reflects poorly on their commitment to this conversation and to the broader education that must take place if we are to change a culture we all find repugnant. The repugnance of sexual assault is not open to question; but the policies and procedures that guide our response to those incidents is something about which reasonable people can disagree. I’m sure there are those who feel that confrontation is necessary to exert pressure on the College to do the right thing. But there is a point where confrontation becomes an end in itself—satisfying, no doubt, but counter-productive with regard to our shared aims. When it crosses that threshold and descends into name-calling, vilification and misrepresentation, it undermines the trust and good will of everyone involved. And worst of all, it does not lead to progress on this important issue.

That letter to the campus paper was published March 5. Veitch has since walked it back some, saying that his letter may have “alienated people who care about sexual assault” and clarifying that his intent was to object to “the implication–reported in the media — that the College is not serious about the issue of sexual assault. We are very serious.”

Serious enough to have brought in, just this week, experienced sexual assault prosecutors as consultants to help the school assess and overhaul its enforcement policy. That’s a smart and sensible move.

It’s just too bad that Veitch waited until campus anti-rape activists lit a bonfire under his doubly enthumbed ass, complete with an appeal to the Department of Education to lift the school’s federal funding, before taking a step he should have taken on Day One. Veitch has been president at Occidental since 2009. That means all the students in the video linked above were raped on Veitch’s watch. All the administrative obstacles to survivors reporting assaults against them mentioned here happened on Veitch’s watch. All the stories relayed in the video above: On Veitch’s watch. All the assigned book reports and community service sentences for acts that should have brought jail time and sex offender registry? On Veitch’s watch.

Not that Veitch’s resigning would fix Occidental College’s rape problem: it sounds as though there are a few other administrators with serious culpability who ought to be examined as well.

But it would be a good start.

Do you want to be like El Salvador?

El Salvador has an absolute prohibition on all abortions — they can’t even be done to save the life of the mother (it’s a very Catholic country, are you surprised?) Now a situation has made the news that exposes the villainy of that policy.

A young woman named Beatriz is petitioning El Salvador’s supreme court to be allowed to get an abortion. Why? There’s a couple of really good reasons.

The four-month fetus is acephalic — no brain has formed. It’s doomed. It will never be viable. At best, it will be born, live a few days as a vegetable on life support, and die.

The mother is suffering from complications from lupus and kidney disease. The fetus won’t even get to the point of being born — the mother will be killed by this pregnancy first.

The heartless, amoral, religiously-based rules of that society are condemning this woman to death. In addition, if any doctor honors their Hippocratic oath and helps her live, they can be prosecuted and sentenced to long terms in prison for it.

Beatriz has been refused a necessary and simple medical procedure because the demented fuckwits of the Catholic Church have prioritized dogma over human life. She has to beg authorities, right up to the highest levels of government, for the right to live.

All because some old assholes believe god has told them that the dying lump of meat in her belly is more precious than a woman’s life.

No more Dan Markingsons

A few weeks ago I gave a talk in Seattle in which I pointed out that science is not sufficient to define moral behavior. A substantial part of that talk was a catalog of atrocities, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. I said that in purely scientific terms, that was a good experiment; if the subjects had been mice, for instance, setting aside an untreated control group to study the progression of the disease would have been considered an essential part of smart experimental design. One could still argue that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…if one were willing to distance oneself from the humanity of the subjects.

Yes, one can always retreat to the excuse that these were cases of bad science, where the scientists violated the rules of their own profession. But where do the ethical guidelines come from? Not science.

Dan_Markingson

I missed a trick, though. I talked mainly about old cases, when there’s a clear case of the conflict between ethics and science playing out right now, right at my home university: the case of Dan Markingson, the young man who was enrolled in an experimental pharmaceutical study and kept there, even as his mental illness worsened, and who eventually committed suicide.

There’s a new article by a bioethicist on this case.

markingson2

The research abuse in this case is so stunning that when I first learned about it I could scarcely imagine it happening anywhere, much less at the university where I work. In late 2003, psychiatric researchers at the University of Minnesota recruited a mentally ill young man named Dan Markingson into a profitable, industry-funded research study of antipsychotic drugs. The researchers signed him up over the objections of his mother, Mary Weiss, who did not want him in the study, and despite the fact that he could not give proper informed consent. Dan was acutely psychotic, plagued by delusions about demons, and he had repeatedly been judged incapable of making his own medical decisions. Even worse, he had been placed under an involuntary commitment order that legally compelled him to obey the recommendations of the psychiatrist who recruited him into the study.

For months, Mary tried desperately to get Dan out of the study, warning that he was getting worse and that he was in danger of committing suicide. But her warnings were ignored. On April 23, 2004, she left a voice message with the study coordinator, asking, “Do we have to wait for him to kill himself or someone else before anyone does anything?” Three weeks later, Dan committed suicide in the most violent way imaginable. His body was discovered in the shower of a halfway house, his throat slit so severely that he was nearly decapitated, along with a note that said, “I went through this experience smiling.”

You know, I’ve been impressed with my university on many occasions: their commitment to academic freedom has been exemplary, my interactions with the university’s lawyers (I’ve had a few of them…) has always left me satisfied that they are fair and pragmatic. But this is a failure not just of the scientists involved, but the administration of the university. It’s an embarrassment.

Yet for three years the University of Minnesota has managed to bluster and stonewall its way through all the criticism, insisting that it has already been exonerated. Even when the state Legislature passed “Dan’s Law” in 2009, banning psychiatrists from recruiting mentally ill patients under an involuntary commitment order into drug studies, the university continued to insist it had done nothing wrong.

I suspect that the stonewalling is out of fear of opening the door to legal action against a university that is already struggling with constantly dwindling support from the legislature. But it’s necessary that they confront this issue and deal with it honestly — it’s the only way to restore confidence with UM’s ethical culture, and it’s the only way to make sure there are no future Dan Markingsons.

And it’s that last bit that is the important concern.

Jesus, the biologist

Oh, joy…yet another bible-walloping lackwit claiming that god hates gay marriage…and this time he claims to have a biological justification.

“You only have 15 percent of the middle who are hypocrites, who think, Jesus is cool, but I don’t agree with how he defined marriage,” Klingenschmitt said. “When Jesus talks about one flesh, he’s really being a scientist, he’s being a biologist. Because he realizes and he’s articulating simple biology, that when a sperm and an egg form together, they match in a zygote and a new DNA is formed and it becomes one new human flesh.”

“[W]e’re not reading our biology textbooks,” the former chaplain added.

“Which were written by Jesus, as you say,” Pakman pointed out. “Jesus was a biologist.”

“Well, he defined marriage between one man and one women, becoming one zygote, becoming one flesh,” Klingenschmitt insisted. “And that’s the only way in the next 100 years that humans are going to be able to procreate. If you get two men together and they mate, they’re not going to have a baby. If you get three women and a dog together, and they all mate together, they’re not going to have a baby.”

Wait, wait there. I can read Matthew 19 just as well as Satan can, and that’s where he claims Jesus is discussing biology. Here’s the relevant passage:

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,

And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Jesus is talking about the man and woman becoming “one flesh”, not sperm and egg. He also doesn’t mention zygote even once.

He’s not describing fertilization at all. That’s the plot of The Human Centipede!

Yet another case of anti-atheist discrimination in Tacoma

The incredibly talented and pleasant Shelley Segal is going to appear in Tacoma, Washington! You should go, every time I’ve heard her I’ve enjoyed it. Only thing is, the venue that was originally booked suddenly pulled out (at least this one gave advance notice!)

We had originally booked a coffee and ale shop called Anthem in the middle of downtown Tacoma. It was a new venue (for us), the staff was incredibly friendly, and it looked like the perfect all ages venue for a show like this. We discussed doing the event there, and they were on board.

That fell apart this morning, when I received an email from the booking folks. It was a polite, professional email, but the intent was very clear. I’ll quote the relevant part:

This isn’t something that we feel comfortable promoting or hosting because it doesn’t align with what we believe and stand for.

Anthem Beverage & Bistro, Tacoma

Additionally, the CC field included an address at “Eternity Bible College,” something that wasn’t in the original thread. So, we we’ve been booted from the venue, and they wanted us to know why.

Man, Christianity ruins everything, doesn’t it? Strangely the coffeeshop has a statement of vision and values that nowhere mentions obedience to fundagelical bullshit, and instead babbles about “integrity” and “community” and stuff that the atheist community also values…but apparently they’re all talk, no action.

They have a yelp page, but since they did at least give the organizers a little time to find a new venue and didn’t pocket any profits, they aren’t quite as vile as Oklahoma Joe’s. You might drop a note there about their hidden Christian agenda, though.

What you should definitely do, though, is give your custom to Doyle’s Public House, the new venue. You should especially go there this Sunday, 14 April, at 5pm to see Shelley Segal in a free show!