Et tu, Chemistry?

Quick, everyone! Get out your Bingo cards!

The International Congress of Quantum Chemistry is going to be held next year, and they announced their preliminary speaker list: it was entirely made up of men. This is not surprising. It’s held by the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences, which is almost entirely made up of men, too.

Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott.

I’ve highlighted the bit about how this kind of sexism is perpetuated. It takes a real effort by existing members of the organization to break up bad habits…and it doesn’t sound as if some members are interested, despite the fact that there is an online list of women in quantum chemistry that would make it easy to find interesting women to invite.

Cue the excuses:

Zhigang Shuai, a professor at Tsinghua University in China and chair of this year’s ICQC, wrote a letter to explain that one woman had been among the original invitees, but had not responded

There might be women in our second choices!

many of the people on the original list were obligatory selections

There aren’t any women of obligatory importance in the field.

And then, of course, the Asshat Backlash. Here’s Professor James Kress, complaining about all those people complaining about discrimination on a chemistry listserv.

If you INSIST on discussing this on CCL, the please place an identifying header on all your emails so that those of us who care about SCIENCE, as opposed to trendy whining about supposed “gender inequality” and other fashionable modes of Political Correctness can at least have a hope of filtering out all of the nonsensical content and peruse the SCIENTIFIC content.

Oh, Dr Kress cannot shut up:

Inequality is a fundamental characteristic of any collection of more than one human being, he said, and suggested that if people don’t like the current conferences they should start their own. You’re not entitled to excel. You have to earn it. I guess that’s kind of an old fashioned perspective but it’s certainly mine.

Kress doubled down in a followup email. Given that everyone has unique DNA, it is scientifically certain that no two people will be identical in terms of capabilities, he wrote. ALL SORTS of differences in capabilities exist in Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Math, etc. Those who work harder, overcome their capability deficient and make themselves equal to or better than their colleagues. Hard work is the way to address the capability issue and thus achieve equality.

He’s got his, and by god, he deserved it, and if you aren’t getting invited to speak at conferences, it’s entirely because you are a lazy slacker with female DNA.

So, what conferences have a problem with rampant manly privilege so far? Atheist, skeptic, science fiction, literature, philosophy, technology, and now chemistry? Did I miss any? Yeah, probably. It seems to be all of them.

Christianity has always endorsed gay marriage? WTF?

This long-winded Christian apologist (well, that was redundant) Damon Linker has been making bizarre arguments for some time: he’s one of those deeply dishonest twits who argues that god is the transcendent source, the ground, or the end of the natural world while simultaneously ignoring the specifics of Christianity — and his primary argument against atheism always seems to be that old canard, that good atheists are supposed to be miserable, like Nietzsche — it’s always Nietzsche. His specialty seems to be making overwrought counterfactuals based on how he thinks the world should be…that is, Christian and pious.

His latest? Christianity invented gay marriage. Somehow, he manages to mention the near-universal Christian unity in opposing gay marriage, waves it all away, and then declares,

The ultimate source of the democratic revolution — the motor behind its inexorable unfolding — is the figure of Jesus Christ, who taught the equal dignity of all persons, and declared in the Sermon on the Mount that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Nothing in the history of the Christian church suggests that they ever followed this rather idealistic interpretation of doctrine. Would the Jews of his time been tolerant of gays? Don’t you suspect that when he said, “the meek shall inherit the earth”, he was actually preaching to a conquered people and promising that the conquerors will get their comeuppance?

But stretching the truth is not an activity Linker confines only to his Bible readings. He’s got a strange view of American history.

They already did touch in the United States, the world’s first nation settled by egalitarian Christians (the Puritans) and explicitly dedicated in its founding documents to the principle of universal human equality.

Puritans were egalitarians? Only if you were a man.

The US was founded on universal human equality? Only if you were white.

Marriage equality is inevitable. It’s also inevitable, I guess, that some Christians are now maneuvering to take credit for it.

Wait, who’s right, Damon Linker or Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, United States Army, (Ret.)? Boykin has made some interesting comments about Jesus.

The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 is says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A might warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.

And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.

I guess I’m going to have to bet on Boykin’s Jesus. Good, bad, he’s the one with the gun.

For further historical revisionism, guess who wrote the second amendment to the US constitution?

Now I want you to think about this: where did the Second Amendment come from? … From the Founding Fathers, it’s in the Constitution. Well, yeah, I know that. But where did the whole concept come from? It came from Jesus…

I’m not handing out prizes for guessing correctly, you all saw that one coming.

Sex differences are real

But they’re more complicated than many people assume, and even where they exist, they say nothing about how you should treat people.

I was reading Alex Gabriel’s article on the gender binary wars, and it just seems to me that a lot of people have this cartoon version of a bimodal distribution in their heads, so I scribbled up some cartoons of my own.

This is how some loud people like to pretend sex differences are distributed. It’s clear, it’s simple, and there aren’t any intermediates. The x axis of the plot can be anything: has a penis/clitoris, has a Y chromosome, likes to have sex with women vs likes to have sex with men, amount of milk secretion, ejaculation volume, whatever. We have a stereotype for how the sexes behave, and you will fit into one category or the other, because there are only two distinct elements.

deepbm

Immediately, though, there are problems. This is a multidimensional problem, and sometimes the distributions match, and sometimes they don’t. For example, if you use adult size of the genital tubercle (the structure that develops into the penis in males and the clitoris in females), you’ll see a nice bimodal distribution of sizes in the population, with one peak for females and another for males. But then the middle isn’t empty: there’s slight overlap. And worse, sometimes males who by all other criteria identify as men fall into the female half of the distribution, and females who by all other criteria identify as women fall into the male half. There is clearly a biological distinction — the peaks are real and distinct — but the middle point is not empty.

And then you have the fact that people love to claim that the biological criteria are clear-cut, but they use different criteria, and they give different answers! So using the genital tubercle criterion, you can place people into that bimodal distribution, but if you use the Y chromosome criterion, you get distributions that mostly overlap well, but then there are people whose penises put them solidly in the male part of the distribution, but their chromosomes put them in the other part, and vice versa. Where’s your mathematical clarity now?

And then what happens? Most of the signifiers we use to distinguish male and female aren’t so robust. We have bimodal distributions that are only weakly separated into two peaks.

shallowbm

This could be a chart of height, for instance; women tend to be slightly shorter than men. It could also be a chart of hair length, where fashion has an influence. It could be a chart of performance in mathematics, in which case it may be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where we mold people to fit our preconceptions. We’ve got a gigantic collection of plastic behaviors that we tend to force on people as gender signifiers: do girls really like pink more than boys, deep down? Are boys really unsuited to cooking or other domestic chores? In these cases, are these distributions a meaningful way to identify what human beings should do? No. In fact, they erode the sharpness of the entire distinction. You can be male in one characteristic and female in another.

There are a thousand different parameters we use to identify sex. It is definitely true that sex differences are real and when we average all of our matches to those parameters, most of us tend to clearly fall into one peak or the other. Most of us are, in aggregate, mostly male or mostly female.

But here’s my problem.

Let’s assume that when we look at the totality of our natures, and we plot an arbitrary index of sexual identity, we do get two clear and undeniable peaks. I think this is entirely true, even though I don’t have a formula to calculate it, and I think a lot of people would agree — the sources Alex Gabriel is discussing are all trying to identify the magic criterion that sharply demarcates male from female. So let’s pretend these advocates for the gender binary are correct and can come up with a simple way to tell who is supposed to be a man and who is supposed to be a woman, and they show that the population looks like this:

deepbmblank

We can argue about how deep that central trough would be — maybe it’s close to zero (but we know it’s got to be non-zero; we wouldn’t even be having this argument if it weren’t for the existence of people who deny that they fit into one peak or the other), maybe it’s a large and significant fraction of the population. I don’t really care. We have people living in this red circle.

deepbmlabel

Even more complicatedly, we have people who, in one criterion, live in the left peak, and by a different criterion, live in the right peak. How many? I don’t know. Does it matter?

If it’s a hundred million people, who are you to say that they must be condemned and punished for making their precious bimodal chart complicated? If it’s just one person, why would you make it your mission to make them miserable for being true to their own nature, rather than yours?

I don’t even get the point of the argument. Everyone — from the trans-exclusionary radical feminists to the most egalitarian and liberal of us — recognizes that sexuality and gender are too complicated to be reduced to a one-dimensional, single binary switch. Once you’ve conceded that, you’re just bickering over the depth of the trough in the bimodal distribution, and nothing in that argument justifies treating the minority case as less than human, or compelling individuals to live in the pigeonholes you’ve assigned to them, no matter how miserable you make them. It’s not even justifiable to label them freaks, weirdos, or anomalies: they are part of a continuum of human behavior that includes every one of us.

It’s as if people are so committed to the idea that there are only two possible valid human natures that they are prepared to wish away all evidence to the contrary.

Cynthia Gockley is a strong, confident woman

And that frightens pick-up artists. Just ask them. You all remember Matt Forney, right? He’s the slimy character whose post about liking women who are insecure and intimidated made the rounds a while back, and his blog is full of repellent bigotry, like his post that says fat girls are vermin and are also stupid, just like black people. So we know direct from the ass’s mouth how these guys react to any woman who does not know her submissive place.

Whenever a girl I’m talking to brags about how she’s “confident” and “strong,” I can feel my dick deflating like a punctured tire.

Or take a look at RooshV, the racist, sexist, homophobic scumbag who travels the world, writing books about all the women he “bangs” in one-night stands. He turns into a whiny-ass-titty-baby when he finds women who don’t fall for his “charms”.

Times are bad for Forney and Roosh, in part because a lot of women are waking up to the game and aren’t falling for it, because there are also a lot of women who are speaking up on blogs and social media to expose these sleazy con artists, and just generally the PUAs are becoming fodder for the mockery mill everywhere on the internet — I’m sure they have a hard time getting it up when everyone is laughing at them.

But really, Matt Forney, “punctured tire” is such a poor metaphor. I’m thinking it’s more like worms on the sidewalk during a rain. PUA dicks are not only limp and squishy, but all the traffic is coming by and stepping on them.

So they’re fighting back, in a way that just makes them look even worse. The Matt Forney’s of the world are cruising around, looking for feminist women they can “neg” and intimidate, and the worst insult they can throw around is that they are feminists.

Case in point: A woman using the pseudonym Cinzia La Strega has been an active commenter on feminist blogs, and has her own blog in which she mocks the absurdity and repulsiveness of PUAs on the web and twitter. She’s annoying to Matt Forney because she laughs at him — she actually reads the nonsense he posts publicly and, rather than becoming aroused, she ridicules him. She must be punished for making him impotent.

So he dug into public records, social media, all that sort of thing, tracked down her identity (it wasn’t hard; she admits to not being a technical person and made no major efforts to hide, other than by using a pseudonym), and exposed her in detail. I won’t be linking to that post. I’ll just tell you that he published her name, her place of employment, her RateMyProfessor page (she’s a community college teacher), her address, her phone number, her weight, photos, her sexual history, accounts about her unpleasant pedophile uncle, her relationship with a transexual “woman” (the scare quotes are Forney’s), and engages in a lot of bizarre remote psychoanalysis. And most damning of all, he accuses her of being a FEMINIST right in the title.

Then he attempts to document her psychopathic stalking of PUAs, oblivious to the fact that she has never done anything as stalkerish as Matt Forney’s own post. But to be fair, I took a look at his accusations. For instance, he claims that she tracked down one of [Forney’s] high school classmates solely so she could write a post about [his] teenage years. It turns out this wasn’t true; she replied to a comment on Jezebel by someone who volunteered that she knew Forney in high school, and then she wrote a post in which expressed sympathy for people who’d suffered social rejection in their high school years.

I’m sure that was the most galling thing for an arrogant creep like Forney: a woman expressing a bit of empathy, even pity, for poor warped individuals like himself. So he rages ineffectually, trying to hurt Cinzia La Strega by publishing her personal data with patently false color added by a disgruntled misogynist.

The laugh is on him, though. He decided to try this feeble tactic on a woman who then turned around and asked me to publicize the story, and who wasn’t intimidated in the slightest.

Cinzia La Strega is Cynthia Gockley. Go say hello. She isn’t afraid, and Matt Forney’s dick is very sad.

You want a dose of irony? One of Forney’s recent posts is titled How to destroy a person’s reputation with Google, it contains a list of recommendations, and it promises to destroy feminism with these techniques. His Cynthia Gockley post is practically a literal exercise in implementing his own suggestions. He got some brief success — his attack on her is currently the top Google result when searching for “Cynthia Gockley” — but it only worked because that name was practically unknown on the internet before this, since she was writing under a pseudonym.

This post is climbing fast in the google rankings for the name. If you have a blog, mention Cynthia Gockley in the title of a post — I think Forney’s priority is pretty easy to topple.

Also, try a Google search for “Matt Forney”. The SEO master has been hoist on his own petard.

I have discovered a time machine!

And I’m a little dizzy after a short jaunt to the 1950s. It turns out it’s really easy to find your way to 60 years in the past; just open the pages of the Wall Street Journal, where dinosaurs walk again, and they’ve got control of all of your money. They ran an amazing opinion piece on Valentine’s Day, giving advice to all you little women out there.

Think about it: If you spend the first 10 years out of college focused entirely on building your career, when you finally get around to looking for a husband you’ll be in your 30s, competing with women in their 20s. That’s not a competition in which you’re likely to fare well. If you want to have children, your biological clock will be ticking loud enough to ward off any potential suitors. Don’t let it get to that point.

That’s the whole story: the author is telling all the women that careers are a waste of time, you need to find yourself a man, and do it while you’re still as young as possible, because face it, when you’re 30, you are so over. We’re not even going to contemplate 40, and 50…OMG, you’re supposed to be dead.

I always wonder what the women with these attitudes are actually like. Do they admire mayflies? Do they think only the first quarter of their life is worth living?

Anyway, she has specific advice for all you ladies: go to college. You face a confusing dilemma, though, because men like their women young and stupid (did I mention that the author has also assumed a deep contempt for us guys?), so you should attend college as a kind of meat market, but don’t learn too much.

An extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult. Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women.

Could you marry a man who isn’t your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can’t keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won’t find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing. And if you start to earn more than he does? Forget about it. Very few men have egos that can endure what they will see as a form of emasculation.

It’s also horribly cliche-ridden.

Men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free.

Grandma? Is that you? You’ve been reincarnated and are writing dating books for Republicans?

The Tom Perkins system

He has opened his mouth again. Tom Perkins, the privileged, overpaid rich guy who thinks the wealthy in America are as oppressed as the Jews under the Third Reich, has an ideal democratic system.

The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get the vote if you don’t pay a dollar in taxes. But what I really think is it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes. How’s that?

Wait, why base votes on money? There’s an assumption there that what we value in citizens is their income.

Here’s the PZ Myers system: You don’t get the vote if you don’t graduate from high school. You get an extra vote for every year of graduate and post-graduate work at an accredited institution. Professors get an extra vote for every year post-tenure. (I am JOKING. This would be a horrible system.)

The Heinlein system: You don’t get the vote if you don’t serve at least four years in the military. You get an extra vote for every military rank above private that you achieve.

The compensation system: You get one vote for every day served in prison while innocent. You get 5 votes every time the police beat you while peacefully protesting. Every year that you work full time but get paid below the poverty level, you get an extra vote.

The albedo system: Instruments are used at the polling places to measure the albedo of your forehead, and all votes are scaled by that value. Might as well institutionalize it, right? And make it sciencey!

The nerd system: We develop an index that takes into account the number of Magic:The Gathering cards you own, the level of your D&D character, the bulk tonnage of your comic book collection, and your high score at Call of Duty/Harvest Moon, and use that to determine how many votes you get.

The astrological system: Point values are assigned to the zodiac signs. Pisces, of course, get the highest number of votes. Just because we’re the best.

The physiological system: Your erythrocyte count, sampled at the polling station, is multiplied by 1 for type O, 2 for type A or B, and 3 for type AB blood. Finally, cell surface glycoproteins get representation!

The young male system: Everyone gets into a pissing contest each year. You get a number of votes equal to the number of feet your stream reaches.

I’m sure there are other arbitrary vote weighting schemes you can come up with…and then we can vote on which is the best using some other vote weighting scheme!

Sometimes even the old white guys get it

This old white guy is also from Texas, and he’s a sportscaster, yet somehow in one fabulous speech he manages to put the whole Michael Sam story into perspective.


You beat a woman and drag her down a flight of stairs, pulling her hair out by the roots? You’re the fourth guy taken in the NFL draft. You kill people while driving drunk? That guy’s welcome. Players caught in hotel rooms with illegal drugs and prostitutes? We know they’re welcome. Players accused of rape and pay the woman to go away? You lie to police, trying to cover up a murder? We’re comfortable with that.
You love another man? Well, now you’ve gone too far!

Good work, Dale Hansen!

Everything you need to know about Bob Jones University

They intentionally turn a blind eye to their sins.

For decades, students at Bob Jones University who sought counseling for sexual abuse were told not to report it because turning in an abuser from a fundamentalist Christian community would damage Jesus Christ. Administrators called victims liars and sinners.

But wait! Then they hired a Christian consulting group to independently help them grapple with the problem. That’s a step in the right direction.

But wait again! Now they’ve fired their consultants, because they were going beyond the originally outlined intentions, that is, they were coming up with criticisms and answers they didn’t like.

This is how BJU handles assault complaints.

Erin Burchwell said that when she accused a university employee of sexually assaulting her in the late 1990s, “their idea of an investigation and counseling was to ask me what I was wearing and whether it was tight, and to tell me not to talk to anyone about it because it wouldn’t look good for me.” She said university officials alternated between “saying it never even happened and saying I was a willing participant.”

I doubt that I have many readers among the student body at BJU, but in case there are any, here’s my advice: get out while you can. Transfer to a real college.