Blatant both-siderism from a physicist

A lot of people have been asking me to comment on a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder. I knew who she is — she is a science communicator who specializes in physics, and I’ve seen a few of her videos. They were OK, not particularly interesting to me, just because I’m on the biology side of the spectrum. Great, though, more people talking about science is a net positive.

But then she did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.

I took a look. I only made it 34 seconds into the video before I closed it and said, “Fuck this.” This is how she opens:

On the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate innocent children. On the other side there are those saying it’s saving the lives of minorities who have been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people like you and I who think both sides are crazy and could someone summarize the facts in simple words, which is what I am here for.

I am done. I’ll never be able to watch another of her videos. You’d think a physicist would at least understand logic, but there’s the fallacy of the false dilemma coupled to a bad case of physicist’s arrogance. It’s both-siderism with a vengeance. She claims to be all about No hype, no spin, but she just made a false equivalence between people who are trying to legislate invasive, destructive meddling in people’s lives, and people who want to be left alone to live their lives without interference, and calls both of them crazy. That she thinks the right to live a life without being tortured by religious fanatics is crazy is most definitely taking a side and putting a fierce spin on her opinion.

Goodbye, Sabine.

And sorry to everyone who wanted me to comment on the rest of her ideas. There’s 27 more minutes of that crap and I just couldn’t bear to continue. I’m cis, and I have no idea how trans people can persist in a society where that kind of nonsense gets served up at you constantly.

While I’m weak and unable to stomach such stupidity, at least Rebecca Watson, the Iron Skeptic, managed to cope. Here’s her take on Hossenfelder.

Yeah, what she said. One the one side you have people who listen to a half-minute of Sabine Hossenfelder and then flip the table, and on the other side there are those who can hear her out and then run circles around her.

Men behaving badly

Yesterday, I mentioned that horrible right-wing “comedian” Steven Crowder was getting divorced, and several of you replied, “Who?” Oh, how I envy you. More ugly details have emerged, specifically, videos of Steven and Hilary Crowder’s normal daily interactions. Hilary is trying to get stuff done and is incredibly conciliatory while Steven lounges with a cigar telling her what she can and can’t do, while being verbally abusive.

In the Ring camera video, which was captured on June 26, 2021, Steven Crowder is angry as he sits on the patio smoking, and Hilary Crowder is in a state of motion as she prepares to leave the house.

Steven Crowder insists that Hilary not take their one car to run errands as it would keep him housebound and that she, at nearly eight months pregnant, should take an UBER.

He also berates her for not doing her “wifely duties,” like grocery shopping, in a way that pleases him.

Tensions rise as Steven Crowder gets more agitated.

“Feeling some constraint?” Crowder said to his wife.

Crowder gets irritated and says that if Hilary, his very pregnant wife, takes the car, he can’t go to the gym, see his parents, or see his friends.

“The only way out of it is discipline and respect,” Crowder said to his wife.

Hilary Crowder, in an attempt to leave, tells her husband that she loves him and that she’s committed to the marriage.

Steven Crowder gets angrier and suggests that if she is committed to their marriage, she should put on gloves to give his dogs the medicine that his wife was concerned was toxic for pregnant women and walk their dogs.

As they headed inside, Crowder got angrier and angrier and was, by his admission (via audio I reviewed) yelling angrily and said, “I will fuck you up.” According to both Crowders, Steven immediately pulled back and realized what he said. But by that point, Hilary was frightened and left the house.

Hilary Crowder has since left his childlike ass, and has issued a statement that reads, in part:

“Hilary is currently living alone in Dallas, apart from her family and support system in Michigan, and is focused on taking care of her young children. She is not prepared at this time to speak about her divorce becoming public or the misleading statements made by Steven about their relationship.

The truth is that Hilary spent years hiding Steven’s mentally and emotionally abusive behavior from her friends and family while she attempted to save their marriage. She was the one who was asking to work on their relationship to keep the marriage intact for their unborn children.”

The video supports her claim that she was in a “mentally and emotionally abusive” relationship, and then some. Steven Crowder might not want to contest any legal decisions about alimony in their divorce, because she has his balls nailed to the wall right now.

That’s Steven Crowder, he’s done. I also mentioned the rape trial of Donald Trump. E. Jean Carroll was cross-examined yesterday. Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, settled on a familiar strategy: abusing the victim of the crime to discredit her. For instance, the fact that she did not scream was used to imply that she wasn’t actually raped.

Tacopina later attacked Carroll’s trustworthiness based upon her testimony that she laughed, but did not scream, when Donald Trump started to rape her. It did not go well for him.

Q: In fact, in response to this supposedly serious situation that you viewed as a fight, where you got physically hurt, it’s your story that you not only didn’t scream out, but you started laughing?

A: I did not scream. I started laughing. That is right. I don’t think I started laughing. I think I was laughing going into the dressing room, and I think I laughed pretty consistently after the kiss to absolutely throw cold water on anything he thought was about to happen. Laughing is a very good—I use the word weapon—to calm a man down if he has any erotic intention.

Undeterred, Tacopina doubled down on his attack.

Q: When you’re fighting and being sexually assaulted and raped, because you are not a screamer, as you describe it, you wouldn’t scream?

A: I’m not a screamer. You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.

It’s hideous what that lawyer is trying to do to the victim of a crime. Other lawyers aren’t impressed, either.

As I wrote yesterday, I do not know whether the jurors believed Carroll’s direct testimony that she was raped by Trump. Based on my 25+ years as a trial attorney, including service as an Assistant United States Attorney who focused on sex crimes, I am confident that any juror who did not already believe that Ms. Carroll lied in her direct testimony would not have been persuaded by any of the cross-examination that she was a liar.

In fact, it appeared that Tacopina—who is a very capable trial attorney—had an agenda that valued being mean to Ms. Carroll over undercutting her credibility. I would not be surprised if that was a direct order from Donald Trump.

Joe Tacopina can go home and lounge on his patio with a cigar now. I am deeply repulsed by what some men consider acceptable behavior. I’m just hoping that these are two women who will emerge triumphant.

How to turn a bad relationship into a click-baity article

Hurt my feelings, why don’t you. Tell me about how awful men are. That’s the entirety of this muddled mess titled Masculinity Is Dead: Why Weak Little Boys Have Replaced Real Men. Gosh, it’s harsh.

Once upon a time, the vast majority of men were really proud to be men. They went to work, provided for their families, and actually behaved chivalrously towards women. They were good fathers, protectors of those they cared about, and actually tackled problems assertively. Of course, those times are long dead.

Once upon a time, men were men, but now they’re not. It’s not a substantial premise. But the way she keeps hammering at it makes me start taking it personally.

Everywhere I look, I see women lamenting the loss of actual manly men.

I hear girls bemoan the fact that guys are now too frightened to get into a committed relationship with a woman. I hear single moms talk about how men bailed on them after they became pregnant. I hear single women of all ages talk about how their last relationship dissolved because the guy they were with never actually brought anything to the table.

OK, I begin to see the basis of her definition of what makes a manly man: they commit to a relationship. That’s not a bad argument, I agree that commitment is what makes a person a strong partner. One could build on that idea to write a good article, but no, she’s just mad.

Make no mistake about it, there is absolutely, positively, nothing manly about most men in my generation.

“Most”? Is this a quantitative argument? Or did your last couple of dates go badly?

We’re now populated by whiny, insecure, entitled, lazy little children that are looking for a second mommy more than a wife and partner.

Ouch.

For the Millennial generation, old-school masculinity is as dead as a parrot in a Monty Python sketch. F-boys, Nice Guys, and Mama’s Boys are symptomatic of the problem.

The older I get, the more I realize how totally screwed up Millennial men’s attitudes on sex, relationships, and women really are. In this sense, many modern male dating stereotypes really are true.

So far, I’m seeing stereotypes all right, but no evidence that they’re true.

I’m going to skip over a whole lot of sweeping generalizations to what I think is a kernel of a good point: media mischaracterizations, which the author has swallowed wholesale.

A large part of the problem is that media tends to warp what we see as masculine. Music and media glorifies men who “pump and dump.” Media constantly talks about why men shouldn’t date gold diggers, or why Nice Guys™ should always get the girl.

Guys are told, constantly, that they aren’t sh*t unless they’re banging a million women. In many cases, the media makes women to be the enemy, regardless of what happened. From what I’ve seen, men are all too happy to find someone to blame for their shortcomings.

Andrew Tate is not “all men,” I assure you. He’s one spectacularly garish example. It is true, however, that a certain kind of loud, loutish, entitled man has become a symbol of one side of modern masculinity, and it is one that is popular among naive teenage boys, but unless the author has been dating MRAs or 15 year olds, it’s not generally representative. Don’t mistake media stereotypes for reality.

This is not a new problem. Back, way back, in the 70s and 80s, the caricature we young men had to deal with was the endless, annoying movies that portrayed us as callous horndogs on a constant quest to lose our virginity — think Porky’s or those Nerds movies. Nobody I knew was as obsessed with virginity as those movies made it all seem, and while we might have been a bit obsessed with sex, the media idolatry of virginity was just sick, warped purity culture.

This is not reality.

It’s a stupid meme. Don’t write articles that pretend it is accurate.

What are we going to do about Missouri?

For one thing, we have to deal with the rise of Missouri Man, rival to the ubiquitous Florida Man.

On April 18, Republic Police Department officers were called to a Price Cutter to respond to a call about a robbery in which a man held an employee at gunpoint so that he would be served meat.

Larry Gene Gay, 70, of Springfield, is charged with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon and a felony count of armed criminal action.

Court documents show that officers responded to the scene and ordered Gay to get out of his truck so they could arrest him. After he was taken into custody, an officer removed a loaded semi-automatic pistol with a bullet in the chamber from Gay’s hip holster.

In an interview, Gay said he went to Price Cutter to buy steaks. He told the “good man” who was helping him that they needed to weigh the steaks. However, the meat department was closed. Gay said at that point, he showed his gun “Just to say I’m not stealing. I need you here to help me to get a couple of these steaks. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The officer asked Gay why he thought the people in the store called police and told them he was threatening them with his gun.

“I don’t know,” Gay said in the interview. “I have no idea.”

Hand stupid people a gun, and at some point they’re going to use it to deal with some minor inconvenience. Missouri has a lot of guns, and a lot of stupid people, it’s an inevitable problem. But we could wave that away, it’s a problem with a few individuals, I’ve met a lot of good people in Missouri, and we can’t blame the whole state.

Here’s wider problem, though. Missouri is run by a gang of regressive Republicans who have been passing all kinds of ugly laws. They hate transgender kids, you know, and want to deny them good healthcare. The state Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, set up a ‘snitch line’ where random concerned citizens could submit their complaints about those danged transes and their wicked doctors who poison them all with estrogen and testosterone. It’s not clear what Bailey was going to do with those complaints…arrest everyone who was androgynous? Send out genital inspectors to check the accused? It was the usual preliminaries, I suspect, where the fascist builds a list in anticipation of the day he can send out the brownshirts.

It didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.

Bailey said his office set up the tip line for parents to submit concerns about the gender-affirming care their children received from transgender youth centers. He also issued an emergency rule severely restricting access to gender-affirming care.

PROMO, a Missouri LGBTQ advocacy organization, said Bailey “fanned the flames of hate” in issuing the emergency rule.

“The Attorney General’s claims are maliciously cherry-picked and come from unverified sources that allow him to promulgate disgusting, obstructive, and misleading information into an emergency rule,” PROMO said in a statement. “It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the real threat to Missourians is the attorney general himself.”

Social media users on TikTok, Twitter and Tumblr ensured that Bailey’s office would have plenty of evidence to sift through for the investigation, flooding the site with fake complaints and other ephemera.

When the online form first launched, it lacked a CAPTCHA, which savvy Twitter users quickly used to their advantage by using bots to spam the site. Users also employed a generator to churn out fake names and fake Missouri addresses. Others just dumped text into the complaint form, ranging from the entire script of the “Bee Movie,” to Billy May’s OxiClean sales pitch, to Walter White’s introductory monologue in “Breaking Bad.” TikTok users said they submitted the “most raunchiest fanfic from AO3” and “a saucy love story of Mario and Luigi.”

Love wins in the end, right?

But here’s my dilemma. I’m a regular tourist visiting Missouri — I go for Skepticon every summer. The question I wrestle with is…should I refuse to go again, and not contribute my travel dollars to a fascist, theocratic state? Or should I go, and contribute my travel dollars to the good kinds of Missourians who support a liberal skeptical conference? I’ve got time to resolve this internal debate since the organizers haven’t even announced a date for the event.

They could fix my problem for me by moving the whole Skepticon show north, to a progressive state (not Iowa), but that leaves the good Missourians in the lurch. I dislike these kinds of decisions. My problem would go away if Missouri would just throw the rascals out, but that isn’t going to happen this year, or maybe even in years to come.

Since when is America fair?

It’s heart-wrenching what various states are doing to trans people, especially young trans people. Missouri, you suck.

Also, Texas, you suck. Florida, you suck. Tennessee, you suck. I could go on with this list, but basically, if any state has a Republican legislature or governor, it is a cesspool of cruelty. Stop electing those people, OK?

Can we debate about how remote the desert island debate bros should be abandoned on should be?

“Great!” I thought, a new ContraPoints video. “Oh no,” I thought, it’s almost two hours long. I put off listening to it until last night (you don’t have to actually watch it, it’s a good audio stream, too), and now I can say: it’s excellent. Partly I’m saying that because I 100% agree with her on everything in the video.

It’s all good, but my favorite part was in the middle, at about the 58 minute mark, where she rips into the debate bros.

…valuing dispassionate intellectualism above all else can cause problems, especially where topics of social justice are concerned. Because it can lead you to this kind of toxic centrism that asks, why are marginalized people so unwilling to have calm, philosophical debates about whether they should have rights? Are they afraid of dangerous ideas?

As examples, she then talks about Sam Harris (he’s on the wrong side, again) and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. It’s a calm, philosophical discussion that exposes those wankers as absolute dickheads.

It’s a good listen, take some time to tune in.

The only reason to pay attention to the haters is to shame them

A borough in the UK posted an innocuous tweet, suggesting that people should go in for cervical screening. They had to take it down because a small minority of haters complained that the words “anyone with a cervix” was offensive to women.

The wording was just fine! It was inclusive and was a message to an appropriate audience. In fact, if you look at the thread, there’s a deluge of support for it, with swarms of people, cis and trans, chiming in to see that the message was good and they appreciated it. There were also, of course, a few indignant assholes whining that only women have cervices, and they were the ones they had to listen to, because Calderdale deleted the tweet.

Those few vicious, mocking tweets are the modern equivalent of this, an ugliness that will stain us all for years to come:

Meanwhile, in the science world, the journal Nature is updating their policies. Language matters.

It is regrettable but true that researchers have used and abused science to justify racist beliefs and practices. As previous editorials have acknowledged, Nature has played its part in perpetuating racism — and has now pledged to play its part in tackling it, together with colleagues in the research community.

As part of this pledge, Nature and the Nature Portfolio journals are updating our advice to authors on reporting research that involves race, ethnicity and other socially constructed characteristics. Specifically, we’re asking that authors exercise care and consideration so that the highest standards of rigour are applied where these attributes are found to be an explanation for an outcome or conclusion. This is part of our ongoing updates to guidance asking authors to describe how demographic characteristics, including sex and gender, are considered in the design of studies — and, more broadly, to consider the research’s potential to cause harm.

They aren’t asking a lot. This is what Nature expects now, and I was a little surprised…shouldn’t this have been standing, routine policy all along?

So, what are we asking authors to do, if their research describes people according to race, ethnicity or other socially constructed categories? Essentially, three things. First, specify the categories used and explain why such classification is needed. Second, explain the methods used to describe people in this way — for example, did study participants self-report, or did the information come from a census, social media or administrative data? Third, we would like authors to describe how they controlled for confounding variables, such as socio-economic status. These requests will be added to a paper’s reporting checklist so it is a part of the usual editorial and publishing workflow.

I’m not going to publish in Nature, and the kind of work I do isn’t going to touch on issues of race and sex (although some will try to force it!), but I would have thought that if you were doing work in those areas of sufficient prestige that it would be published in top-tier journals, those rules would have been already incorporated. You can never underestimate the devious efforts of bigots, though!

Time is fleeting…madness takes its toll

The Red Scare was mostly over before I was born — Joseph Welch squelched McCarthy with his question, “Have you no decency?” in 1954 — but we still see echoes of that paranoia today. I did survive the great Dungeons & Dragons panic of the 1980s, and I followed the insane McMartin preschool case which destroyed lives over hysterical claims of child sacrifice in tunnels that didn’t exist under a preschool. Then we got the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory in 2016, and all the QAnon craziness. It’s total madness.

Now — right now, today, all around us — Republicans are leading the charge under the banner of homophobia and transphobia. They’re freaking out over drag shows.

Florida Republicans are pushing forward a bill that seeks to ban drag shows from allowing someone under the age of 18 to be in attendance.

But the bill is so vaguely worded, using the term “adult live performance,” that even Republican lawmakers have admitted it would prevent a high school kid from watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show or even the musical Hair.

The puckered sphincters who get elected as Republicans also want to shut down all Pride celebrations.

The bill also explicitly targets Pride parades and celebrations, by preventing a government entity from issuing permits to an organization that may put on such a performance. If a violation occurs, say in a city like St. Petersburg, which hosts the largest Pride celebration in the state, the person who issued the permit could be charged with a misdemeanor.

In addition, any establishment that violates the law would be subject to license suspension or revocation and liable to large fines and a misdemeanor charge. One violation would spur a $5,000 fine; subsequent incidents would spur $10,000 fines.

Remember when these assholes assured everyone that they were only concerned about trans people, they were just dropping the “T” in LGBT, they were still supportive of everyone’s sexual orientation? And everyone else knew what was coming and predicted that they’d be expanding those restrictions until it was criminal to be anything but a straight white man? Those days are here already, and they aren’t shy about saying it.

It’s not just Florida and Texas that are a nexus of Puritanical oppression, Tennessee is definitely joining the crowd. Watch this woman testify against allowing a Pride parade by making up lies.


It started out as Pride coming in and I thought everything would be ok…it ended with a rainbow room where 8-12 y/o kids were given butt plugs and dildos.

You know what else is curious about this phenomenon? In every case, without exception, the justification is rooted in conservative Christianity, America’s curse.

Democratic states are so much nicer than Republican ones

Hey, how about some good news, about people who are making other people’s lives better? All you have to do is go to a Democratically controlled state, you know, like Minnesota. High school kids have been lobbying for free menstrual products, and the state legislature is going to approve it!

Students and their allies have pressed lawmakers for years to address the problem they describe as “period poverty.” They detailed the indignities of struggling with periods at school without the products they need or the means to buy them. They framed it as a public health issue for those who viewed it as just a hassle.

The payoff for that hard work may come soon. Minnesota lawmakers appear poised to pass a bill requiring Minnesota public schools serving students in grades four through 12 to provide free pads, tampons or other menstrual products to students in all restrooms.

Advocates credit students for speaking out publicly and refusing to let the issue be ignored at the Capitol. Elif and other teens say in the fight they’ve learned some real-world lessons on power, persistence and making change.

It makes sense, it gives people dignity, it improves education. It looks like it also teaches students that they have the power to make a difference.