It’s good to be the king

As I sit here wracked by some rather intense intestinal distress (I think my travels are catching up to me today), it’s rather nice to read words acknowledging my malevolent power. They don’t seem to alleve these nasty mundane illnesses — I’m still going to have to sporadically run to the bathroom — but I’m glad someone somewhere is keeping up the illusion. Unfortunately, it would be someone who lives permanently in a fantasy world, so it’s not all that esteem-bolstering.

The embittered acknowledgement of my puissance is coming from Paul Elam, at A Voice for Men.

I am sure this might have wowed the crowd at FTB, as they are a rather insulated group thanks to their mindless allegiance to the edicts of PZ Myers.

Ah, good ol’ mindless allegiance. It’s going to be great this weekend at CONvergence, where many of my zombified minions will be in attendance — I shall be carried about on a palanquin, fanned by my lickspittles, fed chocolate and wine at my merest gesture.

Oh, heck, wait — I’m going to be expected to help haul supplies to our room. They’re probably going to bring me crashing down to earth about as effectively as these bacteria.

What could have caused Elam to sneer at me this time? What did I do? Nothing, as it turns out: someone else at FtB pissed him off, and I’m just the puppetmaster. He’s actually really unhappy with Ally Fogg, who has been writing about domestic violence perpetrated by both men and women. Apparently, this is supposed to rouse my wrath.

Though I do expect we will eventually see a one-up as followup article from PZ not too far down the road. If Fogg gets traction with the FTB crowd, Myers won’t long stay silent. He will be there with the “real, real, real” story on intimate partner violence. It will be alpha wars, a secular death match.

Wait, I’ve been promoted to Alpha now? I thought I was a beta mangina or something.

I guess I’d better not stay silent — I must roar with fury (uh, except that I think that’s just my guts rumbling) and attack my challenger!

Except…

There are so many misconceptions there.

I don’t run Freethoughtblogs. Ed Brayton is in charge.

None of us have any say in what other bloggers write. There’s no seal of approval required, you can even disagree with the alpha-male-sort-of-master-of-FtB-only-not-really.

We try to sign on people who are on “our side”, who we can work with reasonably well, but that’s about it. That definitely shapes the general views here, but it’s a looser and broader perspective than Mr Elam thinks.

And this Ally Fogg guy? When he was suggested as a candidate for the network, we all reviewed his writings to see if he’d be a good fit, and we agreed. I voted for bringing him on, because I thought he was a thoughtful person who was writing about significant issues in social justice. I still do.

Contrary to certain lunatic opinions, this is not the man-hating network (that would be awkward for me if it were), nor is it the woman-are-perfect network. Having someone on board who is able to advocate for men’s rights without doing so by hating women is actually a legitimate part of our cause.

Sorry, Elam! At least you can console yourself over being so stupidly wrong by knowing I’m feeling less than wonderful today!

Now, guts, OBEY ME! OBEY ME NOOOOOOW!

Damn, I think they’re going to be as obedient to my wishes as all those other bloggers here, and you commenters, too.

My remarks at #ewts2013

(This is roughly what I said in my panel this morning at Empowering Women Through Secularism. The topic was Secular Values in Society; my fellow panelists were Leonie Hilliard, Nina Sankari, and Farhana Shakir.)

I’ve been campaigning for atheism for about 20 years now, and I have a terrible confession to make. In the beginning, I had this naive optimism that leaving religion behind would make people better people — maybe not perfect, but it would set them on the right path to reasonable lives. Obviously, I’ve been increasingly disillusioned, as it has become clear that many atheists are, well, jerks. There’s nothing about atheism that is sufficient to make a good person: atheism is not enough. But also, I would add that there’s nothing about secularism that is sufficient to make a good state. Secularism is not enough; we also have to select good secular values.

But still, secularism is necessary. It’s the floor of basic decency, it’s the start, and not the be-all and end-all.

Religion is, and always has been a tool for authoritarianism. By its very nature it imposes a vision of our interactions with each other and the world that is hierarchical and ordered and linear — the orders come from above. You will obey them. And further, the concept of faith is antithetical to transparency — you cannot question those orders, because there is no path for verification. You are expected to trust but not verify, and accept without reason.

Secularism is the rejection of the validity of divine authority as a source of any kind of values: moral, material, political, social, or intellectual. Truth and justice are not meted out by a singular authoritative source, filtered through the interpretations of priests and religious leaders, but are instead derived from we, the people, and anchored in reality by a pattern of continuous assessment against measurable real world effects: not, “how does a god feel about this decision?” but “does this decision improve human welfare?”

Secularists are often told that without a central authority in a god or gods, we lack a source of an objective morality. And I would agree with that — we don’t. I’d go further, and say that believing in divine source of truth and justice doesn’t mean it exists, so even the believers lack a source of objective morality as well. Instead, all values are personal and subjective; you can choose to believe whatever you like, and adding “in the name of God” to a belief does not make it any more valid.

This all sounds rather free-wheeling, and it is: you can have a secular tyranny or a secular democracy. In and of itself, secularism doesn’t imply a particular form of government or relationship between citizens, it only knocks away a prop that supports an authoritarian form of government. But it also says that values have empirical consequences.

As a scientist, I am of course entirely comfortable with the idea of empiricism; it’s a good thing to progress by trial and error. As an evolutionary biologist, I also recognize a metric for “progress”: does a behavior increase the viability of individuals and of a species? It’s actually rather cut and dried: we should promote values that increase the stability and success of individuals and populations, because the alternative is extinction.

And I think I can safely say that any set of values that limits the potential of half the population, that reduces the health and happiness of one gender, or race, or class, is empirically detrimental to the long-term viability of the whole. I can definitely say that there is no objective reason one could argue that being born a woman, or black, or poor should make any individual a lesser contributor to our fully shared humanity.

In short, one significant effect of secularism is that it means we have the freedom to make choices, and more: if we care about the success of individuals and of our society, it means we have an obligation to make choices that benefit humanity, all of humanity, and not just the privileged few. Secularism is about the responsibility to better ourselves, instead of simply accepting the status quo. Ultimately, secularism must be revolutionary and progressive, because it encourages change and improvement — it is an empirical model of governance that demands responsiveness to the real world consequences of our actions.

And that’s really why I am here at all. As a white middle-class American male, I am the recipient of a vast amount of privileged benefits. As an atheist and a secularist, though, I realize that I simply won the cosmic lottery — there is no objective source of my privilege, it’s not that I deserve all of my good fortune, and having a sense of fairness and justice — other good secular values — it is my choice and my obligation to advocate for greater equality of opportunity for all human beings.

Now the fun begins

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on the Defense of Marriage Act has the right wing in full meltdown mode. Ed is documenting the reaction, Salon has a roundup, and Futile Democracy has some charming tweets. I have a very favorite, though: it’s from someone calling themselves @FreedomWarrior.

Here’s the good news: Massive population losses will be suffered decade by decade in the Gay States! pic.twitter.com/UORPWvUbCi

So, how does that work?

If DOMA had been upheld, would we right now be compelling gay people to go out and have children?

Now that DOMA has been ruled unconstitutional, are all the straight people in the “Gay States” deciding to not have children?

I’m definitely done with having children, but if I were of that age, I’d be more likely to want to bring children into a world where equality and justice were a little more common. And when we did have children, it was never as a matter of asserting our sexuality (or worse, my masculinity) — it was because we liked children and family. Do these people understand that family is not about sex?

I’m a little worried that maybe they don’t. Which would be creepy.

It’s a species-wide problem!

The results of a world-wide analysis of violence against women reveals that it’s common, it’s widespread, and it’s serious.

Three in ten women worldwide have been punched, shoved, dragged, threatened with weapons, raped, or subjected to other violence from a current or former partner. Close to one in ten have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner. Of women who are murdered, more than one in three were killed by an intimate partner.

These grim statistics come from the first global, systematic estimates of violence against women. Linked papers published today in The Lancet and Science assess, respectively, how often people are killed by their partners and how many women experience violence from them. And an associated report and guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, along with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council in Pretoria, estimates how often women suffer sexual violence from someone other than a partner, gauge the impact of partner and non-partner violence on women’s health and advise health-care providers on how to support the victims.

We’re thinking beings, and we’re aware of the problem (although a lot of people are in denial) — we ought to be able to change this behavior. And speaking as a biologist, it would be an interesting change, shifting the intra-specific social dynamics in powerful ways that would affect the course of our future evolution. Come on, who doesn’t want to do an experiment on our own species? Especially one that reduces fear and increases security?

(via August Berkshire)

God vs. Science, again

I’m flying off to Ireland tomorrow to pay rapt attention to the speakers at Empowering Women Through Secularism — you know that four FtB bloggers will be speaking there, right? Me, Taslima, Maryam, and Ophelia. I’ll be the one with the beard.

Now what could I possibly have to say? I’ve got it easy. I’ll be on the Secular Values in Society panel with Leonie Hilliard, Nina Sankari, and Farhana Shakir, and I’ll just point out that religion oppresses both men and women, and that secular values benefit everyone…but that of course, we see patriarchal values distorting the science and evidence in ways that particularly harm women, since much of their nonsense is contrived to regulate reproduction and sex in ways that benefit men.

Oh, dang, wait: David Grimes just said the same thing in The Irish Times.

There have been few debates on social issues in Ireland in which religion did not loom large; whether the topic has been contraception, homosexuality or divorce, theologically derived opinions have often been centre stage. Even now, in debates about abortion and same-sex marriage, these views are still heard. The threatening behaviour of the past may be gone, but it has been replaced by the more insidious ploy of misrepresenting research to lend credibility to discriminatory views.

The abortion debate provides numerous examples of such contrivances. In this paper recently, Breda O’Brien brandished a study by Ferguson et al (2013) and claimed abortion damages women. However, her championing of this study is textbook cherry-picking that fails to withstand even a cursory examination.

I hope Grimes will be at the conference, at least.

You mean this stuff helps?

Sue Black recounts her experiences as a woman in computer science.

Carrying out research for a PhD in computer science and going to academic conferences I was very much in a minority as a woman. The ratio was around 2:8 female to male, or lower, and sometimes this made things a bit uncomfortable. I remember going to one conference where, after being told by my supervisor that I needed to network at conferences, I approached a couple of guys during a break to discuss the previous session. I plucked up courage and said something friendly about the last speaker to start a conversation with them. They looked me up and down, and then started talking to each other as if I hadn’t said anything. I stood there feeling really silly, realized after about thirty seconds that they were going to continue to ignore me, and then walked away feeling absolutely mortified.

I had a few other encounters similar to this, and of course some good ones too, but I never felt completely at ease in that type of situation. That was until I went to a conference in Brussels for women in science. This time there were about one hundred women and two men. As I walked into the conference room and stood looking around wondering where to go and sit, a woman came over and started talking to me. We had a great chat and joined a conversation with some other women, probably about why we were at the conference and what we hoped to get out of it. What an amazing difference. I met some truly amazing, inspiring and supportive women. That conference changed my life.

I had thought that it was me, and my lack of social skills, that was preventing me from enjoying academic life to the full. Now I realized that wasn’t the case.

Read the whole thing. You know that stuff about women doing it in high heels and backwards? Try getting a Ph.D. as a single parent with 3, later 4, kids.

Remembering the UpStairs Lounge

Over at The Friendly Atheist, Terry Firma points out that today is the 40th anniversary of one of the deadliest hate crimes in recent U.S. history: the deliberate arson of the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans.

Just before 8:00p, the doorbell rang insistently. To answer it, you had to unlock a steel door that opened onto a flight of stairs leading down to the ground floor. Bartender Buddy Rasmussen, expecting a taxi driver, asked his friend Luther Boggs to let the man in. Perhaps Boggs, after he pulled the door open, had just enough time to smell the Ronsonol lighter fluid that the attacker of the UpStairs Lounge had sprayed on the steps. In the next instant, he found himself in unimaginable pain as the fireball exploded, pushing upward and into the bar.
The ensuing 15 minutes were the most horrific that any of the 65 or so customers had ever endured — full of flames, smoke, panic, breaking glass, and screams.

It was a horrible murderous act, with 32 people dead, and Terry’s post is really hard to read. Not only for the description of the suffering (with a grotesque photo of the body of Metropolitan Community Church pastor Bill Larson, be warned) but also for the description of the reaction of locals after the event.

Tough reading, but do it anyway if you can. The victims at the UpStairs Lounge have been all but forgotten. They fucking well deserve better, and so do we.

Misandry In Teh Animule Kingdom!!!!7!

Misandry, polyandry, whatever. I know it’s some kind of -andry. Hordeling Ron Sullivan and her partner in crime Joe Eaton have been spending a lot of time in the San Joaquin Valley of late, and Joe has a new post up on Ron’s blog riffing on their recent frequent sightings of Swainson’s hawks. It turns out that the hawks engage in behavior that completely undermines the traditional institution of marriage as Gahd intended:

Polyandry, it seems, is not that unusual in buteos and related hawks. It’s more or less standard for the Galapagos hawk, which genetic studies indicate is the Swainson’s closest relative. (The i’o or Hawai’ian hawk is also near kin. Swainson’s is typically a long-distance migrant, with most of the population traveling from the North American plains to the Argentine pampas every year. You can see how accidental colonization of remote islands might happen.) Polyandrous mating groups also occur in the more distantly related Harris’s hawk. The advantage? Male raptors often provide prey for their incubating mates and nestlings. A female with two male providers would have a better chance of successfully fledging her brood.

The MRAs were right all along: it’s all about the child support. How dare those ladyhawks go against biology? Don’t they understand about gathering berries?

Anyway, it’s a good post by a longtime favorite natural history writer. And the post title proves that Parentheses Matter.

Speaking of people writing good stuff at the Coyot.es Network, we’ve added two new blogs over there: “InyoOwnWay” by Owens Valley biologist Mike Prather and “Miracle or Mirage?” by renewable energy maven Patrick Donnelly-Shores. We’ve got another new addition pending once she answers her email.