Do not put Gwyneth Paltrow in your vagina

I am not going to watch a single moment of Paltrow’s new show on Netflix, and you shouldn’t either. Boycott it. Cancel it. It’s a disgrace and it hasn’t even aired yet. It’s called The Goop Lab, and there is no science behind it at all, no lab, no research, just a bunch of rich people jumping on tired old bandwagons like energy healing or psychic mediums and using them as vehicles to sell crap to the gullible.

You can get a sufficient feel for the garbage being peddled from the trailer.

The last line there from Paltrow is We’re going to milk the shit out of it. Finally, some truth.

But another interpretation offers a clear description of Paltrow’s business model, which feeds into the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry. (That’s a lot of milk.) With the ever-elusive possibility of a better life, backed by her celebrity status and good genetics, Paltrow’s Goop hawks uber-expensive aspirational wellness products. That includes a $350 crazy straw, an $84 water bottle with a “positive energy” rock in it, and an $85 “Shaman Medicine Bag” with “magically charged stones.”

The business model is depressingly successful. Goop’s valuations in recent years have soared to $250 million, and the company has expanded into brick-and-mortar stores on multiple continents. The Netflix series is just the latest sign of Goop’s achievements.

I guess I won’t be seeing the next MCU movie if she’s in it, either. Thanks for the excuse!

Contrapoints and the test of endurance

A one hour and forty minute video! As always, Contrapoints is engaging, intelligent, and dynamic, but whoa, this one will take you while to sit through, and probably would have been more effective at half the length. She has a lot to say about “cancel culture” and the reign of terror.

I liked it and thought she made some good points, which I think means I now have another target painted on my back.

The Mansplaining Conference

I’m not making this up, that’s what they call it: “DESTINED TO BE THE MANSPLAINING EVENT OF THE CENTURY”, as if that’s a great selling point. Only women (but only biological women, they say) will be allowed to attend, all of the speakers are men, and the cost is $1,999. Did I mention that the speakers are people like Mike Cernovich and Stevan Molyneux and Andrew Dream Johnson, who I’ve never heard of before, but who calls himself the president of the Manosphere?

If that isn’t persuasive enough for you yet, the conference also promises to raise your femininity 500%, become the Ultimate Wife, and help you get pregnant and have unlimited babies!

Our speakers will teach you how to have as many babies as your heart desires with the time you have left and bounce back to amazing health and wellness without extreme diets or stress. The clock is ticking and your babies are soon to be kicking!

A sample of the kind of deep, poetic wisdom you will receive at this conference: “If you’re not strong, you’re weak.” Mind blown.

Well, ladies, have you signed up yet? If not, don’t worry, this is the kind of event designed to have your man sign you up to whip you into shape. Just sit back and let him make the decisions.

If you’re wondering what he’ll do during this woman-only event, don’t worry, there’s a parallel conference, The 21 Convention, 2nd Patriarch Edition, happening at the same time in the same hotel, with pretty much the same speaker list, for only $999 more. So yeah, $3000 for a weekend in which bloviating asses tell you what to do to live up to your man’s expectations, and then duck into the adjacent conference room to tell your man what to expect from you. It’s perfect.

Well? Let me know how many of you are going.

(By the way, that “men prefer debt free virgins without tattoos” is one of the slogans they use, and it’s more horrifying than it even sounds. “Debt free” refers specifically to college debt — so their kind of man prefers women who are uneducated and inexperienced and young and trainable.)

Man, I hope some newspaper somewhere ponies up the cash to send a secret journalist to this thing to report on the nonsense they’re going to peddle.

Love doesn’t always win in the end, as it turns out

I’m not at all involved in this ongoing meltdown of another organization, but wow, does this account of the chaos at Romance Writers of America sound familiar.

It’s interesting to watch a major organization collapse in real time. I’m not involved, thankfully, but seeing the fall of the Romance Writers of America has been something. Whether it truly does cease to be still remains to be seen—a lot of its members are not on social media, and probably have no idea what’s going on—but for the online writing community, it seems the RWA will come to an end, going the way of all dinosaurs.

But to those authors on Twitter who are aghast—AGHAST, I tell you—that there could racism and bigotry in the RWA, I have to ask: why is this news to you? Courtney Milan has been fighting for marginalized romance authors in the RWA for quite some time. What exactly do you think she’s been fighting against?

Yikes. That link has a comprehensive summary of the events, but in short: the woman who was chair of the ethics committee, Courtney Milan, complains about racism in some of the authors’ works, leading several people to file ethics complaints against her, and then everything blew up with a flurry of resignations, firings, retractions, total chaos. Even now further revelations about bias in the management of RWA are trickling out.

It’s rather obvious that bigotry was rife in the organization (as it is everywhere), and what’s driving much of the meltdown is that some peoples method for dealing with racism is to deny that it exists. Problem solved! I’ve seen the same thing happen with various atheist/skeptic groups, and I rarely see them outright ending, they’re more likely to reconstitute themselves. Unfortunately, it’s 50:50 whether they improve vs. ending up under the sway of the assholes.

A science writer who doesn’t understand the difference between binary and bimodal

Tom Chivers has dipped a tentative, timid toe into the arguments about trans issues to declare that of course biological sex exists, a statement I find utterly baffling. “Biological” sex? Is there some other kind? I look forward to hearing stories about abiological sex, or artificial sex, or machine sex. It’s very silly — next thing you know, the TERFs are going to start ranting about an equally silly term like “biological woman”, as if the non-biological women are running around made of plastic and aluminum. Uh-oh, I guess they already are. That’s another one I don’t get. Are they just sticking “biological” onto terms that they want to dignify with a sciencey label, contrary to what actual biologists say?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around “biological sex”. Is non-biological sex what you get when you stuff a Hitachi magic wand into a Fleshlight? Biology doesn’t have much to do with that.

Anyway, what triggered Timid Tom was a comment by a British politician, Jo Swinson (sorry, I’m American, I know nothing about politicians in the UK):

Swinson, on Radio 4’s Today programme, was asked by Justin Webb whether she believes that “biological sex exists”. She replied: “Not on a binary, from what I’ve read. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in the subject but I don’t think that things are as binary as are often presented.”

That’s about as coherent and sensible a response as you can make to a silly question. She’s not going to pretend to be an expert, but she translates an absurdity into something as close to reality as she can, and answers that. She is correct. Sex is not binary. It’s a complicated mess of a subject with all kinds of variations.

Tentative Tom disagrees. He waffles about with a comparison to Pluto? Which used to be a planet? But “planet” was redefined so it isn’t anymore? Which he uses to somehow make an argument that objects in space are either planets or not-planets, a true binary, as long as you use the Correct Definition™, and that the fact that some objects are ambiguous does not affect the fact that Jupiter really is a planet.

OK.

I don’t see how arguing that there are artificial definitions that partition a continuum of object sizes supports his claim of unambiguous definitive binary states, but this is apparently Tom being Tom.

Then he launches into a discuss of intersex individuals, conceding that there are human intermediates in sexual differentiation.

With sex, just as with the concepts of “planet” or “species”, there do exist ambiguous cases. The intermediate cases in human sex are usually known as “intersex” people. There are various ways in which one can be intersex: the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA)’s FAQ site mentions genital ambiguity, such as girls with very large clitorises or boys with very small penises, or scrotums that have divided to form labia-like structures; external genitals that appear female, but with male-typical anatomy inside; chromosomal abnormalities, such as mosaicism, when some cells are XX and others XY, or having three sex chromosomes such as XXY; or having standard male XY chromosomes but a body that is insensitive to the androgenic hormones such as testosterone, which tell the embryo to start becoming male.

You’re losing me, Tom. These are all people exhibiting variation in sex-related traits. Are you trying to argue that these do not demonstrate that sex is nonbinary? They seem to me to show a clear range in the phenomena.

But then he says something that makes all clear. He doesn’t understand the difference between bimodal and binary distributions! Something can exhibit a bimodal distribution yet not be binary, so telling me that a phenomenon is bimodal does not imply that it’s binary.

…that doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t exist “on a binary”. If you did a graph, plotting human beings by height, you will see two clear peaks on that graph — average male height and average female height. If you plot weight, it would be even clearer. Foot size, hip-to-waist ratio. There would be significant overlap between men and women, but there would be very clear differences.

That’s a really good example. You’ve probably seen that kind of curves plotted to illustrate the differences in height of the different sexes. The trick is that they usually segregate the data into two categories first, and then plot two curves. Oh, look: two peaks!

Except for one little problem. He says if you “plot human beings by height”, then you will see “two clear peaks.” Let’s try that, without first biasing the interpretation.

Ooops, without the color coding, that looks like a bit of a smear; maybe with the right statistical analysis, you could extract a bimodal distribution out of that, but it would be pretty much impossible to turn that into a binary distribution.

Other small problems with these data is that height varies in history and geographic location. The average height of men 150 years ago was equivalent to the average height of women today; South Asian men tend to be shorter than American women. Were all those workers in the industrial revolution women, as are the majority of people in South Asia? Belgians are significantly taller than the French…are they more manly?

This is not to claim that biological differences are non-existent — individual traits do vary significantly between sexes. Even height! This kind of growth curve is really interesting.

It’s almost as if exposure to differing hormone concentrations at puberty elicits a differing pattern of growth, an observation that isn’t at all surprising to all those biologists who will tell you that there is a spectrum of variation that tends to be biased by sex, but still insist that sex is not binary.

But you still wouldn’t argue that a solution to the terrible transgender bathroom problem is that all you have to do is put a stick across the restroom door 170cm from the floor with a sign that says “You must be shorter than this to enter”. That wouldn’t work at all. My wife would have to use the men’s room, and Tom Cruise would have to use the ladies’. So why is Tom Chivers using this argument?

I think Timorous Tom is well aware that this won’t work, so he unslings a fresh battery of “facts.”

And those are not really sexual characteristics. If you were to plot, say, volume of mammary tissue, or number of ovaries, or number of sperm cells produced, you would see a far, far clearer picture of two enormous spikes with almost no overlap at all. Sex is about as binary as any biological or natural classification gets. It’s certainly a lot more binary than planetary status, and we’re happy to teach kids that Mercury is a planet but Pluto isn’t. There is a twilight, but it’s tiny compared to the size of day and night.

Whoa. I think if you plotted the volume of mammary tissue it most definitely produce a non-binary distribution within women and within men, and there would be overlap. You wouldn’t see two enormous spikes, you’d see two rounded mounds, which would remind me of something, I can’t quite think what. Similarly, if you plotted sperm counts, there’d be a broad distribution, admittedly floored at near zero for many women and some men, so there’d be a strong, tall rod at 0 and a rounded hemisphere subsequently. But again, it’s a poor way to distinguish men and women. I can’t quite see the bathroom police cupping breasts or getting a sperm sample before allowing you to enter.

It also brings up another problem: there are so darned many traits with differential expression. Trembling Tom brings them up one at a time to try to make the case that everything is binary, and he’s failing at even that, but what about the combos? A person is short, has large breasts, a Y chromosome, and a sperm count of 0; man or woman? Another person is tall, is flat-chested, had a hysterectomy, and identifies as a woman; will you tell her no? We don’t just have a graded distribution, we have combinatorial variation.

Oh, and he also trots out that familiar excuse, that it’s a tiny minority. So what? You don’t get to ignore their existence, and they still wreck your imaginary binary distribution.

But wait, one more absurdity from poor Torn Tom.

Male suspects in domestic homicides outnumbered female ones by more than seven to one in England and Wales from 2016 to 2018. Men — male-bodied people — are simply much more violent than women, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

No one is pretending otherwise, it’s a disgraceful statistic. But why? That’s a real concern — is it something about masculine nature, or is it something about masculine roles in our society? Also, is it binary? Are all males violent, and all women passive victims? Tom — honest question here, I’m just trying to discern your sex — how often do you beat your wife? If the majority of men are not violent, doesn’t this make violence a poor criterion? We’re only going to allow you to use this public restroom if you present a copy of your arrest record for domestic violence.

It should also go without saying that transgender women are by far the victims of violence. I guess that makes them Biological Women™ by definition, then.

That a zygote is human does not imply that it is a person

Yeah, well, it’s Quillette. Steve Jacobs Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn’t Popular. He doesn’t understand why, even though this was the subject of his doctoral thesis, and his own obtuse inability to recognize that he was asking a bad and misleading question is his problem.

Let’s cut to his shocking result.

I reported that both a majority of pro-choice Americans (53%) and a majority of pro-life Americans (54%) would support a comprehensive policy compromise that provides entitlements to pregnant women, improves the adoption process for parents, permits abortion in extreme circumstances, and restricts elective abortion after the first trimester. However, members of the media were mostly interested in my finding that 96% of the 5,577 biologists who responded to me affirmed the view that a human life begins at fertilization.

It was the reporting of this view—that human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are biological humans—that created such a strong backlash.

It wasn’t a backlash. It was a reasonable response to a provocative and misleading question. I notice a significant omission in his list of “zygotes, embryos, and fetuses” as biological humans (what the heck is a non-biological human, by the way?): why doesn’t he mention gametes? If you ask a biologist whether sperm and ova can be classified as “biologically human”, he’d get the same answer: YES. The taxonomic status of gametes is a non-issue here in any discussion of abortion.

The person who brought this article to my attention was all wrapped up in this idea that a fertilized zygote is human, as if that somehow magically conferred a privileged, protected status on it; when I mention that HEK293 cells, a common line of cultured cells derived from human embryonic kidney, are also classified as “human”, it was remarkable how quickly his brain fritzed out and he refused to even consider that as relevant. If you’re going to try to borrow the authority of biologists to justify a position you’ve already made up in your mind to be absolutely true, though, you’ve got to at least listen to what a biologist actually says.

Instead, he presented this Quillette article to show that biologists agree with him.

Wrong. It’s a crude and biased study designed to elicit a specific answer to an ambiguous question. All it is is a survey, built around the premise that determining when “human life begins” will have some power to resolve the debate around abortion. It doesn’t. It’s enlightening to see the authors description of his protocol, though.

I led discussions between pro-choice and pro-life law students. Little progress was made because both sides were caught up with the factual question of when life begins.

And right there is the problem. That isn’t the truth. Anti-choice proponents bring up the question of when life begins as an obfuscating tactic — that’s why little progress was made. Talk to pro-choice people, and you won’t find them arguing that we need to find the magic moment when an embryo becomes “human”, the instant when abortion becomes unethical. The “question of when life begins” isn’t a sharp-edged factual question, and when someone pretends that it is, they’re just looking for a blunt instrument to shut down the conversation. That this author thinks this is a fair and important question exposes his anti-choice bias, which he’s going to propagate throughout his “study”. His entire conclusion is based on the ambiguity of the words he uses, interpreted to fit his preconceptions!

So his first quest is to find who the authorities are.

I surveyed thousands of Americans using Amazon’s MTurk service. I found that most Americans believe that the question of “when life begins” is an important aspect of the U.S. abortion debate (82%); that most believe Americans deserve to know when a human’s life begins in order to give informed consent to abortion procedures (76%); and that most Americans believe a human’s life is worthy of legal protection once it begins (93%). Respondents also were asked: “Which group is most qualified to answer the question, ‘When does a human’s life begin?’” They were presented with several options—biologists, philosophers, religious leaders, Supreme Court Justices and voters. Eighty percent selected biologists, and the majority explained that they chose biologists because they view them as objective experts in the study of life.

Nice to know I’m regarded (in a general sense) as an impartial expert. Not nice to realize that’s only so he can distort my opinion to fit his conclusion. So let’s look at his unsurprising results.

As the usable responses began to come in, I found that 5,337 biologists (96%) affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization, with 240 (4%) rejecting that view. The majority of the sample identified as liberal (89%), pro-choice (85%) and non-religious (63%). In the case of Americans who expressed party preference, the majority identified as Democrats (92%).

The 96% are correct in a limited and specific sense. This is a retrospective opinion. If you asked me when I came into existence as an individual, I’d probably say the same thing, that the earliest moment the unique genetic combination that led to me was generated at fertilization. That does not imply that the zygote was me — it was going to take months of development to produce baby me, and then it was going to take years of learning to produce a functioning human being. But not every zygote is going to develop and grow; not every zygote is viable; the entirety of human nature is not inserted into a single cell at the instant of fertilization. He is intentionally compressing the whole loaded complexity of a human life into a single cell, and that is not true. I’m a biologist, we’ve already established that I am the expert, so you have to believe me.

His entire argument relies on the fuzziness of the terms “human” and “life”. We use “human” as both a label for a genetic lineage and for a complex being with rights and a role in society, and Jacobs loves to intentionally flip-flop between those definitions. When I say a zygote is “human”, I’m saying something about its parentage, but not about its cognitive abilities or contribution to culture. He wants to pretend biologists are saying the latter when they’re actually saying the former.

The 4% who reject his assertion are interesting: I suspect that they’re the ones who saw the trap coming. And, oh, it was a trap.

After getting the general answer he wanted, the trap was sprung, and his questionnaire then mentions that the survey “relates to the controversial public debate surrounding abortion.” And then the 96% realized how they’d been had and reacted appropriately.

Unfortunately, that did not stop some academics from being angered by the very idea of being asked about the ontogenetic starting point of a human’s life. Some of the e-mails I received included notes such as:

  • “Is this a studied fund by Trump and ku klux klan?”
  • “Sure hope YOU aren’t a f^%$#ing christian!!”
  • “This is some stupid right to life thing…YUCK I believe in RIGHT TO CHOICE!!!!!!!”
  • “The actual purpose of this ‘survey’ became very clear. I will do my best to disseminate this info to make sure that none of my naïve colleagues fall into this trap.”
  • “Sorry this looks like its more a religious survey to be used to misinterpret by radicals to advertise about the beginning of life and not a survey about what faculty know about biology. Your advisor can contact me.”
  • “I did respond to and fill in the survey, but am concerned about the tenor of the questions. It seemed like a thinly-disguised effort to make biologists take a stand on issues that could be used to advocate for or against abortion.”
  • “The relevant biological issues are obvious and have nothing to do with when life begins. That is a nonsense position created by the antiabortion fanatics. You have accepted the premise of a fanatic group of lunatics. The relevant issues are the health cost carrying an embryo to term can impose on a woman’s body, the cost they impose on having future children, and the cost that raising a child imposes on a woman’s financial status.”

Some of those responses are clearly just pissed off people annoyed at the dishonesty of the survey. Others clearly get to the heart of the problem. “its more a religious survey to be used to misinterpret by radicals to advertise about the beginning of life and not a survey about what faculty know about biology”…exactly. “The relevant biological issues are obvious and have nothing to do with when life begins. That is a nonsense position created by the antiabortion fanatics. You have accepted the premise of a fanatic group of lunatics.” Yes! He willingly accepted the faulty premise of a derailing tactic used by anti-choice zealots, and designed a survey to reinforce the claim that their red herring is the most important question to be settled. It’s not.

He’s going to completely ignore the fact that a majority of his trusted authorites are pro-choice and that they can recognize the rhetorical games he’s playing to misinterpret their position to be in support of his implied claim that personhood is generated at the instant of fertilization. It’s a terrible, biased article and a bad study that’s only going to be appreciatd by propaganda outlets like The Daily Wire, The College Fix, Breitbart, One America News, and the Patriarchy Research Council — all sources that he brags about featuring his work. And now Quillette. Has he considered the idea that who finds his work useful is telling?

Also telling is that he flat out admits his preconceptions.

I have concluded that one of the biggest reasons the abortion debate can’t be bridged is mistrust. I think this is primarily due to the stakes being so high for both sides. One side sees abortion rights as critical to gender equality, while the other sees abortion as an epic human rights tragedy—as over a billion humans have died in abortions since the year 2000.

Meanwhile, uncountable trillions of human cells have been cut out and discarded in cancer surgeries. Every gall bladder operation destroys precious human cells. When you heedlessly stub your toe, you have personally murdered millions of human cells.

Try this. Rephrase his statement to read “over a billion people have died in abortions since the year 2000″. Does that sound true to you? That’s what he wants to imply, but if you ran that by the 5,577 biologists he surveyed, I promise you that the majority would say that that is false.

Arguments are closed, I’m not going to argue with anyone about trans rights

There’s a lot in this video about hypocrisy in the secular community that I can relate to. It’s a good summary of the recent Deep Rift, prompted by the way certain members of the Atheist Community of Austin rallied behind a vocal transphobe, ejected the more progressive members in their ranks, and then took over the organization. One of the more rational people who spoke out against that transphobe goes by the name Essence of Thought, and they’ve been targeted for all kinds of shenanigans.

One of the more outrageous events was when a person they had blocked started urging her followers to dun EoT with demands that they pay attention to her…and when they responded, immediately accused EoT of harassing her. I got attempts to drag me into that; I had quietly blocked several of the more vocal haters myself, and I suddenly was getting all kinds of messages from other people, saying “Why did you block X and Y? You should unblock them!”

No. Just no. When I block people on social media, it’s because of what they say to me, or what I’ve witnessed them saying to other people. That X and Y were nice to you doesn’t invalidate the behavior I’ve seen that makes them undesirable to me. Don’t order people to respond to the assholes they’ve cut out of their media to make the experience more pleasant; you don’t get to tell me how to manage my feed. You especially don’t give me instructions in order to enable unpleasant people to harass others.

I don’t know Rachel Oates. I haven’t watched her videos or followed her on social media. She may be intelligent and informative on many topics, and she may be perfectly pleasant to you, but her activity in this episode tells me I don’t want to get tangled up in her machinations, especially where they involve her support for ugly transphobic people. I’ve pre-emptively blocked her, too.

I suspect I will now receive all kinds of messages telling me how nice and smart she is, and how unfair I am to not listen to her side of the story. Don’t. I don’t care. There are millions of people out there who aren’t entangled in anti-trans bigotry, and I’d rather be friends with them. I’m going to take EoT’s side in this saga, and have seen enough evidence of the behavior of the other side that I’d rather not be associated with them further.

Trans rights are human rights. There’s no nuance necessary in that statement, and I don’t need to hear from people trying to nibble around the edges with “but…” or “except…” stories.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who wrote abortion laws had to know some biology?

Here we go again. In Ohio, Republicans are trying to pass a law requiring that ectopic pregnancies be surgically reimplanted into the uterus. This is not medically possible. An ectopic pregnancy is a crisis that requires surgical intervention, and this law would require that a doctor who tried to save a woman’s life would be charged with murder.

In Pennsylvania, they want to require a birth certificate be issued and a formal burial be carried out for any fertilized egg that fails to implant. Most failures to implant are not even noted by women or doctors — it’s just another menstrual period. This is another law that cannot practically be implemented, and is just another hurdle added to the trauma of spontaneous abortions, or additional expense for planned abortions.

I am getting the impression that regressive conservatives are desperately trying to exploit this moment of ascendance before a progressive rebound slaps them back into the teeming, hellish pit of hatred they come from.

I wouldn’t want to be a man this fragile

Look at him. He’s afraid of Mr Rogers.

Somebody needs to inform this guy that Marion Morrison, aka John Wayne, was a posturing draft-dodger, a cheerleader for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he said this in 1971:

With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

… I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

But then, that probably makes him even more attractive to the creatures at the Daily Wire.

I’m not as nice as Mr Rogers, but I’m not as dull and reactionary as John Wayne. I don’t believe in settling conflicts with guns, but I also think we have to resist fascism vigorously. Can I just be who I am, without someone telling me I have to conform to one of two different molds? Men are not all the same. Neither are women.