So, atheism is becoming a refuge for people who learned biology in kindergarten?

Some days I feel like I’ve spent one quarter of my life learning oversimplifications, and the remaining three quarters trying to encompass all the wonderful complexity out there. And then I have to deal with all the people who have turned the beginning stuff they learned in grade school into rigid dogma, rather than the first step in learning. I appreciate learning I’m not alone, like from this Stanford blog from a few years ago.

The simple scenario many of us learned in school is that two X chromosomes make someone female, and an X and a Y chromosome make someone male. These are simplistic ways of thinking about what is scientifically very complex. Anatomy, hormones, cells, and chromosomes (not to mention personal identity convictions) are actually not usually aligned with one binary classification.

The Nature feature collects research that has changed the way biologists understand sex. New technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that chromosomal sex is a process, not an assignation.

As quoted in the article, Eric Vilain, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at UCLA, explains that sex determination is a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity or amounts of molecules in the networks can sway the embryo towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes. “It has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it’s a balance.”

Two very nice words: process and balance. Those are so much more accurate than bang, your sexual identity was determined by a collision of two gametes in your Mom’s fallopian tubes, and don’t you argue with me. Or this: a fascinatingly perverse video from a guy who has been banned from playing the card game, Magic: The Gathering for harassment.

Just to explain the context a little bit: the banned player is quite irate, and has discovered a horrible thing that the makers of his favorite card game have done that is ruining the game. You only have to listen to the first 30 seconds of this excerpt, but you can continue if you enjoy listen to a growed man ranting about SJWs wrecking his fantasy game.

“Magic has adopted “they” as the preferred third-person-singular pronoun for a player, replacing “he or she”.”

This on the 25th anniversary of the world’s most popular card game is a fucking disgrace. Gender is real.

Then he goes on to whine about the low frequency of transgender people in the US, as if the number makes any difference, and is if the only possible reason to make this change is to satisfy transgender men and women (hint: there’s a larger spectrum of individuals who don’t identify by those pronouns). It’s a 12 minute video. All that’s in it is this guy complaining about how a card game company wasted all this effort making a grammatical change via one sentence in an internal document about some upcoming card releases, listed in a section titled “various nonfunctional changes”. The sad thing is that over 20,000 people have watched this performance.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’m going to pay more attention to the views of experts in reproductive and developmental biology, published in Nature and by Stanford, than the angry ravings of a bigoted game player who doesn’t like these new people sneaking into his gaming community. But what do I know? That whiny gamer has been invited to speak at an atheist convention in Milwaukee. Remember when atheism used to try to associate itself with science?

It’s International Richard Herring Explains to Clueless Men That 19 November is International Men’s Day Day

It’s International Women’s Day! Congratulations, ladies, on the one day a year we’ll acknowledge your existence, but you still aren’t getting a raise, and hey, why should we hire you anyway when you’re just going to get pregnant and go goof off with babies instead of doing your work?

To add further insult, the internet is going to be full of indignant stupid men whining about why women get a special day and they don’t, which means someone has to clean up the garbage. Richard Herring has volunteered to do the cleanup, and has begun his long day of informing dull plodding fools that there is also an International Men’s Day on 19 November. It will be simultaneously entertaining and infuriating.

He’s also using it as an opportunity to raise money for Refuge, a charity for women and children who are victims of domestic violence, so you could also donate to that.

How quickly a reputation can unravel

Lawrence Krauss has been cut off from the Richard Dawkins Foundation and Center for Inquiry, after years of being one of their most prominent featured speakers. Now he has also resigned from the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and has been put on paid leave from Arizona State University.

The university, in a statement issued late Tuesday, said it began a review of the professor’s conduct after it was contacted for the article.

“In an effort to avoid further disruption … as the university continues to gather facts about the allegations, Krauss has been placed on paid leave and is prohibited from being on campus for the duration of the review,” ASU said in a written statement.

Krauss is busy denying everything. It’s kind of shocking how rapidly his academic empire is crumbling around him, but then I have to think of the women who never had a chance to build a little academic province of their own, and I guess I can’t feel too bad about it.

He does still have one bulwark desperately making a last stand for him: Wikipedia.

…as of today, March 5, Krauss’ Wikipedia page has no mention of any recent developments – not the allegations themselves, not Krauss being barred from multiple college campuses, not several of his upcoming talks being canceled. If you look at the talk page, you can see several contributors deleting edits by other users that mention these things, and insisting that the Buzzfeed article is just “gossip” and that “Buzzfeed isn’t usually considered a reliable source”, and that this merits totally excluding any mention of it.

Note: as of today, the 7th, the Wikipedia article does now include a paragraph on the allegations — I guess since the article was touting his ASU position and his leadership of the Bulletin, and those are now no longer operational statements, that had to be amended.

That dismissal of Buzzfeed has become the routine defense of Krauss — and these clever, serious, objective skeptics don’t even seem to notice that they’re committing the genetic fallacy (also, skimming through the wiki talk page, they commit another fallacy: that because these accusations are serious, if they were true, he would have been arrested, therefore they don’t need to be reported. Who needs philosophy and logic when you’ve got the police to do your thinking for you?)

But Adam Lee has an excellent defense of Buzzfeed, so I’ll just let him continue.

While Buzzfeed does publish its share of silly clickbait, their investigative unit employs 20 journalists and engages in serious, important reporting. One of their reporters was a Pulitzer finalist in 2017; another won a Pulitzer prior to being hired there. Ironically, BuzzFeed’s own Wikipedia page has categories for “Notable stories” (significantly, including the sexual-misconduct accusations against Kevin Spacey) and “Awards and recognition”.

As for the journalists who wrote the Krauss story, one of them, Peter Aldhous, has reported for the journals Nature and Science and teaches investigative and policy reporting at UC Santa Cruz. The other reporter, Azeen Gorayshi, has written for the Guardian, New Scientist, Newsweek, and Wired, among others. The editor, Virginia Hughes, has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, National Geographic, and Slate.

If this doesn’t meet the definition of serious, noteworthy journalism, then no such thing exists. Clearly, the Guerrilla Skepticism group is employing their own biased and highly selective definition of “reliable source” in order to avoid mentioning stories that would cast their hero in an unfavorable light, even in a supposedly neutral and comprehensive encyclopedia article. (The State Press, a student-run newspaper at Arizona State University, has since published their own article about Krauss.)

Yeah, you actually have to read the news articles to assess them. I was also surprised, once upon a time — I thought Buzzfeed was synonymous with superficial clickbait. But then I discovered that they had really built up a substantial news group,
with people I knew who had excellent journalistic reputations, and they were really digging deep.

One of the things about Buzzfeed that may rub some people the wrong way is that they’ve run quite a few stories about the culture of sexual privilege and harassment in academia. It’s not so much that they’re a bad news organization as that they’re a very good news organization that isn’t afraid to challenge powerful, influential people.

You know, like we used to imagine journalists were supposed to do.

I should mention that Krauss does still have some other defenders. His scheduled speaking tour with Richard Dawkins in Australia and New Zealand is still on.

Oops. Spoke too soon.

Whoa, RDF/CFI says the right thing

For once.

I am truly surprised, actually.

Secular Women keep on working

This is a press release from Monette for an upcoming conference, Secular Women Work. They have a Kickstarter for donations.

Secular Woman and Minnesota Atheists are bringing back their activist training conference, and they’re using Kickstarter to make it possible. The Secular Women Work conference will be held in Minneapolis this August 24–26 and features accomplished activists Jessica Xiao, former program assistant at the American Humanist Association and current Prison Book Club Coordinator, and Greta Christina, writer and cofounder of Godless Perverts. Mandisa Thomas will be returning as well after another successful three years for Black Nonbelievers.

Come August, the conference will feature a full slate of exclusively women and genderqueer speakers. The original conference in 2015 highlighted the importance of “women’s work” in the secular movement. Secular Woman president Monette Richards explains, “The recent revelations that atheist figureheads and organizations knew and did nothing about Lawrence Krauss long before his recent #metoo reckoning demonstrate how far we still have to go as a movement in valuing the contributions of women. There’s no better time than now for another Secular Women Work.”

The conference has returned to Kickstarter to sell conference tickets and raise additional funding. The first Secular Women Work was the first atheist or skeptic conference to successfully crowdfund. “There’s a perception of waning interest in secular conferences. We think people are just looking for the right conference to take them to the next level in their activism. The Kickstarter lets us test our theory before committing resources”, said Minnesota Atheists incoming associate president Stephanie Zvan. The campaign launches today, and tickets will only be available through Kickstarter until it fully funds.

In addition to conference tickets, which will be transferable, the Kickstarter offers backer rewards such as t-shirts, custom SurlyRamics jewelry, and advertising space. Those who can’t attend but want to support the conference can buy and donate a scholarship to another activist. The campaign will end March 29.

The Secular Women Work conference will be heavy on skill-building and problem-solving workshops, with panels and speakers covering specialist topics. All workshop leaders, panelists, and speakers will be seasoned activists themselves. Additional speakers are expected to be announced during the Kickstarter campaign.

The conference will be held in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus. Conference organizer Chelsea du Fresne explained that the venue was an important factor in making the first conference special. “Not only is the space wonderful for getting to know other activists, but being surrounded by so much political accomplishment is inspiring. Today, more than ever, those reminders that we can make a difference really matter.”

The conference is a joint project of the Minnesota Atheists and Secular Woman.

It’s a good cause, and I plan to attend. See you there!

Well, that got icky fast

A doctor has lost his license to practice medicine after he was found guilty of fondling the breasts of patients during examinations. He was not, however, found guilty of pressing his penis against their legs because, as he himself argued, he was too fat to get that close to them. You might be wondering how that was determined. No. You’re not wondering that, because that’s kind of the last thing you want to know about this case. I didn’t want to know, either, but the article goes ahead and tells us.

Urological experts were hired by both the college and the doctor’s defence team to chemically induce erections in Kunynetz and then simulate patient examinations to determine if indeed his penis could be felt against a patient’s leg.

After conflicting results from the two experts and after consulting photographic evidence from one of the procedures, the discipline panel could only conclude “that the impossibility of contact between the doctor’s penis and a patient’s skin (through clothing) was not established.”

TMI! TMI! I don’t even understand why they needed to get to this level of detail, since he’d already been found guilty of sexual abuse and professional misconduct. Why should precisely determining which patch of skin touched which other patch of skin even matter, since the general violation of ethical conduct had already been determined?

Oh, well. The important thing is that he won’t be practicing medicine anymore, he has lost his appointment with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, he’s facing some massive fines, and he has still another court date at which he may be convicted of assault.

The Dora Milaje had an actual historical inspiration

It’s not exactly a pretty story, saturated as it is with slavery, colonialism and war, but it turns out that the Kingdom of Dahomey maintained an elite force of warrior women, the N’Nonmiton, in the 19th century. The comic book linked above tells their story, and these were definitely not put on for show — they were an active fighting force.

The Dahomey Warriors were known to be especially skillful, competitive, and brave. Their drills and military parades were always performed to dancing, music, and songs and their weapons were sometimes used as choreographic props. As expressed in their songs, their goal was to outshine men in every respect, and European travelers observed that they were better organized, swifter and much braver than male soldiers. As such, the King would send them to war as opposed to their male counterparts and European soldiers would also hesitate to kill them as they were often young women.

More details at the Smithsonian.

Poor James Damore — losing again

Some good news, at least: James Damore had charged that Google violated labor laws by firing him, claiming that he was merely providing useful internal criticism of Google’s procedures, and you can’t fire someone for that. His claim has been thrown out. It seems Google was very careful to clearly state its reasons for the firing, and it wasn’t because he was trying to improve their training methods: it was because he was bigoted and promoting discrimination. Oops.

The NLRB memo includes talking points that Google prepared and read over the phone to Damore when he was fired. “I want to make clear that our decision is based solely on the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men,” Google’s talking points stated. “I also want to be clear that this is not about you expressing yourself on political issues or having political views that are different than others at the company. Having a different political view is absolutely fine. Advancing gender stereotypes is not.”

Now Damore still pursues “a class action lawsuit in which he accuses Google of discriminating against its white, male, and conservative employees.” You might think that maybe that has a better chance of success, since he’s arguing that he’s opposing discrimination against men, but look at what Google said. They’re against “stereotypes about women versus men”. Those hurt men as well as women, so they were also careful to insulate themselves against the charge that they were favoring one sex over another.

A surprising development

A few days ago, I mentioned that Christian Ott, who lost his Caltech position for sexual harassment, had landed a new research position in Finland. We could argue endlessly about whether it’s appropriate for him to return to academia at all, whether there should be a path for rehabilitation, etc., etc., etc., but now it is all moot: the University of Turku has made a surprise announcement.

The University of Turku has decided to terminate the employment contract of Dr Christian Ott on 7 February 2018. Dr Ott’s fixed-term employment relationship of two years as a senior researcher was to start at the beginning of March.

​– I have considered the matter and decided that the employment of Dr Christian Ott to the University of Turku will be cancelled. I came to this conclusion after extensively hearing the science community, says Rector Kalervo Väänänen of the University of Turku.

Well alrighty then. Maybe something really is changing in the world of 2018. Maybe the powers-that-be are finally having to listen.

I hope Ott has some other skills for a backup career. I hear refrigeration repair has excellent job prospects, carpentry is always useful, and that coal mining is making a big comeback.

Quentin Tarentino, happy hero

Last weekend, Uma Thurman spoke out about Harvey Weinstein and his history of abuse — but she also criticized Quentin Tarentino. Thurman had been seriously injured in a car crash while making Kill Bill, thanks to Tarentino, and she also disclosed how Tarentino stood in to the movie to perform some degrading acts personally, spitting on and choking her. There were no accusations of sexual harassment against him, instead he just comes across as insensitive and crude (which one might guess from his movies, anyway). So now gives his side of the story, and proves that he’s insensitive and crude. Why is it these guys are always so painfully unaware of how awful they make themselves look?

The interview starts off poorly, with the reporter making this condescending remark.

I offered Tarantino the opportunity to clarify because at this moment, stories get written and then picked up across the globe, often getting twisted to suit convenient narratives in this #MeToo moment.

What “convenient narratives” are those? What “twisting” is going on? Gosh, all those #MeToo accounts sure are imaginary.

But then, everything he says confirms everything in Thurman’s account — he just adds this bizarre happy twist to all the unpleasant facts. So Thurman was injured in a crash, and Tarentino was the happy hero who found the video footage of the wreck.

She asked, could I get her the footage? I had to find it, 15 years later. We had to go through storage facilities, pulling out boxes. Shannon McIntosh found it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think we were going to be able to find it. It was clear and it showed the crash and the aftermath. I was very happy to get it to Uma.

Never mind that he was responsible for the incident — smile, everyone, he filmed it! He had an assistant search through storage facilities and found it! He was such a good guy to give her a movie of the scene he made her do that nearly killed her. If only he’d been able to explain all that to Maureen Dowd, then people wouldn’t be so mean to him.

Part of my job on the piece was to do an interview with Maureen Dowd, and back up Uma’s claims. And we never hooked up. Me and Dowd never hooked up. I read the article and basically it seemed like all the other guys lawyered up, so they weren’t even allowed to be named. And, through mostly Maureen Dowd’s prose, I ended up taking the hit and taking the heat.

And then there’s the incident. It’s clear that Thurman didn’t want to do the scene, she had objected multiple times, she wasn’t much of a driver, but hey, Tarentino checked out the road. It was going to be easy. This is a classic example of someone not listening to another person’s concerns and simply sailing right past them.

…I heard her trepidation. And despite that we had set up everything in this shot, I listened to it. What I did was, I drove down this road, this one lane little strip of road with foliage on either side, in Mexico. I drove down it, hoping against hope that it would be easy and safe enough for Uma to drive. So we’re going down the road and I’m looking at it, watching it and I thought, this is going to be okay. This is a straight shot. There are no weird dips, there were no gully kinds of things, no hidden S-curves. Nothing like that. It was just a straight shot.

Uma had a license. I knew she was a shaky driver, but she had a license. When I was all finished [driving], I was very happy, thinking, she can totally do this, it won’t be a problem. I go to Uma’s trailer. Her makeup person, Ilona Herman was there. Far from me being mad, livid and angry, I was all…smiley. I said, Oh, Uma, it’s just fine. You can totally do this. It’s just a straight line, that’s all it is. You get in the car at [point] number one, and drive to number two and you’re all good.

How can anyone possibly think Tarentino wasn’t listening? He was very happy! He was smiley! Therefore, her worries were nonexistent.

I came in there all happy telling her she could totally do it, it was a straight line, you will have no problem. Uma’s response was…”Okay.” Because she believed me. Because she trusted me. I told her it would be okay. I told her the road was a straight line. I told her it would be safe. And it wasn’t. I was wrong. I didn’t force her into the car. She got into it because she trusted me. And she believed me.

By this point, I was more than a little disgusted with how often Tarentino was telling us that he was fucking happy, as if it didn’t matter what her feelings were. Time to blame the reporter!

The thing about it is, the good things I did are in the Maureen Dowd article. However, they are de-emphasized to not make any impression.

Then there’s the tale about Tarentino deciding to stand in for Michael Madsen to spit in Thurman’s face. It was OK, because the scene required the spitting, and Tarentino didn’t trust Madsen to get it right, so he needed to step in and do it so they wouldn’t need as many takes. What a hero!

The shot was, Michael Madsen had snuff juice. And you see him spit out a stream of snuff juice. Cut to Uma’s face, on the ground and you see it hit her.
Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? One, I didn’t trust Michael Madsen because, I don’t know where the spit’s going to go, if Michael Madsen does it. I talked to Uma and I said, look. I’ve got to kind of commit to doing this to you. We even had a thing there, we were going to try and do it with a plunger and some water. But if you add snuff juice to water, it didn’t look right. It didn’t look like spit, when it hit her when we tried that. It needed to be that mix of saliva and the brown juice. So I asked Uma. I said, I think I need to do it. I’ll only do it twice, at the most, three times. But I can’t have you laying here, getting spit on, again and again and again, because somebody else is messing it up by missing. It is hard to spit on people, as it turns out.

Now that get me wondering — where did Tarentino acquire this amazing skill at spitting in people’s faces that Madsen lacked? Has he practiced it often? If people frequently mess up when they try to spit on people (and how does he know that?), why does it have to be a perfect spit for his movie? I think he was getting a little too in to this opportunity, which he wrote, to do something degrading to a woman on screen.

What about the choking scene? Apparently, he’s also an expert in strangling women for verisimilitude, and features his strangler’s hands in a couple of movies.

I was the one on the other end of the chain and we kind of only did it for the close ups. And we pulled it off. Now, that was her idea. Consequently, I realize…that is a real thing. When I did Inglourious Basterds, and I went to Diane [Kruger], and I said, look, I’ve got to strangle you. If it’s just a guy with his hands on your neck, not putting any kind of pressure and you’re just doing this wiggling death rattle, it looks like a normal movie strangulation. It looks movie-ish. But you’re not going to get the blood vessels bulging, or the eyes filling it with tears, and you’re not going to get the sense of panic that happens when your air is cut off. What I would like to do, with your permission, is just…commit to choking you, with my hands, in a closeup.

There’s this thing called acting, but Tarentino wants real panic and fear in the women in his movies, and he’s willing to put it there personally.

It’s also the case that he is the one writing these movies, insisting on the random violence and viciousness. He doesn’t get to excuse it by pointing to the printing on the page and saying that the choking and the murder and the spitting are in the script, therefore he’s got to do it personally.

This is one of those interviews where you like the subject less and less as it proceeds, because he is so oblivious to what he’s saying and his excuses are all so self-serving. And then I thought of the brutal misogyny inflicted on Jennifer Jason Leigh in the last Tarentino movie I saw, and realized that was literally the last Tarentino movie I will ever see.