“Shameless” implies that there is something to be ashamed of

This story bugs me: it argues that Stormy Daniels is just like Donald Trump in shamelessness. I can agree that her tactics are interesting and she has a good chance of smacking Trump upside the head, but implicit in the story is the idea that she ought to be ashamed, and her refusal puts her in the same plane as Trump. So the story contrasts her with the respectable women who have accused the president of harassment.

Many of the women alleging that Trump victimized them (which Daniels, by the way, does not) have proceeded by insisting on their own respectability: They want nothing from him; they simply spoke up because they’d been harassed or assaulted by a presidential candidate, and they wanted to do the right thing. The Trump campaign’s response was to characterize his accusers as attention-hungry profit-seekers. In one case, he implied that she was too ugly to harass.

OK, but why shouldn’t they have insisted on their respectability? They did nothing wrong. The only thing that prevented them from being effective is the complicity of the media, who have been very willing to downplay women’s concerns. Those characterizations by the Trump campaign should have been a whole big story on their own, and should have brought him down. They weren’t, and they didn’t.

But Stormy Daniels is “different” than other women. She’s shameless.

Stormy Daniels is immune to these attacks. Just as Trump bragged about not paying a dime in taxes — “that makes me smart,” he said during one presidential debate — Daniels is open about her desire to profit. Why wouldn’t she? She says she has a story to sell, and she’s 100 percent open about her desire to sell it. She’s the only person in this story as shameless as the president himself. And the White House is reeling as a result.

It’s a truism at this point that Trump benefited from a tiresome double standard. The reality TV star entered an electoral landscape filled with intelligent and image-conscious suits who understood respectability as the sine qua non of political viability. Trump refused to be respectable. He embraced his image as a corny, narcissistic, overtanned procurer of women’s bodies, and twirled and winked at the mountain of crimes and improprieties he stood accused of. It worked: No single charge could stick for very long. Particularly — and this is the nub — because he didn’t seem to mind. For a scandal to stick to someone, they have to worry about it. Trump may talk endlessly about people “laughing” at the United States, but when it comes to his own image, he has the lifelong rich man’s imperviousness to the opinions of the poor. That has protected him from scandal. His narcissism only extends to those he sees as equals or superiors; everyone else is expendable.

Every point there is correct, but it’s just the bias that bothers me. Daniels is open and honest about her career as a sex worker, and she should be. She has nothing to be ashamed of — she hasn’t lied and swindled and trampled over others (I assume — I suppose she could be the Donald Trump of the porn industry, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest it). To claim that she is shameless implies that she has something to be ashamed of, which assumes that sex work is automatically disgraceful.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a corrupt liar who is doing his damnedest to wreck the country, and is engaged in shameful behavior — he is harming people, and harming the nation, which Daniels is not doing. This is not about shamelessness, it’s about honesty, and in that regard Daniels and Trump are completely different.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg has a new book, and he’s a man

He’s transitioning to be a man, and while he was working through that, he wrote a book, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror.

On the one hand, it’s very much a work of fiction. It is not a thinly veiled retelling of relationships and experiences I have had personally. And yet I also began thinking very seriously about my gender identity and the possibility of transition about halfway through writing it. And the title, the idea of a merry spinster — the idea of jolly, self-sufficient female solitude — that’s very dear to me. And in some very real ways, that’s no longer mine.

There’s a line in one of the stories in the book, Cast Your Bread Upon The Waters, where the main character – whose gender is never clarified – refers to their son, against whom they’ve been plotting murder, like this: “My son Johnnie was very beautiful, and I loved him.” It’s one of the first unmitigated statements they make about a person they very clearly loved but are trying to build a case against. Only after they’ve done the deed can they honestly say, I loved him. I don’t want to cheapen the story by saying, “Ah, yes, I too have released someone I love into the sea, it is a point-by-point allegory for transition.” But man. That merry spinster, that Toastified Mallory Ortberg — she was beautiful, and I loved her. And she is! And I do! And she is not gone, there has been no death, no act of violence, no act of disavowal or abnegation or dismissal. And yet she’s not herein the way that she was. Anyhow, it’s a good book, I think, and I’m glad we wrote it.

And still the same writer. It looks good!

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.