On the bright side, we have another reason to be best buddies with Saudi Arabia

OK, I’ve had enough. A resolution before the UN to condemn executions for apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and consensual same-sex relations has passed, but Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates voted against it.

Oh. And one more. The United States voted against it, too, all for allowing countries to continue to execute people for being an atheist or a gay person. The United States. My country.

Can I have myself frozen and thawed out a century, or maybe a thousand years from now, when this madness is over?

(Damn it, no. That cryogenics stuff doesn’t work. We don’t have time machines, either. Technology, you have failed me again!)

WTF did I just read?

Wanna read some classic science fiction from 1958? No you don’t. You will decide that all men are evil; you won’t believe that this monstrosity got written at all, and that it was then actually published. It’s The Queen Bee, by Randall Garrett. The basic story: spaceship with a handful of men and women gets stranded on an earth-like, habitable planet. The men of the crew immediately announce that their destiny is to populate the world, with the assistance, willing or not, of the women. There’s a law, Brytell’s Law, that says they must. They need the women, because they’ll have no purpose in life if they can’t procreate. And they have rules about how to maximize genetic diversity that require pairing off in strict rotation.

You can tell this is some kind of perverse male fantasy.

But there’s a problem: one of the women refuses to be used this way! She’s also useless (she’s a clothing designer, and not useful clothes, but frilly flimsy women’s clothing), and violent in her resistance. So the men come up with a solution. I read it.

Damn. It’s a pdf. I can’t set it on fire, and I can’t afford to throw my computer in a dumpster with a bucket of napalm and set it on fire. Maybe it would make more sense to gather up all the men and throw them in that dumpster with the napalm, me included. Gah. Unclean.

Thanks, Gary Farber. You’ve destroyed the last trace of hope I have in humanity. Although I suppose Randall Garrett is more to blame.

A brilliant comparison to counter homophobes

A gay Muslim man is going through conversion therapy, when an idea comes to him.

“After deciding against suicide, I decided to change my sexual orientation,” says Khaled. “I started reading articles on the internet, successful stories about people who managed to turn straight. I realized that I needed a professional help, so I started my journey with therapy, psychiatrists, and physiologists. Horrible experience in the Arab world.” Mainly because their general approach seemed to be less “pray the gay away” and more “shame the gay away.” Khaled explains: “Most of them make you feel guilty, and that you are not a good Muslim … Some of them treated me in a bad way, as if I’m disgusting, though some of them felt sorry for me … The last one was horrible. He used to give me exercises of watching naked women and [masturbating]. It was awful, I used to cry every time I did that.”

Finally, after all the humiliation, Khaled had an epiphany. “At the end, and in the last session with him, I asked him ‘What is the fruit you hate the most, and can’t eat?’ He said ‘banana.’ I asked him … ‘What is the one you love the most?’ He said ‘mango.’ I said to him, ‘If you can change, and love bananas and hate mango in three months, I will continue with the sessions.’ Of course, he answered that it is impossible, and that’s when I became totally OK with my sexuality … God is fair, he won’t punish me for something I didn’t choose. Being gay is part of my life.”

It’s a great story, but there’s one unfortunate thing about it. I asked myself, how can you possibly hate bananas? And then I asked myself, how can you hate mangos? And then I realized that I must be bi.

Half the experiment is done!

One common refrain among MRAs and such trash is that it’s the women’s fault: they’re using men, they’re money-grubbing gold-diggers, they tease and never put out. So let’s test that: in the absence of manipulative women, are men angels of probity and restraint? We can test this: use a proxy for a woman, one that doesn’t lie, has no ambitions, isn’t going to abuse men. It’s been done. A female sex robot at a tech fair was put on display, and the results were not nice.

Santos complained, ‘The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.’

‘People can be bad. Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.’

Strike one against men.

I did say that only half the experiment has been done, though. We need a complementary test in which a male sex doll is put into the hands of women convention attendees. The result of that experiment will tell us whether it’s just us men who suck, or whether it’s the whole human species that needs to be puked on. I have an open mind, it could go either way.

Early warning signs of bad behavior: take note and act

You may have heard that the founder of AintItCoolNews, Harry Knowles, is being accused of sexual harassment. His little entertainment empire is collapsing fast in the wake of some serious problems.

Melissa Kaercher was acquainted with him and has been attending his events for years, and she has written up an honest analysis of Knowles’ problems. It’s clear how the pattern evolved. Start with a few crude jokes — we’ve all been there. Graduate to gross-out humor. Notice that sexual abuse gets the strongest response. From there, you’re off to the races, and start thinking you can do whatever you want to people. It’s funny!

We have all been there, at least at the early stages. But most of us learn early that we can repel people easily with such behavior, and we tone it down and work to extinguish it. But if you’re famous and popular, if you have rewards, like Knowles’ special, private events, people are less likely to speak out in the early stages, and you’ll also find that other privileged, nasty people gravitate towards you — it’s asshole magnetism. And before you know it, you’re living in a little clique where the decent people try to look the other way, while the similarly bad people are egging you on, until you cross a line that no one can ignore anymore.

It’s tough to handle. People tend not to respond well to criticism. If you do catch them early, and tell someone that, for instance, you don’t appreciate their rape joke, you know what’ll happen: “It was just one little joke! I’m a good guy! Why are you so tight-assed?”, and it all comes back on you. And they don’t invite you to their super-cool party.

But it needs to be done. Don’t let your friends slide down that easy, slick path to abusiveness. Snip it off early.

“The solution is seen as morally repugnant by some people”

Speaking of people we don’t need to hear from ever again…James Damore was interviewed by Thomas Smith, and Damore was an example of posturing aggrieved entitlement. Smith kept pointing out that there are real problems of discrimination, and that there are a number of strategies that companies like Google are trying to use to resolve them, and Damore kept objecting to them either by denying the problems, or by suggesting that these programs should be rejected because they are resented by “some people”, like Libertarians who see them as unfair to white men. If a deplorable doesn’t like something, that’s sufficient to reject it. Damore keeps bring up vague generalities and blanket condemnations of sociology, which he clearly doesn’t understand.

“Sensitivity training is unnecessary!”, the pronouncement of insensitive people everywhere.

Smith keeps his feet to the fire throughout, demanding evidence and asking him to back up assertions. It was annoyingly frustrating because he couldn’t — he just dodges, brings up something irrelevant, and wanders off topic, or piles on more claims that need to be debunked. And near the end, Smith tries to get Damore to defend his claim that “men are more logical than women”, and all Damore can muster is a weird circular argument to simultaneously defend the fact that more men are Libertarian than women, and that Libertarianism is more logical, by pointing out that therefore we’d expect more men would be Libertarian.

I never need to hear from Damore ever again.

Building a sex is harder than most people imagine

Now will you believe me? I keep saying that sex and sex determination are far more complex than just whether you have the right chromosomes or the right hormones or the right gonads, and now here’s a lovely diagram that illustrates some of the steps in sex determination.

The biology is set up to favor driving an individual to one side or the other, but there are so many detours that can be taken en route that it is ridiculous to ignore all the people who end up following a more unique path.

Dunning-Krueger and evolutionary biology fandom

A graphic designer, Katherine Young, redesigned a girls’ magazine cover to highlight the implicit assumptions we all tend to make about women:

I ran across this on Facebook, where someone posted it approvingly, and I agree — why shouldn’t girls and boys be reinforced for a wide range of abilities? You can be pretty, or you can be smart, or you can be strong, or you can be brave, or you can be sensitive…or you can be all of those things at once, even, although then I’ll hate you for being so much better than me. No! That’s not it! We should give everyone opportunities to be all those things, and others as well, and avoid channeling them down a single acceptable path.

But then someone commented on that post, and it was fascinating. I’m used to criticizing creationist for appallingly bad reasoning abilities and misuse of scientific theories, but here’s a magnificent example of someone babbling pretentiously in favor of some narrow scientific concepts, and applying them as a justification for his gender biases. It’s kind of horrifying. It’s also painfully common.

So this person (all names removed to protect the guilty) asks for a clarification. He doesn’t get one, but that doesn’t matter, he’s on a roll.

it seems to me that you are suggesting that is immoral or at least somehow improper for females to be evaluated using physical characteristics that highlight fertility such as facial symmetry, skin texture, hip to waist ratio, etc. and that instead they should be judged on mental abilities that enable them to have a career. is my understanding of your intent correct?

The implication being that the females should be judged on the basis of their potential fertility, where fertility is the most desired quality, but things like intelligence make no significant contribution to their maternal abilities.

I wonder if he’d make the same demands on boys: we should be evaluating them on symmetry, penis length, sperm count, and combat ability, because those contribute to men’s purpose in life, which is to crush their competitors and impregnate females. I didn’t ask, because I was afraid that he’d say yes, and also think those are good things.

Because of course what he claims to be driving his ideas is an objective position on evolution.

given the great demands placed on the female body during homo sapiens’ lengthy gestation and lactation period, would it be wrong for me to suggest that encouraging males to select mates based on characteristics that enable the female to generate wealth independent of a mate rather than on their ability to bear children may have long term negative effects on the species. or is that just the crazy in me talking?

Oh, man. A couple of problems here: evolution doesn’t care what’s “good” for the species. It’s all about short term responses for individuals and their progeny, and different strategies work for different individuals. One size fits all is not a smart plan for a diverse population.

Humans have complex lives and a difficult maturation process. It also wouldn’t benefit us if females were reduced to a shapely, symmetrical uterus perched atop some wide, sexually attractive hips. Maybe benevolent evolution should be shaping men to be uxorious and devoted stay-at-home fathers so their mates can focus on that beauty thing, for the good of the species?

I should also point out that this idea that we men, from our limited perspective, can actually assess what traits are “good for the species” has an unpleasant history. That’s the basis of eugenics, the idea that we can control the complex genetic interactions involved in our development, physiology, and behavior, and that we can predict what traits will be directly beneficial for future generations. We can’t. That we can’t doesn’t stop people from over-simplifying the problem and pretending that they know exactly what’s best for everyone else.

It’s pointed out to him that he’s making the fallacy of composition. Does he care? Of course not! Because evolution. And because he cares about these girls <shudder>.

that may be true but i would caution throwing the baby out with the bath water and ignoring the evolutionary reasons behind our obsession with beauty, not just because of the long term impact on the species as a whole, but also because of the individual impact on the mental well being of young girls

Again with the “species as a whole” argument! How does he know what’s good for the species as a whole? For example, right now we’re seeing a long term pattern of decline in sperm counts in many human populations. Would he favor artificial selection for fecundity in boys for the “good of the species”?

He also seems to think he knows best what is good for the mental well being of young girls, and that is to focus on beauty and appearance and fashion. Some girls will be happy with that, and of course they can follow that course…but others are not. What are we to do with them, for the good of their mental health? Tell them to shape up and memorize cosmetics brands, so they’ll be happy and well-adjusted? I never faced that specific pressure, but I was told as a kid by my peers and teachers that I, as a boy, was supposed to like sports, and should turn out for baseball and football. I was judged because I wasn’t good at sports (maybe some of you experienced the same phenomenon), and it wasn’t good for my emotional well-being. I liked to read books instead. All I needed in my life was some jerk trying to explain to me that my interests in science were not good for the species, and that they had an evolutionary justification for why I needed to butt heads with the big boys on a grassy field.

But now we get into the religious argument. This is an example of uninformed religious dogmatism.

it seems to me that you always turn the natural order of things upside down! sometimes i am not sure if you are serious or just playing with me :)

not everyone can be smart and win the google science fair. suggesting to young girls that they have to be smart in order to have a meaningful and successful life might not be the best way to go.

natural order of things is a dead give-away. How do you know? Why is it that the natural order of things is always a matter of a guy informing girls that they are supposed to make themselves attractive to him?

And that last line…has he considered that suggesting to young girls that they have to be pretty in order to have a meaningful and successful life might not be the best way to go? Probably not.

One last quote…

when i was young and naive, the vanity of women frustrated me. especially because i was a slob, i could not understand their obssession with adorning themselves with all kinds of paints and bows and ribbons and shiny trinkets, but now that the passions of youth that blind objective contemplation have been reduced a few dimly glowing embers buried in a pile of ashes, i understand there are evolutionary forces behind these obssessions and i can accept them as the natural order of things.

The hypocrisy…he was a slob, but he knows best what women should do. He thinks women as a whole are vain. But now that he has found Jesus evolution, he understands the reason why women should be working so hard to make themselves beautiful — it’s to enhance his ability to reproduce, and theirs, too, because the only way a woman can improve their fitness is with a good hip-to-waist ratio, while he can get away with being a pompous slob.

I am not fooled at all. This is a man using poorly understood sciencey buzzwords to justify his culturally supported biases.

Why I am a biologist rather than a physicist

I’ve never written my name in the snow. I’ve never participated in a competition to see how far I can urinate. These are apparently serious deficits in my experiences that affected my ability to visualize three-dimensional trajectories, according to some sad academics.

But the academics argued that ‘playful urination practices – from seeing how high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics’.

Oh, no! I never even heard of “Peeball” before! But according to these wankers, it’s an important life lesson in physics.

This self-directed, hands-on, intrinsically (and sometimes extrinsically, and socially) rewarding activity must have a huge potential contribution to learning, resulting in a deep, embodied, material knowledge of projectile motion that’s simply not accessible to girls.

Where did this nonsense come from? It was published in the Daily Mail, so I felt a momentary relief — that rag is all garbage, so it’s not surprising that they gave it some credit. But where did they get it? The Times Educational Supplement. Christ.

The authors argue that there is a serious problem here. I agree.

The gender gap in physics, and other related subjects including engineering, has long been a cause for concern. This has led to both educational innovations as well as policy interventions such as Change The Equation, Sage and Wise. However, there is little evidence that such campaigns have much effect. For example, Wise was set up in the UK in 1984. In that time, the fraction of female students studying physics in the final two years of school has hovered around 20 per cent.

Therefore we have to ask: why don’t young women perform as well in physics?

Then they acknowledge that there are a whole lot of social forces biasing women’s opportunities and choices. Also true.

Of course, there are likely to be a number of complex, interacting reasons, some of which can be changed more easily than others. The majority of physicists are male, and this reinforces a masculine culture. Historically, logical and mathematical ways of thinking have long been associated with masculinity (although all three of us would argue that such modes of thinking are not particularly masculine or feminine). Most physics teachers are male, so there aren’t many female role models for physics students.

There may also be cultural effects outside the discipline – parents may offer boys more encouragement to study physics as it leads to later study of, for example, engineering (another field that struggles to recruit and retain women).

Knowing all that, they then hare off after this wacky idea that boys learn physics by peeing up to five times a day, so by 14, boys have had the opportunity to play with projectile motion around 10,000 times. Good god. They haven’t done any serious analysis; they watched some youtube videos of people peeing in the snow, they heard a few anecdotes about pissing contests. They did no experiments. They did not propose any tests of their hypothesis. They don’t even suggest possible controls. They make a few jokes about peeing. And they get that published.

There are probably a few people who will take this bullshit seriously, because we know one thing for sure: there are guys who will seize upon any biological basis for their supposed superiority.

I had no idea dresses were encoded in our DNA

Well, your DNA, ladies. Not mine. I have manly DNA that makes me incapable of wearing a skirt.

This fellow, Nigel Rowe, yanked his kid out of school and is planning to sue the school for discrimination…because they allowed another little boy to attend classes wearing a dress. They are just outraged! This is unnatural! It confuses their child, because mommy and daddy say boys can’t wear dresses, but there he is, acting as if it is perfectly reasonable to flaunt how wrong mommy and daddy are!

His reasons are fatuous.

There’s a distinct difference between male and female, not just in what you wear but also within our DNA, the way that we are as boys and the way that we are as girls.

We feel that there’s a political agenda that’s driving and pushing this. Remember we’re talking children that are six years of age.

A six-year-old is not really able to, does not have the mental capacity to work out those kinds of things. It’s such a young age and we’re concerned about that.

We can distinguish biological sex in a number of ways: you can look at the chromosomes, for Barr bodies, for hormones, at anatomy. These are usually, but not always, concordant. But as we look at phenomena like behavior, personality, sexual orientation, it’s not uncommon to find the situation to be far more complicated and for mismatches to arise. And when we look to cultural signifiers, like what clothes you wear or how you style your hair or even how one behaves in public, there is no DNA bias at all — those differences are entirely imposed by culture. To bring up DNA here is try and falsely imply a scientific justification for bigotry. It’s a lie to insist that molecules define your identity.

It’s also obnoxious to disrespect the autonomy and intelligence of six year olds. I remember my kids at six — and they weren’t stupid, unthinking little drones. But then, they weren’t fundamentalist Christians, either.

Yeah, he’s also lying when he claims his objections are driven by scientific evidence. They’re religious nuts.

As Christians, we believe that all people are loved by God. But the school’s behaviour has created a clash between our family’s rights and the imposition of this new ideology.

Allow me to remind you: the school is not imposing anything on their child. The school is allowing someone else’s child to reasonably express their identity, and the Rowes are accusing them of having a political agenda, as if being an intolerant Bible-walloping dorkbag is no agenda at all.