Hamza Tzortzis’s reputation goes before him

Ophelia is hosting a wonderfully entertaining guest post on Hamza Tzortzis and the UCL segregation debacle. I know that guy; Tzortzis seems to show up somewhere every time I’m in Europe to peddle his peculiar brand of ignorance, and he’s invited me to debate him a couple of times now. The article will make clear why I’ve turned him down every time, even though it would have gotten me an expenses-paid trip to London. There are some things I just won’t do.

Sadly, it’s International Women’s Day

It’s that day when we’re supposed to celebrate the accomplishment’s of women. I say “sadly,” because unfortunately there are way too many people out there who would rather sneer at and diminish women’s status in the world.

Case in point: on twitter, I ran across this lovely tweet from one of those repugnant slymepitters.

On #IWD remembered the nearly 0 wimmin – Nobels in science, highbrow art, chess GMs, great standups, but 100s of pop-culture hos #ftbullies

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Yes. Let’s remember those women.

Let’s remember Lise Meitner, Hilde Mangold, Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell — who were all well-qualified (men won the prizes for work equivalent to what they did, instead) to win a Nobel but didn’t get one.

Rather than 0 women, perhaps we should remember Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer, who won Nobels in physics; Irène Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Ada E. Yonath in chemistry; Barbara McClintock, Carol W. Greider, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Gertrude B. Elion, Gerty Cori, Linda B. Buck, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Rosalyn Yalow, in physiology or medicine. Clearly women are not intrinsically incapable of scientific work at the highest levels. Of those whose work I’m familiar with in detail, I have to tell you that McClintock blows me away with the stunning brilliance of her abstract reasoning — I know of no other male scientist whose work is at all comparable (that of course is a matter of taste!)

The relatively lower frequency of women recieving Nobels is not something any man should take pride in; what it really indicates is that we’ve been shortchanging half the human population, depriving them of opportunities to excel. Wait — we’ve been doing worse than shortchanging women; we’ve been depriving all of humanity of the potential in those minds. This pattern of discrimination against women has hurt us all.

Let’s not forget also all the people, men and women alike, deprived of opportunities because of their race or class — deprived by the kind of endemic bigotry that would, for instance, denigrate an entire group of people as “pop-culture hos”. And it’s not just science — it was good of our petty MRA to remind us that we’ve also lost their contributions to art and theater and games.

That’s what I think of everytime some bigot crows about the absence of some group of people from some field of endeavor — it’s a reminder of all that we’ve lost to selfish stupidity.

Bora 1, Climate Denialist Kooks 0

This is really a thing of beauty: climate pseudoscientist Willis Eschenbach whines at the inadvertent comedy blog Watt’s Up With That that Bora Zivkovic has been moderating comments on his SciAm blog.

Eschenbach, who’s also a Mass Extinction denialist, objects to Bora’s having instituted some basic anti-troll measures at A Blog Around The Clock that relegate comments with certain field marks of the climate denialist loon to the spam bin. Says Bora, in a passage that apparently made Eschenbach’s cranial temperature spike like a Warmist hockey-stick graph:

If I write about a wonderful weekend mountain trek, and note I saw some flowers blooming earlier than they used to bloom years ago, then a comment denying climate change is trolling. I am a biologist, so I don’t write specifically about climate science as I do not feel I am expert enough for that. So, I am gradually teaching my spam filter to automatically send to spam any and every comment that contains the words “warmist”, “alarmist”, “Al Gore” or a link to Watts. A comment that contains any of those is, by definition, not posted in good faith. By definition, it does not provide additional information relevant to the post. By definition, it is off-topic. By definition, it contains erroneous information. By definition, it is ideologically motivated, thus not scientific. By definition, it is polarizing to the silent audience. It will go to spam as fast I can make it happen.

What Eschenbach doesn’t mention, and a basic point of Bora’s post on how trolls derail substantive conversation, is that climate denialism is just the most pernicious and prevalent of a number of kinds of pseudoscience that have afflicted some of the sites on SciAm of late:

I know that I used the example of Global Warming Denialism here the most – mainly because it is currently the most acute problem on our site – but the same goes for people harboring other anti-scientific ideas: creationists, anti-vaxxers, knee-jerk anti-GMO activists, and others.

This post is not about climate denial, it is about commenting and comment moderation. It is about the fact that eliminating trolls opens the commenting threads to more reasonable people who can actually provide constructive comments, thus starting the build-up of your own vigorous commenting community.

There are seven billion people on the planet, many of them potentially useful commenters on your site. Don’t scare them away by keeping a dozen trolls around – you can live without those, they are replaceable.

Eschenbach’s month-late response to Bora’s post is as pure and canonical a paean to the hallowed practice of JAQing off as I have seen. A sample:

I can only bow my head in awe. I mean, what better way is there to keep you from answering people from WUWT and other sites who might want answers to actual scientific questions, than not allowing them to speak at all?… See, Bora, the beauty of your plan is, you don’t even have to think about censorship once you do that. The computer does the hard work for you, rooting out and destroying evil thoughtcrimes coming from … from … well, from anyone associated with Watts Up With That, or with Steven McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit, or anyone that you might disagree with, or who is concerned about “alarmists”, you just put them on the list and Presto!

No more inconvenient questions!

I probably ought to feel sorry for Eschenbach: anyone who would proudly link to a piece like this alleged debunking of extinctions — as opposed to deleting it, salting the earth of the server on which it once resided, and denying under oath that you’d ever heard of the thing — is definitely more properly pitied than mocked. “No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause,” Eschenbach says. That’s some Time-Cube-level obliviousness.

But I can’t help snickering, and feeling slyly jealous that Bora was able to elicit a response like that just by mentioning idly that he’s keeping his own comment threads on topic despite a massive campaign by a few fanciers of metallic haberdashery to disrupt them. Well done, my friend. Well done.

Christian hypocrisy…no surprise at all

Here’s a sign of women’s progress: you can’t get fired by a Christian school for getting pregnant anymore. That’s against the law. Unfortunately, you can still be fired for fornicating, along with a few other things.

The way that Christian organizations try to get around the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which bars firing women for pregnancy, is to claim they’re not firing them for the pregnancy, but for the fornicating. San Diego Christian College went another step by making employees sign a pledge requiring employees to abstain from "abusive anger, malice, jealousy, lust, sexually immoral behavior including premarital sex, adultery, pornography and homosexuality, evil desires and prejudice based on race, sex or socioeconomic status." Also, drinking, which means that Jesus would not be able to teach at this college established in his name.

Which does make me wonder how the school would respond if some woman got pregnant via artificial insemination or worse, in vitro fertilization. Test case, anyone?

That doesn’t help Teri James, though. She got fired from SDCC for getting pregnant the old-fashioned way, via <gasp> fornicating with a man. Escape clause met! College has an out and can get rid of the wicked woman!

Except…in a fit of the stupids to which adherents of ridiculous religions are prone, the college turned around and offered the job to a man. The man who fathered Teri James child. Who is, presumably by the symmetry of the act, a fornicator himself.

Unless this is one of those things where it’s IOKIYAM — it’s OK if you are male.

Ha ha, Harvard!

This year, UMM will have Al Franken as our commencement speaker. Guess who Harvard gets?

nelson-ha-ha

A comment on the Crimson story got me poking around (I am not a big Oprah watcher) and now I wonder: Did anyone on the Harvard honorary degrees committee consider the fact that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudoscience? Four years ago Newsweek did an extensive debunking of pseudo-medicine pandered on her show. She was #1 on Brian Dunning’s list of the top 10 purveyors of pseudoscience, citing her as follows: “she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression, angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy, anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed decisions in life.” Or read Martin Gardner’s take on Oprah — and her frequent guest, Harvard’s own Dr. Oz.

Score: UMM 1, Harvard -1,000,000.

Al Qaeda has a magazine?

Apparently, they publish semi-irregularly an online magazine called Inspire. I’ve never seen a copy — and there have been cases of people in the UK being jailed for possessing a copy, so I don’t recommend that you go searching for one — but the latest issue includes this inspiring promotional piece.

inspirepreview

It’s an inspiring bit of mindfuckery, all right: don’t you just love the association of guns, bullets, blood splatter, and “peace be upon him”? And then to include a hitlist: I stand in awe of the religion of peace.

One cute thing I noticed about the list, too: everyone gets a picture, except Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Molly Norris, the two women being targeted. To threaten them with violent death is perfectly acceptable, but to show the bewitching faces of women to the faithful…that is simply beyond the pale.

In case you’ve forgotten who Molly Norris is, she’s the cartoonist who lightly proposed a “draw Mohammed” day, and got condemned to death by Muslims around the world for her offense. She’s since dropped out of sight, hiding from killers, all for drawing this silly little comic.

Everybody_Draw_Mohammed_Day

The fanatics have not forgotten this grievous insult ever since, and a young woman has basically had her life ruined because of the hatred of a few high-ranking clerical goons.

Be gentle, sweet, and kind

One of these trolls — in this case, one populating the #WISCFI twitter hashtag for the Women in Secularism conference — threw out a recommendation to all the ladies out there: 8 Easy Tips to Act More Feminine. It’s not clear whether this person was being cynical, mocking, or serious, but at least we can all concur that he was being stupid.

Here are the 8 tips summarized. Please, control your temper (tips #4, 5, 6, and 8).

  1. Dress feminine.

  2. Brush up on your manners.

  3. Smile often.

  4. Be gentle, sweet, and kind.

  5. Do not use abusive words.

  6. Do not speak bluntly.

  7. Be sensitive.

  8. Control your temper.

Man, what a waste of space. I can reduce those all to just one: be submissive, pliant, and pleasant to men. At least it’s not as long-winded as someone’s civility rules, even if it amounts to the same thing.

By the way, I hope something is done about the #WISCFI hashtag before the conference. Right now it’s just a flaming ground for trolling assholes.

Me and my warlike ways

I’ve always wanted to trigger an international incident, and I guess I got my wish: I unleashed the Horde on Canada. Last week I brought to your attention a poll on abortion by a conservative Canadian MP. You all rushed in and surprised him by bringing in a strongly pro-choice position; he has since rallied the Canadian religious right (or more likely, tweaked a few numbers in the polling software) to produce a lead for the side wanting a complete ban on abortion.

You know the phrase “complete ban on abortion” is impractical, dishonest, and totalitarian, and can only be achieved over the bodies of dead women, right?

Anyway, it’s written up now by Windsor Star columnist Anne Jarvis. The Canadian government doesn’t want to debate abortion at all, and most Canadians are quite content with the current liberal legislation on reproductive rights. What this is is a game by conservatives to gin up the impression that there’s a serious argument being held among the electorate, rather than that there are a few authoritarian cranks lobbying for new laws to oppress women.

It’s what they all do. It’s exactly like the creationists saying we need to argue the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, when no, we do not: the matter has been settled, and only kooks are arguing against the right idea.

Maybe if they sink a lot of the budget into special effects…

There is no accounting for taste or credulity. Universal Pictures is planning to make Eben Alexander’s book into a movie. You remember Alexander; the Proof of Heaven guy, the surgeon who ‘died’ on the operating table and claimed to have visited heaven?

It might be interesting to see the effort. The whole tone of Alexander’s fantasy is one of vagueness, ineffableness, incomprehending awe — he talks about seeing indescribable beings like birds or angels that he can’t do justice to in words, for instance…I don’t think crisp CGI is exactly going to work in his favor.

People suck

I’ve been reading the story of Adalia Rose, a six year old girl with progeria. It makes me sick. Not Adalia, of course, but the fact that when she had fun posting videos on youtube and facebook, the trolls descended.

Sometime in June, Carl Ludwig Sherburne noticed a new "bandwagon," his term for the Internet’s ephemeral obsessions, cluttering his Facebook timeline. The notoriously disruptive 4chan board /b/ had seized upon some evidently sick girl’s Facebook page, and with the Miami Cannibal Zombie meme dying down, the rage among his online peers had shifted to PhotoShopping this child’s veiny, hairless head onto the bodies of famous monsters and extraterrestrials. People pasted her face on E.T., Roger from American Dad, Teletubbies, Land of the Lost Sleestaks, Gollum, Mini Me. There were so many different juxtapositions of this Progeria Girl, as Sherburne would come to call her, that he would start collecting them, like virtual trading cards, and eventually amass more than 500.

…

After Adalia’s passing, he said, the only online trace of her existence would be these cruel images. “You know whose fault it’s gonna be? It’s not gonna be the millions of people on the Internet who looked at them. It’s gonna be yours for letting these pictures escape,” he stammered, as if Adalia’s baby photos were leaked documents. “You are a sick woman. You are more disgusting and horrible than my fat disgusting ass could ever be.” He was nearly spitting. “You are one stupid bitch.”

Sound familiar? Screaming nitwits howling at a sick little girl and her mother, and then blaming the mother for letting Adalia use the internet. They’re bullies, they can’t help themselves, put something to mock in front of them and it’s their target’s fault that they have to bully them.

I’m sorry, Carl Ludwig Sherburne, but you’re wrong. You’re among the most disgusting and horrible things on the internet, and a woman posting her baby photos doesn’t even come close.